Letters From Prison: Alfred Delp

I have recently been working through various letters by political prisoners during the time of British colonialism in India and Nazi Germany in hopes of presenting a paper at an upcoming conference in 2013. Among some of the more interesting are those by the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who I only stumbled upon doing this research. It may not even be proper to call him a political resistor in the proper sense, since Delp’s primary concern, if we are to believe him, was the reconstruction of Germany after the war. It was a visit to Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg to speak about these matters that effectively sealed his fate. Delp was apparently unaware that Stauffenberg just shortly after his visit would attempt to assassinate Hitler.

Delp’s letters run the gamut of emotion. Fear and anxiety are met with moments of extraordinary peace and well-being.  In December 1944, during his period of incarceration, he has what could only be identified as a conversion experience, though he had been in the Jesuit order for his entire professional life. It is in this experience that realizes and feels the hand of God. The fear entwined in his earlier letters, while still palpable is no longer all-consuming. He learns how to trust and surrender.

“God has become almost tangible. Things I have always known and believed now seem so concrete; I believe them. But I also live them.”

Surrender, he finds, the type of Christian surrender that so often eludes us in our well-being, is found when and where there is nothing left to be found. Delp discovers Paul’s spiritual principle – in weakness, the strength of God is perfected in the one who has nowhere else to turn. The quest of making this real in our life, in a world that is inundated by the self, it is the “selfless turn” that makes draws us into true peace.

Despite his best efforts, Delp would not escape his fate. He was executed in February 1944. His role indeed was minimal and his execution unjustified. But he gained something much greater. During those six months of incarceration, he gained himself.  Joseph Fleischer, perhaps the most notorious SS judge ever who presided over Delp’s case, was killed only days later when a bomb hit the building where the deliberations took place and he was crushed by fallen debris. Sure it was no lightning bolt. And my mind immediately moved to the kinds of stories I used to read in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. However much one relegates these stories to fairytales of divine judgment on the Roman Catholics who executed Protestant testifiers, the comparison with Delp’s end is enough for some pause.

Are Christian Fundamentalists Marcionites? Well, Kind of...

Marcion’s historical trouble with certain episodes in the Old Testament is well-attested at least by his enemies. Iraneaus of Lyons reports that he was so appalled by some of the genocides attributed to the God of the Bible that he identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, a lesser god of evil who opposed the true God of Jesus Christ, who on occasion shot through the pages of the Old Testament.  Jesus was therefore not simply a covenant-fulfilling supercessionist. He went even further. The God of Jews was an evil, misleading creature, and Jesus came to point us not to a softer interpretation of that God but a new God altogether! In doing so, he decided to completely ignore those texts that seemed offense by claiming they were the work of something else.

There are few that would debate that Marcion was dealing with a form of the problem of literalism. The scriptures during his time didn’t have the character of authority that they have today, considering too that good ole Marcion was the first to put together anything that looked like a canon of scripture based upon his own offense.

Christians today realize that with the codification of the canon, they are left with these offending passages.  If they are to remain full communion Christians in both the Old and New Testaments, they have to pick and choose carefully. While they may not attribute evil actions somewhere else, they choose to ignore many of them, having some sense that certain practices must have been overcome in Jesus’ overwhelming mission of love. Yet ironically they will drudge up other practices, sometimes even in the same passage that Christians surely should not give up!

In the New Testament, many choose to ignore the affirmation of slavery in the ancient world but focus on Paul’s sayings towards homosexuality (again ignoring that Paul is clear in those cases when he receives an absolute word from the Lord, of which homosexuality is never one of them).

Within the Old Testament itself, many choose to ignore Numbers 5 where God brings on an abortion, but are conveniently reminded of the God of Jeremiah who told him how he knew him in the womb, which of course one has no way of arguing it as a New Testament principle since Jesus nor Paul spoke of abortion.

These methods pretty much frame the interpretation of many fundamentalists. It’s a free-for-all that rather than preserves the integrity of scripture, exposes it as something diabolically unbalanced and hardily chases off even the most untrained skeptics who spend anytime rummaging around in scripture.

Trying to speak to the radical collisions that occur between literal interpretations applied to some verses and the cultural context of other verses in Scripture is of little practical use.  Pointing out to Fundamentalists that they do this all the time, but apply an unfair measure of equality across the board seems to be no illumination either.  Of course a problem that not even Marcion dealt with, makes Fundamentalists all the more arbitrary, and that is the doctrine of inerrancy. The doctrine simply means we take the parts as the sum of the whole, which is the revelation of God to man. This allows for a dead Moses to refer to himself in the Deuteronomy for example. If there is no touch of the human experience in this, then this famished text presents a God that is so utterly unintelligible in his demands upon us that we must cower in fear. In fact, a study by the conservative Biola University suggested that the anxiety level among Fundamentalists and surprisingly atheists about the fear of death is much greater than in groups where the Bible is not interpreted literally and where ambiguity about the divine remains. As far as Fundamentalists go then, there is a lot riding on “getting their scriptures right.”

Seeing Marcion and his struggles with the scriptures alongside Fundamentalists and their struggles with scriptures testifies to the very nature of belief. At times, it is desperate for harmony. And until it is exposed to other forms of interpretation, it may always be defensive and dismissive.