Read this as theology, not as history,
January 2, 2013
I began a project of reading
scholarly history books on the Nazi relationship with Christianity because of
the atheist claims that "Hitler was a Catholic" or "Hitler was a Christian."
After reading Richard Stegman-Gall's
The Holy
Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 and Susan Heschel's
The Aryan
Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany and Kevin
Spicer's
Resisting
the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin and Hubert Wolf's
Pope and
Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich and Derek Hastings'
Catholicism
and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism, my
conclusion is that the truth is far more complicated and far more interesting
than a simple yes or no answer can provide. The warm relationship between the
Nazis and the Christian churches at an early stage had a lot to do with the
particular history of Germany, which included a pent up sense of nationalism,
but also a healthy dose of what we would call "liberal Christianity," which was
willing to "re-imagine" Christ and the biblical canon in order to make
Christianity "relevant" to "modern times."
As a result of this background
reading, I came Erwin Lutzer's Hitlers Cross with a great deal of interest. I
had thought that the book might be a scholarly work that reviewed the history of
the Nazi's subversion of Christian symbols for their own purposes. What I
discovered was a book that really is an extended sermon, written from very few
sources, by the Senior Pastor of the Moody Bible Church, as if he was giving a
sermon to his congregation. For example, there are a number of occasions where
Lutzer drops into rhetorical tropes that obviously come from Mr. Lutzer's
clearly well-practiced skills a public speaker.
This book is really
Lutzer's attempt to come to grips with the problem that so many Germans, German
Christians and German Christian pastors in the Nazi era either were willing
accomplices of the Nazis or, at best, were compliant non-objectors to the evils
of Nazism. Lutzer looks at various explanations, including occultism, Hinduism,
German history, and the influence of Luther. Lutzer also stirs in what he finds
to be parallels to trends in the America that he was writing about in the
mid-1990s, trends, frankly, that have accelerated.
It is Lutzer's
conclusion that Hitler was an avowed Satanist who swore allegiance to Satan
before the Spear of Destiny in Hofburg museum. (p. 64 - 66.) As a result, Lutzer
infers that Hitler was imbued with occult powers to mesmerize his audiences and
subordinate them to his will. I've never heard of the "Spear of Destiny" story
in any of the books I've read. Lutzer's source for this story is Trevor
Ravenscroft
The Spear
of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear which pierced the side of
Christ , which a little internet research indicates is not a trustworthy
source. Lutzer, for example, quotes verbatim a lengthy verbatim quote from
Walter Stein as quoted by Ravenscroft, but Ravenscroft never met Stein, and much
of Ravenscroft book is written in an obviously novelistic style with gross
misstatements of fact. (Google "Bad Archeology Spear Lance Destiny Hitler".)
Interestingly, Ravenscroft's book may have been an inspiration for "Raiders of
the Lost Ark," one of whose major characters was "Marion Ravenwood."
The
occult connection with Nazism is problematic. Some Nazis - for example, Heinrich
Himmler - were drawn to occultism. (See Peter Longerich's recent, encyclopedic
Heinrich
Himmler.) Others were not. Goering, for example, seems to have conceived of
himself as a pious Lutheran throughout his career and viewed the pagan excesses
of Himmler as "nutty." Even Hitler put the brakes on Himmler when Himmler went
"over the top." (That's not to say that any of these people were Christian or
committed to anything other than the complete revision of Christianity along
Nazi lines.)
Lutzer likewise seems to blame Hinduism for providing
something to Nazism (p. 91), albeit he affirms that he doesn't intend to blame
Hinduism (p. 96.) It is true that study of Hinduism was influential in Germany
in the 19th Century and that Himmler, at least, read some scholarly works on
Hinduism in his youth, but in my reading of Longerich's massively encyclopedic
tome on Himmler, Hinduism is not mentioned as a substantial influence on him.
Notwithstanding Lutzer's assertion, Himmler's statement about "decency" has more
to do with being civil and courteous than it has to
re-incarnation.
Lutzer also considers German history, including the
influence of Luther. Although a lot of this analysis is based on a popular
understanding of history as viewed through modern American evangelical eyes -
apparently there was a healthy undercurrent of real Christians throughout the
Middle Ages who refused to baptize children - to his credit Lutzer is willing to
lay some of the blame for German anti-semitism on the unfortunate anti-semitic
writings of the later Luther, although Lutzer walks back some of that blame by
contextualizing it, which may be a fair thing to do, since, in the words of
historian Robert Louis Wilken, "every act of historical understanding is an act
of empathy." (See
John
Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th
Century.)
Of course, running through Lutzer's book is the sheer
existential mystery of evil. Our ability to understand may forever elude us
because there are, quite properly, limits to our ability to empathize. And yet
empathize we ought to because we share with those Christians in Nazi Germany the
same human propensity to "screw up" as they had. (For an interesting discussion
on this propensity, see
Unapologetic:
Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional
sense.)
Lutzer's sermonizing style may therefore not be
inappropriate. Nor may it be inappropriate to discuss the Nazi era in terms of
biblical truths and prophecies. We want to understand it so that we can explain
it, but we also want to have some distance from it so we don't have to own
it.
However, Lutzer's theology doesn't make Lutzer's book history. He
makes some real errors in history, both large and small, and often-times the
small errors are the most impeaching. Thus, Lutzer incorrectly asserts that
Houston Chamberlain was the nephew of Sir Neville Chamberlain (p. 89.). This is
not true, and I was surprised that I had never heard such a thing before. I
filed this away as possibly being true, until I did sufficient research to rebut
it. (Frankly, I hate being misinformed on trivia like that because I hate
looking like an idiot when I repeat it.)
Likewise, there was no Catholic
bishop in Berlin who was arrested and died in a concentration camp for "leading
his people in prayer for the Jews." (p. 146.) German Catholic bishops were shot
at and threatened with arrest and would have been summarily executed after the
war, and many Catholic priests went to concentration camps, but the Catholic
bishops of Berlin, although heroic figures, were not arrested. Lutzer is
probably thinking of the Berlin Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg, who did
speak out for the oppressed Jews, and who was arrested and died in a
concentration camp. Lichtenberg's heroic story deserves to be more widely known.
Lichtenberg's story is told in Spicer's
Resisting
the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin. The true story is
well worth reading.
Another throwaway line is also problematic. Despite
what Lutzer says, Poland did not receive territory that Bismarck had
"conquered." (p. 30.) After World War I, Poland was reconstituted from the
territory that had been "partitioned" by Prussia, Austria and Russia. Since
those "partitions" had occurred in the 18th Century, and Bismarck unified
Germany in the 19th Century, the Polish territory had long been "conquered" but
not by Bismarck.
Lutzer also does not appear to understand that the event
that sparked the decision of Martin Niemoller and otehrs to form the Confessing
Church was the fact that the majority of Protestant churches under the control
of the German Christians had accepted the idea of removing the Old Testament
from the Christian canon. This would have been a fascinating area for Lutzer to
explore since it ties directly into two themes that he is very interested in,
namely (a) the erosion of Christian core theology by liberal philosophy and (b)
the mystery of how any bible-loving Christian could agree to such a
disfigurement of God's word.
If I was to rate this book as a work of
history, I would give it one or two stars. I choose, however, to view this book
as an effort to get evangelicals thinking about history and, in particular, the
history of Christianity under the Nazis. As such, I choose to view this as
introductory material that might whet the interest of those who don't know much
about that history. I would recommend to any such readers, not to put too heavy
a reliance on the data that you read in this book. Move on to more weighty
books, like the ones, that I mentioned throughout this review, and think about
what the history of that era says about our own era. I believe that such an
exercise will pay dividends.
Posts
