The Holocaust Ideology:
A Theological Threat to Christianity and Islam
What is meant by the term, “Holocaust ideology?” It encompasses these
propositions. The Nazi government formulated a master plan to murder
all the Jews of Europe. This master plan was primarily carried out
with the use of homicidal gas chambers in six concentration camps in Poland,
and with mobile gas vans on the Eastern Front. In addition, planned,
forced starvation and mass shootings were also employed as instruments of
mass murder. Finally, approximately six million Jews were slaughtered
by the Nazis.
Another of the standard claims of the entire package called the “Holocaust”
is that Western Christendom created the climate of opinion that made the
alleged mass murder of six million Jews possible.1 Accordingly, European
Christianity is to a large extent responsible for this horrendous massacre.
Not only is this a major theme of standard works on Holocaust, such as Raul
Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, but it has been a
major theme of many Holocaust conferences in the past. For example,
this theme played a prominent role in the “Remembering the Future” Conference
at Oxford, England, in July 1988.
Establishment Holocaust intellectuals
never tire in pointing out that Lutheran Christianity in Germany was a major
force behind the rise of virulent anti-Semitism “that led to the Holocaust.”
Martin Luther himself is accused of being one of the major figures in the
pantheon of intellectual demons who conjured up anti-Semitic hatred in Germany.2
These are serious charges that are leveled against Western Christianity.
Before one can evaluate the charge—“Western Christendom is to a large extent
responsible for the Holocaust.”—we must first determine if the mass murder
of six million Jews actually occurred.
But this is not the only way in which the Holocaust ideology affects Christianity.
There is a way in which the Holocaust issue affects world Christianity,
and not just European Christendom. A quite popular, avant-garde school
of philosophy claims that “God died with Auschwitz.” According to
this line of thought, a morally perfect, omnipotent God that deeply loves
all mankind would never allow something as horrendous and monstrous as the
Holocaust to take place. But the Holocaust did occur. Hence,
the God of Christianity probably does not exist.
The Jewish theologian, Amos Finkelstein: “The admission that God—or ethical
theism—died in Auschwitz because Auschwitz defies all meaning calls, we
are told, for a radical change in the most fundamental premises.”3
The Christian theologian, Robert McAfee Brown: “This is the crisis of belief
that the Holocaust forces on us. For who, whether Jew or Christian,
can believe in a God in whose world such things take place? The perennial
mystery of evil, the source of our greatest vulnerability as believers,
reaches unique expression in the Holocaust. No theodicy can encompass
this event so that is wounds are closed or its scars healed. It forever
precludes easy faith in God or humanity. Both are placed under judgment,
and a verdict or acquittal may not be lightly rendered, if at all, to either
party.”4
(Finkelstein’s and McAfee Brown’s statements also imply that the Holocaust
doctrine is a challenge to even Jews that believe in God, but a discussion
of how it affects theistic Judaism is going beyond the bounds of this short
essay.)
According to influential Jewish and Christian thinkers then, the whole Holocaust
ideology destroys, or could destroy, the very credibility of the Christian
religion or a belief in God. Let us continue with this theological
speculation in relation to the Holocaust.
The ardent Jewish-Zionist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Elie Wiesel, has
claimed that “the sincere Christian knows what died in Auschwitz was not
the Jewish people but Christianity.”5 The Catholic theologian and
Gentile-Zionist, Harry James Cargas, has cast a sympathetic glance upon
Wiesel’s claim. For he has written: “The Holocaust is, in my judgment,
the greatest tragedy for Christians since the crucifixion. In the
first instance, Jesus died; in the latter, Christianity may be said to have
died.”6
If I understand Wiesel and Cargas correctly, their argument goes something
like this. It is not conceivable that a religion which is directly
inspired by God could be responsible for something as horrendous and monstrous
as the Holocaust, the mass murder of millions of Jews in gas chambers and
by other means. But the Holocaust did occur, and Christendom inspired
it and is largely responsible for it. Hence, Christianity is probably
not inspired by a morally perfect, omnipotent Being, or this Supreme Being
may not even exist.
Clearly then, the whole Holocaust ideology represents a direct challenge
to the credibility and the very existence of Christianity and a belief in
God, as a significant number of intellectuals and laymen give credence to
this “God-died-with-Auschwitz” theology.
The Holocaust ideology has
created a major crisis of faith among contemporary Christians and other
believers in ethical theism. The speculations of theologians like
Finkelstein and McAfee Brown are simply expressions of this crisis.
In order that Christians may successfully deal with the crisis of faith
that the Holocaust ideology has created, it is necessary to first answer
the most obvious question: Did the Holocaust actually occur? In order
to answer this question in a truthful way, one must examine and evaluate
both the traditional and revisionist views of the Holocaust in a fair and
objective manner.
But in contemporary mainstream society, this is not possible. The
Holocaust ideology can be used to discredit and disprove God’s existence,
and attack and undermine the Christian religion. Yet, it is not acceptable
in our Western mainstream society to attempt to show the Holocaust ideology
is not true. According to the prevailing mores, it is “evil and immoral”
to disprove the Holocaust ideology.
Indeed, according to the prevailing mores that reign supreme in academia,
mainstream society, and in mainstream Christian circles, it is morally wrong
to even attempt to argue the revisionist viewpoint. This was
stated many years ago by the Lutheran theologian, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery,
in Christian News. In regard to the piles of bodies found in
some concentration camps at the end of WWII, he stated: “It is immoral to
argue that these people [the Jews] were the victims not of an extermination
program, but of disease and malnutrition brought on by the total collapse
of Germany.”7
Even more generally it was recently reported in the news that Cardinal Cormac
Murphy-O’Connor, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has said “that
Holocaust denial is tantamount to ‘sacrilege.’”8
In other words, it supposedly violates Christian morality to reject the
traditional view of the Holocaust and argue that revisionism is correct.
To put the “Holocaust” beyond
the realm of rational critique, to make it sinful and immoral to debunk
it, is tantamount to elevating it to the status of a sacred dogma.
Yet, the Holocaust ideology is a human interpretation of history
created by human officials and historians, and is propagated by
human ideologues and their sympathizers. There is nothing “sacred”
about the Holocaust ideology, it was not in any way sanctioned by the Supreme
Being. God did not hand down the doctrine of the “Holocaust” to Moses
on Mt. Sinai along with the Ten Commandments. One could cogently argue
that to endow a totally human doctrine with an aura of holy, religious
sacredness is, according to Christian morality, to engage in idolatry.
How so?
In Exodus 20, we read: “I
am the Lord thy God…thou shalt not have strange gods before thee.”
In a word, in contemporary Western society, the Holocaust ideology is
before the concept of God. You can use the Holocaust ideology
to “disprove” and discredit the concept of God, but it is “evil and immoral”
to attempt to disprove the Holocaust ideology.
There
is no commandment in Scripture that says: "Thou shalt believe in the Jewish
Holocaust ideology." However, there are statements in Scripture that
command the Christian to search for truth. In John 8: 31-32 it is
stated: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed: And
ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." In1 John
2: 21, we read: "I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth,
but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth." Finally,
to illustrate the point, let us quote Exodus 20: 16: "Thou shalt not bear
false witness against thy neighbor."
These statements clearly imply that they who
follow the words of the Bible will search for truth and reject lies.
A Christian does not find the truth about the alleged Jewish Holocaust by
blindly accepting what the Zionist influenced mass media tells him. The
real Christian strives for the truth. He gives the revisionist and traditional
view of the Holocaust a fair hearing, and then attempts to determine where
the truth really is. The “Holocaust” is an ideological interpretation
of history that is propagated world wide by various power elites.
It is to be evaluated with the same set of rational-scientific methods that
historians and political scientists apply to other doctrines of this nature.
In recent years, the Holocaust ideology has
been used in a developing assault upon the Islamic religion. Consider
this example. In the January 8, 2006, issue of the San Francisco
Chronicle, the ardently pro-Zionist writer Edwin Black made this statement:
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial with
his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it’s more like self-denial.
The president of Iran need only look to his country’s Hitler-era past to
discover that Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust
and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership
of the mufti of Jerusalem.” The implication here is that Iranians
and Muslims are also “guilty of the evil mass murder of the Jews.”
The very same arguments that we have seen in
this essay used against Christianity could very well be used against the
Islamic religion. For example, Muslims believe that God is absolutely
good and perfect, and He directly inspired the Islamic religion. So
the argument then proceeds. Islam could not be inspired by an infinitely
good and perfect God, because its followers are connected with something
so horrific as the Holocaust.
My ultimate point here is this. The Holocaust
doctrine is a theological attack upon and a threat to both the Christian
and Islamic religions. Christians and Muslims must deal with this
theological threat in an honest and forthright manner by giving the both
the revisionist and traditional views of the Holocaust a fair hearing, as
is consistent with the teachings of both the Bible and Koran.
Footnotes
1. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition
(Holmes & Meirer, 1985), passim.
2. ibid., pp. 13-15, passim.
3. Francois Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the
Genocide of the Jews (Schocken Books, 1989), p.296.
4. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University
(Evanston, Ill., 1977), p. 49.
5. Quoted in Harry James Cargas, A Christian Response to the Holocaust
(Denver, Col., 1981), p.31.
6. Ibid., p. v.
7. See Christian News, March 13, 1989, p. 10; Paul Grubach, “A
Response to Dr. John Warwick Montgomery: Exterminationist Fallacies,”
Christian News, April, 10, 1989, p.14.
8. Archbishop of Westminister Labels Holocaust Denial as “Sacrilege.”
Online:
http://www.totalcatholic.com/universe/index.php?news_id=652&start=0&categ
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