Theology After Auschwitz

Last updated on: September 2, 2014 at 2:47 pm by Michael Hardin

Theology After Auschwitz 2014-09-02T14:47:54-04:00 Michael Hardin

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You cannot stand at the gates of Auschwitz and be Calvinist for if this is how God controls the universe then God is arbitrary and not very helpful. You cannot stand at the gates of Auschwitz and be Conservative Evangelical for the Jews you see go “right from Hitler’s flames into God’s flames” (Brad Jersak in Hellbound?). You cannot be drunk on the Holy Ghost and stand at the gates of Auschwitz and feel only the good, the true and the beautiful amidst the ugliest heinous evil, the smoke and the ashes. You cannot stand at the gates of Auschwitz and deny that sin exists, that there is no sin or ‘sin-nature.’ What do you call the sounds of the crying children as they are separated from their parents and sent away to the gas chambers? Millions of them.

If we are going to take the gospel seriously, Auschwitz casts us into an abyss, a place where irrationality and chaos and laughing torturers rule the day. Auschwitz, or I should say the Jewish Shoah, is a significant turning point in human history. In a way one could say it is unique (sui generis). One could, with Elie Wiesel, answer the question, “Where is God?” by pointing to a young boy slowly suffocating while being hanged. Auschwitz either puts a great big question mark after God’s power or God’s love or both. In the standard western Christian model of theology, whether Protestant (including Anabaptist) or Catholic, one can no longer speak of either God as loving or God as powerful at the gates of Auschwitz. We are silenced. All of our claims about God’s ability to control the universe or how much God’s loves people (whether some or all), dies there too.

Auschwitz cannot be explained theologically. It is the biggest question mark to Christian theology ever. Whatever your theology is, if you cannot proclaim it to those who lost their families in the ovens, as you stand under the gates of Auschwitz, you have nothing to say. The very spirits of those who died there will shout loud and long if you do not acknowledge their presence in your theology.

I would suggest that American Christianity is, in far too many of its forms, not drunk on the Holy Ghost, nrt demonstrating intellectual honesty and integrity and is far more about mimesis or social identification and social acceptance than anything else. Christianity in America is not about the gospel but about successful marketing strategy and Type A personalities. Just as over 1,500 newspapers and 9,000 radio station and 1,500 television stations are owned by 6 major corporations, so also the 40,000+ denominations are owned by one corporation, one theological viewpoint they all share and have in common: The Corporation for the Advancement of Sacred Violence.

Contemporary American Protestant Christianity is, for the most part, just archaic cannibalistic religion dressed in ‘Christian’ guise. In its fundamental bases, at its origins, in its tenets, Protestant Christianity is formed by an us/them dichotomy. Differentiation only occurs at the expense of an ‘other.’

You may not have been an SS guard at Auschwitz but you cannot claim that you weren’t there, if you are a Christian. That which was being played out by the Nazi’s at Auschwitz was executed by the complicity of Christians, specifically Lutherans. Sure, you can say, well I am not a Lutheran so don’t blame Auschwitz on me. That may be true; you may have never been a Lutheran. But perhaps you might consider this: when you stand before the gates of Auschwitz do you have a ‘theology of glory?’

In his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation theses, Martin Luther distinguished between a ‘theology of glory’ and a ‘theology of the cross.’ Here are the theses:

18. It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the »invisible« things of God as though they were clearly »perceptible in those things which have actually happened« (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25),

What Luther is saying is this: if you believe that God is revealed in historical processes (the ascension of the Führer for the Germans, the election of officials for others), natural disasters or plagues, or in wealth, fame or power, then you are not seeing God but an idol of your own making. You have bought into a Deuteronomic hermeneutic (God blesses the good and curses the bad), and you also have a sacrificial way of thinking that justifies violence in one form or another. This is a theology that requires a deus ex machina, a God who intervenes in human history on behalf of ‘God’s own’ (of course, always conceived of as ‘my group’). This is the predominant theology of American Protestant Christianity and its infected counterparts around the globe.

This kind of theology is decimated at the gates of Auschwitz. As an historical event, Auschwitz is a great big question mark to consumerist Christianity, where it is all about my feeling good, my spirituality, my journey. I, me, my. This narcissistic approach to the Christian faith (grounded as it is in ‘the romantic lie of autonomous individualism’) is why marketing and branding have become more important than solidarity with the suffering, the extruded, the ostracized. We must never forget that the problem that afflicted the goats in the parable of Matthew 25 is also our disease today. We would love God in others, but hey, we don’t see God in those we have cast out or scapegoated. Why? Because our enemy is obviously God’s enemy.

A theology of the cross sees God in the suffering. A theology of the cross recognizes victimage and weeps and wails. A theologian of the cross doesn’t stand on Calvary jumping up and down with joy nor do they show up there in Jaguars or bling. A theologian of the cross shows up on Golgatha in sackcloth and ashes.

Before you get angry at me, please understand I am asking a very hard question here. Luther asked it in the 16th century. Calvin, Zwingli and Bullinger went another direction entirely. Had the pastors in Germany taken Luther seriously, the Christian church could have been a powerful force. Alas, neither Rome nor other ecclesial institutional bureaucracies would find the courage to heed Luther even though Barth, Niemöller and Bonhoeffer sought to do so.

In America, we are faced with a choice: to either continue in our ‘theology of glory’ and thus ignore the place of God’s self-revelation in the cross of Jesus by turning it into just another sacrificial mechanism or we can come to the Cross just as we would come before the gates of Auschwitz and recognize that scapegoating others is not the way God works. It’s not about what the Bible says, it is about what God says in Christ as the son suffers at the hands of an inhuman humanity. Can your theology do this? If not, it may be time to reconsider whether it is really God you know or some mimetic religious copy provided by the institution, even the anti-institution institution.

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