The strange must cease to be the strange: in memoriam Ernst Lange - 1927-1974

An ecumenical visionary in Bonhoeffer's footsteps

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer died on the gallows on 9 April 1945 his most outstanding successor among German ecumenical theologians was not yet 18 years old: Ernst Lange, born 70 years ago on 19 April 1927 in Munich, was to become the most articulate ecumenical visionary of our generation.

Ecumenism can no longer be toyed with as a mere possibility. It has become the test case of faith. And being ecumenical is at the same time the contemporary expression of peace, of shalom... Ecumenism is the form, is the only form in which the universality of Christianity is possible today. In the one world Christianity is present ecumenically -- or not at all... The strange must cease to be strange.(1)

It was in his last and most fascinating book, And Yet It Moves: Dream and Reality of the Ecumenical Movement (1972), that Ernst Lange drew his conclusions from his lifelong ecumenical commitment. He made Bonhoeffer's appeal for world peace at Fano in 1934 his own with these words:

The ecumenical movement is a movement for peace. Far wider than the Geneva

association

it is in fact the way in which the Christian churches really serve the

cause of peace... I mean

the real churches -- in the light of their possibility. I mean the real

churches -- under the

pressure of their calling. This calling, I believe, obliges them to make

the ecumenical utopia

a reality. Of course it is well known that churches betray their calling.

Shalom! Yours E.L.(2)

Lange's biography has some striking similarities with Bonhoeffer's. Both were sons of professors of psychiatry. Their decision to study theology came to both families as a surprise. The initial encounter with the international world happened to both during their student time -- to Bonhoeffer in New York, to Lange in Sigtuna, Sweden. East Harlem became for both an inspiring source of their ecumenical commitment: solidarity with the poor, the church for others. Also quite similar were the contexts of their first public appearance at ecumenical youth conferences: Bonhoeffer spoke at Fano in 1934, Lange at Lausanne in 1960, where he said:

You must put it to the test to find out whether in the end it is really

true that the one and the

only place where heaven and earth meet and where God appears in his glory

is the world of

every day. The test will be whether we are willing to believe that Christ

is able to keep his

promise of his all-transforming presence at home, too, even there. It will

be whether we are

willing, through our expectation, to challenge him to do this. For our

lack of expectation

ties Christ's hands and prevents the miracle of the church from taking

place.(3)

From the very beginning of his ecumenical involvement Ernst Lange was a passionate advocate of the local church in ecumenical perspective. In later years when he served in Geneva as director of the WCC's Division for Ecumenical Action he sharply criticized what he called the "parochial conscience" of Christians produced and cultivated by churches who only look backward and inward.

Christians live with a parochial conscience in a universal world. We have

to discover the

ecumenical dimensions of our conscience. The ecumenical experience is a

threshold for

contemporary piety. There is no way back behind this threshold. From its

very beginning

the biblical promise has been an "ecumenical" promise. Our Christian

conscience must

enter into the spirit of the larger household into which it has been

challenged from the

beginning -- to which it has been oriented since ever: the household of

the inhabited earth.(4)

The most profound and tragic convergence of the biographies of Bonhoeffer and Lange is in the fragmentary character of their lives: Bonhoeffer was hanged when he was 39. Ernst Lange ended his life by suicide when he was 47. He had closed his last public presentation in February 1974 by saying: "People perish because they are not able to tie together the end and the beginning."

When he died he had reached the age of his father. Like his father, he had been a professor. But he chose the way of his mother, who had committed suicide in 1937. Did he wish "to tie together the end and the beginning"?

An educator for freedom and companion of Paulo Freire

Ernst Lange was a very sensitive and vulnerable person. The marriage of his parents did not succeed. While his father was a professor and the director of a clinic in Breslau, he divorced his wife, Kathe Lange-silbersohn. This happened in 1935, the year of the so-called "Nuremberg Laws", which expelled all Jews from public services. Ernst's mother, who was also a medical doctor, was Jewish. She returned to Munich with her two children Ursula and Ernst. Finally despair over the situation -- both private and political -- overwhelmed her and she took her own life. A year later the father died as well. The children were brought to Schondorf, a first-class boarding school on the Ammersee in Bavaria whose headmasters were relatives of their father.