Christ, Faith, and the Holocaust

By Richard Terrell

How did the Holocaust take place in a nation of rich Christian history and cultural achievement?

What ideasspiritual and intellectualcontributed to the nightmare of Adolf Hitlers Third Reich?

What theological forces contributed to the confused witness of the Christian churches?

How do Christians respond to the accusation that the Christian faith itself, even its own Scriptures, contributed to this modern tragedy?

What can Christians today learn from those who did, in fact, stand in the evil day?

In Christ, Faith, and the Holocaust, Richard Terrell responds to these haunting questions in a work of cultural apologetics that takes up the challenges and accusations that Christianity itself was a major cause of Nazisms destructive path. Here, the Nazi movement is exposed as a virulently anti-Christian spirituality, rooted in idolatrous doctrines that took every advantage of distorted theology and emotional pietism that had evolved in German thought and church life. Here you will find the drama and importance of ideas and stories of personal witness that will sharpen the contemporary Christians sense of discernment in the arena of spiritual warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449709112

Richard Terrell

Richard Terrell is Emeritus Professor of Art at Doane College, Crete, Nebraska, where he taught in the areas of fine arts and humanities from 1970 to 2009 His articles on the arts and Christian faith have appeared in Christianity Today, Eternity, Christianity and the Arts, and Religion and Society Journal. He was a contributing author to the Leland Ryken-edited collection The Christian Imagination. His book, Resurrecting the Third Reich, was published in 1994 by Huntington House, Lafayette, Louisiana. He has pursued studies in New Testament history, church history, and Christian apologetics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, and has served various churches in Nebraska as lay-pastor and pulpit minister. Richard is a lay minister in the American Baptist Churches USA, a practicing and exhibiting artist, and writer. He is the program director for Ad Lib, a retreat ministry for Christian artists and writers meeting annually in Colorado. He has been married since 1962 to his wife, Louise. They have two children, a son and daughter, and one granddaughter. A native of Illinois, he was raised in the Chicago suburbs and has lived in Nebraska since 1970. He received a BFA degree in 1962 from Illinois Wesleyan University, and an MFA in 1964 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is an avid student of theology and biblical studies, history, politics, and the arts. He has been a frequent participant in public forums in his community discussing social, religious, and artistic issues.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1 Confronting the Accusation

Chapter 2 Anti-Semitism in The New Testament?

Chapter 3 Richard Rubenstein and Holocaust Theology

Chapter 4 The Nazi Religion

Chapter 5 Images and Their Worship

Chapter 6 The Voices of Saints

Chapter 7 Pius XII: Saint or Nazi Servant?

Chapter 8 Theological Foundations and the Utopian Temptation

Sources Cited

Periodicals Consulted

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Various people played a role in bringing me to approach the subject matter of this book, and have encouraged the process of getting it published. Of special importance to me are the following:

My mother, Jesse Terrell, who introduced me to the gospel of Jesus Christ through the Calvary Community Church in Maywood, Illinois

My brother, Bill, with whom I have engaged in countless conversations concerning things that matter.

My wife, Louise, who brought me kicking and screaming into the world of computer technology, without which I would not have been able to approach a publisher. She is the living definition of the biblical concept of a helpmeet.

Robert Sokan, my teacher in English and Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University (1958-1962), whose influence on me endured over decades.

My former colleague at Doane College Dr. Erika Barton, who grew up in the Third Reich and who wrote encouraging and affirming words to me in response to my 1994 book Resurrecting the Third Reich.

Rev. Dave Argue, who mentored me and encouraged me to study matters of Christian apologetics.

Preface

He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe… . All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sort of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible… . They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, describing a nightmare of Raskolnikov’s. (1866) [1]

So far as … the National Socialist party is concerned, the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement. — Office of Strategic Services, 1945: The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches[2]

On a sunny afternoon in 1950 a ten-year old boy—a son of Chicago-land suburbia and resident of a peaceful, dead-end street—sat on the floor of his bungalow home in a working class west suburb and felt himself strangely drawn to images of a nightmare. From a small twelve-inch screen of a new Air King table model television set he saw a film of a parade. It was unlike any parade he had ever seen. The marchers seemed tall and powerful. They appeared as dark and threatening silhouettes emerging through a diffused light. They were high stepping in a unison that was beyond mere order; their movement was animated by a rhythm that was threatening, oppressive. At the same time the marchers looked magnificent. Their uniforms were stylish and emphasized their strong, heroic bodies. On their heads they wore helmets that projected a mystery, an attraction that the boy could not articulate. He could only feel it. There was something wonderful about it, but at some level the boy knew it was wrong.

The scenario above describes my earliest encounter with the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. Born in 1940, I began to acquire a consciousness of world affairs between the ages of five and ten years, during the immediate aftermath of World War II. The vehicle for this growing sense of the world was film imagery and photographs expressing the various dimensions of the Third Reich. The films were alluring records of Nazi rallies and parades in all their mysterious grandeur. At the same time I encountered the incomprehensible horror of photographs, published in Life magazine, of mass graves and wasted prisoners. They stared with blank, cavernous eyes set deep into skeletal bodies. The pictures were haunting and unsettling.

My early Christian understandings were formed at a small Protestant church in Maywood, Illinois—the Calvary Community Church of the Evangelical and Reformed denomination. This experience also provided me with many images, mostly of Jesus. To the extent that my boy’s mind was tuned to an awareness of the War, (which was frequently mentioned in the conversations of adults so that you could not help but think about it) I had a simple outlook. God had been on our side in the conflict. Hitler’s Germany had been evil but was now defeated as a result of the forces of Light and the courage, goodness, and righteous power of Christian civilization.

Little did I comprehend, at that time, that others were beginning to see a different connection between the two. I became aware of the phenomenon of Christian guilt over the Holocaust during a period when I was, after many years of wandering away from the faith, renewing those earlier commitments to God, Christ, and the Bible. During that time (the 1970s) I was confronted by a colleague—a death of God theologian—with the disturbing suggestion that Christianity was itself a major contributing factor to the reality of the Holocaust. I was challenged and interested in his indictment, for it went far beyond the mere complaint that the churches in Germany had failed in a context of dire social and political crisis. Rather, the indictment rested on the notion that there was something about the Christian faith itself, including its foundational New Testament documents, which laid the groundwork for Adolf Hitler, the ovens of Auschwitz, and the various other horrors of the Third Reich.

Whereas I had been doing some work as a Christian layman in the arenas of Christian apologetics (mostly with college and university students), this particular accusation defined a unique frontier, for if the Holocaust was in some way a logical outcome of the Christian faith itself, including the narratives and epistles that were considered to be inspired by God Himself, was not that faith false, and did not the association represented in the indictment provide good reason for its rejection?

Yet, I had reason to think that the colleague who presented me with this challenge might not be telling the whole story. He was very interested in themes of Christian guilt, but I suspected that there might be another side to the story. I was curious about suggestions that the New Testament itself was anti-Semitic, or that Martin Luther could be considered a spiritual ancestor to Adolf Hitler.

This book sets forth my case and response, and represents a major revision, with significant additions, of my former book Resurrecting the Third Reich (1994, Huntington House Publishers, Lafayette, Louisiana). In response to that book, a notable religious scholar wrote me expressing the view that [t]his is such a fraught subject, most of the time one just keeps silent. But that doesn’t seem right either. Yet the subject matter is important, for the Holocaust is arguably the most profound theological event of the twentieth century. Indeed, there seems to be quite a bit of Christian guilt over the Holocaust. The impulse to defend the faith from the charge of its complicity in the Holocaust is tepid, at best.

Indeed, those writers who bring forth the Christian-guilt hypothesis do so with great confidence in the irrefutability of their thesis, which remains convincing to great numbers of people today, especially Jews. I remember vividly the Jewish existentialist author Richard Rubenstein, in the 1970s, visiting our campus and intoning, with apparent profundity, the view that the Holocaust left intellectually honest people with but one conclusion—that of despair and an acknowledgment of eternal nothingness as the final reality. The experience of the Third Reich demanded it. As this book will reveal, this notion has considerable currency in our world today, even among church leaders.

The Holocaust is the most visible and enduring modern embodiment of the abstract Problem of Evil. In response, Christian thought must address certain specific issues, among which are four major questions.

• What was the nature of Nazism itself as a spiritual movement or an actual religion?

• What was the actual spiritual condition of the churches of Germany in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the Protestant churches in which the Nazi movement had its greatest impact?

• What principles motivated the actions of Christians, clergy and laity alike, to take a visible stance of opposition to Nazi thought and actions?

• Is the charge of the New Testament’s anti-Semitism plausible?

On a personal note, I want to address a question that may be aroused in the reader’s mind. Why should someone trained as an artist, and who has taught in the area of visual arts be trusted to say anything significant about these issues? To this possible objection (or dismissal) I can only say that the larger matters I am considering fall within the scope of the humanities and cultural history, subject areas that came within the scope of my teaching as a college professor over a period of forty-four years. Further, why would a culture as ardently symbolic, utilizing all of the arts as the Third Reich did, be regarded as outside the normal interest of an academic person in the area of art, especially a Christian? As I have indicated above, this work grew out of a challenge put to me implying that there was something for which I needed to answer, given my Christian faith. I have taken seriously the arguments of the accusers and the accusations presented here, as well as a command of scripture to be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence (I Peter 3:15, Revised Standard Version). That is my goal.

In a deeper way, however, this study represents an attempt to resolve the sense of mystery that I felt as a boy upon viewing the pictures and films of the Third Reich. Although unarticulated, I believe that in my fascination with those images I was asking a question: what is this all about? Through my professional studies in cultural and artistic expression, my studies of Church History and Christian Apologetics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield Illinois (Church History under David Wells and Christian Apologetics under Norman Geisler), and eight years of pulpit ministry as a Christian layman, I have developed a response to that question that is set forth in what follows.

I invite the reader to consider the arguments I present and evaluate them on their own terms. This study constitutes an introduction to the issues of Christian faith raised by the Holocaust. It is a work of cultural apologetics and invites further study. For anyone who might want to study the issues further, the listing of sources should prove helpful by way of providing a gateway to a fascinating realm of inquiry. Hopefully, what I present here will make it more possible for the message of Christ and his people to make its headway in the world.

Richard Terrell

Lincoln, Nebraska

October, 2010

Emeritus Professor of Art

Doane College in Crete, Nebraska

Chapter One

Confronting the Accusation

On January 1, 1940 the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg wrote in his diary that the Christian-Jewish pestilence was approaching its end. [3] In 1942, Hans Frank, a Nazi legal expert and governor of Nazi-occupied Poland, wrote in his diary concerning the future of Poland under Nazi rule: I won’t let any churches in here; we won’t have any church problem. [4] Following the war, a 1942 document was revealed in the Nuremberg trials elucidating the Nazi view of Christianity. It had been written by Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, and was originally intended as an instruction to all the party’s gauleiters (district leaders). It openly declared that the National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable, that because Christianity is historically related to Judaism we have no need of Christianity, that the Protestant Church is just as hostile to us as the Catholic Church, and that the influence of the churches must be broken, completely and forever. [5]

These thoughts are striking today, in view of a popular and conventional wisdom that the Holocaust is the responsibility of Christianity. The Nazi experience concerns us uniquely, for Nazism is singularly problematic to Christianity. After all, didn’t the Third Reich develop in a Christian country? Wasn’t Hitler widely welcomed by the German churches? What about the anti-Semitism of Christian history? Indeed, how can we pose Christianity as a valuable barrier to destructive, secular utopianisms like Communism and Nazism when Christianity itself was a likely cause of one of the twentieth century’s greatest socio-political disasters?

Yet if the Christian faith was so advantageous to Nazism, how do we explain the thoughts expressed above? Maybe this whole matter invites a deeper look beyond cherished positions. Notice, in the quotes, the identity of the perceived enemies and how the Nazi leaders characterize them. Christianity is inextricably linked to its Jewish roots as a pestilence to be rooted up and thrown out of the new utopian garden of German National Socialism.

The view that Christianity caused the Holocaust has many advocates, even within the Christian churches. Indeed, one can detect an almost fashionable acceptance of guilt among Christian leaders relative to the Holocaust, or at least an embarrassed silence when faced with the thesis of the Christian faith’s foundational role in the Holocaust. Theologically liberal Christian leaders are most typical of this, but a variant of the accusation informs the popular conservative evangelical writer Dave Hunt, who frames his perspectives within an overall assessment of Roman Catholicism as a system of antichrist.

In recent years new books have appeared by writers who give renewed life to this viewpoint, most notably Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, John Weiss’s Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened In Germany, and John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope. The Jewish existentialist author Richard Rubenstein has gone so far as to assert that in the wake of the Holocaust Christianity faces a crisis of disconfirmation of its view of the universe and, implicitly, of the faith itself. Nor is it unusual to find contemporary Jewish and liberal Christian writers asserting that even the New Testament—sacred scripture to Christians—expresses anti-Semitism and that the sacred texts initiate a clear line of progression to the ovens of Auschwitz!

Vidal Sassoon, in his introduction to Harry James Cargas’s Reflections of A Post-Auschwitz Christian, suggests a direct progression from the gospels to the death camps. In order for Christianity to survive it must eliminate hate from the Gospels and from its teachings.[6] Author Cargas reminds us that probably every killer of Jews murdered by the Nazis was baptized in the Christian faith.[7] In a related matter, controversy was aroused over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with some critics charging that the film is inevitably anti-Semitic for the simple reason that it is based on, and seeks to be faithful to, the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ suffering and death.

In the discussion that follows, these various charges, in summary, will be referred to as the Accusation.

The Accusation offers a coherent narrative, a story that satisfies a certain desire for resolution to a mystery—the mystery of awesome iniquity. According to this story, the years of the early church saw the development of great tension between the existing communities of Judaism and the new movement declaring Jesus to be the fulfillment of Jewish messianic hopes. This tension was deepened by the growing presence of non-Jewish populations within the church. The Accusation alleges that hatred of Jews by an increasingly dominant Gentile Christian population came to be expressed in the literature and letters of the early church, writings which were eventually canonized as the New Testament. These writings were essentially political and mistakenly believed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. In time, they came to underwrite various injustices to the Jews in medieval Europe, the world base of Christendom. Hence the origins of anti-Semitism, according to the Accusation, lie within the primary source documents of Christianity itself.

According to the narrative, this tradition of Christian anti-Semitism was carried forth by Martin Luther, who blistered the Jews for their obstinate refusal to receive Christ in his volatile tract of 1543, Against The Jews and Their Lies. The persecutions of the Jews under Hitler gave concrete embodiment to the ideas of Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant tradition, making Adolf Hitler a kind of spiritual descendent of Martin