1) On the role of the Confessing Church
2) The post-Holocaust turn away from anti-Judaism
3) Comments on selections from Prof. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst
4) Informal Writing Assignment for Thursday, March 5, 1998
1. On the role of the Confessing Church, "...the only social institution in the Third Reich that successfully resisted domination by the Nazis." (Thompson, 1)
Hitler regarded Christianity "as a form of Bolshevism, a Jewish peril that was Germany's historic duty and destiny to destroy." (2)
The hostility of the Nazi regime against both Judaism and Christianity is clear - see the excerpts from Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century:
We must refuse both the Old and the New Testaments. If we accept either one of these texts, then we accept the Jews as God's chosen people, because they received this revelation.... (11)
[--> early Gnostic rejection (e.g., Marcion) of the Hebrew Bible]The Barmen Declaration of May 29-31, 1934, represents the open breech between a loose confederation of Protestant Churches and the Nazi state (15), leading to the establishment of the Provisional Church Administration (VKL) as representing the Confessing Church - and claiming to be the sole representative of the Protestant Church in Germany (16).
The VKL sent a memorandum on 28 May 1936 outlining the six "concerns" of the VKL, including:
5. National Socialist philosophy contradicted Christian values:
When Blood, Race, Nation, and Honor ... are raised to the rank of qualities that guarantee eternity, the Christian is bound by the first commandment ["Thou shalt have no other gods before me."] to reject the assumption. While the "Aryan" human being is glorified, God's Word bears witness to the sinfulness of all men. When, within the compass of the National Socialist view of life, anti-Semitism is forced upon the Christian ... [it contradicts] the Christian injunction to love one's neighbor. (19)According to Thompson, "The Confessing Church's new public stance in defense of Jews - all Jews, whether baptized or not - redefined the issues of the Church Struggle." (20)
Contrast this stance with Bartov's observation that "the leaders of England and the United States ... would not present the war as an effort to save the Jews for fear that their populations would perceive that as a cause unworthy of their sacrifice and could only promise that the Jews would be saved as a by-product of an Allied victory...." (5:100)
2. It may also be valuable to know that since the Holocaust / Shoah - there has been a perceptible turn in Western Christianities away from implicit and explicit anti-Semitism, and towards affirming the fundamental legitimacy of God's original covenants with Israel.
This means, among other things, that calling the church "the new people of God" cannot mean that Jews are no longer the people of God. (This is the "supersessionist view," one implicit in our calling the Hebrew Bible the "Old Testament," in contrast with the Christian Scriptures as the "New Testament.") Rather, the view emerges that Gentile Christians should understand themselves as a church that has been "grafted onto God's well-cultivated olive tree," making Gentile Christians "A Guest in the House of Israel" (Williamson, 37).
This includes, for example, recognizing that using "the Great Commission" (Matt. 28.18-20) as justifying conversion efforts targeted at the Jews is an unacceptable form of anti-Semitism.
(See Clark M. Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology, ch. 2)
3. Prof. Omer Bartov's comments, Murder in Our Midst
a) ideology remains a motivating factor - i.e., one that cannot be explained away through determinist models (economic determinism and other forms of sociological determinism). (5:91)
--> human nature: in addition to the various factors influencing our behavior - we seem to remain creatures of choice, capable of choosing both good and evil.
(cf. his comments on the conditions at Mauthausen [Austria], where "those caught helping inmates either were not punished at all or were punished only light. This does not mean that risks were not involved, but it does illustrate that the choice for some human action was present, and that those who ignored it made a choice nevertheless, since passivity meant complicity with the killers." [5:97])
b) "Collaboration could be interpreted in various ways." Consider the comments made by a Dr. Renno, a member of the medical staff in charge of the euthanasia operations:
The notion that a state could pass a law that was illegal was beyond my conception, particularly as people of station and name accepted the euthanasia program (quoting Horwitz, p. 63: in Bartov, 97)
--> moral conscience?
--> Renno's understanding of "law" is most compatible with
divine command theory (a command is right because the powers that be command it)
natural law theory (a command is right because it conforms with a natural moral law, and the powers that be must be held accountable for conforming to and enforcing the natural law)c) In response to a massacre in Kfar Kassem in 1956, "...the [Israeli] perpetrators were tried by an Israeli court and sentenced to prison terms, and a new supreme court ruling on the right (and duty) of soldiers to disobey unlawful orders was passed and incorporated into Israeli martial law." (5:103)
human nature: are we free to disobey superior orders?
divine command vs. natural law theories: which supports the possibility of disobeying "superior but unjust/illegal" orders?
--> cf. the story of the American soldiers at My Lai who disobeyed superior orders and worked to save villagers from the massacre.d) Following Primo Levi, Bartov concludes this chapter with the observation that
..."Satan is not necessary," not because, as Levi so hopelessly wishes, humanity can do without violence, but rather because having once played the Devil's game, it is now doomed to play it over and over again, in an endless variety of locations and forms. For the moral of the idiot's tale is that murder is already in our midst. (5:113)Over against this sense of fallenness and the consequent inevitability of evil, however, Bartov also critiques those intellectual positions - postmodernism in particular, but also the ethical relativism and determinism [cf. Boss, 194] we have seen more generally - which would undermine any grounds for resisting such evil. One of his especially striking comments:
If historians, as intellectuals, concede their moral neutrality, then they will finally concede their intellectual, political, and moral irrelevance. Thereby they will also abuse their function as educators, reconstructors of the past, and serious critics of the present. I do not see why historians or, more generally, intellectuals should doubt their role as critics of society, as representatives of a moral view, as persons seeking the truth and exposing lies. They must do so carefully, with integrity, with critical self-reflection, recognizing their weaknesses and limitations, remaining open to criticism, to new ideas and new evidence. But once they surrender their claim for truth, they will end up serving those who will never be afraid of claiming the truth for themselves. (6:134)Central point: ethical relativism, while ostensibly intending to encourage those most humane values of tolerance and openness, leads rather - historically and logically - to the Holocaust/Shoah, i.e., to the total extinction of tolerance and openness.
Corollary: if you do not think for yourselves - others will, and to their advantage.
4. Informal writing for Thursday, March 5, 1998
a) Boss describes various views on the possibility of a moral conscience
(see especially her summary, pp. 229ff.).
Do you think that there's such a thing as a "moral conscious" as Boss
describes it - one involving both moral sentiments and reason, and capable
of discerning and pursuing a "good" or "right" which transcends individual
and cultural factors?
Whatever your answer - support your view with at least one observation,
argument, or other piece of evidence.
b) We have now seen any number of individuals and communities which lift up "countercultural" values - early Christian communities (as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian, "feminist"), American revolutionaries, abolitionists, (women's) suffragists, Christian obedience and resistance in the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, and the requirement in the Israeli and American military to disobey superior but illegal/unjust orders.
Which reading of the Second Genesis creation story - the early, Jewish-Christian reading, or the later, especially Augustinian reading - better supports such disobedience?
Which version of religious morality - divine command or natural law theory - better supports such disobedience?
c) In your view, is such disobedience ever justified?
If so, why?
However you answer this question, what do you assume in support of your answer regarding
human nature - are we free or determined?
ethical relativism or moral universals - are all values entirely relative solely to the individual and/or his/her culture, and/or are there moral values which are valid beyond the boundaries and definitions of cultural norms? If you believe there are such universals, give one or two examples.
epistemology: how do we know the answer to the above questions? In particular, how do we know that moral universals are indeed universal (if you affirmed such things)?
ontology: given all that you've said in response to these first three questions - what are your basic assumptions regarding what is real and what is not real?logic: what logic prevails in your views as you have worked them out above - the logic of dualism and/or the logic of complementarity?