Back to basics with a Dutch Nazi resistor

An associate pastor on my staff once completed a two-year master’s degree in theology specific to her area of ministry practice. When I tried to congratulate her, she waved me off, in tears, pointing to my collection of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and asking, “Why didn’t they make me read books like that?”

There was a day when pastors devoured Barth. The famous Dutch pastor K. H. Miskotte devoured the first book of the second volume of the Dogmatics over the course of 48 hours when it arrived in the mail (with a short break to preach to his congregation). He needed the sustenance. He was trying to reintroduce Christian faith to its Jewish roots and to lead the church in the Netherlands to resist the occupying Nazis, with his family taking the risk of sheltering Jews in their home. Miskotte channeled Barth in his own work, now translated into English for the first time as Biblical ABCs.

If you or I were writing a primer on Christian resistance today, we would likely focus on antiracism training or diagnosing authoritarian trends in media and culture. Much good work is afoot in those directions, and Miskotte’s work might seem a distraction. It is an intensely biblical meditation on the name of God and the basics of divine revelation. It is Karl Barth for Dummies in Dutch in 1941. As we in the anglophone world learn about Miskotte from translation efforts like this one, what will we find?