Part
of me would simply like to respond with a time of silence.
But,
I think, today calls for confession and understanding.
What
can we say?
1.That the Lutheran tradition has within
it a strain of submission to people in authority
2. a strain of anti-Judaism in it
Both of which make us complicit in
the horror of the Holocaust.
3. Additionally,
there was also a portion of the faith that resisted Nazism, but it wasn’t
enough and didn’t go far enough.
Let
us pray.
One
aspect of the faith going all the way back to our beginnings is that common
question “How do we relate to the state and the society in which we live?”
One
tact is to take Jesus’ words “my kingdom is not of this world” to move all our
concern in an otherworldly direction—to assume those things shaping day to day
life here and now, are none of our business as Christians.
Similarly,
and this is more the norm for us Lutherans, is to follow Paul’s advice to the
Romans—those in authority are there because God is the God of History, and
therefore we ought to be good citizens of our country and not question
authority.
(Augustine)
Lutheranism’s
tendency to side with the powers that be, fits Luther’s life experience—when
there were death threats by the Pope and other Catholic officials it was the secular
princes who kept him from trial and death. The state kept him alive and the
reformation afloat, and he rightly thanked God for that
—not knowing the kind of murderous
totalitarianism that was to come.
(larger society)
Now,
Anti-Judaism is perhaps the original sin of Christianity. It was birthed out of
that strange back and forth that lead to the cleaving of Judaism and
Christianity.
Rome called on Jews to denounce
Christianity as a new cult—an innovation and therefore not exempt from Emperor
worship,
and the Roman Empire called upon the
early Christian movement to denounce Jews as rebels to be expelled from Rome
and Jerusalem.
The debates and stories Jesus told within
the Judaism of his time and Paul’s description of “The Law” sounded much
different coming from Gentile lips. It switched from being an inter-Jewish
discussion to an antagonism from the outside.
Eventually Marcion, a Roman
Christian, declared a separation between the “Jewish God” and the God revealed
in Christ—and while he was condemned as a heretic, that did little to repair the
widening breach between the two faiths.
Supersessionalism—the
idea that the Church replaced Israel and the New Testament replaced the 10
commandments—still haunts the Christian heart to this very day.
In
Nazi Germany this original sin was in full blossom—with wrongheaded arguments
that Jesus was not a Jew and with renewed Marcionism—calling for the
de-Judaizing of scripture.
Similarly,
the unfortunate words attributed to the crowd in Matthew’s telling of the passion,
“His blood be on us and on our children,” has been used to justify all kinds of
horrible things done to the Jews—Pogroms in Poland, the Inquisition in Spain
—the charge of “Christ-Killer” comes
from these words.
In fact, so powerful a motivator were
these words in past decades and centuries, that the panel on Lutheran-Jewish
relations insisted, that “the New Testament … must not be used as justification
for hostility towards present-day Jews", and that "blame for the
death of Jesus should not be attributed to Judaism or the Jewish people.”—that
is why on Good Friday you hear me talk a lot about Judeans and Religious
Officials when I read the Passion account instead of the traditional translation
“the Jews.”
But,
let’s get a little more particular—what of Luther?
At the age of 40 he wrote a tract
against Dominican abuses of the Jewish populous entitled, “That Jesus Christ
Was Born a Jew,” in which he writes:
“Our fools, the popes, bishops,
sophists, and monks—the crude asses—have treated the Jews in such a way that
anyone who is truly a good Christian ought to become a Jew. If I was a Jew and
heard such dolts and blockheads teach the Christian faith I would as soon be a
wild boar as be a Christian.”
If
only he’d stopped there, but he did not. When he was 60, a few years before his
death, he wrote “On the Jews and Their Lies” a tract so vile that even his
closest friend Melanchthon said it “reeked of the Inquisition.”
In
it he maps out a “solution” for what he calls the “Jewish problem” in Germany—that
Synagogues and Jewish houses ought to be burnt, Talmuds taken, Rabbis forbidden
to speak, safe passage on highways removed, Jewish property confiscated, and
Jews made to be serfs on German farms until they choose to self-deport.
If
this sounds similar to the Nazi “final solution,” minus the gas chambers—there
is a good reason for it—Luther’s anti-Semitic writings were picked up quite
whole-cloth by the National Socialists.
There
were however some Lutherans who heard the pseudo-Theological claims of the
Nazis such as:
“The New Word of God is found in the
History of the German People.”
“Jesus is not Savior but a
Hero-Prophet for the Church just as Hitler is the Hero-Prophet of Germany.”
And “You may only believe in the
resurrection if you believe in the resurrection of Germany.”
They heard these claims and took the
entire Nazi program as an attack on the Church.
When
most German Church-folk were asking the question, “Should the Nazi controlled
Church be more Calvinist or Lutheran?” There was a movement called the
Confessing Church, who believed the Nazis should not control the Church and
responded with the Barman Declaration, which we will confess together in place
of the Apostle’s Creed in today’s service.
One
of those members of the Confessing Church, Reverend Doctor Dietrich Bonheoffer,
responded to the situation in Nazi Germany by entering into a conspiracy to
kill Hitler and smuggle German Jews to Switzerland. In fact one of the last
orders of the Nazi High Command before they lost the control of German was
“Bonheoffer must die.” And indeed he was executed in the Flossenburg
concentration camp on April 9th 1945
I
bring up these heroes not to absolve us, but to challenge us to hear God in the
midst of societal noise and historical half-truths. Challenge us to hear the
Gospel above the clangor of Culture, to hear always the cries of our common
humanity.
So,
“What can Lutherans say about our complicity in the Holocaust?”
Christianity’s
original sin Anti-Judaism, and Luther’s tract “On the Jews and Their Lies” are
part of a train of thought that leads to Auschwitz.
The
Lutheran hesitancy to challenge secular authorities ensured that resistance to,
or even questioning of, “The Final Solution” was limited.
Finally,
I thank God that there were some who tapped other veins of our tradition—Theology
of the Cross and Scripture Alone—and in so doing resisted Nazism and the
Holocaust.
We
mourn the majority’s inaction and wrong actions,
we remember the martyrs who died
doing what was right,
and we continue to pledge to the 20
million victims of the Nazi regime, especially the 6 million Jews, never again.
Amen.
