graeme's picture

graeme

image

A thesis for an ambitious theolog

There's a topic that I'll bet nobody has ever done.

Take, say, about 1938. By then, even earlier, it was clear what Hitler was about. He made no secret of it - world conquest, brutal anti-semitism.... Charlie Chaplin had made a very popular flim on the subject. And, contrary to what we like to think today, large numbers of people in the western world (especially among big business - but really including the broader society) - approved of him. They weren't ready to embrace a Nazi party over here. But they thought Hitler had some pretty good ideas. so:

 

How about a study of sermon topics in a year of the 1930s? Just the topics. How many mentioned that there might be moral issues involved here?

That's rather an important question for the churches in our times.  But studying sermons today would be too much like putting feet to the fire. Much better to look back to a past we're not so tied to.

It might be useful to understand what we were - and maybe think about what we are - with just a superficial change of labels.

Share this

Comments

paradox3's picture

paradox3

image

Would be interesting, Graeme. Are you going to undertake such a project?

rishi's picture

rishi

image

great idea...

RAN's picture

RAN

image

The Barmen Declaration is a famous statement of where some German Christians were in 1934 (text of declation at ucc.org).

 

I find it helpful that in each case they stated not only the doctrine that they affirmed, but also the doctrine that they rejected. It indicates the areas where the new German government was pressing them.

graeme's picture

graeme

image

That's a most interesting document. I had heard of it, but had never read it. Thank you for sending it along.

Would I do  a study of 1930s sermons in the United Church? No. Moncton is not a very good base for it. And, you know, as you get older, you have so damned many things to do.... I'm sorry I ever retired. I need the relaxation I used to have in my working days.

RAN's picture

RAN

image

Thanks graeme. Glad to be of help.

seeler's picture

seeler

image

That type of information might be archived somewhere - I'm trying to think where.  Having been a church secretary (or administrative assistant, as they are now called) I never kept a record of sermon titles.  I did keep the bulletins for a few years but, with a change in pastoral relations, I think they were thrown out.  Individual ministers might keep records, but going back that far its likely their families would have thrown them out when going through the piles of paper with the executor.   I have all my sermons, but then I only preach a dozen or so sermons a year and only go back twenty years.  If anybody wants them, they better grab them before we downsize into a seniors' apt. or Seelergirl cleans out our stuff.  

 

Maybe newspapers reported on sermons in the major city churches back then - they might be micro-filmed somewhere.

 

That type of research is not my cup of tea. 

 

 

graeme's picture

graeme

image

Not really mine, either. It would call for far more patience than I have. I know there was considerable anti-semitism in Canadian and American churches in the 1930s - and, indeed, with echoes well into the 1960s. I've been corresponding with my high school classmates of 1950, many of them Jewish - and they have memories of the Montreal Protestant School Board that are still painful.

DKS's picture

DKS

image

graeme wrote:

Not really mine, either. It would call for far more patience than I have. I know there was considerable anti-semitism in Canadian and American churches in the 1930s - and, indeed, with echoes well into the 1960s. I've been corresponding with my high school classmates of 1950, many of them Jewish - and they have memories of the Montreal Protestant School Board that are still painful.

 

The answer might be as close as your local public library. They would have microfilm or microfiche copies of the Moncton newspapers from those years. The church ads (the tombstones) would have been published every Friday or Saturday. Just read the relevant 52 issues each year for several years.

 

Too difficult? No patience? I did that for ten years of two Ontario newspapers for my major undergrad history assignment on the public face of the RCMP (NWMP then) in the public media between 1880 and 1890. The research took me about a week of 4 hour days.

 

Yet in the 1940's many Jewish children went to Strathcona Academy, a PSBGM school in Outremont, where the protestant kids were in the minority and taunted mercilessly. My father was one of them.  

Pinga's picture

Pinga

image

Also, I don't know if titles would tell you what the sermon was about.

 

I think you would need to get into the content.

Pinga's picture

Pinga

image

but --- a neat idea!

seeler's picture

seeler

image

I was thinking that too Pinga.  Unless the secretary requests a title for the bulletin, I sometimes don't bother with a title.  Then, when she phones me, I grab one from the first line.  Or something catchy.  Or a partial quote from scripture -- that gives no hint of where the sermon is going.   Today's message might be titled "The Empty Tomb"  but unless the researcher noticed that it will be immediately followed by the hymn "Jesus, you have come to the Lakeshore" they probably wouldn't realize that the main theme will be a call to discipleship and how we might follow the Way of Jesus in the world today. 

graeme's picture

graeme

image

At best, this is an assignment that would take at least a year of full time work.  And that would still leave a lot of loose ends.

I don't there were some Jewish kids in Montreal who persecuted Christian kids. Jews and Christians - and everybody else - have that much in common.

I think Canadian Zionists bully everybody - including Zionist Jews who aren't quite so crazy as they are.

But I've lived on both sides of the fence  (in fact, on all four or five sides of it). From the 1890s to at least the 1860s, the major hatred and persecution was aimed at Jews by Christians. Now the major source of persecution is militant Zionists whose target is everybody - including other Jews.

As for Strathcona Academy, Chistrian kids from my end of town didn't like Christian kids from Strathcona, either. We thought they were snobs.  (The poor Jews, most of them in those days, attended Baron Byng.)

graeme's picture

graeme

image

As to the project, it might be a manageable and thought-provoking one to try as an experiment for one congregation. Then to discuss what it tells them about their own faith.

Back to Religion and Faith topics
cafe