Hitler and Christianity

America is in increasingly great danger from a source that few people are mindful of. I mean something other than the following commonly mentioned threats:

~ being inundated by hordes of illegal aliens

~ the collapse of the dollar

~ the growing tyranny of government

~ terrorist attacks using WMDs

~ the explosion of a nuclear device in the atmosphere that would cut off all electrical power

~ the emergence of some new disease that would kill people in the millions

~ the rise of Red China

These and other threats may or may not be real possibilities, but there is something we need to be concerned about even more than those, and that is the will of God.

It is my belief that the greatest single threat to America’s well-being, peace, prosperity, and security, is the God whom we as a nation have offended, denied, rejected, ignored, ridiculed, and rebelled against.

Christians like to say that our precious national gifts of liberty, prosperity, and security are from God, and indeed they have been. But, if God can give them, can he not also take them away? And are not our undeniable losses in all of those areas the direct result of God’s displeasure?

There is nothing that stands between America and unimaginable catastrophe now but the same will of God which blessed us in the past (in spite of many and obvious flaws and injustices). If God wants to humble the mighty superpower it will be a light and easy thing for him to do so – and this will not be accomplished by Christian militias, by “fearsome Christian holy warriors,” to paraphrase one particularly paranoid and ignorant secularist.

Christians are called to be agents of God’s reconciliation. That is why there has never been one Christian suicide bomber – and if some nutcase did pull off such a deed using Christian words to justify it, his crime would be instantly and unhesitatingly condemned by all leading Christian figures, and without clever and evasive beating around the bush (such as, “Of course it was wrong, but I understand why he had to do it”).

No, if the God of justice, punishment, and, yes wrath, the God in whom many Christians today do not believe, wants to afflict America yet more for its manifold wickedness, all he has to do is remove his protective hand and allow the forces of evil to operate. There are plenty of eager and active servants of the devil who delight in death and destruction – why should God give us any help against them?

God can also allow current foolish policies to continue until their natural result is reached. If the leaders of our government bring disaster upon us by their own incredibly wrong policies, that too can be from God, if he has abandoned us to our folly and allows us that freedom from wisdom, decency, and morality which seems to be the heart’s desire of so many in America today.

America as a nation has grievously sinned against God. His hand is yet stayed, as he has his own times and purposes, but when the iniquity of America is full we will as a nation reap the results of our iniquity and stupidity.

We do not need more singing of “God bless America” at this time. We as a nation do not deserve anything from God. What we need is more of Daniel chapter 9 – but how many Christians care nothing about these things? We have forgotten the God of the Old Testament – the God who can give peace and prosperity but can also take them away, and is now taking them away.

It will be objected that in Christ we have a higher revelation – but for those who are outside of Christ, the Old Testament God is still very much on the throne. And, neither is the God of the New Testament a pale shadow of his former self, concerned only with saving individual souls or meeting specific prayer requests, but not ruling over the nations.

What shall we say of those who call themselves Christians but believe that God will never bring judgment on America? Who think that, as Americans, prosperity and security are our birthright, promised to us no matter what we are and no matter what we do? It matters little now how godly America used to be. Israel under David and Solomon was yet more godly, and had a special relationship with God America has never had, but in the end God destroyed that nation because of its sins.

The first time I heard that the Nazis were Christians, my immediate reaction was disbelief – it didn’t seem possible to me that any reasonable person could make such an extraordinary claim. Becoming more involved with the subject, I found that people did in fact hold such a strange, illogical, and one might say even irrational idea. 

How do people arrive at conclusions that are, to us Christians at any rate, so far removed from reality? Isn’t it obvious to any thinking person that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount has nothing whatever to do with the bizarre fantasies of the Third Reich? 

Recently I came across a concise description of one reason for confusing Naziism with Christianity. It is found in Yossi Klein Halevi’s book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for Hope With Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (New York, 2002). In the introduction, Halevi discusses the view of his father, a Holocaust survivor, on this subject: 

“My father reserved a special rage for Christianity, which he blamed for preparing the ground of the Holocaust by demonizing Jews. No phrase struck him as more ironic than ‘Christian love.’ When Christians spoke of love, he said, they meant ‘everyone but Jews.’ The church leaders my father and his friends remembered from Hungary and Poland were Jew-haters and pogromists; for survivors, Hitler wasn’t a pagan but a Christian [p. 3].”

This sort of thinking, sometimes in less extreme forms, is more common than many Christians are aware. A well-known Jewish scholar, Prof. Steven Katz, has made a similar claim in his book The Holocaust in Historical Context (New York / Oxford 1994). Katz recognizes that the Nazis were not Christians, and were contrary to Christianity, but still asserts that Christianity laid the foundation for the Holocaust by its centuries of Jew-hatred (hatred, which in Katz’ view, comes directly from the New Testament) [p. 226].

Halevi has gone beyond his father’s thinking, and is interested in building bridges between the religions (especially but not exclusively the three monotheistic faiths), but still the stereotypes of Germany as a Christian nation and the Nazis as Christians linger on in the Jewish community.

This goes far beyond Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Non-Jews also like to make the connection. Some are openly hostile to Christianity and are eager to believe and say anything bad about it. They feel they are furthering the progress of civilization by marginalizing Christianity, and painting Christians as fanatics is one way to do it. Pictures of Church leaders saluting Hitler; statements by Church leaders praising Hitler; the Nazi party’s official report for ‘positive’ Christianity; Hitler’s references to God and the Bible and his one or two claims to have been a Christian; the massacres of the Old Testament; crimes over the centuries by people with the name of “Christian” – these make the Nazi-Christian connection more plausible, and more widespread, than many Christians like to think.

What should our response as bible-believing Christians be to this sort of thing? It is a mistake to just dismiss it as too extreme and too ignorant to be dignified with a response. Increasing numbers of people in our post-Christian culture do not really know what Christianity is, and a few photographs or simple-minded quotes are convincing to them. A Holocaust video checked out from the library blames Christianity for demonizing the Jews; a history of the Third Reich by a well-known and reputable historian compares Hitler’s speeches to religious revival meetings; radical secularists claim Christians are by nature dangerous and a menace to democracy. Severe attacks are being made against us – how do we respond?

Let us recall that Christ and Paul both responded to false statements and exposed and rejected them. When Christ was accused of being an evil doer while on earth, he gave an appropriate response. When Christianity was misrepresented, Paul gave a response. Preaching the Gospel includes dealing with distortions and misrepresentations of the Gospel that hinder people from believing.

But, what sort of response should there be? Let us recall that we need something here that goes beyond mere debating and presentations of facts. Many people are hostile to Christianity and do not want to hear the truth about it. Others may be more receptive to reason, facts, and argument, but still need to be approached in different ways depending on their situation. Just winning an argument is not good enough.

This all a part of a much larger spiritual warfare. Darkness hates the light and is eager to discredit it, and reluctant to accept it. Therefore, we need a spiritual response, not merely an academic or an intellectual one. This requires wisdom, sensitivity, holiness, obedience to God – in short, all of the spiritual armor necessary for us to adequately represent Christ. Do we have this? If so, we can present Christ, and represent Christ, in suitable ways. If not, we are only beating the air, arguing and disputing with logic, facts, and evidence that do not touch the heart.

Was the Third Reich destroyed by God? Atheists, agnostics, philosophical theists, and even many Christians as well, will consider this to be a superfluous, if not a ridiculous question. Hitler overreached himself, he tried to take on the three greatest world powers at the same time, he made many errors of strategy and tactics – no further explanation is necessary. Why bring God into it?

It is safe to say that not one single history of the Third Reich has suggested that Hitler met his final end because God decreed it; that God arranged the circumstances of his fall, and set the limits which Hitler was not permitted to go beyond. Secular wisdom has no need of such a hypothesis, and many people who believe in God see no need for it either. Even Christians who profess belief in the bible see no need for theological explanations of what is so transparently evident. What, though, does the bible teach?

First, we read in the book of Hebrews that Jesus Christ upholds all things by the word of his power. He does not uphold them blindly, without knowing or seeing. We Christians do not have the false god of Deism who started everything and then left it to go on its own momentum. Our God, if we really do believe in God, is active in the world – not only in bible times, but also today.

Secondly, we read in the Psalms that God sends the clouds and the rain, and makes the grass to grow. He provides food for the beasts and the birds, and sends snow, and fire, and hail. He is intimately involved with the creation which he not merely created, but also sustains moment by moment. This is confirmed by Christ, when he teaches that not even a bird falls to the ground without God’s knowledge. He is not remote, uncaring, absent, or ineffectual.

Moreover, Paul teaches in Acts that God determines the boundaries of the nations of men (17:26). Was that just true for bible times? Do people who make this argument even believe in God at all? Paul goes yet further in a well known passage in Romans, stating that “the powers that be are ordained of God.” Daniel also states that “the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.”

What if behind all of the human comings and goings which the historians complacently consider to the final reality, there is yet another reality, an invisible reality that is no less real for all of the common inability to see it? Does not Paul teach about “the rulers of the darkness of this world,” about “spiritual wickedness in high places”? Do his words have any application to the world at large, or are they only applicable to our personal struggles?

There are three problems, however, with asserting that God is involved with these things. First, it is a challenge to the complacency of many Christians for whom God is a comfortably limited abstraction, custom-fit to their private expectations, rather than the God of the Old and New Testaments.

Secondly, this strikes a blow at human free will. We are not the masters of our fates, there are larger forces of good and evil at work far above us, forces which can only be seen with the eye of faith, but remain real whether we accept them or not. But, human free will is not what life is all about, as if there were certain aspects of life, and the most important ones at that, beyond which God is not allowed to trespass.

Thirdly, there is of course the problem of evil. Job twice states that evil and destructive acts, done by Satan and his human instruments, were from God – and these statements are approved in scripture as being right (1:21-22 and 2:10). This is comprehensible when we consider that, if God has the power to prevent evil, and does not, then it is permitted by him and, in some way, even if indirectly, from him.

Thus, God could have easily caused Hitler to die in World War I, or caused him to drop dead of natural causes at any time afterward. Since God did not decide to do this; and since he allowed Hitler to flourish; and since we as Christians do not want to say that God was a) ignorant or absent; b) impotent; or c) indifferent – then we can say that Satan and evil men were responsible for the horrors of World War II, yet God allowed them to act for a time, as he allows evil to be at work in the world at large, for a time.

Paul suggests (presenting it not dogmatically but as a question), that God endures “with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,” so that in the end, when he finally shows his wrath upon them, and when he also shows “the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy,” he will be magnified and glorified. As to those who object to this arrangement, “O man, who art thou that repliest against God?” God is God, and our proper response to all of his doings, is faith, love, obedience, and worship, even if we do not understand his larger and hidden purposes.

God did not will that we should stroll into heaven on a carpet of roses. He has placed us in a world in which evil is a reality, so that we might come to God out of our sins, and so that we might have the honor and the privilege of representing him, and suffering for him, in a world that truly is place of great beauty, but also of great wickedness.

In the meantime, while we wait for our final deliverance, we can have the confidence of biblical faith that God sets limits that evil cannot pass. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Darwin, Freud, contemporary radical atheists, and all of the many other vain opponents of God were not and will not be allowed to prevail in the end (though they are given their temporary triumphs). And, in our personal lives, God will allow nothing to come against us greater than what he has enabled us to endure.