In the early nocturnal hours of May 10, 1940, the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Dutch troops resisted for several days, but the bombardment of the City of Rotterdam compelled the government to capitulate on May 15. Two days later, Hitler proclaimed a decree by which he appointed the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as the Reichskommissar for the occupied territories of the Netherlands. In the beginning, the German administration tried to pacify the Dutch people “decently” as a “Germanic Brudervolk,” and with some success. Many (too many!) officials, for example, complied with the first measures of Nazification such as signing the Arierparagraph for civil servants. However, in the autumn of 1940 the first protests arose. At Leiden University, R.P. Cleveringa, Dean of the Faculty of Law, publicly contested the dismissal of his teacher and colleague, the Dutchman of Jewish origin E.M. Meijers,[i] and the students called for a strike. Jan Koopmans, reverend of the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam, wrote an anonymous pamphlet Bijna te laat! (Almost too late!)[ii] to warn the many that had already signed the first anti-Semitic declaration of the Arierparagraph. This pamphlet was published illegally and distributed by the so-called Lunterse kring, a group of persons from the church that had maintained relations with the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany during the thirties.[iii]
A second pamphlet by the same underground group was published in Amsterdam and its environment after the strike at the end of February 1941; in spite of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the strike was organized mainly by communist working men in protest of the Nazis’ first anti-Jewish raid. The anonymous author was a friend and colleague of Koopmans, Kornelis Heiko Miskotte—although stylistically his text was much too easy to identify and so required radical revision by other members of the underground group. Its title was Betere weerstand (Better Resistance), and it was meant to warn against an activist demonstration of anti-German feelings because of only injured national pride.[iv] Instead, it urged the importance of knowing the spiritual grounds for resistance and the indispensability of values such as justice and the search for humanity against the totalitarian state. It may be that the title of Miskotte’s work had been inspired by the same expression (bessere Widerstand) that Karl Barth used in his letter of October 1940 to the Protestants in France.[v]
As pastors of the Dutch Reformed Congregation in the capital of the country, Koopmans and Miskotte felt obliged to contribute to this better resistance of the population. Remarkably, it was a grassroots movement for Bible-reading that gave them the opportunity. In 1966, Miskotte remembered that a sudden asking after the sense of the Bible had taken place in 1940 and a movement arose among laypersons (housemates, neighbors) to read the Bible in common. Miskotte’s remembrance was wrong, however, when he dates these initiatives back to the first year of the German Occupation. In the context of his Ph.D. research on Jan Koopmans, Niels den Hertog discovered an announcement by Miskotte himself in the church journal that listed preachers for the next Sunday (Het Amsterdams Predikbeurtenblad).[vi] In this announcement, dated to May 16, 1941, Miskotte promotes a course on “the basics (grondlijnen, ground-lines) of the biblical message,” to be held in the New Church, the central medieval church at the Dam square; the goal of the course was to equip its attendees to lead Bible-reading groups afterwards in neighbourhoods all over the city. Miskotte explains: “it should not become a series of apologetic lectures; thus, one does not have to expect edification or a defence of Truth—it will simply be a matter of instruction. We will convene as a beit-hammidrash, a house of learning.” Of course, it is significant that Miskotte uses here a Jewish expression for a meeting that is not in the synagogue, but alongside the synagogue. It may well be that he had in mind the “Free Jewish Learning House” of Franz Rosenzweig and others in Frankfurt when he wrote this notice. At any rate, he did not intend for the meetings to be a church service, where Word and Sacrament were celebrated, or confession and obedience presupposed. Rather, he meant for this course to host a common effort of learning without presuppositions—including the presupposition that it makes sense to read the Bible together because the Bible is a good, important, or foundational book. Soon after his announcement, Miskotte evidently provided a hall for this course in the New Church, and in summer 1941 he expanded his lessons into a booklet entitled Biblical ABCs, which was edited (in two editions) in the autumn by the usual publishing house of more popular materials by Dutch dialectical theologians: Callenbach in Nijkerk. The appearance of this manuscript in print implies that German authorities permitted its dissemination. Other books by Miskotte from the same period received a negative assessment from the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands and its censors; one such work was Messiaans Verlangen (Messianic Desire), a study of the lyric of Henriëtte Roland Holst-Van der Schaik, a Dutch activist and poet, which can be compared to someone like Rosa Luxemburg.[vii] But Biblical ABCs didn’t sustain such a verdict—though one may wonder how the association of sanctification with sabotage (usually an act of a militant resistance! see chapter 10 section 1a) could pass the censor. Nonetheless: Miskotte clearly aimed in 1941to offer the spiritual foundations for resistance, but in this text he didn’t openly criticize the propaganda and the terrible measures of the Occupation force and its accomplices.
Another point of attention for reading the present work concerns the already-mentioned distinction that Miskotte makes between preaching and instruction, or, in the language of the Gospels, between kērygma and didachē. Biblical ABCs does not mean a short reproduction of the content of the Bible in order to adhere its truth and to convert to its appeal. This title means only, and in a strict sense: an acquaintance with the Bible’s language, in expectation that this specific language will bring a specific message and a specific way of life to light. In this procedure, Miskotte’s presuppositions are, firstly, that it makes sense to distinguish phenomenology (the art of observing) from theology (the art of decision-making), and secondly, that it doesn’t belong to the range of human knowledge to discern what God is doing with the hearts and minds of those who read Scripture. As a result, Miskotte’s concentration on biblical language leads to a predominant concentration on the language of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. And as such, this concentration implicitly expresses solidarity with the Jewish people, who were extremely threatened in 1941. More than 100,000 members of the Jewish people from the Netherlands would not, in the end, survive the Shoah.
So far I have described the main contributions of the book that now lies in your hand. In the Introduction that follows, I will sketch the factors in Miskotte’s life and work that made him the right person to lay the foundations for resistance during that moment and in this way. I will also describe some aspects of the book’s first reception and indicate the character of the additions that the author himself would make to the book in its postwar edition of 1966.
Miskotte’s Vigilance in the 1930s: A Sketch of Five Steps towards Biblical ABCs
1. Miskotte, at that moment 38 years old,defended his Ph.D. thesis on December 17, 1932, at the University of Groningen, nearly two months before Hitler came to power in the Netherland’s eastern neighbour. The subject of this, Miskotte’s third attempt at a dissertation, was quite unusual. It dealt with Judaism, not in its classical Talmudic expression but as reflected in a range of its contemporary philosophical representatives. Its title, Het wezen der joodse religie (The Essence of Jewish Religion),[viii] indicates the use of the phenomenological method of Wesensschau, the “intuition of essences.” Instructed by Max Brod, Miskotte distinguished Judaism from Paganism and Christianity as the three fundamental types of being human. (We will return to the conception of Paganism below.) Next, in an analysis of the thinking of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, Miskotte systematically sketched the characteristics of Judaism, with some attention also to extreme positions such as those of Franz Kafka (exceptional as a Jewish adherent of original sin) and Ernst Bloch (utopian and messianic). In Miskotte’s eyes, the most important witness in this company was Franz Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption he had bought from the bookstand of the local Jewish congregation at the Pressa, an international press exhibition in Cologne in 1928. He read it intensively and assessed it as the writing of a great thinker and a great theologian, too. In a certain sense, Miskotte’s dissertation is his most scholarly work, in that reconstructing the Jewish religion is more important than elaborating its possible contribution to Christian theology. Only the last chapters compare Jewish interpretations of the Hebrew Bible with a Christian reading of the Old Testament, specifically one shaped by the nineteenth-century Christian preacher H.F. Kohlbrugge.[ix] Kohlbrugge had deeply influenced the spiritual atmosphere in Miskotte’s parental house, especially the piety of his mother. In agreement with Hermann Cohen, Miskotte’s dissertation describes Judaism as a religion of “correlation,” where the Godhead makes itself dependent on the human covenant-partner, i.e., on the moral action of the people of Israel. By contrast, for Kohlbrugge, sanctification always is and remains a divine gift, passively received by the human sinner. Therefore, for the Miskotte of 1932, there is a dispute between the Jewish and the Christian (or Reformation) reading of the same Scripture. This would remain his opinion, including in the Biblical ABCs, but through the dramatic developments of the following years, this aspect would gradually recede.
2. In March 1934, Miskotte wrote an article for the Journal of the Christian Student Movement. In it, he makes a point in a quite opposite direction. The title of the article is “Judaism as a Question to the Church.”[x] If his dissertation raised this theme only implicitly, here it emerges directly: namely, what it means for the Church that it encounters Judaism as another post-Biblical religion besides itself. Miskotte argues that in the whole of its being, Judaism is asking, and thereby challenging the Church. It asks, at least tacitly: “Why are you, Christians, such a resting, reposing people? Where can we see your contestation with things as they are?” “Where is your earnest prayer for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven?” “And when you are saying that the Messiah has already come, how can you show that you have actually come further, and that the expectations of the prophets have been fulfilled?” “If the promises were fulfilled in Jesus, why don’t we see a redeemed reality in the world?” “Moreover, why do you pretend to have a missionary appointment towards us, whereas we cannot recognize in your message the direction of the Scriptures you received from us?” “And how can we determine that you actually are keeping the divine commandments?” Miskotte does not offer a Christian theological theory, either an old one or a new, to demonstrate his answers to these questions—or better: to this one question in its many variants. Instead, he encourages the Church to persist in being disturbed by Judaism: by a Judaism that is a questioning of the Church’s whole existence, in its claim of being the people of the Messiah. In his diaries of the 1930s, which have now been mostly edited and published, we can study how Miskotte himself as a Christian preacher and theologian tried to let these questions penetrate his soul and his heart. This approach to Judaism as a fundamental question appears in the emphasis of Biblical ABCs on expectation as a key word in biblical language. Such an emphasis also reveals the “pagan” character of bourgeois western culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for which expectation is exactly not a key word (Chapter 11, sections 1-4).
The category within which Miskotte perceived the reactionary spirit of the 1930s was that of paganism, in the sense that Max Brod used the term.[xii] It is, consequently, not just a rhetorical flourish but a true self-confession when Miskotte says: “we must honor paganism, because we have to acknowledge that we are pagans ourselves.” It is difficult to distinguish the Christian as a third way of being human beside the Pagan and the Jew. In Europe, Christians are pagans who have been disturbed by the proclamation of Israel’s message in their context. As such, Miskotte’s definition of a Christian is a disturbed pagan. And that insight explains Miskotte’s great project of the late thirties: Edda and Torah: A Comparison of Germanic and Israelite Religion, a book that appeared at the beginning of October 1939, when the double invasion of Poland had already begun the Second World War, though the Netherlands still strove (delusively) to maintain its neutrality.[xiii] One faction in the Nazi Party of Germany sought a revival of “native” Germanic religion (of course in what we now call a “reinvented” way). For a better understanding of this current, Miskotte read many books by reactionary thinkers, who argued that the Jewish spirit had tried to intoxicate the people of Europe, and that Christianity in a certain sense derived from this blameworthy Judaism. Some critics of Miskotte’s project hold, that in this approach he overestimated the religious component in the Nazi-ideology. On the other hand, in our early twenty-first century, many extreme thinkers of the “conservative revolution” from that time—such as Ludwig Klages, Janko Janeff, Friedrich Hielscher or Leopold Ziegler—are intensively studied and discussed on neo-Nazi websites; they are increasingly influential again, or still. In Miskotte’s eyes, their appeal to pre-Christian Germanic religion could be confirmed by reading the mythological-poetic texts composed in Iceland around the twelfth century, known as the Edda. This use of the so-called Edda, once published, elicited well-founded criticism on historical and philological grounds from the Germanist Professor Jan de Vries, who personally sympathised with National Socialism.[xiv] However, the feelings and the attitude toward life of his fascist contemporaries, which Miskotte recognized in these old texts, show their own coherence: life is dominated by fate, the beginning of all things is chaos, and in the end, all gods and all humans go to ruin; in between, only struggle takes place, where the strongest are heroes and the weak are held in contempt. In considering Christianity, Miskotte did not consult a single basic text; given its character as paganism disturbed by Israel, Christendom represents a syncretistic entity, and is therefore unfit for such a comparison. Instead, Miskotte contrasts the Edda with the Torah: the latter is the witness of an encounter between a speaking God and a responding people. It testifies of a good Creation at the beginning and a completed Kingdom at the end, and since it aims at justice, it commends the person who protects weak people. In this way, Miskotte thought that standing up for the foundational text of Judaism was the best way to defend the values of humanity, and also in the end to defend the Christian Church under the threat of oppression. Miskotte was convinced that this threat would come, and that it would come soon.
5. A last element of the prehistory of Biblical ABCs occurred on Saturday, January 6, 1940. On that day Miskotte received in his letterbox Volume II.1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.[xv]Miskotte had many objections to Barth’s theology as he initially encountered it in the second Letter to the Romans. However, at the end of the 1920s, Barth personally helped him to overcome some serious problems in his ministry, and Miskotte gradually grew in an admiration for “the Master,” though never without some criticism. On that day at the beginning of 1940, Miskotte did as he usually did when one of Barth’s volumes appeared, reading and studying it intensely in less than forty-eight hours (also preaching in between). Horaion! (Greek for “splendid!”), he wrote in his diary. Especially the doctrine of the divine “perfections” (traditionally: attributes) in this volume was of great importance for him. Later (in 1956) he would explain his enthusiasm in a contribution to the Festschrift for Barth’s seventieth birthday (titled “Permission for a Scriptural Thinking”). There, Miskotte characterizes CD II.1 as the draft of “an Israelite doctrine of God,” because of Barth’s openness to the “theological depth exactly of the primitive language (about God in Scripture).” Methodologically, Miskotte praises what he calls “the induction out of the Name” instead of “the deduction out of a concept.” For the method of Biblical ABCs,this insight is decisive. One doesn’t have to start with a general concept of “God” and then afterwards derive the several divine attributes from this concept. Rather, one must start with the concrete Name of the God of Israel, which is at the same time known and unknown to us, and then afterwards, one thinks through the implications of this reliable Name, who wants to communicate with us. Moreover, one need not start with general, metaphysical attributes and then afterwards discern the virtues by which the Name is compassionate and just towards us. Instead the reasoning must proceed the other way around: from the Mercy and Justice of God to God’s Power to be merciful and just. In my judgment, Miskotte tends to neglect Barth’s appreciation for the tradition of scholasticism, and I would then say that methodologically, CD II.1 and Biblical ABCs are not following quite the same path. It seems indubitable to me, however, that reading Barth’s volume gave decisive inspiration to Miskotte, and that his booklet of 1941 would not have yielded the same clarity and tendency without his encounter with this part of the Church Dogmatics.
Miskotte and the Biblical ABCs during the German Occupation of the Netherlands
Miskotte worried that he would be arrested and punished (by deportation to a camp?) because of having written Edda and Torah (diary entry from August 25, 1939). Also, his public debate with the reverend Lodewijk Ekering, member of the National Socialist Movement, at a special meeting of the council of the Amsterdam Reformed Church on February 27, 1939—after which meeting the Church council refused to take a clear position (!)—could have made the German authorities suspicious of him. Later during the war, Miskotte willingly jeopardized himself and his family by illegally hiding Jewish people in his house. Furthermore, the activities of the resistance group the Lunterse kring continued; they instigated the Synod to more clearly protest shameless injustice, and they sent couriers to Switzerland (via Barth in Basel and via Visser ’t Hooft in Geneva) to keep in contact with the Dutch government-in-exile in London. But apparently, none of these were grounds enough to arrest Miskotte. Although the Nazi censors immediately forbade his Edda and Torah, by May of 1940 nearly all copies had already sold out. The occupying forces prohibited only Miskotte’s appointment to a professorship in Groningen, thereby menacing the theological faculty. There is no reason to regret that outcome, though, because the universities were soon closed, and the church appointed Miskotte to pursue Bible work amid an educated public in the southern quarters of Amsterdam. This special appointment gave him opportunity to develop the catechetical program that Biblical ABCs would expand: to equip people for a “better resistance” in favor of justice and humanity over against the advancing forces of death.
From April 1944 onwards, Miskotte hid himself during the nights at other addresses than his own home, and so did his friend Koopmans. Together, both comrades could suddenly appear among their colleagues, to encourage the irresolute and to admonish the cowards. On March 12, 1945, the Germans shot twenty-four persons dead in reprisal for the gunning down of a member of their security force (Sicherheitsdienst) by the armed resistance. One of the bullets moved over the head of the victims and struck Koopmans, who was watching from behind the window of his hiding place. After twelve days he died because of his wounds. It was the same, much-mourned Koopmans who wrote the (in my perception) most impressive review of the Biblical ABCs, for the Amsterdam church journal of February 13, 1942.[xvi] He remembered another famous work in the history of Dutch theology: Herschepping (Recreation), a very original dogmatics for laypeople by Oepke Noordmans, written in 1934. “That book,” Koopmans said,
was an outcome of the First World War. It tried to understand the doctrine of the Church in a new way. But meanwhile, seven years later, a storm rages over Europe. And now we have been thrown back to the most elementary datum, i.e. to the reading of the Bible itself, and therewith to the question of how the structure of learning has to be in a biblical sense.
Koopmans closes his review of Biblical ABCs with these words:
Through this war, God teaches us to ask for the Bible. In the meanwhile, the basics of our existence have become considerably narrower. We almost don’t have a Church anymore, apart from the form in which it can be found in the Bible. And perhaps we must release what we do have that is more than that. In that situation, it is of great importance to have been instructed how to read the Bible.
Personally, I’m deeply impressed by these words, and I wonder whether many of the problems we deal with nowadays in theology will fade away in the perspective of an urgency such as Koopmans expressed.
The Postwar Edition of 1966
After the Second World War, the effort to reconstruct the country generally suppressed attention to the spiritual struggles that took place during the war. In the Netherlands, it was not until the 1960s that a revival of interest in the years of the German Occupation would begin.
After his retirement in December 1959, Miskotte began to work on a new edition of his former publications. All the titles mentioned in this Introduction received a reedition, and often at the same time a revision also. In the case of Biblical ABCs, Miskotte remembered that in the Foreword of the 1941 edition, he had expressed his wish to write a deeper and broader study in better times. In 1966, he determined that this study had already appeared. It was When the Gods are Silent: On the Meaning of the Old Testament (Dutch 1956; German translation 1963; English translation 1967).[xvii] For him, the publication of this work made the task of rewriting the ABCs easier. Besides the addition of poems, hymns, and stanzas from the new Dutch rhymed version of the Genevan Psalms, and some larger excurses on biblical language (i.e., what is the biblical word for liberation? What does the day of YHWH mean?), I will distinguish two categories of major additions.
First, in 1966 it was possible to be more explicit about the circumstances of oppression and resistance that marked the book in its first edition. Miskotte could now more openly express the deep connection between the readers of this book and the people of Israel. He could mention the initial intuition that reading the Bible could help to resist the menace of the Third Reich; and he could refer to the SS, the Confessing Church, and so on.
Secondly, Miskotte now alluded to the typical debates of the 1960s. In this way, (a) he discusses the anti-authoritarian atmosphere of those days—remarking that the Dutch word that indicates authority (gezag) is related to the word for “saying” (zeggen, het gezegde), and, in good Reformation fashion, that precisely the Word that God is speaking to me generates my liberation and my “coming of age” (Mündigkeit; Chapter 1). Furthermore, (b) he hints at the newly revived discussion of the “death of God,” and hence discusses atheism in a more extensive way (Chapter 5). He also (c) comes back to the struggling that humans do in the Bible concerning God and God’s relationship to evil (Chapter 6), a question that had always engaged Miskotte, but which had been postponed in the heat of the struggle for justice and liberation. Miskotte then reacts to the assertion that the young generation of the 1960s should be “a skeptical generation” (Chapter 12), but he argues that this generation in its optimism to improve the world isn’t skeptical enough. And finally, on the last page of the book, he responds to the new movements in literary criticism to regard the Bible as literature. This assertion is not incorrect, Miskotte says, but at the same time it is easier: for the sense of humanity that the Bible communicates is not a literary motif, but a deep feeling; a feeling of simplicity arising from the particularity of the Name, and at the same time, with a universal tendency.
I conclude that the translators of this book did not deprive its English-speaking readers of essential insights by their decision to omit these additions from 1966, striving as they have to preserve the atmosphere of the historical circumstances under which the book of 1941 was written.
[i] Rudolph P. Cleveringa, “Rede naar aanleiding van het ontslag van prof. Mr. E.M. Meijers, uitgesproken op 26 november 1940, als Decaan van de Juridische Faculteit”, during the occupation published by some ‘underground’ journals, after the war officially published in: Leids Universiteits Blad, 11 (1945) 6, 26 november 1945.
[ii] Dr. J. Koopmans, Bijna te laat!, after the war officially published in: H.C. Touw, Het verzet der Hervormde Kerk s’Gravenhage: Boekencentrum N.V., 1646), Part II, 209-216. See also: Geert van Istendael, Mijn Nederland, (Pandora, 42010), 203-213
[iii] This group, with origins in the Dutch Protestant Circles that contacted the German Confessing Church, inclides members of the Gereformeerde Kerken in Hersteld Verband (Reformed Churches in Restored Union). See Ger van Roon, Protestants Nederland en Duitsland 1933-1941 (Utrecht/Antwerpen: het Spectrum , 1973).
[iv] ‘Betere weerstand’, in: H.C. Touw, Het verzet der Hervormde Kerk, ibid. Part II, 222-227. Now also in: K.H. Miskotte, Messiaans verlangen en andere literatuur- en cultuurkritische opstellen. Verzameld Werk Vol. 12 (Kampen: Kok, 1999), 462-468.
[v] K. Barth, ‘Eine Frage und eine Bitte an die Protestanten von Frankreich (1940), in: K. Barth, Eine Schweizer Stimme 1938-1945 (Zürich: EVZ, 1945), 147-156; now also in: K. Barth, Offene Briefe 1935-1942, herausgegeben von Diether Koch. Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe Abt. V. Briefe (Zürich: TVZ, 2001), 238-251, S. 250: ‚der Geist des christlichen Ansatzes zu neuem, besseren Widerstand.‘ English publication under the title „The Church and the War: a Letter by Professor Karl Barth to a French Pastor, in: Theology. A monthly review, London, no. 237, March 1940l p. 209-217.
[vi] Cf. Willem van der Meiden, “Bijbels ABC, een polemische grammatica”, in: In de Waagschaal 46 (2017) 1, 7-10.
[vii] K.H. Miskotte, Messiaansch verlangen. Het lyrisch werk van Henriëtte Roland Holst (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Holland, 1941), now in: K.H. Miskotte, Messiaans Verlangen, Verzameld Werk Vol. 12, ibid., 13-194.
[viii] K.H. Miskotte, Het Wezen der Joodsche Religie (Amsterdam: Paris, 1933); third edition in K.H. Miskotte, Verzameld Werk Vol. 6 (Kampen: Kok, 1982). German translation: K.H. Miskotte, Das Wesen der jüdischen Religion, übersetzt und mit einer Einführung versehen von Heinrich Braunschweiger (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2017).
[ix] Cf. H.F. Kohlbrugge, Wozu das Alte Testament? Anleitung zur richtigen Schätsung der Bücher Mosis und der Propheten (Elberfeld: Verlag der Niederländischen reformierten Gemeinde, 1855).
[x] K.H. Miskotte, ‘Het jodendom als vraag aan de kerk’, in: Eltheto 88 (1933/34) 6,Zeist, 195ff. Now in: K.H. Miskotte, Theologische opstellen. Verzameld Werk Vol. 9 (Kampen: Kok, 1990), 89-97.
[xi] K.H. Miskotte, “Opmerkingen over theologische exegese”, in: M.C. Slotemaker de Bruïne (ed.), De openbaring der verborgenheid (Baarn: Bosch & Keuning, 1934), 63-99; K.H. Miskotte, ‘Das Problem der theologischen Exegese’, in: E. Wolf (hrsg.), Theologische Aufsätze. Karl Barth zum 50. Geburtstag (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1936), 51-77. A critical edition will be published in K.H. Miskotte, Verzameld Werk Vol. 16 (forthcoming).
[xii] M. Brod, Heidentum. Christentum. Judentum. Ein Bekenntnisbuch I.II. (München: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921).
[xiii] K.H. Miskotte, Edda en Thora. Een vergelijking van Germaanse en Israëlitische religie (Nijkerk: C.F. Callenbach N.V., 1939). Now in K.H,. Miskotte, Verzameld Werk Vol. 7(Kampen: Kok, 1983). German translation: K.H. Miskotte, Edda und Thora. Ein Vergleich germanischer und israelischer Religion, Übersetzt und mit einer Einführung versehen von Heinrich Braunschweiger, (Berlin: Lit, 2015).
[xiv] Jan de Vries, “Boekbeoordelingen. K.H. Miskotte, Edda en Thora, in: Nieuw Theologisch Tijdschrift 29 (1940), 151-157. Again published in: Chris Doude van Troostwijk and others (eds.), ‘Wij willen het heidendom eeren’. Miskotte en de ‘nieuwe tijd’ (Baarn: Ten Have, 1994), 243-249.
[xv] K.H. Miskotte, Uit de dagboeken 1938-1940. Verzameld Werk Vol. 5c (Utrecht: Kok, 2018), 855. On Miskotte’s estimation of Church Dogmatics II.1 see K.H. Miskotte, “Die Erlaubnis zu schriftgemäßem Denken’, in: Antwort. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Karl Barth (Zürich: EVZ, 1956), 29-51; now also in:K.H. Miskotte, Karl Barth. Inspiratie en vertolking: Inleidingen, essays, briefwisseling, Verzameld Werk Vol. 2 (Kampen: Kok 1987), 196-220.
[xvi] J. Koopmans, “Boekbespreking K.H. Miskotte. Bijbelsch ABC”, in: Kerkbeurtenblad voor Amsterdam en omgeving, Officieel orgaan van den Algemeenen Kerkeraad der Nederduitsche Hervormde Gemeente te Amsterdam, 16 (1942) 20.
[xvii] K.H. Miskotte, Als de goden zwijgen. Over de zin van het Oude Testament (Amsterdam: uitgeversmaatschappiij Holland, 1956); 4th edition in: Verzameld Werk Vol. 9 (Kampen: Kok, 1983); German translation: Wenn die Götter schweigen. Vom Sinn des Alten Testaments, Übersetzung besorgt von Heinrich Stoevesandt (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1966); English translation: Wenn the Gods are silent. Translated with an Introduction by John W. Doberstein, (London: William Collin Sons & Co., 1967).