Know More News - Adam Green - The German Dejudaization of Christianity

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Jan. 25, 2021 - Know More News - Adam Green

10:25

The German Dejudaization of Christianity

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	A few months after the election of Hitler as Germany's chancellor, the Deutsche Christian rose to its height of popularity and power.
	They embodied a belief in Germany's military strength, a manly Christianity, and an intense hatred of Jews and of Jewish influences in Germany's church.
	As the Deutsche Christen coalesced as a movement, they included many pastors, they included theologians, professors at universities.
	They had a goal of propagating their point of view, and there are therefore many publications which begin to present this point of view of these German Christians.
	The anti-Semitism, the nature of a newly established or a newly understood Christian message, and this can be found in pamphlets, it can be found in lectures, it can be found in publications of all sorts, and it can be found in a particular journal called the Gospel of the Third Reich.
	This series of publications can be seen now to show the arguments by which Deutsche Christen tried to convert Christianity into a doctrine that was perfectly acceptable in the Nazi state or that could fit comfortably in the Nazi state.
	The Deutsche Christian were very interested in obedience and loyalty.
	They were very opposed to a democratic state.
	They were very interested in national unity.
	But above all, the Deutsche Christen had to try to describe what it meant to be a Christian in a nation where everything Jewish was held to be unacceptable.
	And this, of course, created a huge problem for the Deutsche Christen, because anyone who looks with any degree of awareness at the Christian tradition recognizes that it is deeply rooted in the Jewish faith and the Jewish tradition.
	Matters in the German Evangelical Church today reached a serious path.
	There have been signs last week of action, less by the new Reich Church authorities than by...
	At this rally, the building was at least in all accounts described as full, so it was an enormous crowd of people, and the main speaker, one of the main speakers, was a high school teacher named Reinhold Krause.
	He gave a speech that talked particularly about the need to purge Christianity of its Jewish elements.
	And his speech used very sort of crude and direct language.
	For example, Krause said, if we in Germany refuse even to buy a tie from a Jew, how can we accept a religion that comes to us from the Jews?
	Or he talked about, you know, we need to free ourselves of the theology of cattle dealers and pimps, of the rabbi Paul, Krause made these statements about the need to remove the Old Testament, the need to sing hymns that were in German that did not celebrate places like Jerusalem,
	but rather the holy sites of German suffering, to um create a heroic fighting form of Christianity, to worship, as he said in our own German language, because only in that language can we express the truth of the German soul.
	So Krause's speech important for a number of reasons.
	One was for the very clear, even crude, way in which he expressed what a de Judaiz Christianity would look like.
	The other for the extremely public forum in which he did so, a very large audience, an audience that responded with enthusiastic applause, all accounts of the speech repeat that.
	In the New Testament in the book of Acts, Baptism has the function of breaking down racial barriers.
	What's happening is the Holy Spirit is converting people who are Gentiles.
	The church was initially Jewish, and it's converting Gentiles.
	An Ethiopian eunuch and so forth.
	and they're coming in, they're being baptized.
	What was happening was that baptism served the function of making people into followers of Jesus.
	You die to to your old selfish self with Christ, and you're raised to live in Christ.
	So it was creating a church that was both Gentile and Jewish.
	That's the Christian story.
	Niemuller and his supporters said that the Arian paragraph has no place in the church.
	And Niemuller also argued that the entire doctrine of baptism was undercut if Christians could be separated by race.
	So that if they took baptism seriously, according to Niemuller, then no Christians could be considered second-class Christians on the basis of race.
	In a culture that's out to destroy everything Jewish, does the church cling to its roots?
	Or does it seek to fit into the culture?
	The church was faced with a critical decision.
	Either maintain beliefs that are at odds with the prevailing culture or re-examine those beliefs and reshape Christianity for a new day.
	In the course of writing my book about Abraham Geiger's Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, I also looked into the next generation.
	What happened after the turn of the 20th century to these ideas of Jesus' Jewishness?
	And what struck me was that increasingly Protestant theologians were talking about Jesus as a Galilean, as a Gentile, and even as an Aryan.
	And that Aryan argument, I discovered, began even before Hitler came to power.
	It began already at the turn of the century, and it was popularized by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, published a book called Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, that became a kind of bestseller at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany.
	It was read by the Kaiser, by theologians, but people took it seriously and debated it, was discussed in periodicals and so on, and that helped spread the notion that Jesus was Aryan.
	Chamberlain says, in all probability Jesus was an Aryan.
	Probability.
	He doesn't say it definitively.
	He says probability.
	There's something about propaganda that makes oh makes people more sympathetic when you say probability.
	If you ask someone, is it possible that Jesus was an Aryan?
	Is it possible that he wasn't Jewish?
	This issue of de Judaizing Christianity was raised by pastors, it was discussed.
	There were even popular books written about Jesus that said not only was he not Jewish, he was really German.
	Somehow these Arians who were in Galilee were uh were originally Germanic tribes, or they were originally from Iran, or they were originally from India, whatever it was, they certainly weren't Jewish.
	And Jesus must have come from one of those populations, one of those families.
	Where was he born?
	Bethlehem?
	Well, it turns out there is another tiny village, also named Bethlehem, up at the north in the Galilee.
	So perhaps that's where he was born.
	He wasn't born in the Bethlehem near Jerusalem.
	Speculations about Jesus and his origins were nothing new.
	But the Third Reich offered those speculations an official credibility never before experienced.
	With some dismay that I discovered in a library in Berlin at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism, some volumes of articles by prominent theologians published during World War II, I wondered what were these theologians writing about?
	And I pulled these volumes off the shelf in the library and I started thumbing through, and it was sheer anti-Semitic propaganda.
	And I noticed that these books were published by the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish influence on German church life.
	And I wondered about that institute.
	What was it?
	Who was involved?
	And I looked at this massive historiography about the churches in Nazi Germany.
	You know, there are just thousands of books written about it.
	One book had one footnote that mentioned this institute.
	That's it.
	And I asked around some prominent scholars.
	Nobody knew.
	And then I went to Thuringia, which is where this institute had been located, which is right in the geographic center of Germany, to the town of Eisenach, where the church archives for Thuringia are located.
	It was a very spooky experience for me because so much of what I had studied about this institute that existed from 1939 to 1945, so much of it was still there.
	The hotel where they had held meetings, still there, and really didn't look at all changed.
	And there was something very unpleasant for me about holding these documents in my hands in the first time I was at that archive and actually held documents from this institute that wanted to eradicate Judaism.
	I actually broke out in hives from head to toe.
	The institute was led by Walter Grundmann, one of the 20th century's most famous Bible scholars.
	Grundmont was a friend and colleague of Gerhard Kittle, editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and had written many articles for it.
	Six years after the fiery unpopular speech in the Berlin Sports Palace, its main points were being carried out.
	The project of removing all Jewish references from the New Testament in the German Protestant hymnal had begun.
	The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish influence on German church life located itself in the town of Eisenach, home of Wartberg Castle, and of Martin Luther's project of translating the Bible into German.
	The imagery was clear.
	As Luther had translated the Bible for his own historical situation, Walter Grundmann and his institute were translating it for theirs.
	One thing he did which was widespread um among such folks was to split, to limit the gospel to to private life, individual life, and to say what happens in society is up to the Fuhrer, Hitler, and that the gospel doesn't speak to that.
	And that therefore that in that the gospel needs to be made friendly to German sensibilities.

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