Pastor Paul Schneider at the funeral of a child “denounced the web of pagan mythology that for political reasons was being superimposed upon the Christian concept of the hereafter.” He, like other members of the Confessing Churches had denounced the attempt by various groups and people in Germany to de-Christianize the Churches.
In a letter to Hitler some of the Confessing Church members had complained that, among other acts against the Christian faith: “Other members of the Reich Government have, under the cloak of positive Christianity, divested of their confessional character categorical conceptions of the Christian Faith, such as belief, love, eternity, prayer, resurrection, and have given a new, purely worldly, psychological interpretation.” (emphasis mine)
In the book The Shame and the Sacrifice: The Life and Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider is mentioned as the first Confessing Pastor to die in a concentration camp. Always outspoken and courageous, when he was banished from his two Churches he refused to leave them and was arrested. Schneider was beaten many times both for preaching the gospel and for standing up for other prisoners. He died when a prison doctor gave him poison rather than medicine.
In the book on Bonhoeffer another small book is mentioned which was circulated privately in Germany during the time of Schneider and Bonhoeffer and their imprisonment. Dying We Live was translated into English in the fifties in a small paperback book. It contains letters from many prisoners of the Nazi’s.
Most of Schneider’s letters, featured in Dying We Live, are written to his wife and children while he awaited his trial which would lead to Buchenwald and death. In the letters, he often refers to an old chestnut tree in the prison grounds and uses it as a picture of the Church. As Schneider writes of the Lord, the Church and the times he lives in, his words carry meaning for other eras. Here is one letter dated November 7, 1937:
“You ask me what I do all day long. Above all I am a student of the word of God, and want to go on being that. …
Once again the chestnut tree is preaching a sermon to me. Its bare black branches reach out to me so promisingly the small brown buds for next spring. I can see them close to the window and also in the top branches. They were already there even when the yellow foliage was still hiding them. Should we be so thankless and of so little faith that we deliberately overlook among the falling, withered leaves of the church the buds that here too cling tenaciously to trunk and branches?
Dear wife, I believe we know enough out of our own inner experience to speak and to believe for our communities too. … The Confessional church—it is truly that—is the tree with the buds; the secret congregations within the congregations are the buds of the church. Wherever a pastor is ready to assume a ministry that no longer is a ‘ministry,’ that continues to exist even without the assurance of state support (because a ‘position’ thus supported would no longer be a religious post), while all calculations and considerations of church politics are at an end, there the spiritual eye sees even now the coming church and its spring. Of course the world and the faithless churchmen see the bare tree stripped of its cultural and public significance and judge that, since the world and the state withhold recognition, it will soon die and serve only for firewood. They take refuge in the tangled vine of the false church and state religion, rankly overgrowing the duly doomed tree of a godless, self-glorifying and self-complacent world—a vine that will collapse and be burned with the tree of such a transient world.
But we abide in the branches of the poor, bare, despised, and defamed church that reaches its buds out to us with so much promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. In it only can we live in safety, ‘secure in all our ways’; only in that faith which is the indestructible strength of its life and its burgeoning can true freedom and happiness be found. Let us go on holding to this faith, live by it and act by it, as the richly ‘comforted,’ because this faith alone represents the victory over the prison of this world and its lethal power. ‘Then let the world with its vain reward dissolve. Faith perseveres, the Cross will lead to the crown.’”
There is an excellent article about Paul Schneider, with pictures, here.
In a letter to Hitler some of the Confessing Church members had complained that, among other acts against the Christian faith: “Other members of the Reich Government have, under the cloak of positive Christianity, divested of their confessional character categorical conceptions of the Christian Faith, such as belief, love, eternity, prayer, resurrection, and have given a new, purely worldly, psychological interpretation.” (emphasis mine)
In the book The Shame and the Sacrifice: The Life and Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider is mentioned as the first Confessing Pastor to die in a concentration camp. Always outspoken and courageous, when he was banished from his two Churches he refused to leave them and was arrested. Schneider was beaten many times both for preaching the gospel and for standing up for other prisoners. He died when a prison doctor gave him poison rather than medicine.
In the book on Bonhoeffer another small book is mentioned which was circulated privately in Germany during the time of Schneider and Bonhoeffer and their imprisonment. Dying We Live was translated into English in the fifties in a small paperback book. It contains letters from many prisoners of the Nazi’s.
Most of Schneider’s letters, featured in Dying We Live, are written to his wife and children while he awaited his trial which would lead to Buchenwald and death. In the letters, he often refers to an old chestnut tree in the prison grounds and uses it as a picture of the Church. As Schneider writes of the Lord, the Church and the times he lives in, his words carry meaning for other eras. Here is one letter dated November 7, 1937:
“You ask me what I do all day long. Above all I am a student of the word of God, and want to go on being that. …
Once again the chestnut tree is preaching a sermon to me. Its bare black branches reach out to me so promisingly the small brown buds for next spring. I can see them close to the window and also in the top branches. They were already there even when the yellow foliage was still hiding them. Should we be so thankless and of so little faith that we deliberately overlook among the falling, withered leaves of the church the buds that here too cling tenaciously to trunk and branches?
Dear wife, I believe we know enough out of our own inner experience to speak and to believe for our communities too. … The Confessional church—it is truly that—is the tree with the buds; the secret congregations within the congregations are the buds of the church. Wherever a pastor is ready to assume a ministry that no longer is a ‘ministry,’ that continues to exist even without the assurance of state support (because a ‘position’ thus supported would no longer be a religious post), while all calculations and considerations of church politics are at an end, there the spiritual eye sees even now the coming church and its spring. Of course the world and the faithless churchmen see the bare tree stripped of its cultural and public significance and judge that, since the world and the state withhold recognition, it will soon die and serve only for firewood. They take refuge in the tangled vine of the false church and state religion, rankly overgrowing the duly doomed tree of a godless, self-glorifying and self-complacent world—a vine that will collapse and be burned with the tree of such a transient world.
But we abide in the branches of the poor, bare, despised, and defamed church that reaches its buds out to us with so much promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. In it only can we live in safety, ‘secure in all our ways’; only in that faith which is the indestructible strength of its life and its burgeoning can true freedom and happiness be found. Let us go on holding to this faith, live by it and act by it, as the richly ‘comforted,’ because this faith alone represents the victory over the prison of this world and its lethal power. ‘Then let the world with its vain reward dissolve. Faith perseveres, the Cross will lead to the crown.’”
There is an excellent article about Paul Schneider, with pictures, here.
