Issues Facing Christians Today by John R. W. Stott

Author:John R. W. Stott [Stott, John R. W.]
Language: spa
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Life, General, Religion, Christian
ISBN: 9780829761955
Google: dk5HYAAACAAJ
Publisher: Zondervan Publishing
Published: 2011-10-24T06:11:57+00:00

GERMAN ANTI-SEMITISM AND SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

Anti-Semitism in Germany and apartheid in South Africa seem at first sight so different from one another as to be entirely unsuitable for comparison. In particular, the unspeakable outrage of the Holocaust has had no parallel in South Africa. Nevertheless, although it will shock some readers to learn this, the theory of “race” on which both systems were built is almost identical. So is the sense which many Germans and South Africans have expressed that they are “destined to rule” and must at all costs preserve their “racial purity”.

In Mein Kampf, published eight years before he came to power, Hitler extolled the splendour of the Aryan race. “Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power … it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity … he is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth …”12

Borrowing his ideas from Wagner’s dream of Germanic greatness, Nietzsche’s notion of a “daring ruler race” and Darwin’s concept of the ruthless struggle needed for survival, Hitler developed both his illusions of Aryan destiny and his insane phobia of the Jews, who, he declared, were economically, politically, culturally, religiously and morally destroying civilization.13 The insulting and irrational language he used of them is unrepeatable. He dared even to claim that in dealing with them he would be acting on behalf of the Almighty Creator.14 In this he was able to quote Christian scholars who had developed a “creation theology” to justify racism. Paul Althaus, for example, recognizing marriage, family, race and Volk as God’s order of creation, wrote: “We champion the cause of the preservation of the purity of the Volk and of our Race.”15 Hitler himself knew, it seems, that this racial theory of Aryan Herrenvolk (“master race”) had no scientific basis. In private he conceded this. Yet he continued to use it because he needed it as a politician: “With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world.”16

The origins of the Afrikaners’ sense of divine destiny are bound up with their history. When the Dutch first arrived at the Cape of Good Hope (1652), they saw themselves as the heirs and bearers of European Christian civilization. They saw a parallel between themselves and the exodus of the Old Testament people of God, destined for a new promised land. The Africans were their equivalent to the Amalekites and the Philistines. After they defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River, they entered into a solemn covenant with God, and henceforth thought of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State as the promised land to which God had brought them. “Afrikanerdom is not the work of men,” said Dr D. F. Malan, the Nationalist leader who became prime minister in 1948, “but the creation of God.

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