SPCK Introduction to Bonhoeffer by Keith Clements

Author:Keith Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

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Bonhoeffer, the Jews and the Holocaust

The Jewish Holocaust, or Shoah, presents an inescapable theme for Western theology today. It is not only that the scale of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’ – some six million Jews murdered – raises huge questions for any belief in ‘theodicy’ (God’s justice in history). It is also the question of Christian complicity in this genocide that has come to the fore. A recent bibliography on the religious impact of the Holocaust lists some 1,500 articles and essays by both Jewish and Christian writers.1 ‘Theology after Auschwitz’, often with a question mark, has become a motif of our time.

The Holocaust happened in ‘Christian’ Europe, admittedly at the hands of the Nazis but at a time when the churches were still alive, relatively strong and with the possibility of a powerful voice. There were individuals and organizations who helped Jews to hide or escape, and churches in Nazi-occupied countries made some bold public protests. But over the record as a whole a dark cloud hangs, especially where church leaders are concerned. On the Roman Catholic side the record of Pope Pius XII has been under grave scrutiny: did he hold back criticism for fear of Nazi assault on the Church? In German Protestantism, anti-Semitism had long been endemic. The Confessing Church leadership – for the most part anxious to distinguish its ‘theological’ stance from ‘political’ opposition to the Nazi state – stoutly rejected the imposition of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ that would have barred pastors of Jewish descent from holding office, but made little overt protest about the persecution of the Jews at large. Neither the famous Barmen Declaration on which the Confessing Church was founded in 1934, nor the post-war Stuttgart Declaration by its surviving leaders in October 1945, specifically mentioned the Jews and their fate.

This is serious enough. But there is a further charge, namely that the shame of the Church in face of Hitler and the extermination of Jews was not just a modern ‘lapse’ but the culmination of a 20-century-long history of Christian anti-Judaism that remains endemic in modern Europe. There are on record Martin Luther’s infamous inflammatory injunctions to harry and expel the Jews. There were the Spanish persecutions, the medieval pogroms and expulsions. There is the tradition, dating back to the patristic period, of seeing the Church as the successor to God’s rejected child or bride Israel: rejected for the most ultimately serious crime of deicide in the crucifixion of Jesus the Son of God, and therefore irretrievably guilty. Again, it is tempting to say that this represents a lapse, if a rather long-running one, of Christians and churches failing to live up to their true precepts and ideals. But the charge is in fact graver: that Christians and churches were living up to their ‘ideals’, and it is their basic precepts and doctrines themselves that are the source of the trouble; that the virus of anti-Semitism is not an infection from outside the Christian body, but arises directly from the core doctrines of the faith.

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