Dorothee Sölle

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Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle (Template:Née; 1929–2003), known as Dorothee Sölle, was a German Lutheran liberation theologian who coined the term "Christofascism".Template:Sfnm<ref>Template:Harvnb</ref>

Life and career

Sölle was born Dorothee Nipperdey on 30 September 1929 in Cologne, Germany.Template:Sfn Her father was Professor of labour law Hans Carl Nipperdey, who would later become the first president of the West-German Federal Labour Court from 1954 to 1963. Sölle studied theology, philosophy, and literature at the University of Cologne,<ref>Anselm Weyer: Liturgie von links. Dorothee Sölle und das Politische Nachtgebet in der Antoniterkirche. Herausgegeben für die Evangelische Gemeinde Köln von Markus Herzberg und Annette Scholl. Greven Verlag, Köln 2016, S. 15 Template:ISBN.</ref> earning a doctorate with a thesis on the connections between theology and poetry.Template:Sfn She taught briefly in Aachen before returning to Cologne as a university lecturer. She became active in politics, speaking out against the Vietnam War, the arms race of the Cold War, and injustices in the developing world. Notably, from 1968 to 1972 she organized the weekly ecumenical {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (political prayer night) taking place in the Antoniterkirche (Cologne). Those were sunday evening services which by means of prayers, performances and considerations of protest addressed contemporary issues such as the war in Vietnam/Laos/Campodia, authoritarian patterns in church, faith and public life.<ref name="Soelle spirit">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

File:Union Theological Seminary 2.jpg
Union Theological Seminary, New York

Between 1975 and 1987, she spent six months a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she was a professor of systematic theology.Template:Sfnm Although she never held a professorship in Germany,<ref name="Essays in English" /> she received an honorary professorship from the University of Hamburg in 1994.Template:Sfn

She wrote a large number of books, including Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God (1968), The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (1997), and her autobiography Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (1999).Template:Sfn In Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future she coined the term Christofascist to describe fundamentalists. Perhaps her best-known work in English has been<ref name="Essays in English" /> Suffering, which offers a critique of "Christian masochism" and "Christian sadism".Template:Sfn Sölle's critique is against the assumption that God is all-powerful and the cause of suffering; humans thus suffer for some greater purpose. Instead, God suffers and is powerless alongside us. Humans are to struggle together against oppression, sexism, antisemitism, and other forms of authoritarianism.Template:SfnTemplate:Page needed

Sölle was married twice and had four children.Template:Sfn First, in 1954 she married the seven years older visual artist Dietrich Sölle, with whom she had three children before divorcing in 1964.Template:Sfn In 1969, she married<ref>Anselm Weyer: Liturgie von links. Dorothee Sölle und das Politische Nachtgebet in der Antoniterkirche. Herausgegeben für die Evangelische Gemeinde Köln von Markus Herzberg und Annette Scholl. Greven Verlag, Köln 2016, S. 16f. Template:ISBN.</ref> the former Benedictine priest Template:Interlanguage link, with whom she had her fourth childTemplate:Sfn and with whom she organized the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}.<ref>Anselm Weyer: Liturgie von links. Dorothee Sölle und das Politische Nachtgebet in der Antoniterkirche. Herausgegeben für die Evangelische Gemeinde Köln von Markus Herzberg und Annette Scholl. Greven Verlag, Köln 2016, S. 9 Template:ISBN.</ref> The 19th century Germany historian and university professor Thomas Nipperdey has been her brother.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Sölle died of a heart attack at a conference in Göppingen on 27 April 2003.Template:Sfnm She has been buried on the Nienstedten Cemetery in Hamburg.

Sölle's theological thinking

"I believe in God/ who created the world not ready made/ like a thing that must forever stay what it is/ who does not govern according to eternal laws/ that have perpetual validity/ nor according to natural orders/ of poor and rich,/ experts and ignoramuses,/ people who dominate and people subjected./ I believe in God/ who desires the counter-argument of the living/ and the alteration of every condition/ through our work/ through our politics." (ET, from Meditationen & Gebrauchstexte. Gedichte. Berlin 1969, Template:ISBN)

The idea of a God who was "in heaven in all its glory" while Auschwitz was organized was "unbearable"<ref name="Essays in English">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> for Sölle. God has to be protected against such simplifications. For some peopleTemplate:Who Sölle was a kind of prophet of Christianity, who abolished the separation of theological science and practice of life, while for othersTemplate:Who she was a heretic,<ref name="Essays in English" /> whose theories couldn't be reconciled with the traditional understanding of God, and her ideas were therefore rejected as a theological cynicism.<ref name="Essays in English" />

Some of Sölle's provocative statements:

  • "Vietnam is Golgotha, a contemporary crucifixion."<ref name="Soelle spirit" />
  • "The Third World is a permanent Auschwitz."<ref name="Essays in English" />
  • "Every theological statement must be a political statement as well." (Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian (1999))
  • "God has no hands except from our hands." (famous statement attributed to Teresa of Ávila which Sölle frequently used)
  • "We should eat more at the Eucharist and we should pray more when eating."<ref name="Essays in English" />

Publications

For publications in German language see de:Dorothee Sölle#Literatur

Texts in music

  • The musician Sergio Pinto converted Sölle's poems Credo für die Erde and Ich dein Baum, into musical compositions which were published by Verlag in 2008 under the title entwurf. The CD recording was performed by the band Grupo Sal.<ref>Dorothee Sölle auf der Website von Grupo Sal (in German) Template:Webarchive</ref>
  • The composer Ludger Stühlmeyer converted Sölle's poems Kreuzigen and Atem Gottes hauch mich an into musical compositions as well. The vocal and organ arrangements were commissioned by a circle of friends of the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing; the work was first performed in April 2013 and included a reading by Ursula Baltz-Otto during a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the death of Dorothee Sölle.

See also

Notes

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References

Footnotes

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Further reading

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