on your WhatsApp<\/a>.<\/p>\nGermany was known for its world-famous physicists such as\u00a0Albert\u00a0Einstein,\u00a0Max\u00a0Planck, and\u00a0Werner\u00a0Heisenberg. When Adolf Hitler came to power, 97 percent of Germans considered themselves Christian, two-thirds of whom were Protestant and one-third Catholic.<\/p>\n
What on earth had happened in people\u2019s minds to make the mass extermination of Jews seem acceptable? What makes the matter even more shocking is that the genocide was carried out in a civilized and highly educated\u00a0Christian\u00a0Europe.<\/p>\n
Doris L. Bergen, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), offers a sharp analysis in her book\u00a0Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust:<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Elie Wiesel has said, not all victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all Jews were victims. The mirror image of this is also true. Not all Christians stood idly by or participated in the atrocities, but all those who stood by and participated were Christians. Of course, not all of them were examples of genuine, personal, living faith.\u00a0But just as surely, not all of the murdered Jews were necessarily practicing their faith or even members of the Jewish community.\u00a0Likewise, those who carried out the Holocaust were Christians in the sense that they had been raised in homes, schools, and churches where the Christian Bible was read and taught, where the birth and death of Jesus marked the high points of the year, and where the Lord\u2019s Prayer and Christian hymns were as familiar as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.\u201d (p. 109)<\/p>\n
Robert P. Ericksen\u00a0notes in his book\u00a0Complicity in the Holocaust \u2013 Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany: \u201cWe understand the Holocaust best when we acknowledge the role of the university system and the church, and accept that those who were guilty of it were people just like ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is certainly no single path leading to the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism and hostility toward Jews have a long history in Europe, and its influence cannot be overlooked. But the traces of the Holocaust lead, at least in part, to the academic world of the 1700s and 1800s and to changes that occurred in theological thought as well.<\/p>\n
Eero Kuparinen, in his book\u00a0From Alexandria to Auschwitz, demonstrates how the rise of modern, biological anti-Semitism in the 1870s was partly \u201cinfluenced by the efforts of many theologians and philosophers of religion to reinterpret Christianity. These thinkers were offended by the fact that Christianity was regarded as the heir to Judaism, and they wanted to define the truth of Christianity in a new way\u201d (Kuparinen, p. 149).\u00a0Johann Semler\u00a0(1725\u201391),\u00a0Johann G. Fichte\u00a0(1862\u20131814), and\u00a0Friedrich Schleiermacher\u00a0(1768\u20131834) were among those who, according to Kuparinen, sought to tie Christianity to Western culture, Indo-European identity, and a specific human species.<\/p>\n
Similarly, they also sought to define Judaism as an anthropological category, a characteristic associated with a specific human race. In connection with this development, Schleiermacher denied the Old Testament\u2019s theological significance for the Christian faith. Anyone who has taken basic courses in the theology department recognizes the names Fichte and Schleiermacher. The latter, in particular, is widely regarded as the father of so-called liberal theological thought.<\/p>\n
Alongside the anthropologization of Christianity and Judaism in the 19th century, trends emerged in German academia that signaled a fundamental break with the revelatory nature of the Bible.\u00a0Julius Wellhausen\u00a0presented his famous source theory regarding the origin of the Books of Moses in the late 1870s: The collection, pieced together from four conflicting sources (J.D.E.P.) after the Exile, was not written by Moses. Therefore, the Old Testament could not, in any meaningful sense, be the word of God. According to Wellhausen, its origin represented \u201cJewish decadence.\u201d The entire early history of Israel was an ahistorical myth created to serve the national and religious situation following the exile. Wellhausen, together with his influential colleague\u00a0Herman Gunkel\u00a0(1862\u20131932), regarded the patriarchal narratives as fairy tales. Wellhausen later resigned from his position as professor of theology because he believed his teachings rendered his students unfit for church service.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Noteworthy is the late Finnish Old Testament professor\u00a0Timo Veijola\u2019s account of the developments within the history of religion school that followed in Wellhausen\u2019s footsteps, which in part culminated in the great\u00a0Babel und Bibel\u00a0controversy in the early 20th century. At that time,\u00a0Friedrich Delitzsch, one of the founding figures of Assyriology, declared talks about the revelatory nature of the Old Testament to be baseless. He regarded the Old Testament as a fraud and (unsurprisingly) wanted to replace it with Germanic heroic tales (!):<\/p>\n
\u201cIn his famous lecture \u2018Babel und Bibel,\u2019 which he delivered in Berlin on February 13, 1902, in the presence of Emperor Wilhelm II, Delitzsch declared that the Old Testament is nothing more than a poor-quality copy of Babylonian culture and devoid of any revelatory value. Delitzsch went even further, branding the entire Old Testament a \u2018great deception\u2019 and wanting to replace it with German heroic tales \u2026 The controversy surrounding Delitzsch himself caused him to develop in an even more radical direction. A shocking document of his development is the two-volume work *Die grosse T\u00e4uschung*, published in its final form a year before his death, which is, without exaggeration, a direct slander of the Old Testament and its religion in the spirit of anti-Semitism\u2026 Jesus himself\u2014whom Delitzsch assumes to have been of Aryan descent\u2014frees us from the shackles of Old Testament Judaism. The conclusion is that \u201cthe books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Daniel, have absolutely no religious significance for us living today, especially not for us Christians.\u201d To support his position, Delitzsch refers to Goethe and Schleiermacher and finally invokes the doctrine of Jesus\u2019 love. There is no need to go into detail about how Delitzsch\u2019s \u201cgreat deception\u201d was met. The subsequent course of history provides a sufficiently clear answer as to how beneficial it was to replace the Old Testament with Germanic paganism.\u201d (Veijola: Old Testament Research and Theology, Gummerus Oy 2003, pp. 32, 44\u201345)<\/p>\n
In the same book, Veijola refers to another leading figure in German liberal theology,\u00a0Rudolf Bultmann, who in an article published in 1933 (the year Hitler came to power) stated in an article that \u201cthe Old Testament as such is not the word of God to us, nor is the history of Israel in general any revelation to us\u2026\u201d (Veijola, p. 64).<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
How, then, was the genocide of the Jewish people in Christian Europe possible? The perpetrators and bystanders of the genocide had grown up in Christian homes, where German \u201cscientific biblical scholarship\u201d had convinced them that the Jews had no revelation from God and that the nation\u2019s roots and ancient history as God\u2019s people were entirely fabricated! Israel and the Jews were not God\u2019s people. As the scholars taught, so the people followed: Europe was ready to be \u201cliberated from the shackles of Judaism.\u201d<\/p>\n
The genocide of the Jewish people can be considered the culmination of Europe\u2019s anti-Semitic history up to that point. It was made possible by the indifference that had taken root at various levels of society. Although the church never officially endorsed direct violence in principle, even its highest leadership saw no problem with marginalizing Jews from the economic life of society, restricting their civil rights, and driving them into ghettos.<\/p>\n
The German liberal theological interpretation of Christianity could very well coexist in harmony with age-old stereotypes (Jewish greed, baseless tales of the ritual murder of Christian children, the desecration of communion wafers, and aspirations for world domination).<\/p>\n
Once the significance of the Jewish people\u2019s sacred texts as divine revelation had been undermined, and the people\u2019s early history branded as a \u201cgreat deception,\u201d there was no sufficient ideological, moral, or spiritual counterforce in Christian Europe to oppose Hitler\u2019s ambitions. \u201cThe Jewish question\u201d was on everyone\u2019s lips long before Hitler\u2019s rise to power.<\/p>\n
It is therefore not insignificant what kind of understanding we have of the Bible as God\u2019s revelation and of Israel\u2019s position as God\u2019s people. The history of the persecution of the Jews shows that what we believe and how we believe matters. It is interesting that Israel\u2019s and the Jewish people\u2019s strongest friends and supporters are found today among those Christian circles that also hold the Bible in high regard as the Word of God.<\/p>\n
On this day of remembrance, we must not forget history so that it does not repeat itself. The first thing we must not forget, however, is God\u2019s Word and the history of the Jewish people recorded therein.<\/p>\n
Pasi Turunen is a Finnish author, theologian and Christian radio-broadcaster and president of Patmos Foundation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt feels sinful to me to sleep in a warm bed when my dearest friends have been killed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2319,3647,5124,1760,1758,1759,5127,5,939,4807,5132,1927,5125,5130,1761,5129,5128,5131,5126],"class_list":{"0":"post-5018","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-anti-semitism","9":"tag-antisemitism","10":"tag-bible","11":"tag-church-news","12":"tag-digital-evangelical-news","13":"tag-evangelical-news","14":"tag-finland","15":"tag-germany","16":"tag-history","17":"tag-holocaust","18":"tag-liberal-theologychristian-news","19":"tag-nazi-regime","20":"tag-old-testament","21":"tag-protestantism","22":"tag-religion-news","23":"tag-remembrance","24":"tag-schleiermacher","25":"tag-theology","26":"tag-timo-veijola"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}