In an
article posted in
USA Today,
Stephen Prothero makes a point that got me thinking and that I'd like to highlight:
When I was a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, I required my students to read Nazi theology. I wanted them to understand how some Christians bent the words of the Bible into weapons aimed at Jews, and how those weapons found their mark in the concentration camps. My Christian students responded to these disturbing readings with one disturbing voice. The Nazis were not Christians, they said. Jesus was, after all, a Jew. This response was in many respects laudable. But in distancing their religion from the history of the Holocaust, my students absolved themselves of any responsibility for reckoning with how their religious tradition might have contributed to these horrors.
I think we do this with much of Christian history, not just the Nazi Holocaust. We hide the parts we disagree with, clean out the dark spots, and say to ourselves, "they weren't really Christians". We see only the "good" side of our faith, but not the "bad", and we don't really learn from our faith's mistakes.
Prothero mentioned to me that it was the book
Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, by Robert P. Ericksen, that he assigned to his students.
Prothero mentioned to me that it was the book Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, by Robert P. Ericksen, that he assigned to his students.
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5 comments:
I think its important for Christians to cherish their positive contributions to history and not to brush over negative areas but to try to link Christianity's role to nazism would be quite a stretch. Although their have been accusations of complicity by some church leaders during Hitlers rise to power, NOBODY would link Hitler's atrocities to Christianity. If anything, the church formed a strong voice in opposition to Hitler and particularly his treatment of the Jews. Christian leaders like Dietrich Bonhoffer organized church resistance to Hitler and was eventually executed for his convictions.
Hitler himself used the political apparatus of the established church for his own ends but every historian would pretty much state that Hitler's attitude was anti-Christian.
I don't think you do your argument any favors by trying to link Christianity to Hitler
Steve,
I don’t think it is as much a stretch as one might think. Now to be clear, I know that Hitler and the Nazi party were anti-Christian, that they even required those “Christian” supporters they did have to not use Nazi symbols at “church” functions after a while, because they didn’t like Nazism to be connected in any way to a “Jewish church”.
But just because the Nazis didn’t like the church doesn’t mean the “church” didn’t like the Nazis. Even though we like to focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others who resisted the Nazis, the sad truth is there was very little resistance to the Nazi regime from the church in Germany. In short, in a country that was at least nominally a majority Christian country, the church failed. Even the ‘Confessing Church’, of which Bonhoeffer was a leader in, largely failed to speak out. And then there was the pro-Nazi ‘German Christian’ movement, of which the Barmen declaration railed against, which dominated much of church polity within Germany during the Nazi period. From what I’ve gathered from book reviews and a film based on the book, the three theologians in the book that Prothero assigned (Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch) played significant roles in supporting the ‘German Christians’ and their support for Hitler.
Now the thing is those theologians weren’t thugs. They were thoughtful, pastoral, ordinary men, they were writers, men of influence, respected, and based on their theological reflections they supported the Nazi regime, they thought it was right, good, and that it was the will of God. They were dead wrong, and what they did cost a lot of people their lives.
We like to think that if we had been there we would have been just like the true Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we would have stood up, spoken out, resisted, and very likely died a martyr at Flossenbürg just as he did. But the fact is most pastors, theologians, and ordinary Christians, who were there didn’t do what he did. And in all probability neither would we. We too might have just gone along with the theology of the time, not noticing the aberrations, and wind up on the wrong side, or remaining silent. That’s why I think Prothero is right, and we can’t just distance ourselves from these guys, and absolve ourselves of any responsibility for critically examining how our theology, our traditions, might contribute to these horrors.
Didymus,
I agree that an examination of the church in Germany during that time is certainly worth an examinination and yes certainly there was more the church could have done. But, if we are going to use the logic that Germany was a "Christian" country and therefore we as Christians today somehow shoulder the burden of that atrocity, then an argument could be made that Christian America, England, and France rose up in defense of the oppressed and overcame abberant (sp?) Christianity when it manifested. Essentially ALOT of Christians died to end, among other things, the holocaust.
Personally I go back to my original suggestion...that Christianity was a minor footnote in the causes and agendas which perpetuated WW2. To suggest in a university class that we discuss Christian responsibility for it, again I maintain, is quite a stretch.
Well, I'm not saying it's anything more than really a "minor footnote" in the big picture of WW2, and I doubt Prothero was trying to lay the blame for the Holocaust all on Christianity. He is merely wanting his students to ask how there faith "might have contributed" to what happened there. He is after all a religious studies professor, and the class was I'm sure just a religious studies class, so that footnote would I think be an appropriate footnote to focus on.
And I know there were many Christian success stories during WW2, but that's not my point.
All I'm trying to really point out is that in the church in Germany, in the theological reasoning that they did, many concluded that it was good and right to support the Nazis. That was a critical mistake, they failed to be the body of Christ to the Nazis. Now I don't think we can just write them off as "well, they were not Christians" and ignore them. We need to critically examine their mistake, so hopefully we don't make the same mistake.
Didymus wrote:
"Now I don't think we can just write them off as "well, they were not Christians" and ignore them. "
They were not Christians just as George Bush was not a Christian nor is "Focus on the Family" Christian.
The Nazi's rejected the Epistles of St. Paul. How you can be Christian and edit the Bible is beyond me.
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