“Endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” – Ephesians 4:3
Chapter 30
Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, commonly known as K.H. Miskotte, was a prominent Dutch theologian and pastor in the 20th century. Born in Utrecht on September 23, 1894, and died on August 31, 1976, Miskotte played a major role in shaping modern Dutch Reformed theology. Miskotte is best known for his engagement with the Bible and his critical stance toward modern secular culture. He was strongly influenced by Karl Barth, a leading figure in neo-orthodox theology. Like Barth, Miskotte emphasized the transcendence of God and the importance of Scripture. He wrote several influential works, including When the Gods are Silent (“Als de goden zwijgen”), which explores the challenge of maintaining faith in a secularized world.
When it comes to resisting Christian passivity, Christians often draw on the wisdom of Bonhoeffer, who was a leading voice in the Confessing Church—a clergy movement that resisted the Nazification of Germany’s Protestant churches. Instead of fleeing to America, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany before the war. He was banned from teaching and preaching and eventually joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which led to his imprisonment and eventual execution.
In summary, while both Miskotte and Bonhoeffer were deeply committed to resisting Nazi tyranny and were rooted in their Christian faith, Bonhoeffer was more directly involved in active resistance and focused on discipleship and community, whereas Miskotte emphasized intellectual resistance through biblical theology and critique of modernity.
Yet many today have fractured and co-opted Bonhoeffer’s legacy by separating his biography from his theology. This distortion creates a “Bonhoeffer option.”
Methods of Resistance:
Bonhoeffer:
• Active Plotting: Bonhoeffer’s resistance included direct involvement in plots to overthrow Hitler, which was a significant and risky form of opposition.
• Theological Education: He founded an underground seminary in Finkenwalde to train pastors in the Confessing Church, emphasizing discipleship and community.
Miskotte:
• Intellectual Resistance: Miskotte’s primary form of resistance was through his intellectual and theological work, writing and preaching against the ideologies of the Nazi regime.
• Pastoral Care: He provided pastoral care and moral support to those in the resistance, encouraging them to remain steadfast in their faith and opposition to tyranny.
One way pastoral theology makes this possible is by reminding people of the power of God’s word—which brings us back to Miskotte. When his fellow Dutch citizens faced a costly choice between pious inaction and violent reaction, Miskotte invited them to a theologically grounded yet politically active form of resistance. This, he believed, began with the simple yet radical act of listening. Miskotte saw that the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam produced a surprising, new hunger for Scripture—including an outbreak of Bible study groups in occupied cities in the winter of 1940. Miskotte personally facilitated some of these underground meetings and used his theological training to publish and distribute a study guide to meet the desperate need for biblical resources. His booklet, entitled Biblical ABCs, targeted the religious roots of Nazism. The primer began with the importance of God’s name, which Miskotte saw as the “cornerstone” of all “resistance” to authoritarianism and the decay of truth.
Ben Cowgill makes an interesting statement:
Miskotte respected the power of paganism. This may sound obscure or even offensive. The term has a long and controversial history, including colonialism, and modern people use it to describe their own religious practices. But Miskotte means by paganism something primordial: the standard human outlook that specific cultures concretize in different ways. This pagan outlook is rooted in particular lands, and it contains no grand contrasts: no creation from nothing, no end of the world, no transcendent agents. Instead, it is pluralistic and agonistic to the core. Gods and mortals struggle. Miskotte believed that paganism was honorable and even, in a sense, true, and therefore extremely durable. In fact, he thought that the Christian church, being composed of converted pagans, was always unstable and in danger of falling back into this most natural vision of the world. Only a constantly renewed attention to the Torah—“the anti-pagan monument par excellence”—can prevent this relapse. Only an active discipline of unbelief can keep us from absorbing the surrounding status quo ethos. Christians must also understand that it will take very strong catechesis to arrest our drift: we should not underestimate the fascism latent in ourselves and our churches, nor the kind of intensive, preventive deprogramming we need to pursue. Miskotte is an expert, Torah-based deprogrammer.
In this way, Miskotte saw Christian sanctification as a form of sabotage. The God of Israel revealed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, Miskotte said, “is a saboteur from the beginning.” Not only does Jesus destroy our man-made notions of God and religion, but sanctification initiates us into God’s ongoing holy sabotage of our lives and the socio-political worlds that define them. In his essay on Miskotte’s work, theologian Philip G. Ziegler says that a key to “sanctifying the name” is active unbelief and disobedience to the chthonic and religious powers that drive natural life. Yet even this form of nonviolent theological resistance is often viewed as literal subversion by the political establishment—especially by people whose visions of peace, justice, and greatness conflict with those of the kingdom of God.
Sacred sabotage is brought about not by the power to crucify, but by the power of one who was crucified. This translates into a political presence that, according to Stanley Hauerwas, exists “so that the world may know that there is an alternative to the violence that characterizes relations between peoples and nations.”
More than that, God distinguishes us together. In the same way, resisting political violence in our time requires the church to renew its identity as the community of God’s Word.
As Miskotte reminds us, Christian sanctification involves participation in God’s holy sabotage of our world and its mechanisms of violence. The church’s prophetic task is to bear witness to the peace of Christ that reconciles and sustains the world. A restored humanity is possible only at the cross, not by the sword. And as dissident disciples, we smuggle this subversive message as witnesses in, to, and for a hostile world that is being reconciled to God but has not yet recognized it.
As sanctified saboteurs, baptized into God’s life, we boldly say, “We are Christians before we are (add your nation),” in accordance with our original confession that Jesus is Lord.
Wishing my readers a good and peaceful start to this new week in whatever form of sabotage they take. ✨
Philemon
References
• Bonhoeffer, D. (1995). The Cost of Discipleship. SCM Press.
• Miskotte, K. H. (1967). When the Gods are Silent. Collins.
• Stacy, J. (2024). Sabotaging Political Violence. Journal of Reformed Theology, 68(5), 74.
• Ziegler, P. G. (Year). A Theological Provocation. Journal of Reformed Theology.
• Cowgill, B. (Year). The ABC’s of Biblical Resistance: An Interview with Dr. Collin Cornell. Reformed Theology Today.
