Apologetics against National Socialism in the Sermon “Samaritan Spirit” by Viktor Glondys 1931

Abstract

Romania after 1918 was a miniature empire, often characterized by great internal violence. It was also the eighth-largest European country. Central governments in Bucharest attempted to integrate the connected areas by reversing ethnic dominance through political, economic and cultural homogenization. This led to reciprocal counter-reactions among the minorities in the composite country. The traditional anti-Semitism of the unsettled Romanian population also mixed with anti-Bolshevism, especially among the country’s academic youth.

In his sermon to the public in 1931, theologian Glondys sought to immunize the ethnic church milieu of the Transylvanian Saxon minority against National Socialism. Rhetorically brilliant, he combined elements of German cultural Protestantism with the Lutheran Renaissance of the 1920s. On the one hand, it carried potential for resistance against excessive nationalism, racism and cultural pessimism. On the other hand, the limits determined by idealistic optimism and a cultural-imperialist, Christian sense of mission also revealed themselves. The decisive factor – against the background of the Protestant bourgeois, altruistic-minded diaspora milieu – was the clear demarcation from the “racial culture” as the ideological core of German National Socialism, which was radiating into the Transylvanian Saxon group. On the basis of excellently researched and presented sources, Glondys precisely analyzed National Socialism and presented its refutation. In doing so, he managed – despite practical theological limits – to work out the incompatibility between National Socialism and Christianity.