They Just don't Get It:They Just don't Get It:
Christian Reaction
to the Holocaust
by Rev. Isaac C. Rottenberg
"They just don’t get it." That expression of exasperation came to mind as yet another folder announcing yet another "Scholars Conference on the Holocaust" crossed my desk. This one has as its theme "Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century." A mandate indeed. A divine mandate to be sure, and one of immediate urgency. A mandate for this moment.
The conference, I suspect, will feature academic papers aplenty, some of them profound, some pedantic; some of them showing a scholar’s love for esoteric subjects, others demonstrating a more pastoral concern, while others again may have been written with a career move in mind. The tongue-in-cheek character in John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, who is head of the department of "holocaustics" at the local university, is alive and well at such gatherings. But so–thanks be to God!–are the scholars whose conscientious and sometimes soul-tearing research has finally confronted the church with long-suppressed truths. The truth, however, has not yet made us free, because by and large Christians simply haven’t gotten it. After these many centuries of Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism, is there a well-founded basis for hope that things will be different in the 21st century? What must happen for that to be the case?
What do I mean when I say that Christians aren’t getting it? Haven’t they heard about the Holocaust? Many church members do indeed know that Hitler was a madman who hated Jews and who built concentration camps to kill as many of them as he could. They may even know that the total count reached six million plus. That much many Christians do know, and the revisionists who deny the evil events not withstanding, most of them remain convinced that "they did it." The problem is that it is "they" who are seen as having done it. Hence, the Holocaust is isolated from Christian history.
Selective Listening
As the prophets of Israel knew so well, there is a folly of the human heart that causes people to hear the sounds without getting the message. Jesus knew that too. Both children and adults display that willful element called selective listening. But in adults especially we find that deeper dimension of human evasion which Jesus identified as hypocrisy. To paraphrase his words; "You hypocrites, you are quite good at analyzing the phenomena of nature, but you refuse to face those aspects of history which disturb your complacency and call you to account" (Luke 12:54-56).
The Holocaust is about that kind of history. It is about the horror aspects of Christian history. Hence, it is about all the truths we don’t want to get, because if we do, they get to us in ways that are profoundly revealing of the dark side of human nature, including that of Christian sinners. The knowledge we are now talking about involves the painful loss of innocence.
In the biblical thought-world knowledge is a matter of both the head and the heart . . . the mind and the emotions. Sexual intimacy is seen as a form of knowledge. Knowledge of God is relational, not merely intellectual. That is what is meant in Hosea’s prophecy: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (4:6). The Good News Bible version uses the word "acknowledgment." And then, of course, there is the matter of knowing the facts versus facing the truth. All the hard and awful facts. Behind Hitler were his henchmen: Himmler, Heydrich, Streicher, Eichmann and many more. There were also intellectuals among Germany’s academic elite, like the philosopher Martin Heidegger. And there were famous theologians like Gerhard Kittel, advocate of a purified Judenrein church and society. That, he said, was God’s design for an outcast people, declaring further that Jews were part of an Unheilsgeschichte (damnation history) rather than a Heilsgeschicte (redemptive history). Let others call what we do barbarism, boasted professor Kittel, we know that it represents obedience to God.
Anti-Semitism in Christian History
But the history of hatred against Jews and the implication of Christians in the crimes goes far beyond Hitler and his cohorts. And that’s where the rub comes in and the resistance against really "getting it" gains its strength. It is not just the massiveness of the data that poses a problem, although that is a factor, but above all it is the enormity of the guilt that is involved. Where to begin and where to end? How to deal with it all?
First there is the language of rejection, then the harsh polemics and finally the persecution. The Council of Nicea (325) produced not only the Nicene Creed, but also a change in the calculation of the Easter date in order to put a distance between that festival and the Jewish observance of Passover. It was stated specifically that the Church wished to have nothing in common with "the enemy people of the Jews." Of course, that was mild language when compared to John Chrysostom’s vitriolic outbursts half a century later, calling Jews inveterate murderers, men possessed by the devil, worse than wild beasts, while he referred to the synagogue as a whorehouse.
The great St. Thomas Aquinas (1125-74) felt a need to validate the principle of Jewish servitude to Gentiles, which had been promulgated during the preceding centuries, while Luther (in 1542) accused Jews of abducting children for ritual murder. Adolf Stroecher, a 19th century preacher at the German Court, wrote numerous anti-Semitic tracts which found a wide readership. No wonder then that during the rise of Nazism, the Austrian Bishop Gföller felt the support of tradition when he wrote a "pastoral letter" calling the Jews "a poison in our national soul." The same can be said when six years later (in 1939) the Evangelical (Protestant) Church in Thüringen decided that Jews may not become members of the church. And what about Jesus? In 1940 the famous theologian Martin Dibelius declared that he wasn’t really a Jew.
Hate language leads to hateful actions. Some one hundred church councils have seen fit to pass anti-Jewish measures, declaring Judaism to be illegal (Toledo 681), sanctioning the forceful removal and baptism of Jewish children (Toledo 598) demanding that Jews wear a yellow mark, (the Lateran Council 1215–later this became Hitler’s yellow star of David), prohibiting the treatment of Christians by Jewish physicians (1246), and placing the Talmud on the Index of forbidden books (1559). In 1592 the Jesuits adopted a rule that persons of Jewish descent could not join the order. This Judenrein clause was dropped in 1946, but in the meantime, as we have seen, Protestant Churches had followed suit. This is a small sampling of the Jewish experience in Christian history.
Confronting the Holocaust by Facing the Past
Confronting the Holocaust will mean dealing honestly with that history and the horrors it has produced. But how to communicate this in such a way that it might touch people’s hearts without overwhelming their souls and shattering their sense of selfhood as children of God? The accumulative effect of confronting so much cruelty can be mind-boggling and spirit numbing. How to convey the message that the response we seek is repentance and not a "guilt trip." Emotional and spiritual insecurity is already the source of so much brutality. The last thing the world needs now is more guilt-ridden Christians, who rather than facing the truth will be inclined to strike out in self-righteous resentment.
The pathology of a past not faced can be very subtle but still very powerful. This is true not only for individual persons, but also for corporate bodies, like the Church and society at large. The pain and suffering inflicted upon others affect the souls of the perpetrators, even though sometimes at subconscious levels. Unfaced facts do not disappear; they become the underground saboteurs of human existence.
But there is more. Christian hatred of Jews and Judaism has harmed the Church by depriving it of some of the richest aspects of its own heritage embodied in the Hebrew scriptures. Without its Judaic roots the gospel, as history should have taught us, will soon be spiritualized and philosophized into a shadowy facsimile of the biblical visionary message.
The first thing the synoptic gospels tell us about Jesus is that he proclaimed the Kingdom of God. His listeners knew what he was talking about, because they knew their Bible, the message of Moses and the prophets, the teachings of Torah about personal and communal existence before God. Later, as Gentiles defined themselves in sharp contrast to the faith delivered to Israel; when the Church first claimed to have replaced the Jews in the divine covenant economy and then declared that there was no place for Jews in a "Christian" society, the killing of Jews was in many cases accompanied by the death of the biblical dream of the Kingdom of God.
The road to healing and renewal leads through repentance and that’s what in the final analysis "getting it" is all about. Who shall lead the way? Some of the faithful already have. In virtually every major denomination small groups of concerned Christians have produced study documents and pronouncements which were eventually adopted by ecclesiastical/ecumenical assemblies. Together they form a rich source of information and insight on the history of Jewish-Christian relations. But then, it is hard to think of any topic under the sun on which denominations and ecumenical bodies have not produced position papers. The very multiplicity of pronouncements, many of them claiming to be "prophetic," is not likely to produce a sense of focus, priority and/or urgency .
Furthermore, we face what my friend and mentor, Father Edward Flannery, has often referred to as a "plumbing problem." The stream of new insights that come from on high will not be pressured through the "system" by its own weight. That will require conviction, commitment and a sense of excitement about the challenge before us.
A major bottleneck in the lines of communication can be found in the institutions that prepare pastors and church workers. Many graduates of seminaries and Bible schools enter the ministry with views on Jews and Judaism that have hardly been affected by what their denominations have publicly confessed. To use an imagery from Israel’s prophets, the shepherds are leading the flock astray.
Not long ago I heard a pastor introduce the words of the "summary of the law" with a remark that here we had an example of what was truly new in the "New Testament" message. The singing of the Kyrie Eleison which followed was more appropriate than that pastor could ever imagine.
0 Lord, have mercy on us, for we have sinned grievously. Grant us the courage to face the past and the grace not to fall into despair. May the truth of the gospel and an experience of forgiveness make us free to create a new future. Amen.
Rev. Isaac Rottenberg is a retired general official of the Reformed Churches in America. He has written extensively on theology and is a frequent contributor to various theological journals, often focusing on issues vital to the developing Jewish/Christian dialogue. His wide range of relationships with scholars and leaders in Judaism and in mainline Christian denominations makes his insights informative, provocative, and well balanced. Isaac and his wife, Malwuina, live in Denver, Colorado.