Trueman: What Thielicke Can Teach Us About Nihilism

Bonhoeffer may be the most famous German theologian to oppose Hitler and Nazism, but he was not the only one. Another who speaks to our times is Helmut Thielicke, a Lutheran theologian and pastor. Like Bonhoeffer, Thielicke was hounded by the Nazis, though he survived and was even able to pastor a church for a while in the 1940s. A polymath and a preacher, he wrote a massive theological ethics as well as a critique of Bultmann. Many of his sermons and lectures were collected and published. Also like Bonhoeffer, he was not an entirely reliable guide to traditional Christianity. His historical context was Nazism but his theological context was neo-orthodoxy. The latter was always somewhat more “neo” than “orthodox” at key points.

I first encountered Thielicke when I picked up a copy of Man in God’s World in a used bookstore in the late 1980s. It’s a series of lectures on Luther’s Small Catechism that he delivered in Stuttgart Cathedral in the early 1940s. What caught my attention was the fact that the series continued through the Allied bombings of the city. Thielicke knew that every lecture he gave would be the last gospel message that some members of his audience would ever hear. That gave them an urgency and a relevance I have not encountered elsewhere. Perhaps never has Richard Baxter’s comment about preaching as a dying man to dying men applied to anyone as pointedly as to Thielicke in Stuttgart during the war.

I had not read Thielicke for many years until I recently discovered a book of his that I had never heard of: Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer. This work is stunning, for it identifies the problem at the center of our contemporary culture: a collapse in the cultural consensus about what it means to be human. The book’s context is the anthropological challenges posed by Nazism and Marxism in the twentieth century, but its argument offers insights for today.

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Carl Trueman | “Nihilism—In Nazi Germany And Today” | March 7, 2024


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3 comments

  1. Since when was Helmut Thielicke considered orthodox? Or Bonhoeffer? Liberalism is not Christianity.

    Carl Trueman, as a minister of the gospel, has a duty not to talk like this. Does his presbytery know about this?

    • Lucas,

      So we can’t read Helmut Thielicke’s work on nihilism, and doing so means we must notify one’s presbytery? You need to learn how to glean from a source/author without having to endorse it/him wholesale (you’d think this would be obvious since I image we do this in every other area of life, but alas). Since Trueman published this piece, I image his presbytery knows, but go ahead an alert them if you wish.

  2. Thielicke also authored a book entitled “Our Heavenly Father” which contains a series of sermons he preached based on each petition of the Lord’s Prayer. It, too, is an excellent read, especially so because those sermons were preached during the final war years. But I believe that he dropped the ball when he wrote “The Trouble with the Church.” Among some things he endorsed in that book (that we would disagree with I hope!) was the use of a historical/critical approach to exegesis.

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