Dorothee Sölle: God Has No Other Hands Than Ours

Today, 30 September, Dorothee Sölle would have turned 97. She was born in 1929 in Cologne. She died on 27 April 2003 in Göppingen.

Sölle was a theologian, poet and activist. She was devoted to God and courageously fought injustice in society.

Political Night Prayer

In 1968, in the shadow of the Vietnam War, Political Night Prayer began.

Sölle wanted faith and public action to go together. One of the early night prayers in Cologne led into a demonstration against the war in Vietnam.

In her 1985 confession of faith she says she believes in God who did not create the world finished and who wants the change of all conditions through our work and our politics.

For her, prayer did not mean folding one’s hands and waiting until someone above intervenes.

Farewell to the Papa-God

After Auschwitz she strongly questioned the image of the almighty Father in heaven. The God who would fix everything she called a “Papa-will-sort-it-out theology.” God’s work in this world depends on what people do.

From that came a famous line she coined:

God has no other hands than ours.

That is a farewell to comfort. If you see people in suffering and wait for an intervention from above, you push away the work that already lies in your hands.

In the memoirs Gegenwind she writes in 1995:

Theological reflection without political consequences amounts to hypocrisy. Every theological sentence must also be a political one.

Peace, women, environment

In this spirit Dorothee Sölle took part in the peace movement, the women’s movement and the environmental movement.

In the 1980s she stood in sit-ins outside the Pershing II depot on the Mutlanger Heide and outside the poison gas depot in Fischbach.

In a second confession of faith she writes:

I understand what the life task of all people is:
to create peace and justice
and to feel reverence for all that lives.

Mysticism and politics

Her main work of 1997 is called Mysticism and Resistance, with the subtitle “You Silent Cry.” For her mysticism was not an escape from the world into a quiet chamber. It was a widening of the horizon. Closer to God, and precisely therefore closer to those who suffer silently and need to be heard.

A touch from God moves the mystic to question and improve the conditions of the world. For Sölle, mysticism and politics belong together.

Sölle practiced both: poems and blockades, prayer and struggle. On her grave in Hamburg-Nienstedten it says: “In your light we see light.” Light that remains. And hands that do something.

On this birthday, therefore, my deep respect goes to her.

Photo: Nationaal Archief / Anefo, International Women’s Peace Conference at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 27 November 1981. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Right Dorothee Sölle, left Adriane van Melle-Hermans.