Clairvoyance & 'Scientific Sight'

Peace Friends. Sharing a little more from the first book, An Unpromising Hope. The language is a bit clumsy, but I'm hoping some of it may apply to the present. We'll see. Please note that for Westehelle 'scientific sight' is not the same as 'all science that ever existed.' It's something else. If the concept interests you at all, I encourage you to read his essay “Scientific Sight and Embodied Knowledges: Social Circumstances in Science and Theology.” Modern Theology 11.3 (1995) 341–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0025.1995.tb00070.x . I've got a PDF of it that he gave me permission to share indefinitely, and I am happy to do so upon request! Peace. ~Tom

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Bloch’s Loss of Clairvoyance & Westhelle’s ‘Scientific Sight’

Yet, for Bloch, why is there no clairvoyance? Why can we no longer catch a glimpse of what is to come? A piece of our seeing as in a mirror dimly, is the frames we have inherited. Indeed, our lenses help us to perceive, but only by way of their distorting function. And we have mistaken our method of observing-distorting as truth itself, or as true perception. Westhelle calls this way of perceiving scientific sight.

Scientific sight, he explains, first emerged at the wedding of colonization and scientific exploration. Going into a new habitat, scientists would observe species. They would then categorize these species, simultaneously encapsulating them into two-dimensional sketches or diagrams.

A sketch itself (the representation of the observed object, of the spectacle), would be copied and recopied, then, by way of the printing press. This representation of the observed object (the spectacle), produced by the observer (and not the one spectated), would then become universally available for the consumption of other eyes in nearly all corners of the colonized world. This practice happened more frequently as technology advanced.

The representation, reproduction, and universal distribution of a spectated object became something of a Platonic ideal form of the object. To scientific sight, this other on the page was held as truer than the other’s account of herself. This becomes evidently dangerous when the colonizer/scientist begins to define indigenous people in the Americas, in Africa, and so on. There, as elsewhere, scientific sight silences and distorts those it wishes to represent.

Scientific sight in the colonizing world becomes the truth. Scientific representations become so well trusted that if an objectified person wished to deviate from her own idealized sketch (her confining caricature—often as one who is meant to be detained/enslaved) she would become something of a transgression—or she would be caught in transgression—and one that requires a hefty penalty. To de-conform is to be abnormal. To become abnormal is to transgress. To transgress is to be criminal, to be labeled as illegal. To be criminal is to be potentially crucifiable.

Drawn, defined, described, and contained, the other to empire is taxonomically put in its place. In its place, judgements are made about inferiority and superiority. Policy and legislation reflect these judgements. Such science aids fascist ideologies (such as Hitler’s eugenics) and, as mentioned, worldwide colonization. Such sight aids fascist ideologies today. Certainly Bloch and his family were targeted by such science. He, defined as a Jew by rising fascist power, was subject to the fascist definition of what Jew or Semite meant and to the appropriate punishment for existing as a transgression.

Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 11-13.

An Ash Wednesday Prayer (2025)

 Peace, all. Here's a prayer. Ash Wednesday. 2025. ~Tom

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Into a void desiring.

You shaped us.

Of laughter.

And of clay.

Still.

Where hate.

Where greed.

Arrive.

Here.

Here.

Is ash.

Boots.

Trample grinding.

To whom.

To where.

To turn.

Dissolution’s Revelation

Peace, All! As Transfiguration has come and gone, and Lent is at hand, I thought I'd share this weird little reflection from the Death book that Matt Holmes and I put together. I hope you dig it.

Peace, Love and Liberation. 

~Tom

Image Source: Saint Calixte Catacomb, Third Century

From the time it is foretold, until its end, each person involved in its

life already knows the terrible truth: the fullness of the beauty of bread is never perfectly known until it arrives at the agony of its final hour. It is only then that, being eaten, it dies, giving up its ghost for the life and joy of others.

For this reason, the ancient messianics declared that, among all of the available elements, their godhuman (whom they called the Bread) picked bread as its sign—a tool to point human bodies toward the heavens. For it was there, they believed, that the Bread sat. Mystical and majestic. Its forehead casting beams of light from cushions made of right hands.

The sect also understood that this sign was not a sign alone.

Their communities celebrated the advent of spring with a solemn period dedicated entirely to death. Songs of praise were omitted from worship, replaced with absence or by the sounds of a dirge. Dust was traced onto skin. Garments were torn. And the whole thing concluded with a recitation of the very last words muttered by the Bread on its very last day.

The season itself was prefaced with a story. The Bread ascends a mountain. Arriving at the trail’s end, it is greeted by a cloud who, in reverence, bows down, becoming fog in its humble descent. Lifting its eyes, the cloud is met with a surprise. There, with the Bread, two figures have appeared: the Order Maker and the Agitator of Kings! Ancient men, faces afire, their bodies are left unconsumed, embracing, and overjoyed. A holy convocation. A meeting of faith, space, and time.

Quickly, however, it is revealed that what they had received as intimate joy has, in actuality, been subjected to another’s gaze. The Bread has been followed, its students, voyeurs, in a tizzy, emerging from the weeds.

The earth shakes, as well. Not from fear. But in rhythm with a thunderclap. Arriving as a thief. Breaking windows. Fracturing skies. As the heavens, exposed, are forced to testify. This Bread is Love. This Bread is loved. And this Bread, beloved, is sacred, indeed. At this proclamation, the fog ascends, taking the ancients and the voice with it. The Bread, left alone, sets its face toward the city about which the oracles had foretold.

Here, the reading ends, setting the tone for the weeks to follow, not to be picked up again until the end of the season when at last devotees will find the Bread in that city. Arrested and abused by those who fear leaven, the Bread will be hung high upon a hilltop, no one hiding in the weeds, exposed on purpose, for the whole world to see. It is only then, in the nausea of devastation and in the Bread now broken, that the Bread’s students and friends will finally come to realize who the Bread really was.

Michaelangelo once imagined man, naked and pale, his finger flaccidly drooping toward the Divine—yet, nonetheless approached in its impotence by the outstretched finger of God. After the Bread was gone and the community still remained, this is what began to happen to the bread that they were baking. In its gesturing, their bread was greeted. Not by a nearness producing a gap, one finger not quite touching another. But by a full embrace. An adoration. A cloud bowing down. A fog.

The bread pointed and the Bread pointed back. With a hug. A touch so powerful that it left the bread transformed. Not only in posture or figure. But to the core. So that, there, pointing and embraced, the bread became the Bread itself. Broken, shared, tasted, and seen.

Bread is a sign that is more than a sign. It points. As it points, that toward which it points draws near—so near, that the bread is touched. Touched, it is transformed, becoming the presence of that very thing toward which it had been pointing in the first place. Sharing a meal, recipients of the bread perceive the Bread that is presenced in the bread. This is fleeting as, again, it takes place only at the moment of dissolution. Such is the life of a sacrament. It’s here. And then it’s gone.

There is another sacrament. One that no sect has yet acknowledged. Neither in declarations nor in catechetical instruction. This is not because the sects don’t believe in it—they do—but because their traditions and their hierarchies, for millennia, have preached disdain for the vessel in which it is contained: breath and blood and dry cracked clay.

It was not always this way. The lives of the messianics were once marked by bodies invigorated, revived through spiritual acts of ecstasy, eyes euphoric, backward rolling, joy remaining for days. Wind, spirit, love: these their bodies welcomed in as breath, as smoke, as fire, moaning expulsions, nonsensical cries. Codswallop. Gibberish. Laughter. Glossolalia.

They shared in communistic feasts where each would eat each one’s fill, taking leftovers home for family and for occasional late night snacks. Pleasure and longing took their place at the center of the community. For decades. Here, the body, healthy and well-fed, was celebrated, alive, and unbound.

Then a new generation of leaders arrived. And quickly all of that was buried. The body, they condemned, calling it unkind names. Concupiscent. Cage. The Cause of All That is Wrong! From it, they claimed, no good could arrive.

If a member causes you to sin, cut it off! Cut it off!

If it tempts or if it tests you in any way, throw it away, throw it away!

Toss it, toss it, to the fire, to the flames!

Toss it, toss it, toss it away.

These were the words of their anthem, sung while swinging machetes.

Chopping. Hacking. Scraping. Until the job was done. They swallowed every cord. They left no trace. They made certain no memory would remain. The marriage, nullified. The kid? Cut in half. Body and soul were forever estranged.

Severed from spirit and mind, the body was quickly and easily reduced into a caricature, a cartoon, a sketch—unseen even as it was viewed—subjected to the ignorant, arrogant, and reductive gaze of the ones called theologians. And yet, all the while, the sacrament within it remained. Intact. Buried. But alive.

And so we wonder. What is this Sacrament? Of what is it composed? What is its name? What does it do? How, in us, does it feel? These questions we will explore briefly below.

WHAT IS THIS SACRAMENT? OF WHAT IS IT COMPOSED?

Unlike the Sacrament of Bread that is made and can be touched by human hands, this sacrament simply exists and is only touched from inside of our skin. Like the Bread of the Table, this sacrament is composed of at least two elements, each with its own instincts and personality. Distinct though they are, however, they are also connected. To borrow a theological metaphor, each is a pole that inhabits a sphere. Though, from the surface of one pole, the other may seem foreboding and alien; from a distance, we are able to see that they’re conjoined at the core. They grow from the same earth. They are shaped by the same movements of the same ocean waves.

WHAT IS ITS NAME?

This sphere, in its wholeness, is the sacrament that we now know as the Sacrament of Expectation (or sometimes the Anticipatory Sacrament—the names are used interchangeably). The names of the poles, as you may have guessed, are Anxiety and Hope.

WHAT DOES IT DO?

As noted above, sacraments are signs that point. The Sacrament of Expectation points in at least two ways.

First, the pointing of this sacrament is both future-oriented and emotional. It is felt as a premonition, a hunch, a prayer, a suspicion, an intuition. It is a funny feeling, a what if?, a what about, and so on. It is a feeling of feeling-already that which has not yet taken place. It’s a feeling of feeling already that which the sacrament is gesturing toward. Known among many as a forestate, it’s a feeling that, feeling already, invites the body, in one way or another, to salivate or simply to prepare. Said differently, feeling already that toward which it points, the Sacrament of Expectation gestures toward a future—or, rather, futures: happenings or events that, for now, exist only in potentiality. Lying in wait. It is this multiplicity of futures, commingling in potentiality that complicates this sacrament’s pointing. Also, it is what makes its pointing unique. This uniqueness of pointing is also the source of this sacrament’s second differentiating quality.

Second, unlike other sacraments, this sacrament does not point in one direction, alone. As futures and fate are many and unfixed, the Sacrament of Expectation is unable to fixate. Unlike the bread who only and ever points toward the Bread, and unlike the water who points only toward its Bird (a topic we have not covered here, but which I invite you to investigate), the pointing of this sacrament is multidirectional and a bit more scrambled. This multidirectionality is the source of the sacrament’s considerable emotional impact upon the human body.

HOW, IN US, DOES THIS SACRAMENT FEEL?

As the pointing of the Sacrament of Expectation is less of a pointing and more of a pirouette, it often produces a dizzied sensation. As the body partakes of this dizziness, the elements themselves can begin to drift. Hope and anxiety melt. And they merge. And as they mix, they become much more complex. Hybrid emotions are born, swimming and unpredictable. Just as a great pianist can play three melodies at once, so the body sings in endless emotional symphony. No field of study has produced an adequate name for this state. It is usually described simply as mixed emotions. Other times it is called a state of erosion or overwhelm. Whatever we call it, it is sacred and sacramental.

In these state(s), there emerges in the body an unspoken imperative: With heart, hands, and hair, stand on edge! At attention. Lamps lit and ready. Be prepared! it cries. And then again. And again. But for what? Here is a mystery: neither the body nor the sacrament knows. There is no knowledge. There is only a sense of something unknown.

THE UNPREPARING

There is one exception. If one lives long enough, if the body grows old, ears and nose full of hair, if the spirit becomes tired, if the heart has mellowed or learned to let go, similar changes sometimes take place in the sacrament. The sacrament starts to let go of its spin and to acquire a unique direction. Having sought for so long, it finally finds a focal point. It fixates. And it feels, at last—body, soul, and mind—that future toward which it now points.

In these last days, anticipation is unceasing. A nag. The body that once possessed the sacrament now feels as if it is the one who has been possessed. Perhaps it was this way all along. The former vigilance has departed. There is no preparation to complete. For that toward which the body and that toward which the sacrament has been pointing, arrives.

Holmes, Matthew., Gaulke, Thomas R., Everyday Armageddons: Stories and Reflections on Death, Dying, God, and Waste (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023), 96-101.

God & Mammon Revisted

Peace, friends. As Lent approaches, I'm attempting to pick up the practice of theologically/theopoetically reflecting out loud on the internet again. No promise about the frequency of posts. A couple of paragraphs here and there. Things are busy. But I'm hoping the practice will keep me engaged and rooted in the hermeneutical circle(s) with which our liberation theology ancestors gifted us. I hope it might maybe be helpful for some of you, too. Especially as we all discern the path of living faith active in love in these twisted, weird, and often terrifying times. The following is a variation on a theme I've been engaging since I accidentally picked up a piece on "the Idols of Death" by Hugo Assmann in the JKM library many years ago. The frame is still helpful. 

Peace, love, and liberation, all. Stay close to one another. God is love. And those who live in love live in God. And God lives in them. 

[ Christ of the Breadlines, Fritz Eichenberg, 1951, Image Source ]

It’s one thing to assert that a Liberator God has chosen an oppressed people to become free; to assert that the Desire of beating hearts (the Spirit) burns within bodies struggling toward survival and joy; to assert that God–flesh, blood, body, tangible–is touching, salivating, anticipating, in all who stretch, in every gesture toward a sun, a home, a Not Yet, a Beyond, negating and transgressing the Right Now, the As-It-Is, structures that strangle and enslave.

It’s wholly another thing for a dominant culture or people to claim special status (as did many who colonized continents and continue to attack human rights), oppressing, enslaving, torturing bodies in the name of “at least we’ve civilized ‘these least of these.’ At least we have “saved ‘their’ souls.” Never mind their bodies. Baptizing. In blood, in dogs, by water clouded. Word. Firehose. Into “submission.” “Civilization.” “Domestication.” “Saved” here becomes code for “enslaved.” Incorporation into a system whose God and goal is gold, Mammon, that idol of death that rains down blessings, honor, glory, riches, and might, demanding only, in exchange, human sacrifice.

[ Bartolomé de las Casas, “Brief relation of the destruction of the Indies,” Regionum Indicarum per Hispanos. (Heidelbergar: typis Guilielmi VValteri acad, 1664). New-York Historical Society Library. image source ]

Utopian Surplus: Ernst Bloch's Antifascist Hoping, Part III

 Peace, All. Here's a bit more from the hope book. Hope you dig it. -Tom

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Contrary to what Bloch sees as the idealizing (making-static/immobile) impulse in fascist ideologies, Bloch looks back at no Golden Age, but only at dissatisfaction and its struggling hopes and dreams, only at becoming and the dreams that helped bodies to make history become. “Our heritage is the Peasants’ Revolt!” Here we see: he looks back not to go back or to be “great again,” but, rather, in order to hope and dream as the peasants hoped and dreamt, even as we hope and dream anew.

Bloch finds in the Exodus, in Jesus, in Joachim of Fiore, in the peasants, and ultimately in Marx, the same impulse: a world where all things are held in common, where each has according to her needs, and where all people are able to eat—and a world where “humanity and nature no longer see each other as strangers,” but as friends. The world will be new—and so will we. We will have become, even as we will still be becoming. Simply put, Bloch’s looking back is looking back in order to dream forward, toward the dream of the classless banquet, which is the resurrection of the body.

It is true: the impulse toward change always runs the risk of going awry. Bloch would be the first to say that the longings of the heart take terrible and even evil turns. Again, he was made a refugee by the heimweh of the Reich. However, not hoping, is an impossible task. Indeed, hope and hunger are what bring the body to life, make life worth living. Though, it seems, the question must be about life for all, not just for me. Said differently, hope must become collective. We must all be looped into one another. Self-preservation (which is willing to sacrifice the other) must become communal and hungry self-extension."

~Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Pickwick, 2021)

The Cathedral: Ernst Bloch's Antifascist Hoping, Part II

Peace, All. Here's a bit more on Ernst Bloch's hope, taken from An Unpromising Hope. Glad folks are finding it helpful. I'll keep sharing here and there when I get a minute. Much love. Peace. ~Tom

 

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[It is] in Gothic cathedrals that Bloch finds a deep well of surplus hopes and dreams.* In addition to their shape and their presentation of space, these buildings also allude to stories of faith which, although they hold the possibility of being corrupted by fascism, still often hold in themselves the feeling of a certain longing for something which is beyond.

Bloch notes, in a surprisingly polemical fashion, that at the center of a pyramid is a dead person, a lifeless body prepared for the underworld—in other words, at the center of the pyramid is death. This is the god of slave-holding empire. In contrast, Bloch lifts up, at the center of the cathedral, that wherever there is a crucifixion (an image of the right now), there is also the body that is again alive. There is at the center of all of the bloodied bodies, still a glimpse of resurrection. There are vines in the woodwork. There are grapes carved into the altar. In other words, for Bloch, even in static materials, there is the feeling of growth, of liveliness, and of becoming. There is a yearning to live more fully wherever we look. Everything in the cathedral screams the secret desire of those who pray: the body hungers for resurrection. The body wants life. The images of a messiah, the apostolic confession about the resurrection of the body—these are wishful images and ideas, day-dreams that, like music and art, feed hope. Bloch does not need to believe them to find their value. It is not the dogmas, but the hunger for a better life, the Utopian Surplus contained in the art, and the space, and the images, and even the spoken words, that Bloch wishes to imbibe. “The last shall be first” (Matt 20:16; Luke 13:30), “The tyrants shall be torn from their thrones,” “Now the whole group . . . were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection” (Acts 4:32–35). These holy words are filled with utopian surplus and so they should be tapped for the sake of hope, and for the sake of messianic longings among and within the hungry.

Bloch’s work is very much the product of this activity: mining history, art, theology, mythology, anything he can get his hands on, for Utopian Surplus, for traces of utopia, for residual hope. All of these might be utilized to feed hope and instigate hunger and heimweh today.* Indeed, in all of his encyclopedic tediousness, this is his primary objective: to drill into cultural expressions of generations now deceased, to find in them the sweet syrup that longs for a liberated world, a classless society, something better beyond what currently is, and to pull that syrup to the surface so that it may be tasted and so that it may feed hope, increasing the hunger and the heimweh, that resides within those who dream, or who would dream of a better life and a better world.* 

In his digging through German history, for example, in search of a German “heritage of hope,” a task which he held like a heavy weight as he saw fascism rising around him, fascism which claimed that Bloch was no longer German himself, Bloch will comment: “Our German heritage is not Hansel and Gretel!” It is not blood and soil. The true German heritage, if there is one, is obvious: “it is the peasant’s revolt!”* With Müntzer and the peasants, and with Bloch, the poor and the persecuted cry: Omnia sunt communia! This is the heart of Bloch’s revolutionary hope.

Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 17-19. 

Footnotes

*Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 20.

*Bloch, “Man as Possibility,” 65.

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:236

Ernst Bloch's Heimweh & Antifascist Hoping

Peace, Friends!

I wrote my first book as a dissertation during the first reign of 45. Among other things, it was a study of hope summoned in hopeless times--and a search for hope that might hope in a liberating direction. This is a small excerpt from the book, An Unpromising Hope. As you may have noticed, I have mostly peaced out of social media, and have been focusing my energies on relationships, family, and community organizing.

That said, I am quite grateful for the time I got to spend digging into hope. If folks find this helpful, let me know, and I am happy to share more from the book.

Peace, all. And love. And hope. And liberation.  

PS: If you are reading this on your phone, it may be easier to read if you flip your phone to a horizontal position.

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Bloch's Hope

Ernst Bloch began his work on hope in the context of rising fascist ideologies in Germany—and therefore in the context of fascist hoping.* Fascist hopes were hybrid in nature. They were born of an idealized and glamorized German past, a past understood by fascist dreamers as having been both “pure” and “true.” Looking backward, toward a fantasy projected upon history, they simultaneously longed forward toward a future realization of the fantastic images that the glamorization of an idealized past evoked. That is, their desire was directed toward the fulfillment and/or completion of that which the image of the past simultaneously presented and promised.* The sciences of the day helped to ensure that these hopes were well founded in scientific facts. At the time, scientists had constructed and produced a number of racial distinctions and hierarchies, taxonomies that proved to be useful to the fascist cause, confirming at once fascist values and fascist aspirations toward their realization.*

These so-called truths and facts of Arian supremacy were further augmented by the newly accepted and quite in-vogue theory of Social Darwinism. In the service of fascism, science and religion were not necessarily conflicted. Fascist ideologies and hopes were enabled and even propagated by churches who held to the ancient understanding that “all authority is given by God,” and so taught that the Christian is to faithfully obey Hitler, to pray always for him without ceasing, never resisting the SS, and so on.*

In addition, propagandizing preyed upon the already dominant conviction among many in the church, that the Christian is the superior and true believer, and indeed the bearer of salvation. Today this attitude and belief is called “Christian supremacy.”*

Here was a vision of an Arian nation: The Third Reich, the final kingdom.* It was to be for these believers something of heaven on earth meant for the chosen, the few, the pure. “The eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind,” claimed church leaders in a public fashion, “It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the National Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”* The Third Reich for these Christians was the fulfillment of the promise, spoken from history, the fruition of fascist, supremacist hopes and dreams.

Of course, such hope was not exclusively for the Christian. Resourceful as they were, fascist hopes played similarly on the messianic impulses within communist dreams and socialistic anticipations: desire for power to the people, to the workers, the proletariat, the farmers, those born of sweat and blood and soil.*

Hearing any claims to be of the people, we must always ask, with history, “Which people?” Fascist hopes simultaneously dehumanized and were willing to sacrifice, to kill, to incarcerate, to displace those deemed non-people or lesser people, according to their own scientific or theological classifications.* Such as these were not heirs to fascist hopes, they claimed. They were merely sacrifices toward hope’s fulfillment, here and now, on earth, as it is in the imagined fascist heaven. In Germany these became the Jews, the Roma, those who were gay, and so on. These were rounded up, detained, tortured, and killed in the name of the kingdom, the Reich, the imagined paradise conceived by idealistic minds. To these hopes, Bloch, a Jew and a refugee who was forced into flight, sought to write alternatives.

Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021).

Footnotes:

*What Bloch means by fascist hope will be unpacked later in the chapter. (It will become important to our conversation later that these propagated hopes, dreamt by the Nazi party, where they resonated with many, were not born from within the hoper, but rather were received from an outside authority. This authority named both the pains and the responses to pain for the hoper, thereby robbing the hoper from genuine personal dreaming. In other words, hope was imposed, received, and not born from within.

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:235–36.

*For “scientific racism,” in Nazi Germany, see especially Günther’s notorious work on the “ethnology of the German people.” Günther was praised by Hitler, having been used largely as a basis for the Reich’s eugenics policies. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss was also a leading contributor to this conversation, claiming distinctions between Germans, Nordics, Arians, and so-called inferior groups. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes; Clauss, Race and Soul.

*For Bloch addressing this directly as “the europic principle,” see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:98–102.

*As mentioned, although Protestantism remained diverse, there were concentrated attempts to erase the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew origins of Christianity by the state and by self-proclaimed German Christian movements. The Confessing Church formed in distinction to the German Christians (the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and, later, the Reich Church, who colluded more directly with the Nazis. Beyond collusion by organizational structures, church members and party members overlapped. Bergen, Twisted Cross.

*Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology.”

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:509, 3:856.

*Remak, Nazi Years, 95–96.

*Of course, this movement was as much a heresy to Marxists as it was to the Confessing Christians—both schools claiming, at their best, fidelity to the crucified and the poor, to those the regime wished to exterminate.