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Holocaust Remembrance and Christian Responsibility
The history of Christian relationships with the Jews has both its bright spots and its dark corners.
Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day (or Yom HaShoah in colloquial Hebrew). On this day, Jews do not have a uniform ritual for memorializing those who died as part of the Nazi genocide. The observance was established too recently (inaugurated only in 1951), for any genuine tradition to have developed. Jews marked the occasion in different ways today. I have even less sense of what I should do, but I decided this morning to wear my kippeh (yarmulke) to work as a sign of solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters. It gave me a number of opportunities to remind my Christian coworkers of today's significance.
The key issue Christians face is trying to grasp the degree of Christian responsibility for the Nazi genocide. Clearly, many German Christians were utterly complicit, but certainly not all. Clearly, there are cultural links between this history of Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism. But there is more to the story than that.
Here are three things to remember and to help us have a balanced, accurate view of Christians' relationship to this great horror.
First, not all German Christians collaborated or quietly stood by. German Christians are counted among the ranks of the righteous Gentiles who resisted and protected Jewish lives. The most famous is, of course, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (See Christian History issue 32 for a full exploration of his heroism. And if you want to investigate the topic of righteous Gentiles even more, try to find a copy of the 1994 book by former CT columnist David Gushee, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Reflection.) The stories of righteous Gentiles display how the fundamental Christian command to love our neighbors as ourselves motivated many to take great personal risks.
Second, Christian anti-Semitism was historically different in several key ways from Nazi anti-Semitism. One of those ways is the distinction between placing an accent on race (as the Nazis did) or on religious identity (as the medieval church did). Even in the church's teaching of contempt, the focus was on the spiritual blindness of Jews who refused to recognize what God was doing in Jesus of Nazareth. Baptism and conversion (and thus a changed religious identity) were always open doors for Jews who wished to escape prejudice and oppression. For a more detailed list of such contrasts, see my 1998 National Review essay about the Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Museum's handling of the topic. Also, my 1998 Christianity Today editorial, "Did Christianity Cause the Holocaust."
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Third, without Christian activism, there would not be a Jewish homeland today. More to come on that in a few weeks when Christian History will publish the story of British Christians who wanted to show their love for the Jewish people in marked distinction from the history of medieval Christianity and its teaching contempt for the Jews. (These British Christians saw their efforts on behalf of the Jews as part of their Protestant departure from historic Catholicism.) They were responsible for the British government's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which laid the foreign policy and legal groundwork for the eventual establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In that forthcoming article, Donald Lewis of Regent College reports: "Seven of the ten members of the war cabinet that issued the declaration were from evangelical homes; six of the seven were from Calvinist backgrounds, including Balfour (the foreign minister) and Prime Minister David Lloyd George."
So on Holocaust Remembrance Day, please recall that the history of Christian relationships with Jews has both its bright spots and its dark corners. We bear the shame of our fellow Christians whose long teaching of contempt toward the Jews and whose complicity with Nazi policies led to the deaths of millions. But we also claim as our own the righteous Gentiles who stood up to the horror and the Christians who laid the foundations for a Jewish homeland. Today, we honor them.
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Comments
David,
I want to thank you for this, and for the 1998 CT and National Review articles related to the film shown at the Holocaust Museum.
I appreciate the approach you take in these articles. You do not deny that there is certainly a history of Christian antisemitism to be read, regretted, and repudiated by Christians today. Yet you strongly argue that Christians should neither take upon the Christian faith as a whole the burden of Hitler's racial and genocidal antisemitism, nor assume that the church as a whole in Germany supported Hitler--who, as you point out, viewed the church with disdain and even disgust.
Is the film still showing today at the museum?
I look forward to reading, soon, about the story behind the Balfour Declaration.
Posted By: Chris Armstrong | April 25, 2009 10:02 AM
This post, on Holocaust Rememberance Day of all days(!), is shameful. The notion that Christian anti-semitism was somehow less bad than Nazi anti-semitism is a horrific abdication of our Christian responsibility to seek and tell the truth.
Neff claims in his 1998 CT article:
"For all the horrible history of Christian European anti-Judaism, it was almost always a cultural and theological prejudice, not a racial one, and therefore it was at least possible for Jews to escape the pressures through assimilation and conversion. Sadly, when they refused conversion, they faced even further straitening of their circumstances, as when Martin Luther, deeply disappointed by Jewish lack of interest in his Reformation, called them "this damned, rejected race," and advised the German princes to raze their synagogues and houses and forbid their rabbis to teach."
He says again in this post: "Even in the church’s teaching of contempt, the focus was on the spiritual blindness of Jews who refused to recognize what God was doing in Jesus of Nazareth. Baptism and conversion (and thus a changed religious identity) were always open doors for Jews who wished to escape prejudice and oppression."
First, to any sentient human being, forced conversion is PROOF OF, not escape from, the anti-semitic oppression.
Second, while Nazi anti-semitism may have had slightly different intellectual underpinnings from Christian anti-semitism, there can be no denying that Nazi anti-semitism found favor with the masses of German Christians precisely because of the long history of officially established anti-semitism within the Church. This is not holding the Church responsible for the rantings of a David Koresh, whose views were never shared by the Church. Naziism was a political philosophy many of the anti-semitic policies of which were officially shared and endorsed by the Church, regardless of whether the intellectual underpinnings for the policies differed slightly.
Neff goes on to criticize a short film at the US Holocaust Museum:
"The film paints with a broad brush. A dull voice intones disconnected facts and quotations that leave the viewer believing that anti-Jewish bias is the result of Christian influence on the Roman Empire, that it has been Christian society alone that has marginalized and oppressed Jews, and that Nazi racial prejudice against the Jews was in clear continuity with earlier religious prejudice. The anti-Judaism that preceded Christianity and that has long existed outside Europe is ignored."
Martin Luther's direction to the German princes to raze the Jewish synagogues and prevent the rabbis from preaching goes a long way toward proving exactly the message that the film "leave[s] the viewer believing." Really, what does it matter that China in the pre-Christian era also held anti-Jewish views? Is Neff seriously arguing that those views had more impact on the Nazis than did the official teachings of the Church over many centuries?
This post is just bad history and bad Christianity. In fact, it's a disgrace, particularly by the editor in chief of Christianity Today, and especially on Holocaust Rememberance Day.
Posted By: Christian Lawyer | April 25, 2009 1:48 PM
It seems to me that Christian's comments and observations bear a greater degree of true perspective than David's. Let us remember the words of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, penned in October, 1945. The Council of the EKD, at the insistence of Nartin Niemoller, voted the following words, "With great anguish we state: Through us, inestimable suffering was inflicted on many peoples and lands."
Corporate guilt for the Holocaust, rather than an attempt to avoid such, was the thinking of many German Christians in those early post-war times. Are we postmodern Christians drifting away from what appears to be a biblical position? If we Christians are willing to accept our corporate guilt of the death of Jesus, why cannot we do likewise in the recent shameful history of the Holocaust? Maybe we would do well to try and begin to think like our Jewish brothers--corporately.
Posted By: Bill Brace | April 25, 2009 3:27 PM