God is a Survivor
Click to Download Audio MP3 File.
Monday is yom hashoah. yom hashoah is the day Israel remembers the genocide that ended 66 years ago this spring. On yom hashoah, holocaust remembrance day, Israel observes two minutes of public silence and gives thanks for the remnant who survived.
The shoah, the holocaust, did not take place under Islamic rule. The shoah did not take place under militant atheism. The shoah was not some sort of dreadful accident that came out of the blue. Wholesale extermination of Jews could only have taken place in a society where the majority population was Christian. The shoah is a Christian phenomenon.
The few survivors of the Auschwitz camp report that on the still night of Christmas Eve 1944, with human ashes floating gently down all around from the great smokestack, in the distance they heard beautiful singing. The camp staff, who’d been busy all day, were taking a break. They were singing Christmas carols!
To most of us here this sounds totally incongruous; how can men who flung little boys and girls directly into the incinerator alive to save money on insecticide, enjoy singing to baby Jesus in the evening? Didn’t they know baby Jesus was Jewish too? Why didn’t the perpetrators catch the disconnect?
The political party in power that planned the genocide wasn’t Christian, but they understood their constituency very well. The party members had Christian parents and had Christian upbringings. Party propaganda was geared to Christians. The Nazis openly appealed to Christian teaching and to Christian precedents. The Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler, declared that “He was only putting into effect what Christianity had preached and practiced for two thousand years.”
Many of the legal restrictions, which the government imposed on Jewish people before taking their lives, were based on canon law. Canon law was the legal system of Western Christianity prior to the emergence of sovereign nation-states. Canon law is church law. The Nazis updated and re-implemented centuries-old provisions of church law. What could be more Christian than to make so many church laws once more the law of the land? Nazi policy was carefully constructed on Western Europe’s Christian heritage.
When we discuss responsibility, the objection is often raised that we ought to distinguish between good Christians and bad Christians.
The trouble with this objection is that good Christians and bad Christians shared a common belief system. Good Christians and bad Christians both believed God had unelected Israel as his witness to the world. Good Christians and bad Christians both believed non-Jewish Israel had replaced literal Israel in the plan of salvation. Good and bad Christians both believed God had eternally cursed the Jewish people. Good and bad Christians both believed that the Jewish people had lost their land and were condemned to wonder the earth as the first installment on their punishment for rejecting Jesus.
When the papal ambassador was asked to intervene in the deportations from Slovakia to Auschwitz, considering the innocent blood of the children, his reply was:
“There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you, because of the crucifixion.”
What the papal ambassador said was accepted Christian tradition. No Jewish children are innocent; in every generation all Jews are guilty of Jesus’ blood. This tradition goes back at least to the time of Origen in the 4th century. In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, when he comes to chapter 27 verse 25, Origen of Alexandria explains,
“Therefore the blood of Jesus came not only upon those who lived formerly, but also upon all subsequent generations of Jews to the consummation.”
The Adventist prophet Ellen White speaks from the same Christian tradition in slightly different words. I’m reading from Desire of Ages, page 739.
“The people who choose Barabbas in the place of Christ were to feel the cruelty of Barabbas as long as time should last. Looking upon the smitten Lamb of God, the Jews had cried, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’ That awful cry ascended to the throne of God. That sentence, pronounced upon themselves, was written in heaven. That prayer was heard. The blood of the Son of God was upon their children and their children's children, a perpetual curse. Terrible was it realized in the destruction of Jerusalem. Terribly has it been manifest in the condition of the Jewish nation for eighteen hundred years, — a branch severed from the vine, a dead, fruitless branch, to be gathered up and burned. From land to land throughout the world, from century to century, dead, dead in trespasses and sins!”
According to Ellen White, Jewish people are to feel the cruelty of Barabbas, who she interprets to be Satan, as long as time shall last, because certain of their ancestors swore a judicial oath, which she interprets to be a curse. According to Ellen White the condition of the Jewish nation is terrible, because they are under the perpetual curse of God.
There’s no point in visiting the land of Israel and noting that the Jewish nation is not wandering throughout the world homeless. There’s no point in listing Jewish scientific and cultural achievement and asking that if Jews are the unproductive branch that deserves to be gathered up and burned, then who on earth is the more productive branch that deserves to flourish? There’s no point in visiting a synagogue and noting that repentant Jews offer a marvelous testimony to God’s transforming power. Ellen White says the Jewish nation is dead, dead in trespasses and sins. That’s the tradition.
Now you can’t change tradition by pointing out evidence to the contrary. You can’t challenge tradition with logic or with facts. If only it were that simple!
It’s really none of our business to rewrite ancient tradition. Today our task is to help God’s people understand his Word, his activity in our history, and his continued presence among us. Tradition does preserve some valuable insight, but tradition also preserves a lot of human perversity and error. We cannot allow tradition to dictate how we shall read God’s Word. Instead of trying to doctor historical documents or to argue with dead leaders, we must offer better alternatives. We can’t allow tradition to have the final say. Sometimes, in order to honor God, we have to bypass our own tradition and countermand our own prophets.
The shoah, the holocaust, was the result of attitudes shared by good and bad Christians alike. Good and bad Christians alike were responsible for the theological climate that made it possible for sincere Christians to commit mass murder and feel they were doing God a favor. Although not all Christians were direct participants, all Christians bear responsibility for the environment that encouraged crimes against humanity.
When we reflect on the causes of the shoah, we’re dealing with a defect in Christian teaching. It certainly didn’t start with the generation of the perpetrators or with those of us living now. But it’s the responsibility of all Christians to fix the defect. Jews also have a responsibility to help us fix the defect, and we welcome their input. But since the teachings that produced the shoah are Christian teachings, the primary responsibility is ours. Jews can do a lot of things, but Jews cannot change Christian teachings.
It wouldn’t be historically accurate to say only a certain brand of Christianity was guilty, that my brand of Christianity was immune to anti-Semitic violence. Among all groups of Christians there were perpetrators. Among all groups of Christians there were courageous individuals who risked their lives in order to rescue Jews. There were Seventh-day Adventist rescuers such as John Weidner in the Netherlands, Katrin and Eugenia Apog in Latvia, and Laszlo Michnay in Hungary. The courageous Christians were pathetically few, but they stand out because they defied the Devil on his own ground. Among all groups of Christians the vast majority were indifferent to the fate of their Jewish brothers and sisters. They’d been desensitized by Christian education.
The sad thing is that the rescuers, the brave Christians who risked everything to do the decent thing, had to go against traditional Christian teaching, against the government, and in the case of Seventh-day Adventists, they even had to go against denominational policy. The official policy of Seventh-day Adventists in Germany and in countries under German occupation was severely compromised.
At first, in order to keep our retirement homes and sanitarium opened, Adventist leaders agreed to the government policy of euthanasia. Our healthcare facilities, which were supposed to be the right arm of the message, become places where old people and the infirm were administered lethal injections to save government money.
Next, in order to keep our publishing houses open, Adventist leaders agreed to demands that our publications actively promote government propaganda goals. Our literature evangelists sold magazines advocating race purification. Our magazines pointed out that Bible prophecy foretells a purified people will inherit the earth. Our magazines proclaimed that for the Jews, who have contaminated so many other races, the last judgment has already begun. Seventh-day Adventist publications became the vehicle for pseudo-scientific claptrap and racist poison.
Next, in order to keep our welfare work going, Adventist leaders agreed to government demands that distribution priorities match those of the government. Hulda Jost, the leader of our welfare work, proclaimed there was no more room for misplaced compassion. Limited resources mustn’t be squandered on the weak. Adventist aid must be denied racially inferior elements. Adventist aid must be reserved for the genetically pure. The welfare of the individual must give way to the welfare of the purified race.
Next, the government declared Sabbath-keeping was illegal, and threatened to close down all our churches. Church leaders reminded our members that government was ordained by God, and agreed to temporarily suspend the Sabbath.
The government demanded that the church disfellowship it’s Jewish members. Some Seventh-day Adventist congregations complied. Jewish Seventh-day Adventists went to their death abandoned by their church family. The church stripped the victims of their Seventh-day Adventist identity before the government stripped them of their clothes and murdered them. They sanctified God’s holy name as Jews, but not as Seventh-day Adventists.
By the time the killing frenzy stopped, we’d made so many compromises and concessions that the organized Seventh-day Adventist Church had became an extension of the totalitarian government.
But we cannot harshly stand in judgment over the Adventist leaders who made those concessions. Unless you’ve lived under a totalitarian government, you don’t understand leverage. Government officials understood the weaknesses of Christianity better than Christians themselves did. Our own teachings made us vulnerable to manipulation.
It’s one thing to stand up against the government if you have the moral support of your church family. It’s one thing to stand up against denominational policy if your Christian education tells you current policy is shortsighted. It’s one thing to go contrary to your Christian education if a brother or a sister shows you a better way. But it’s quite another thing to stand up against all three. It takes a very strong individual to simultaneously take on your government, your Christian education, and your church family. Not all Seventh-day Adventists were such strong individuals. Later on they were ashamed.
Traditional teaching prevented most Christians from acting as their brother’s keeper. Traditional teaching froze Christians into inaction until it was too late to do anything constructive. The shoah was the greatest moral failure in modern Christian history.
Unfortunately, those Christian attitudes that allowed the extermination didn’t disappear after the death factories were shut down. In the immediate aftermath almost nothing changed. It took two generations for Seventh-day Adventists to gradually realize doctrines that got so many people killed might be defective. It took several decades for Seventh-day Adventists to see that the shoah might be a Christian problem.
To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the exterminations, the Seventh-day Adventist Churches in Germany and Austria published a moving apology. None of these church members are old enough to have been among the perpetrators. They grew up with grandparents largely unwilling to talk about what went on. But the present generation does not agree with the decisions of previous Adventists. They wanted to register their regret. They wanted to apologize for what happened in the Church they love. They confessed past failure and resolved in their generation to stand up for right. We should rejoice whenever God’s children repent. Whenever God’s children come under conviction it’s because his Spirit is moving among them.
The recent apology still sees the Adventist failure in terms of policy error rather than theological error. In the October 13, 2005 issue of the Adventist Review, there’s an article on the apology. It includes excerpts from an interview with Elder Herbert Brugger, President of the Adventist Church in Austria and one of the signers of the apology. I quote that article.
“Asked how a church that considers keeping the Sabbath as one of core beliefs could forsake Jewish Sabbath-keepers during a time of persecution, Brugger suggested that it was political, not theological, considerations that may have led to the strategy.”
End of quote. It will probably be some time before Adventist spokespersons dare admit that it was theological error that occasioned moral capitulation.
Your and my challenge is to help our Seventh-day Adventist brothers and sisters move from denial to healing. We have to demonstrate that within Adventism historical truth can be more than just a niche interest. We have to furnish our leaders a motivation for fixing what’s wrong.
Sixty-six years ago we came perilously close to the inconceivable, to a world without Israel, to a world without God. Without Israel, we can’t sort out the true God from the competition. If God has revealed himself in some different way to the inhabitants of some other planet, he might be God somewhere else in the universe, but on this planet he hasn’t revealed himself other than through Israel’s story. On this planet he wouldn’t be God without Israel. For practical purposes, a world without Israel would be a world without God. We humans would be sadly mistaken to worship any god who is not the God of Israel. During the shoah we came perilously close to losing the God of Israel.
The popular Jewish song asks, “od avinu chai Is our Father still alive?” [Genesis 45:3] The refrain answers, “am yisrael chai The people of Israel are alive!” The answer to the question as to whether God exists is that the people of Israel are alive. If Israel is alive, God exists.
The Nazi party was not only anti-Jewish; it was also profoundly anti-Christian. The Nazi party wished to kill the God of Christianity and return to the old gods of European mythology from before the introduction of Christianity. [confidential memorandum from Martin Borman to the district party leaders in 1942; George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966.] Government officials knew how they could trick Christians into killing their own God. Their plan was to destroy Christianity by destroying Israel. Christians cooperated in their own destruction! Christians helped the government dismantle Christianity. In their own sick way, government officials understood the dynamics of Christian doctrine better than Christians did.
On yom hashoah, on holocaust remembrance day, Israel praises God that the inconceivable didn’t quite succeed, that the Nazi “final solution” wasn’t final. Christians can also praise God that Israel is still with us. Israel’s survival means that God has overridden our erroneous theology, which negates his covenant. Israel’s survival means there’s hope for all God’s other children too, even for God’s children who teach perversion in his name.
yom hashoah, holocaust remembrance day, is not only for Jews. Christians need to remember the perpetrators, to correct the doctrines that led us into sin, and to praise God for the remnant of Israel.
On yom hashoah we can also congratulate God on his recovery. He was severely wounded, but God survived the assassination attempt. God is a holocaust survivor too.
