Complicit in Terror

Yesterday I went to a special screening and discussion of the documentary Theologians under Hitler by Rev. Steven D. Martin. In contrast to many of the demonizing, dehumanizing portrayals of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is a provocative look at the ways in pious, wise, and incredibly intellectual German theologians bought into the master story propagated by the Third Reich and became complicit in the Holocaust, the extermination of millions of ethnic Jews. Yet, for them this story was not at odds with Scripture, it was the fulfillment of Scripture and the German volke was God's new Israel, called and ready to be a blessing to the world. In 1933 Althaus spoke of Hitler’s rise as “a gift and miracle of God.” Hirsch saw 1933 as a “sunrise of divine goodness.” And Kittel, the editor of the standard reference work on the Jewish background of the New Testament, joined the Nazi project to research solutions to Germany's Jewish problem. These were pious, Godfearing people, who bought into a story that lead them to do horrific things to humanity.

The true question is "Could it happen again?" This question haunts me. It does so because as those who live today, we do not have the advantage of hindsight, which allows us to comfortably and smugly sit in our recliners and discuss the evils of Nazi socialism over coffee and cigars. Hindsight only is helpful when we use it not to demonize or dismiss the actions of others as beyond us, far too radical and evil for us to ever embrace, but when we use it to critique our own lives and decisions, when we challenge ourselves to constant reevaluate the stories that we embrace and syncretize with the master narrative in Scripture.

"Could it happen again?" Of course it could. Look at Bosnia. Look at Rwanda. Look at Sudan. Ethnic cleansing is not just a thing of the past. "Could it happen again?" I struggle with the way that many in American churches embrace the syncretism of the narrative of American Empire as God's blessing to the world. I struggle with partisan rhetoric that divides the church and allows Christians to unreflectively ally themselves with a political story. Scripture is our political story. Our politic should be the politics of Jesus. Yet often our imaginations are co-opted by the very powers that propagate death in the world, as opposed to the work of God in Christ, who will draw all things into himself for the sake of the world. God's new creation is supposed to be breaking into this world through the church. The church is supposed to be a witness to the powers, not simply a tool that the powers propagate their own political, social, economic, and religious narratives of salvation, which are ultimately only about power, control, and destruction. It is against those stories that the church is raised up as a witness of what God is doing in the world now, as a light to all of the powers that are in the heavenlies (Col. 1:15-20; Eph. 1:20-23).

Yet, often the stories are so sly, so brilliantly underhanded and sneaky that we do not realize that they are laced with death, that the very foundation upon which they are built is death, destruction, and oppression. Consider the Roman Empire. The narratio de jour was the Imperial Pax Romana, the story of the Roman Peace. It was a tale embraced by so many that through the Roman Empire, through Caesar (who was called Savior and Lord), peace and salvation were coming to the world. Yet, the Pax was built on bloodshed, conquest, war, institutionalized slavery, patronage, and the paterfamilia (the paternalistic ideology that permeated society). It was into that world, to those powers that the emerging church was called to bear witness to the new creation, to proclaim that Jesus, not Caesar, was Lord and Savior, and to dare to confess that true peace comes through self-sacrifice, not self-assertion.

"Could it happen again?" What stories of peace, hope, and salvation are propagated by "the powers" around us, be they political, religious, economic, or social? How has the church been co-opted to syncretize the gospel narrative with these stories of peace and salvation? Are we above or immune to joining in the horror of Holocaust? How do we protect ourselves, protect the church, proctect God's new creation from complicity in horror?