The Work Ethic: Toward Effective Christian Social Action
By Franklin H. Littell
Dr. Franklin H. Littell is an elder in the United Methodist Church and is a retired Professor of Religion at Temple University. From his home base in Philadelphia, he still works like crazy, all over the world. He is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today. And he is "a friend that sticketh closer than a brother."
On the western slope of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, a recent confrontation raised again the question of the work ethic. A new logging law, typical of those passed in the last few years of total deference to corporate interests, has made available for cutting one of the few last stands of ancient trees. Many stands already have been clear cut since the election of 1980 closed the door on the great environmental tradition set by Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir.
In the confrontation, a logger put the issue squarely. He was representing the public opposition to clear cutting the remnant stand. He had grown up and spent his life working in the old trees, and now he represented the preservation agencies. He wanted selective cutting to preserve enough of the growth to secure the interests of coming generations. He spoke sympathetically of the company loggers, many of them his boyhood friends, in a recent interview:
" A lot of their identity and pride was tied up with working in the woods, and timber`s been a part of the Northwest for a long time. That was, in my mind, something that was supposed to go on for generations."
Then he made-referring to those company loggers who were going ahead to clear cut the area-the critical point in respect to the work ethic:
"People tell me they`ve got to do their jobs. I`ve got a job to do, too, but there are some jobs you just don`t take."
This report1 may seem to afford a slender bridge across which to transport the burden of the Holocaust. But any student of the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, is struck by the way in which the work ethic, for which the Germans were and are justly famous, has been used to justify monstrously criminal actions. Werner Richter, during the war a refugee professor at Elmhurst College and later a professor at Bonn and sometime President of the heads of the German universities (Rektorenkonferenz), described in his book on the teaching profession the way hard work and devotion to duty were perverted in that social sector.2 The dozens of medical doctors and psychiatrists assisting Dr. Josef Mengele (the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz) were "just doing their jobs."3 The hundreds of lawyers and jurists who operated Roland Freisler`s Teutonic courts were "just doing their jobs."4 So too were the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, whose participation in the genocide of the Jews has been fully documented and related by Christopher Browning.5
The churchmen who blurred the truth and collaborated with Nazism were of course too well educated in linguistic skills to be satisfied with the banal excuse that they were "just doing their jobs." Nevertheless, in numbers representative of their profession they soldiered on valiantly.6 Fortunately, we have the testimony of the Confessing Church and of individuals like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, and Friedrich Jägerstätter to show that the "still, small voice" was not totally extinguished during the season of massive Baal-worship in Hitler`s Festung Europa. But this is no credit to those officials in the theological faculties and church bureaucracies who were "just doing their jobs."
Fortunately too, we have the testimony of those Christians who after 1945 worked valiantly, and to a remarkable degree successfully, to rehabilitate the work ethic in Germany. Their work was carried primarily in the Protestant Conference Centers ("Evangelische Akademien"), of which the oldest was Bad Boll (founded in October, 1945).
The patriarch of the movement called "evangelical Academies" was Eberhard Müller, a former SCM activist and messenger between the "intact church"7 of Württemberg and the Confessing Church. He started up in 1945 at Bad Boll, a quiet village in the hills east of Stuttgart. Boll was already famous as a Pietist community and as the center of the missionary and Christian social action work of Johann Christoph and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Beginning with simple borrowed facilities, and helped initially by money raised by Reinhold Niebuhr and his circle in the United States, Eberhard Muller built in time one of the most important conference centers in Europe. Bad Boll also served as a model for other centers of lay education in Germany and also eventually on the larger map of world Christendom.
The first decade of conferences at Bad Boll and in sister academies centered dozens of times upon the ethic of work. The conference leadership defined the issue to add to the intense diligence, perseverance, and single-mindedness, for which the Germans were already famous, the dimension of the use and direction of one`s effort. Work was discussed in the language of "calling" (vocation). Professional activity was placed in the context of ethics (Berufsethik).8
At the beginning, all Germans knew that something basic had gone wrong with their nation, even though they didn`t readily agree as to what was askew. Because of the loss of complacency, for some years after the collapse of the Third Reich it was possible to bring together members of the specialized groups that are vitally important in sustaining life in an advanced society-engineers, jurists, police officials, surgeons, elementary school teachers, architects, members of city and state and national governments, etc. The vocational conferences were so important in restoring the morale and structures of a shattered Germany that the major political personalities of those early years of the Federal Republic often participated-Hermann Ehlers, Eugene Gerstenmeier, Konrad Adenauer, Gerhard Schröder, and others.
The conferences began with two questions:
1. "Where did we go wrong?"
2. "What is our public responsibility now?"
Every day began with Bible study and a brief homily, followed by lecture/discussions illuminating these two questions and their answers. Although the papers were often learned in the academic sense, they were seldom "objective" in the pseudo-scientific sense. Few of the educated leaders (Intellektuellen) at that time, realizing that they were better fed and better housed and more secure than millions of their countrymen, avoided the second question by retreating to the balcony of life. They knew well that "the treason of the intellectuals" had led some to think themselves "above politics" while others had betrayed their calling by working hard and asking no questions.
Two of Eberhard Müller`s books were comprehensive presentations of the basic approach of the Academies. The first was a brilliant little book on the art of dialogue (Die Kunst der Gesprachsfuhrung, 1954), which argued that basic matters of decision (such as questions of professional ethics) could not be transferred out. Such decisions could be settled by no absent and arbitrary authority: they must be discussed thoroughly and decided by persons willing to learn from testimonies of the past and from each other, and then in faith to accept the consequences.
The second book dealt with the changes of structures necessary if personal and ethical values are to survive in a world of efficient and impersonal bureaucracies, including massive corporate and governmental engines of control. In his book Die Bekehrung der Strukturen9 Eberhard Müller criticized the common tendency to think of "conversion" in purely individualistic terms: basic social groupings and structures also need to be greatly changed.
During the first decade the concentration upon the ethic of work shaped the dialogue and the subject matter for dozens of conferences in the church conference centers. Later, many major conferences were held of the thematic kind more familiar to Americans. For example, a significant conference was held in the Bavarian academy (Tutzing, on Lake Starnberg) which brought out both Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars and politicians to discuss "The Church and Resistance." In another setting, at Arnoldshain Academy, the conference center of the Church of Hess, a gathering of church and political leaders worked with representatives of the American peace churches to draft the first regulations providing for conscientious objection and alternative service in German history.
The vaunted "German miracle" has been interpreted almost always in economic and political terms. To be sure, through credits such as the Marshall Plan and by extremely hard work the people of the Federal Republic of Germany did accomplish an amazing recovery. In 1948 the American Secretary of State said publicly it would take Germany at least 30 years to recover, and the French official in inter-Ronal consultations responded, "at least 100 years!" In fact, by 5 May 1955, when sovereignty was transferred to the Federal Republic ("West Germany," not including the 7 eastern states until 1989), the GNP (gross national product) was greater than that of the whole Reich in 1936.
A "miracle" more true to the meaning of the word was the rehabilitation of shattered and demoralized communities of work. This was accomplished by considering the importance of the ethics of work as well as the imperative, especially in a destroyed economy, of a strong work ethic.
There were some efforts, in view of the success of the professional and vocational conferences in the German Evangelical Academies, to translate the experiment to the American scene. Haddam House launched in 1960 a series of study books under the general chairmanship of Edward L. Long, Jr., including The Christian as Doctor and Christianity and the Scientist. Cameron P. Hall called a conference and edited a small volume published by the National Council of Churches: On-the-Job Ethics (1963). Several articles appeared urging the adoption of the dialogical and ethical approach of the Academies in lay education within the American churches.10
Only within the last few years, however, has the emphasis upon professional and vocational ethics become strongly represented in American articles, books, and conferences. This may be another evidence of the unsettled economic mood and widespread political unease in our country. In any case, the manner in which the church conference centers in Germany filled out the inherited concept of a strong work ethic with a deep concern for the context and purpose for which that work is performed has raised a landmark to effective Christian social action.
Endnotes
1Report with Heath Dewar byline; The Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 March 1996, page A3
2 Richter, Werner, Re-educating Germany, translated by Paul Lehman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). "Their training was regulated by the authorities on the assumption that a too well-educated elementary-school teacher would no longer be willing to carry out his unostentatious duty in remote villages….Consequently, the elementary-school teacher was to be discouraged from seeking a really fruitful academic preparation; hence his training had to be different from the rest of the teaching profession. The institutes for the training of these teachers cultivated a kind of Spartan sobriety and discipline. The watchword was obedience." p. 23
3 There has been in recent years a large volume of articles and books reporting on and analyzing the medical profession during the Nazi Third Reich. Note the books by Benno Müller-Hill, a professor at the University of Köhn: Tödtliche Wissenschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), Robert Jay Lifton: The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Michael Kater: Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Henry G. Gallagher: By Trust Betrayed (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990).
4 See Ingo Müller`s Hitler`s Justice (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1991), by a German professor of law, and Richard L. Miller`s Nazi Justiz (Westport CT: Praeger, 1995).
5Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
6 The most recent thorough study is Klaus Scholder`s unfinished set of volumes: The Churches and the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988f). A fine specialized monograph is Robert P. Ericksen`s Theologicans Under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Pres, 1985).
7 The territorial churches (Landeskirchen) of Hanover, Bavaria and Württemberg are called "intact" because their leadership posts were not purged by the Nazis and filled with open collaborators. The posts in the Old Prussian Union churches (Altpreussische Union-by far the largest of the territorial Protestant churches), on the contrary, were ravaged by Nazi Party violence accompanied by populist election victories scored by the collaborating "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen). See Conway, John S., The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-45 (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 98-101; and Helmreich, E.C., The German Churches Under Hitler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 157f.
8 The work of the Evangelical Academies was discussed in my chapter on "Developing the Law Apostolate," in The German Phoenix: Men and Movements in the Church in Germany (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1992), PB of 1960 original, pp. 111-40, 150-55.
9 Müller, Eberhard, Die Kunst der Gesprächsführung (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1954); Die Bekehrung der Strukturen (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973).
10 Several of these essays were by the present writer: "Can America Adopt the Evangelical Academy?" XLIII The Christian Scholar (1960) 2:39-45; "Democratic Discipline and Professional Responsibility," in Fletcher, C. Scott, ed., Education: The Challenge Ahead (New York: American Foundation for Continuing Education, 1962); "The Recovery of Ministry in the New Era," in Walmsley, Arthur E., ed., The Church in a Society of Abundance (New York: Seabury Press, 1963); "A New Pattern of Community," in Robertson, D.B., ed., Voluntary Associations (Richmond VA: John Knox Press, 1966).
