Christian history demonstrates repeatedly that the church at its best has been a self-criticizing institution. Furthermore, the call to both corporate and individual reformation has never ceased to be regarded as the special obligation of Christian, preachers. Their hearers through the centuries have often been, highly sensitive, as individuals and groups, to castigation of any kind emanating from whatever quarter. In every era, however, there have been some prophetic spokesmen who have continued to take seriously the censures of the church's enemies and to call for self-examination, repentance, and rededication—both personal and social—on the part of its true friends.

If it be assumed that in any survey of the religious situation in post-war Europe, reconstruction and the struggle against Stalinist communism are the two main themes, Germany is deserving of attention on both counts. By the end of the war, approximately fifty per cent of the church's physical property in cities of more than thirty thousand people had been destroyed. The Nazi penetration into the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Evangelical Church and practically all the minor Protestant sects also presented a reconstruction problem of major proportions. In the matter of communism, Germany at the crossroads of East and West was soon subjected to a determined leftist drive, conducted in the guise of anti-fascism, to remake its society on an anticlerical and irreligious pattern.