The holocaust occurred in the most educated, most enlightened, most modern of nations the world had ever seen.
The following quotes are from Richard Terrell's book Resurrecting the Third Reich. This book traces the philosophical roots of the nature of Nazi-ism. This is a truly shocking period of time, and even more so to have occurred in the most "enlightened" nation of the time. Children were taught to pray to the Fuhrer, and Christmas Carols were re-written to deify Hitler and the German state. Are we ready for the repeat screening?
As in Germany, this horror will begin within the "Christian" Church.
What happened?
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Intellectuals and educators in the West are tempted by cultural chauvinism or naive views of human nature to see the Nazi epoch as an aberration, a movement running counter to all major trends in modern thought and intellectual life. Actually the reverse is true. Such a thing as the Holocaust does not come about at random, as if in some intellectual vacuum.
The full-scale assault on Christian theism, which began in the eighteenth century philosophers of the Enlightenment and which strengthened through the nineteenth century, captured the imaginations of intellectuals and artists alike and laid the foundations of modern secularism.
Of foremost importance to this context was the gradual undermining of the credibility of Christian faith during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first among the intellectual classes and educators, and then in the populace at large. The anti-supernaturalism of the Enlightenment had posited a bias against propositional revelation in scripture. Not that all enlightenment philosophers denied the existence of God; many recognised the reality of God but adopted a theology of Deism, in which God was held to have created the world with all the natural and moral laws "built in" to the system so that direct, divine intervention was not necessary. In such a system, the Christian claim that God had in fact spoken in specific ways through inspired prophets, apostles, and ultimately through the person of his incarnate Son, did not make sense. Although Deists retained much of traditional Christian morality, Deism set in place philosophic premises that fed a spirit of scepticism in regarded to Christian claims of special and unique revelation. Related to the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, in which reason and science alone became arbiters of truth, the "higher criticism" of the Bible made the Scriptures appear top be faulty, historically incorrect, "mythological", and contradictory. Many of the conclusions of the higher criticism resulted not from real evidences of a scientific or textual character, but from the necessity of explaining biblical materials from the standpoint of a purely naturalistic philosophy that did not recognise either the ability or inclination of God to actually reveal Himself in tangible word or deed. Never the less, the conclusions of the higher criticism became the authoritative orthodoxy in biblical studies.1
Hegel, Nietzsche, Schleriermacher.
Hegel - Deification of the State
Nietzche - God is Dead, attack on Christianity
Schleriermacher - A Christian who made the Bible look faulty, contradictory and unreliable
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Emerging out of this philosophical picture, grounded in Hegel and Nietzsche, was the recognition of the proposition that man was the measure of all things. It is virtually impossible to distinguish between God and man in these philosophies. With Hegel, the activity of man is the activity of God, whereas in Nietzsche the concept of God is thrown out altogether, with humanity emergent, at least in potentiality, as God.
However important the Hegelian deification of the State and Nietzsche's attack on Christianity, another important element contributed greatly to the formation of German religious attitudes that would leave the population intellectually and spiritually disarmed before the rise of Nazism. The central premise here is the subjectivity of truth, and the central figure is the philosopher Freidrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1864).
As in Hegel and Nietzsche, Schleiermacher’s thought makes humanity the ultimate measure of spiritual truth. Because humans were thought to share a oneness with God through participation in the life of the spirit of the universe, inner sentiment was seen as a reliable guide to religious truth. Dogmatic matters, creeds, and the reliability of Scripture were peripheral elements for Schleiermacher, who is regarded by many as the “father” of modern liberal theology. Oddly, his principle concern was to defend Christianity in the face of the growing power of scepticism. He was concerned that the rationalist attacks on Christian faith by the philosophers of the European Enlightenment would destroy Christianity. Rather than seek premises and evidences with which to defend the historic faith, Schleiermacher chose to refashion Christianity itself so as to make it appealing to the “cultured despisers” of religion. He had, then, and apologetic intent – that of preserving Christianity against scepticism of the Enlightenment. His approach, however, was very strange. He replied to attacks upon Christian doctrinal understandings by saying, in essence, that doctrines and historical evidences were not important anyway, that what mattered was the inner spiritual consciousness of human beings, not the acts of God in history and the witness of Scripture.2
The further away from biblical authority the church moved, the more vulnerable it was to the distortion which equated Christian faith with German culture. One can see the seeds of future tragedy in the thinking of prominent theologians of the early twentieth century. Having adopted the conclusions of the higher critics that there could be no “once for all” revelation, they opted for the Hegelian concept of salvation of historical processes, with that process now seen as raising up German culture as a redemptive principle for humanity.3
The central presence of the Bible and its positive impact on culture, have been noted by Joshua O. Haberman, a rabbi ...[who has said] ... that America's "Bible Belt", contrary to the virulent scorn of its critics, is America's safety belt against a Holocaust happening here in the United States. Haberman fled his native Vienna in 1938, just months after Austria came under the control of Nazi troops. Why was it that this cultured city succumbed to nazism without so much as even a mild resistance? Haberman calls attention to an intellectual climate "dominated by moral relativism, bordering on nihilism," that spiritually disarmed its people against the appeal of the pagan idolatry that was nazism. "As a eyewitness to the horror and barbarism of a totalitarian regime, I hold a different view of Americans who take the moral absolutes of the bible seriously.
For Rabbi Haberman, the Bible-believing people he met in the United States were in sharp contrast to the Austrian culture he had left behind. The sometimes uncouth, seemingly naive residents of Mobile, Alabama, offered a stark contrast to the outwardly sophisticated and courteous citizens of the Vienna he had known. Their roughness was balanced by qualities of openness and good-naturedness, whereas in Vienna he "was constantly on guard with people, wondering what reality might hide behind the mask of gracious courtesy." Of the Bible-belt people, he wrote, that "their Biblically grounded moral standards and faith in God, deeply rooted in and reinforced by all levels of society, acted as barriers against the excesses of governmental power that can lead to totalitarianism.
What, asks Haberman, made possible such despotisms as we have seen in the twentieth century? His answer is clear and forceful:
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"The suspension of the Bible's moral "barriers" made possible all the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and other totalitarian rulers. It is no accident that the Soviet State and Hitler's Third Reich both identified the Bible and its teachers as primary enemies... Rosenburg was not mistaken in judging the Bible to be incompatible with Nazi philisopy. The Bible mandates a Supreme Law, to which all human creatures, even the Fuhrer, must submit...On the whole, the official clerical leadership of German Protestantism and Catholicism left a dismal record of compromise, submission and collaboration with the Nazi regime. Not so the members of the dissident Confessing Church...which following Karl Barth's staunch fidelity to Scriptural theology, felt impelled to reject "unscriptural" Nazi views."
As a Jew, Haberman acknowledges significant differences between himself and Bible-believing Christians concerning America's social agenda and public policy matters. Yet, overshadowing the differences is a common moral and spiritual vision growing from a recognition that the Bible gave the United States its moral vision that is the guarantor of fundamental rights and freedoms.
Whether or not the Bible and its moral vision constitutes a safety belt for a society in crisis depends, in the final analysis, on the degree to which its authority is acknowledged and accepted by a population.4
Footnotes:
- Richard Terrell, Resurrecting the Third Reich, Huntington House Publishers, 1994, pp 21-22
- Ibid pp 32 - 33
- Ibid pp 58
- Ibid pp 208
