THE ABC’S OF BIBLICAL RESISTANCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. COLLIN CORNELL
In their introduction to the first English translation of Biblical ABCs: The Basics of Christian Resistance, (Drs.) Eleonora Hof and Collin Cornell note the disturbing ways many Americans have in the past few years fused the Christian Gospel with white supremacy. Similarly, K. H. Miskotte published the first edition of Biblical ABCs in the fall of 1941 under Hitler’s regime; he intended it as a resource for churches trying to discern God’s voice in a time of widespread Christian collaboration with Nazis, confusion, and fear. Resistance to these forces is the connecting thread between our times and theirs.
I caught up with Dr. Cornell to have a conversation about the timeliness and scope of this project, and what K.H. Miskotte may have to say to Christians today.
Who was K. H. Miskotte, and how did you find out about him?
Miskotte—it’s pronounced with three syllables, by the way, kind of rhymes with biscotti: mees-kot-tuh—was a Dutch theologian and antifascist. He sheltered Jewish refugees in his home, risking arrest (or worse) by the Nazis. Towards the end of the German Occupation, Miskotte was moving from house to house at night to evade capture. For years he had publicly and vocally opposed Nazism. In 1939, for instance, he debated a bona fide Nazi pastor, and he wrote a book during the war that the Nazi censors outlawed. He was also a celebrated Protestant theologian. Miskotte authored a prizewinning dissertation, wrote tons, and counted Karl Barth as a personal friend and mentor. Besides being a theologian and antifascist, the final thing to say about Miskotte is: he was a pastor. He pastored from the age of 27 until he was 51, first in small, rural congregations and later in bigger places around the city of Amsterdam, and he made his name as a scholar and anti-Nazi activist while doing all the things a pastor does: preaching incessantly, making visitations, dealing with church drama.
I found out about Miskotte while I was in seminary (at Princeton). In the late 2000’s and early twenty-teens, blogging online was a big thing, and I followed a blogger named Philip Sumpter, a British-German-Israeli guy who wrote about the American biblical theologian Brevard Childs. I was interested in Childs because it seemed like he honored the insights of historical criticism while continuing to treat Scripture as the word of God. Childs was also (notoriously) a bibliographic machine. He set aside swathes of each day just to read, and he read everything for himself: early Christian theologians, Latin treatises from the Reformation, German Catholic scholarship on the pastoral epistles, whatever. As such, he read and commended Miskotte, who was as obscure in Childs’s heyday as he is today. So Childs himself and also then Philip Sumpter brought Miskotte to my attention. I didn’t get the appeal at the time. As with many seeds that seminary plants, this one didn’t blossom until much later.
Tell us about Miskotte’s project. Is it a fruitful approach for the twenty-first century biblical scholar? How about for the twenty-first century preacher or layperson?
Maybe the best way to get at Miskotte’s theological project is like this: consider, say, the popularity of Robert Alter’s recent Bible translation (at least in my circles!). What Alter does is to make the Hebrew more visible in English. Instead of “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies / thou anointest my head with oil,” Alter has: “You set out a table before me in the face of my foes / You moisten my head with oil” (Ps 23:5). I think church people find the oddity interesting and refreshing. In this way, Alter emulates an earlier translation effort, that of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. These two German Jews made a famous, brilliant, and bizarre Bible translation into German; and they inspired Miskotte. Like them, his project makes the formal contour of Hebrew Scripture more visible—but not just in translation. Miskotte takes Hebrew Scripture as the template for Christian theology writ large: its key terms, its concerns and concepts, its literary tactics, become the stock-in-trade of Christian preaching and teaching.
The other way into Miskotte’s project is to see him within a certain ascetical, revisionary, postliberal theological moment. I would say, a Protestant theological moment, but actually some Jewish thinkers were making similar intellectual moves, and Miskotte drew from both streams. A generation of young Continental thinkers experienced the high-water mark of liberal theology, with all its confidence in the infrastructure of society and the power of human reason, and then they lived through the collapse of both through war and criticism. They therefore said “no!” to theology grounded in the human self (hence the ascesis); they started over theologically, turning again to classical sources such as the Epistle to the Romans (Karl Barth) or the poetry of Judah Halevi (Franz Rosenzweig); and, though they did not renounce the liberal heritage, they moved beyond it. All this applies to Miskotte as well. Like his heroes Barth and Rosenzweig, he accepted the achievements of liberalism (freedom of thought, historical criticism) and the critiques made of it; he looked to God’s voice, discerned in Hebrew Scripture, for new footing.
Whether all this is fruitful: I hope so! At the level of basic Christian instruction, I see such hunger to learn about the Bible; to have some “working hypothesis” for it, on which to hang all the individual bits and bobs. And I’ve found that once they are exposed to it, students love Hebrew Scripture and receive real spiritual nourishment from it. Miskotte was a Bible teacher and an Old Testament enthusiast, so in those regards, his writings are ripe for our time. I also notice a lot of discussion among Christians on Twitter and elsewhere about how to navigate the legacy of modernity. What does it mean to be Weird (as in: Weird Anglicans)? How much ought we disavow the decidedly non-weird, secular, university-type knowledge? How deep should our suspicion of liberal democracy run? Miskotte can help us here. More than that: he thought deeply about the rise of rightwing and authoritarian forces—and about a de-Christianizing society. These are our circumstances, too.
What are grondwoorden in the Dutch theological school? Do they make an appearance in mainstream Anglican or English theology? Why or why not?
Ah yes, grondwoorden! This is (obviously?) a Dutch term. Those memes on Twitter about how Dutch is not a real language (“geef me een klap papa”) are so funny to me, but I’m not sure how my Dutch friends and colleagues feel about them. At any rate, in this case, the English cognates are right there: you can see grond = ground and woorden = words, so put them together and you get, ground-words. The latter is a technical term that Miskotte used, and his successors in Dutch Protestant theology ran with it even further. It refers to scriptural keywords, drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Miskotte envisioned these words architecturally, if you will: they are the bones that structure the whole, two-testament Christian Bible. Miskotte’s little wartime booklet Biblical ABCs is organized around biblical ground-words, starting with the cornerstone, the Name of God, and proceeding through God’s Acts, God’s Word, God’s Way, Sanctification and Expectation (or Hope).
I don’t think this view of Scripture has any real counterpart in English-language theology. Maybe the closest thing would be Walter Brueggemann’s Old Testament theology, which takes a linguistic approach, attending theologically to Hebrew verbs, nouns, and adjectives. But Brueggemann doesn’t boil his hermeneutic down into a single concept, and that lack of an equivalent informed the decision by me and Eleonora to leave the word in Dutch in our translation. We hope maybe it can even become a theological term of art (like, e.g., Sitz im Leben). If nothing else, it’s a handy, compact reference point for getting at Miskotte’s project. He’s Dutch, he theologically interprets terminology from Hebrew Scripture, voila: grondwoorden.
How has reading Miskotte informed your personal theological understanding of the events of Charlottesville in 2017, or of January 6 2021? What counsel might Miskotte have for the twenty-first century church?
Miskotte respected the power of paganism. Maybe that sounds obscure or even offensive. The term is wrapped up in a long and polemical history, also with colonialism, and modern-day people use it to describe their own religious practice. But Miskotte means by paganism something primordial: the default human outlook, which specific cultures concretize in different ways. This pagan outlook is rooted in particular lands, and it contains no grand contrasts: no creation out of nothing, no end of the world, no transcendent actors. Instead, it is plural and agonistic all the way down. Gods and mortals struggle. Miskotte believed that paganism was honorable and even in some sense true, and hence extremely durable. In fact, he thought that since the Christian church is composed of converted pagans, it is always unstable, threatening to fall back into this most natural vision of the world. Only a constantly-renewed attention to Torah—"the anti-pagan monument par excellence”—can prevent this relapsing. Only an active discipline of un-believing can save us from absorbing the ambient, status quo ethos.
Miskotte saw the Third Reich’s Blood and Soil ideology as an intensification and perversion of Germanic paganism. Nazis emphasized the mutual belonging of people and land; they glorified war and manly virtue. Because of his nuanced view of paganism, Miskotte understood the tenacity and appeal of this view. For Christians in the USA, we do well to appreciate how naturally Blood and Soil, dictatorship and Muscular Christianity come to us, especially to white people. (I would say white insistence on proprietorship – “this land is our land” – is all the more vicious because of its artifice: we white people know the land is stolen.) American Christians must also understand that it requires very strong catechesis to arrest our drift: we should not underestimate the fascism that is latent in ourselves and our churches, nor the kind of intensive, preemptive deprogramming we need to pursue. Miskotte is an expert, Torah-based deprogrammer.
You’ve already addressed online one question that may be raised about Miskotte and his work: “Why study another dead white guy?” How does Miskotte’s theological approach distinguish him in an already male-dominated theological field?
Fair question. Reading another dead white guy is, on the one hand, benign, and on the other hand, fraught: benign because white men have participated in struggles for freedom and so can instruct us; fraught because white men are so overrepresented in theology and generally so compromised by complicity with the white supremacist status quo. I recommend Miskotte only as part of a mixed literary diet: he has specific gifts for us—his antifascism, his Hebrew-Bible-centeredness, his view of paganism, etc—but he should be read alongside precursors, fellow-travelers, aftercomers, and allies from the global and national undercommons.
Editor’s Note: If you found this interview compelling and want to know more about Miskotte’s work, you can watch a longer interview with Dr. Cornell here.
Collin Cornell earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament from Emory University and taught for three years as a visiting professor of biblical studies in the School of Theology at the University of the South (Sewanee). He is now the coordinator of the School's Center for Religion and Environment.
