Karl Adam (22 October 1876 – 1 April 1966) was a German Catholic theologian, known for his work in the fields of ecclesiology and Christology. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Tübingen, where he published work influenced by Lebensphilosophie and German Romanticism including The Spirit of Catholicism (1924), which argued for an understanding of the church as a community and for a revitalisation of Christian faith. Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Adam sought a rapprochement between the Nazi regime and the German Catholic Church. In pursuit of this aim, he published work during the Nazi era that sought to reconcile aspects of Catholic and nationalist thought, defended Nazi anti-Jewish legislation and expressed antisemitic sentiments. His later work included The Christ of Faith (1954), a collection of lectures on Christology.
Life and career Early life and education Karl Adam was born in , near Regensburg in the Upper Palatinate, Bavaria, on 22 October 1876. He had a brother, August Adam, who would also become a priest and would later in life become a critic of the Nazi regime. Soon after being ordained a priest of the Diocese of Regensburg in 1900, he matriculated at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, studying historical and systematic theology. He worked on the Latin Fathers in Munich and received his doctorate in 1904, submitting a thesis on the ecclesiology of Tertullian, and received his habilitation in 1908, completing a Habilitationsschrift on the Eucharistic theology of Augustine. In this period Adam's thought was influenced by Ignaz von Dollinger, Albert Ehrhard and Joseph Schnitzer.
Early career Adam taught from 1908 until 1917 at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich and was a tutor to the sons of Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria. In 1910 he published an article critical of Pius X's requirement that priests take the oath against modernism, which he described as "the official death notice regarding all Catholic scholarship" in Germany. This led to an investigation by the Holy Office, which ended when Crown Prince Rupprecht intervened on Adam's behalf. In 1917 he completed monographs on Pope Callixtus I's instruction on penance and on Augustine's account of forgiveness of sins. In the same year he began teaching at the University of Strasbourg, but was required to leave Strasbourg the following year due to a provision of the Treaty of Versailles which prohibited Germans from holding positions in the French civil service. He then moved to the University of Tübingen, where he took up a professorship in systematic theology. His work in the years from 1900 to 1918 focused on historical theology.
From 1919 Adam's work dealt predominantly with systematic theology. In these years he advocated ecumenism and criticised structures and hierarchies in the church that he saw as outmoded. Upon taking the position at Tübingen in 1919 he publicly declared his intention to continue the tradition of the Tübingen school, which emphasised scholarly dialogue between Catholic and Protestant theologians. He would remain at Tübingen for three decades, where his work focused on the critique of the church, the critique of modernity, and the development of a contemporary theology. In this period he also drew on the tradition of Lebensphilosophie, a school of thought rooted in German Romanticism that emphasised the interconnectedness of life. This aspect of his work, along with his use of the German language rather than Latin and his emphasis on the humanity of Jesus, once again drew scrutiny from the Holy Office, and his book The Spirit of Catholicism (1924) was threatened with placement on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1932. Eventually, however, he was informed that neither The Spirit of Catholicism nor Christ Our Brother (1927) or The Son of God (1933) would be condemned provided he made certain revisions to the texts, which he did in 1933.
Nazi era Adam was one of several German Catholic theologians who sought rapprochement between the church and Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He saw his role as that of a mediator between the church and the Nazi regime, and envisioned a new relationship between the church and state in which the church would exert a greater influence as part of a corporatist or communitarian system. While other Catholic theologians at Tübingen did not publicly oppose the Nazi regime, Adam was unusual in publicly seeking to mediate between the church and the regime. Nonetheless, he never became a member of the Nazi Party.
Early 1930s In his 1933 essay "German Nationality and Catholic Christianity" ("Deutsches Volkstum und katholisches Christentum") Adam argued that the German nation should be primarily the domain of Christians of German heritage, rather than being a pluralistic, secular society. The essay examined the relationship between Catholicism and the "German race" in terms of the relationship between nature and grace. Building on an argument made by Karl Eschweiler, Adam argued that Protestantism demands the separation of church and state because it sees nature and grace as opposed, whereas in Catholicism nature and grace are intertwined, and thus so must be the church and state. In this model the state would oversee the natural order while the church would have primacy in matters supernatural. The essay argued that the church is capable of observing "the blood-given determinations of a race or people", such that Catholicism takes different forms in different countries. Adam described the church as "the true mother of all ethnic-racial identity" and declared that nationalism and Catholicism could complement one another. In the same essay, Adam argued that Nazi anti-Jewish legislation was justified by Germans' obligation to strengthen their own racial identity, an obligation he argued originated in the Old Testament, and implicitly endorsed the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Nonetheless, Adam also argued that Christians were obliged to treat Jews justly and lovingly, and that it was wrong to deny the Jewishness of Jesus.
Whereas Adam's ecclesiological work in the 1920s had emphasised the universality of the church and its relationship to peoples' common humanity, in 1933 he began to see the unity between Christ and humans in the church as resting on racial and ethnic distinctions. He argued that the church could only flourish among a group of people to the extent that it took on the traits of those people, and that the German-speaking church must encourage the solidification of a German racial and ethnic identity.
In a 1934 speech Adam criticised the Nazi state's support for the German Faith Movement, a neopagan religious movement that called for Germans to reject Christianity. Adam argued that the strength of the German nation depended on the continuing dominance of Christianity, and that the neopagans failed to acknowledge the positive influence of Christianity on German culture over the course of centuries. Immediately following the speech he was denounced in a Nazi newspaper and harassed by the Sturmabteilung. Days later his licence to teach was revoked and his courses cancelled. The following week he was reinstated, having pledged to no longer criticise Nazism.
"The Spiritual Situation of German Catholicism" (1939) Adam re-entered the political sphere following the invasion of Poland in 1939. He delivered a lecture entitled "The Spiritual Situation of German Catholicism" ("Die geistige Lage des deutschen Katholizismus"), in which he proposed three ways to foster Christian faith in Germany that he thought would also strengthen the nation and contribute to the blending of Catholicism and German culture: that the church should permit priests to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht, that the church should permit the use of the German language in the Catholic Mass, and that the Pope should canonise more Germans. His aim was to encourage Catholicism to modernise by responding to the "positive" elements of Nazism, and to limit the influence of the German Faith Movement in order to prevent the disintegration of Christianity in the Nazi state. Without naming the German Faith Movement or any other neopagan group, he described "a new Weltanschauung, a non-Christian and anti-Christian faith movement" filling the vacuum left by Christianity's decline. The lecture pleased pro-Nazi Catholics while angering Catholic opponents of Nazism. Joseph Joos accused Adam of watering down Catholic doctrine and failing to emphasise the divergences between Catholicism and Nazism, while Bishop told Adam the lecture had harmed the church and ordered him to cease speaking publicly about the war.
Bernhard Lichtenberg wrote to Adam upon reading the transcript of the lecture, accusing him of offering a "fatal vagueness" under the pretence of a clear delineation of the status of German Catholicism. Lichtenberg criticised Adam's argument that German Catholics ought to obey the Nazi authorities, argued that Adam accepted Nazi efforts to make Catholic doctrine secondary to other Weltanschauungen, and accused Adam of confusing the concept of Weltanschauung itself by treating it as solely a secular phenomenon then later using the term with regard to theological matters. He argued that Adam overlooked Nazism's anti-Christian and anti-Catholic themes, and objected to Adam's formulation of the concepts of original sin and "German nature". In concluding, Lichtenberg observed that the practical proposals Adam made had already, to a large extent, been implemented. Lichtenberg was later arrested, convicted of violating the Pulpit Law and the Treachery Act of 1934 and imprisoned, and died while being taken to the Dachau concentration camp.
"Jesus, the Christ, and We Germans" (1943) In 1943 Adam wrote "Jesus, the Christ, and We Germans" ("Jesus, der Christus, und wir Deutsche"), which expressed anti-Semitic sentiments while defending Christianity from neopagan critiques. The essay argued that although Jesus was Jewish, he was not purely so, because he came from Galilee, a region where interracial marriage was common, and because the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary meant he lacked the "ugly dispositions and forces which we condemn in full blooded Jews." The essay also reiterated the strong connection Adam perceived between the spirit of Christianity and that of Nazism. It was Adam's final effort to connect Catholicism and Nazism.
Adam's reasons for accommodating Nazism Krieg has argued that Adam's pursuit of accommodation between the church and the Nazi government was due to his belief that the church should play a central and fundamental role in society and the state. Krieg also argues that Adam's political naivety was in large part the result of his dependence on the ideas and categories of German Romanticism, which led him to envision a national community in harmonious relation to the church, and thus to misjudge political realities and fail to realise the incompatibility of Nazi ideology with Christian faith. In addition to his Romanticism, Krieg argues that Adam's political stance was also informed by the view that Germany was threatened by modernity and the tendencies toward democracy, individualism, secularisation and a modern notion of freedom that promoted diversity. These tendencies, Adam thought, required new social and political formations that would restore order and encourage community, tradition and Christian faith. The theologian argued that Adam's "predilection for the 'vital' and 'organic'" and his rejection of rationalism and liberalism contributed to his willingness to accommodate Nazism.