Ernst Bergmann Thesis 7

 

Thesis 7

Asatru is not an enemy of churches. It strives for an Asatru Church on a

völkisch-religious basis.

What is a church?

Church and christianity are just as little identical as religion and christianity. Church as an

organizational entity as well as a place of worship and consecration is quite capable of being

taken out of the judeo-christian world of ideas.

Church in the sense of cult and consecration place was already possessed by

all pre-christian peoples, in particular our Germanic ancestors, who partly, as

Tacitus reports, worshipped the deity in open and free nature on holy mountains or under

holy trees. Only partly however, for example, Winter Julfest, the main celebration of

the old-Nordic religion, was celebrated in temples or houses of worship. Also

for other, e.g. artistic reasons, there is no reason to reject the closed church building

as a place of Asatru consecration action with reference to the above Tacitus passage.

We are no longer old Teutons, we are Germans of today. This does not prevent us

from feeling the beauty of the Germanic forest religion in the deepest kindred heart.

By the way, in our opinion, the Gothic cathedral, taken purely architecturally, is nothing

but a replica in stone of the Germanic forest sanctuary, just as the entire Gothic style

sprang from the Nordic soul. 

As for the church as a site for organizing the life of faith of the people in doctrine

and worship, this organization is not bound to the form of christianity, even though

it may have grown historically on this form. Lutheran church reform proves that

ecclesiastical institutions are changeable. Luther detached the German Church

from the international Papal Church, an undertaking no less daring for those

times than the detachment of Asatru from the christian idea in

general, which we Asatru of today strive for. Therefore, in the second

and final German church reformation, we place next to the Catholic and Protestant

churches the Asatru Church with Asatru teaching and preaching,

Asatru worship and congregational life, Asatru school instruction

and the training of Asatru speakers, pastors and social workers in Asatru

theological faculties and seminaries to be newly founded at the universities.

Thus, Asatru is not churchless; on the contrary, it demands and

promotes church life, albeit Asatru church life based on Asatru religious confession.

It wants, to speak with the proverb, that the church remains in the village, but that it

becomes an Asatru church. And it is convinced that this is the only way to effectively

counter the aversion of the widest circles of the population to the previous church life.

Yes, it believes that the day will come when whole congregations, together with their

pastor and under his leadership, will convert to Asatru and the Asatru

church, as it was in Luther's time or in 1845 and later, when many pastors, together

with their circle of followers, converted to the federation of the free-religious Catholic

congregations, which at that time had already recognized the

true religion of the Germans.

Luther could overcome Rome only with Christ. And so we Asatru of today also

believe that one can overcome church only with church. All other ways are utopias. So

come to us, German pastors, who have inwardly shed the judeo-christian foreign religion

and feel German in your heart. Come with your whole congregation and help to build the

Asatru religion and Asatru church. 

Editor's Notes: Probably my favorite Thesis so far. This debate is, I believe, settled.

Yes, the ancient German people gathered in the forest or in nature for some, SOME,

of their rituals. But we also had churches, and we only know roughly what they look like

because the stave-christian churches were built to imitate the pagan ones! So, burning

down churches is silly; simply fill them with different gods. The fact is christianity as known

and practiced in America is essentially Germanic paganism anyway. Easter and Christmas

are Easter and Yule. The church is just a convenient place to gather people. We can read

them our life rules, the Havamal, just as easily as from the Bible. Added bonus - we're the

chosen people in our history and our lore.

Our religion affirms us, and as shown by Mozart, Wagner, Tolkien

and Shakespeare, we create beauty wherever we go. Nature should be central,

and affirmed, and part of the church. Use the church building to create the nature worship.

These two institutions, a church building/community center, and forest retreats, go hand

in hand, not as either/or but both. Our job is to reclaim the Germanic beauty of the churches

already built, already waiting, by our ancestors in our towns and villages that we still occupy in a

healthy fashion. I watched a TV show where an international banker with a lot of money bought

abandoned congregational churches in New England, smashed them to the ground, and

sold the beautiful bells for scrap. We can do better. Our people deserve a place to gather,

where they live now, and our ancestors deserve our loyalty to the buildings they built for

their descendants. I personally, wholly reject the edgy church burning impulse, and

wholly embrace the church-saving impulse, with the caveat that the marriages, funerals,

sermons and gatherings, books and spirituality inside these old/new churches comes from us,

and not outside influences.