Not everyone can be a Bonhoeffer. Instead of being the lone voice crying in the wilderness, Eivind Berggrav made the public witness that gathered the entire Church of Norway around him in resistance to Nazism. Date of commemoration: January 14.
How unlikely that an unbelieving student, who on principle declined to receive the Lord’s Supper for a decade, would go on to become bishop of Oslo and spend three years in solitary confinement as the cost of his public faith!
Eivind was a pastor’s son, and despite a reasonably happy upbringing in a country parish, doubts crept in and took over. The bitter factiousness of church and theology in the Norway of his youth certainly didn’t help. At his lowest point, Eivind even ripped out the page of his confirmation Bible that his mother had inscribed and burned in ceremonially. He turned to journalism, adding to it teaching, and in time, mysteriously, the wounds began to heal. Marriage to his gifted wife Kathrine helped, as did the fellowship of Christian students. Time spent reporting on World War I, on site in Germany, opened up to him the striking fact of soldiers’ faith. But it was only his father’s death in 1918 that brought about the end of his confusion and pain. He knew, then, that he also had a call to serve in the ministry of the church, and he accepted it.
Eivind’s gifts for the work were immediate and enormous. He could talk to anyone, and would, whether villagers in rural Norway or prisoners at the Oslo penitentiary. Through Nathan Söderblom he got involved in the nascent ecumenical movement and made friends across multiple national and confessional borders. He studied religious psychology and even spent time in Switzerland with Carl Jung before heading even farther north to serve as bishop of Hålogaland, the Arctic diocese populated by the Sámi and their reindeer. One of the most popular among his more than forty books was Land of Suspense, an account of his nine years there that honored both the culture and the faith of a people very different from the usual portrait of Norway.
In 1937 Eivind was summoned back south: he was appointed Bishop of Oslo and thereby the Primate of the Church of Norway. It was not an auspicious time. Rumors of war were on the air and Eivind, having already lived through one world war, knew it was his Christian duty to try to prevent another. He traveled around Europe, arranging visits with high-ranking political officials; he even managed a private audience with Hermann Göring, one of the highest ranking leaders of the Nazi state. It was an honest effort, but all for naught.
On 9 April 1940, Germany violated Norway’s neutrality, invaded, and occupied, retaining control until 9 May 1945. Despite the Nazis’ immediate suspension of rule of law and the conventions of democracy, Eivind at first, again wishing to prevent bloodshed, urged cooperation. This earned him no friends, not least among Norwegian patriots. Norway was a very young country at the time, having gained its independence from its Nordic neighbors only in 1905.
Ultimately it was not the nationalistic argument that won Eivind over, but the theological one. The moment the notorious Vidkun Quisling—like the bishop, a pastor’s son—took power as the head of the puppet government, Eivind realized that resistance was a Christian necessity. “I negotiated until I discovered that I had to deal with very clever rascals,” he later said. “Then I refused further discussions.”
Already formed in his ecumenical habits, Eivind reached out to the Catholic and Free churches of Norway. It was hardly necessary from a strategic point of view, since the Lutheran church claimed 96% of the population at the time, but Eivind saw already that the state church would have to learn how to be a Free church.
Then in January 1941 Eivind sent a letter to the Nazi-appointed Minister of Religion and Education, calling out the puppet government’s disregard for justice, penchant for violence, and overt pressure on the clergy to abandon the seal of the confessional. Drafted in consultation with and signed by his fellow bishops as well, the letter questioned the very legitimacy of the Nazi-run government: “As the [Augsburg] Confession indicates, the Church stands in a definite relationship to the just state. This presupposes that the State, through its constituent bodies, maintains law and justice, both of them God-given orders.” Even according to the standard of Romans 13, Christians are not obligated to give their loyal obedience to an unjust state.
The response from the Nazi Church Department, dated 5 April 1941, declared that, “In the present situation, it is required, pending further notification, for all pastors, whether they are party members or not, to emphasize in their proclamation that which is purely edifying and eternal in the Gospel, so as to prevent the church’s worship services from being affected by political divisions, which are a tragic reality among our people.” The bishops once again issued a public response composed by Eivind, defying the dictat: “The eternal Word should shed light upon what is foremost in our daily life and in the lives of all of us.” Resistance had its costs: before the occupation ended, 130 Norwegian pastors were sent to jail.
Eivind’s perspective on church-state relations were developing rapidly by now. In 1941 he wrote an essay entitled “When the Driver Is Out of His Mind” and gave it as a public lecture in many places, demonstrating Martin Luther’s endorsement of resistance to false and abusive government—that it is in fact a Christian obligation. Accordingly, the bishops also criticzed the Nazi ban on Jewish-Christian marriages and plans to confiscate Jewish property.
Tensions rose over the course of the next year until the beginning of February 1942, when Quisling declared himself summus episocopus. His first act was to dismiss the dean of Trondheim Cathedral and install one of his own flunkeys in his place. The new dean took up his position in an empty church. Outside, thousands of resisters thronged and sang “A Mighty Fortress” in protest.
Quisling also passed a law forcing all young people into the Norwegian equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Still at this time the Church of Norway was a state church, receiving money and protection from the government. It was time to change that.
By the end of February, all seven bishops resigned from their position as church administrators while asserting their ongoing pastoral and spiritual authority. On 5 April 1942, Easter Sunday, the overwhelming majority of the Church of Norway’s ordained clergy did the same. From each pulpit they read aloud the same statement of faith and resistance, “The Foundation of the Church: A Confession and Declaration.” Eivind was the leading author and editor of its final form. His words read:
“The servants of the church are not able to accept directions from outside as to how God’s word should be interpreted in a given situation. For nine hundred years ordination in our Norwegian Church has been an initiation based on the Scriptures. The church therefore finds it intolerable that any ruler should, for political and worldly reasons, deny an ordained man not only his office but also the right to exercise his vocation to work with the Word and Sacrament, and should take away his right to wear the clerical robes which belong to the church. A true church must oppose any coercion of the conscience… We testify that every Christian father and mother have the right and duty to bring up their children in the faith of the church and in the Christian life. Parents and teachers may not be driven into conflict with their own consciences and leave their children to an upbringing which will revolutionize their minds and introduce them to a philosophy of life alien to Christianity. The faith of our church makes a clear distinction between two orders of regimes, the worldly state and the spiritual church… The words ‘for conscience’[s] sake’ mean that it is for the sake of God that we obey authority, and that we therefore should obey God rather than man.”
Eivind did not have the gratification of seeing his act of resistance in action. He was promptly arrested. Afterwards he made light of the interrogation and its absurd charges against him—that he was defaming the policy and circulating seditious rumors—but, in fact, Quisling had already signed his death warrant. In a private audience, Quisling sneered at the bishop, “You triple traitor! You deserve to have your head chopped off.”
“Well, here I am,” was all Eivind had to say.
What saved him was not Quisling’s change of heart but intervention from Germany. Helmuth James von Moltke, an agent within the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence unit, had become a resister, opposing and preventing humanitarian abuses where he could. On a visit to Denmark and Norway with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in April 1942, he discovered Eivind’s inevitable fate and was able to invoke the power of German Nazis over above Norwegian Nazis. Though neither he nor Bonhoeffer were able to see Eivind in person, they sent him an encouraging letter. The following year Berggrav managed a secret meeting with Moltke, but the latter would not outlive the war any more than Bonhoeffer.
Officially Eivind was released from prison on 16 April, but it was really a transfer from one prison to another. The second was admittedly preferable to the first: Eivind’s own family cabin in the small town of Asker. What he didn’t know is that he would spend the next three years in the cabin, almost entirely alone. He was not free but on house arrest.
A delegation of a dozen guards were assigned to his case, three on watch at all times. He had a watch of three guards surrounding his house at all times. Berggrav was so gregarious that he continually won over his guards and they had to try to impose strict rules forbidding any conversation with him. Most of the time he was denied visitors, including his wife, though one of his sons was granted occasional access. Letters were heavily censored.
Outside his fellow clergy and countrymen were fighting the Nazis—protesting pastors had been given all of eight days to evacuate their parsonages—but Eivind was pushed to the sidelines. And despite his own protests, and another protest issued by church leaders in November 1942, Norwegian Jews were being deported. Nearly half of them would die before the occupation ended.
It was certainly an advantage to be at home, and not be tortured, as so many like him were at this time. But it was its own kind of suffering for such an outgoing man to be completely isolated, and for a wanderer to lose his freedom. Contrast his situation with this remembrance of his childhood urge to peek over the horizon:
“It was quite simple: suddenly, after I had been there many times, watching the water cascading over the little hill, I began to search over the top of the waterfall and beyond. Then I made up my mind to explore what lay beyond the waterfall. There was an area of woodland, so that at first I could not trace the river, which fed the waterfall, because it disappeared, round a bend into the forest. Without thinking, I explored further, asking myself what lies behind the bend in the river? I went on, crossing a field and searching until I came to a hill in the midst of the wood, which until then I had not been able to see. I had discovered where the river came from.”
All the same, Eivind wasn’t quite restricted as even his captors thought. He made himself a key and so could leave for walks when the guards were dozing. He even disguised himself and went into Oslo on four occasions. But as others in prison have learned, the way to survive enforced solitude is to maintain rigorous standards and a full schedule. In Berggrav’s case, this meant shaving every morning, reading, and doing physical labor outside. He translated much of the New Testament into modern Norwegian and wrote several books of his own.
As the war drew near to its end, the noose began to tighten. The third of his four sons, Jan, fled Norway in the summer of 1944. In December of that year, Dag, his youngest, was arrested. One of Eivind’s own guards was executed. The long isolation was taking its toll; Eivind found it hard to pray, and harder to believe his prayers would do any good. One thing was clear: Berggrav would not survive the end of the Nazi occupation unless he got out. On 16 April 1945, with the knowledge and approval of the resistance, he slipped out of his cabin and, in the company of his oldest son Otto, traveled to the Swedish consul in Oslo. His escape was discovered and the safe house encircled, but Berggrav’s friends overcame the soldiers and he was able to exit the country safely. A few weeks later, when the war ended, his son Dag was released as well.
Eivind resumed his post as bishop at once. Among his first acts was to petition for the commutation of the death penalty for Quisling—the very man who had gladly signed Eivind’s own death warrant three years before. Eivind would not counter injustice with further injustice. His petition, however, was not granted.
The rest of Eivind’s life was spent in pursuit of reconciliations of all kind. In 1946 he participated in the formation of the United Bible Societies and served as its first president. The next year his beloved wife Kathrine died, and three years after that his still deteriorating health forced him to retire as bishop. Nevertheless, he remained active in the formation and development of the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches and continued to reflect deeply on the complex interplay of church and state in postwar Europe. He died in Oslo on January 14, 1959.
His character and contribution were well summarized by Hanns Lilje, another churchman who suffered for his resistance to the Nazi regime: “Eivind Berggrav is one of the few truly great figures of recent church history. He was very prudent and very courageous, a Christian with a deep and simple faith and the same time a man of great immediacy who could effortlessly come close to people.”
For Further Reading
Eivind Berggrav, Land of Suspense (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1943).
Eivind Berggrav, Man and State (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1951).
Edwin Hanton Robertson, Bishop of the Resistance: A Life of Eivind Berggrav, Bishop of Oslo, Norway (St. Louis: Concordia, 2000).
Torleiv Austad, “Eivind Berggrav and the Church of Norway’s Resistance against Nazism, 1940–1945,” Mid-Stream 26/1 (1987): 51–61.