The Ten Commandments are foundational for civilized nations. Hitler’s regime brazenly broke every one of them. Once the Nazis severed themselves from God’s universal laws, all they had left was the naked abuse of power.
10
Nazism and the German Disaster
Another time of testing has come. Another day of reckoning is here. This is a testing and a reckoning … that could prove even more decisive than earlier trials.
OS GUINNESS, A FREE PEOPLE’S SUICIDE
HOW DID GERMANY, a nation with such a rich theological and cultural heritage, come to such disastrous ruin? Given the similarities between Churchill’s age and our own, we must consider how a nation steeped in theology, art and scientific and technical achievement could collapse at the feet of Hitler and Nazism. Why did important segments of the Church ignore the warning signs? Why did so many in the Church allow themselves to be led astray?
Today, many people believe that Christian civilization is once again being weighed in the balance. Mary Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, describes the situation like this:
Some time back, the great majority of people living in what still broadly can be called Western civilization believed in certain things: God created the world; He has a plan for humanity; He promises everlasting life to those who live by His Word; and other items of faith that Judeo-Christianity bequeathed to the world. Today … no great majority continues to believe in all such particulars.1
The harvard sociologist Samuel Huntington refers to ‘the fragility of nations’, as ‘national identities, like other identities, are constructed and deconstructed, upgraded and downgraded, embraced and rejected … with a growing gap between … cosmopolitan and transnational commitments and … highly nationalist and patriotic values’.2
Anthony Daniels (writing under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple), a retired psychiatrist and physician who spent his career working in emerging nations and serving institutions in Britain’s social welfare system, ties the destruction of civil society to a progressive breakdown in the ‘constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on … evil’.3 Being ‘unconventional’, breaking taboos and opposing traditional social rules are now ‘terms of the highest praise in the vocabulary of modern critics’.4 Yet the consequences of this breakdown in moral restraint are simple and obvious: ‘When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes.’5
Daniels also notes that the locus of control has moved from the external to the internal. ‘In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil that ordinary men and women do, they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism.’ But now, in our current postmodern culture, ‘instead of one dictator … there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere… . Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil … is that it is unforced and spontaneous.’
After everything he observed, Daniels concluded, ‘Never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.’6
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, addressing the Church of Scotland General Assembly in 1988, said, ‘I think back to many discussions in my early life when we all agreed that if you try to take the fruits of Christianity without its roots, the fruits will wither. And they will not come again unless you nurture the roots.’7 Far from nurturing the roots of Christian civilization in our day, much of what our culture now embraces seems more like a herbicide.
Prime Minister David Cameron, expressing his desire ‘in this ever more secular age’ that Britain be regarded as a ‘Christian country’, has called for ‘expanding the role of faith-based organisations’ in the nation. ‘People who … advocate some sort of secular neutrality fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality,’ he said in remarks that reflect almost Churchillian insight.8
Seeing that people such as Churchill and other civilization-saving leaders have seemed to appear at just the right time throughout history gives us hope that God has such leadership in the wings in our critical hour.
The Bible has a phrase for these timely occurrences: the fullness of time. Jesus, for example, was born ‘when the fullness of time had come’, according to the apostle Paul.9 In line with God’s purpose, human history builds to climactic moments. God often positions human leaders strategically to keep the course of history on track and prevent the derailing of his ultimate purpose.
It can be discouraging when those leaders are not readily apparent, but the noted historian Will Durant expressed optimism in his day that ‘the very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure’.10 That hope rests on the shoulders of leaders whom God may raise up with the qualities of a Winston Churchill.
Many observers of our contemporary situation draw parallels between the present array of crises imperilling Western civilization – and all orderly societies everywhere – and those of the Nazi era, though most seem to focus primarily on jihadist terrorism as the present image of Nazi cruelty. In Churchill’s day, many wondered if they would continue to live under the freedoms of Judeo-Christian civilization or fall under the tyranny of the Third Reich. In our day, the question is whether the world will live according to Christ’s kingdom of love and grace or under a caliphate of legalism enforced by terror. But it’s not as simple as that. We find broader resemblances between the contemporary forces of repression and that of the Nazis.
THE FOUR DS
When the Second World War ended, the Allied task force charged with restoring German liberty, order and culture had to look at the broader picture. Shutting down the military machine that had slaughtered and terrorized millions was only part of the problem. The seeds for Nazism had been sown deeply into the German soul since at least the 1920s, and the spiritual, moral and philosophical malignancies that had fed the cancer of Nazism had been growing and spreading for more than a century. The Nazi world view had shaped family, education, law, entertainment, media, government, business, and even theology and the Church, as we have seen.
In order to address the problem holistically, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union instituted the 1945 Potsdam Agreement to establish categories for German restoration. There were variations in the precise wording, but the general agreement encompassed four major groupings:
Demilitarization – disarming and disbanding German military forces
Denazification – rooting out Nazi doctrine from German institutions
Decartelization – eliminating cartels and monopolies that had provided such a facile tool in Nazi hands for the construction of their war machine
Democracy – returning the German government to a democratic foundation
Why were the Four Ds necessary? How had Germany, once a land of such promise, veered so far from its highest ideals?
Germany had been the seedbed of the Protestant Reformation, the nesting place of deep spiritual movements and a verdant forest of biblical study. By the time the Nazis came along to scour the landscape, deforestation was already well underway through forces that, in some ways, parallel those in Jesus’ parable of the farmer scattering seed in Matthew 13.1–9. As the sower went along casting his seed, some of it ‘fell among thorns that grew up and choked out the tender plants’.11 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany, as Christians hurled the good seed of the gospel throughout the land, the ravenous ideologies of racialism, militarism, Teutonic mythology and a distorted messiah complex quickly swallowed it up.
Spiritual, moral, ethical, social, cultural and political deforestation resulted. By examining the steps through which Nazification occurred in Germany, we can see how similar devastation might arise in our contemporary culture.
Knocking down the windbreaks
People living on the prairies in the United States and Canada in the 1930s knew how to appreciate windbreaks. Dust storms during that time were so intense
that the era became known as the Dirty Thirties. However, the problem wasn’t merely the gritty sting of flying topsoil but the fact that the winds reduced fertile land to barren ground. Farmers soon learned how to raise hedge barriers that would limit the impact of the gales.
Johann Sebastian Bach, born in 1685, could be the poster child for all that was good in the soul of German Christianity. ‘The aim and final end of all music,’ he said, ‘should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.’12 He inscribed most of his compositions with the letters SDG, representing the Latin words, soli Deo gloria (to God alone be glory).
Bach lived long enough to see the early incursions of the spiritual-cultural desert as the reductive-destructive forces of the Enlightenment began to batter the windbreaks. Taking Bach’s transcendent vision of music for God’s glory, Enlightenment theoreticians such as Charles Burney whittled it down to ‘the art of pleasing’, ‘an innocent luxury’, and a ‘gratification of the sense of hearing’.13 Immanuel Kant was even more demeaning when he said that instrumental music is an art that ‘merely plays with the sensations’.14 It was no longer all about God but all about human experience.
Bach worked hard in his day to build up the windbreaks that sheltered the arts and nourished the German soul.
Bach knew that the times were changing. In [his] later works, he was erecting monuments upholding the high view of music bequeathed to him by his ancestors: music as a ‘refreshment of spirit’ for his neighbor, a tool for the proclamation of the gospel, and a way of giving glory to God. In the world around him, that view was rapidly giving way to a lower view of music spawned by the Enlightenment.15
In attempting to make music pleasing to the German ear, the new Enlightenment composers actually contributed to the withering of the German soul. Wagner’s operas, though musically rich, were philosophically and spiritually devastating. It’s no wonder that he was Hitler’s favourite composer and that listening to a Wagner opera stirred a sinister call in the young Adolf. It was the siren song of the Valkyries, not the call of the Holy Spirit, that summoned Hitler to his destiny.
The same reductive theories that struck the arts also began to blow at gale force against the windbreak of sound theological doctrine, and by the late nineteenth century, Germany’s theological windbreaks had largely been uprooted. Eventually, the arid tenets of theological scientism – that matters of the human spirit can be evaluated empirically, that any idea of transcendent causality should be summarily dismissed, that the primary ethic of scientific research and application should be mere utility, and that anyone challenging such ideas deserves no place in secular institutions – stretched across the landscape. In fact, one might argue that the perversion of science, which Churchill found to be so distressing and such a threat to civilization, resulted from the perversion of theology, the ‘queen of sciences’.
The German theologian J. S. Semler played a key role in the assault on theology. Milton Terry refers to Semler as ‘the father of the destructive school of German Rationalism’ in hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) and theology, though he also says that Semler ‘was surprised at the use others made of his critical principles’. Semler regarded the Bible’s reporting of miracles and the ideas of sacrificial atonement, Christ’s resurrection, the existence of angels and the coming of a final judgement as ‘an accommodation to the superstitious notions, prejudices, and ignorance of the times. The supernatural was thus set aside.’16
Semler fragmented biblical scholarship by severing the sacred text from the Holy Spirit’s inspiration and by separating religion and theology. Religion was a private matter, ‘largely a matter of personal taste, and should be cultivated as individual feeling and the dictates of reason prompted’.17
Germany was not the only place where Semler’s ideas took root. As William Wilberforce crusaded in the British Parliament for the end of the slave trade, Lord Melbourne reportedly said that ‘things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life’.18 But we should not blame it all on Semler, writes Milton Terry. Some German theologians ‘were thoroughly infected with the leaven of English deism and French infidelity, and … writings [that] breathed the most offensive spirit of hostility to all accepted Christian doctrine’.19 Semler’s work, in the hands of others, turned into ‘instruments for the destruction of all faith in divine revelation’.20
The concepts of rationalism crescendoed in the nineteenth century, reaching an explosive pitch with the publication of Darwin’s theories, and shaping the Zeitgeist into which Adolf Hitler was born and educated. Nineteenth-century German theologians widened the divide between the Old and New Testaments forged by their Enlightenment predecessors. Thus, writes Leon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth, ‘the fathers prepared the ground for the heresies of the children.’21
The German psyche, fuelled by Teutonic myths, yearned for the mystical and the supernatural. Even if the Bible could be dismissed, the mystical longings could not. Hitlerism celebrated the demotion of biblical authority wrought by theological scientism, but it also sought to fill the spiritual void for which the German soul hungered and thirsted.
The devastating gales of Wagnerism, Nietzscheism and Darwinism
RICHARD WAGNER
Hitler acknowledged that Richard Wagner, the nineteenth-century Bayreuth composer, was the source of his world view and the inspirer of his destiny. In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares that he was ‘captivated’ by the composer. Hitler’s ‘youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds’.22 He retained that enthusiasm for the rest of his life. ‘Wagner’s line of thought is intimately familiar to me,’ Hitler said. ‘At every stage of my life I come back to him.’23
Part of Wagner’s appeal to the Nazi leader lay in the composer’s racialist undertones. Among the ideas that informed Wagner’s art were Schopenhauer’s anti-Jewish metaphysics and Gobineau’s racial theories. As Leon Poliakov notes, Wagner’s work ‘was a mixture of musical, ideological, theatrical and religious themes’ that ‘could not have been better suited to the needs of the time’. Furthermore, ‘in a society searching for new myths and avid for undiscovered thrills’, Wagner’s compositions and productions ‘aroused a frenzy of enthusiasm’.24
Thus, Wagner’s music ‘unleashed the savagery of the Nazis’, in the words of Thomas Mann.25 Spiritually, writes Mann, ‘Wagner’s work was a clear proclamation of that “metapolitical” movement which today terrorizes the world.’26
Listening to Wagner propelled Adolf Hitler and his devotees towards sheer triumphalism in their conviction that Aryan beliefs and cultural forms had every right to sweep the entire world into its superior civilization. Millions were under the spell that Wagner, long-dead, had helped weave. ‘Under the Third Reich,’ writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Bayreuth became a temple of National Socialist art.’27
Hitler met the Wagner family in Bayreuth in 1923 when he came ‘to pay homage to the composer’s memory’ and to meet Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (who, incidentally, was also Neville Chamberlain’s cousin). Houston Chamberlain’s ‘sub-Darwinian eugenics, mystical championing of pure Aryan blood, and hatred of Jews’ appealed to Hitler and would later cause him to be seen by many Nazis as ‘the seer and herald of the Third Reich’.28 Within a year of Hitler’s 1923 visit, ‘some devotees of Wagner’s music were already claiming that it was being hijacked for unsavoury political purposes.’29
Thereafter, Hitler made annual pilgrimages to Bayreuth. As members of the Wagner family and the Bayreuth community learned more about Hitler and his vision, they began to view him as akin to Wagner’s Parsifal redeemer, who would save Germany. In response to this adulation, Hitler reportedly declared, ‘From Parsifal I build my religion, a sacred service in ceremonial form without theological trappings.’30
Thus, through Nazism’s appropriation of his work, Wagner provided the hymnody and vast orchestrations for the emerging liturgies of neopaganism, of which the spectacular Nazi rallies were prime ex
amples.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
As a young man, Nietzsche idolized Wagner; but later in life, he turned against him with an attitude approaching violence – especially as Nietzsche’s mind deteriorated. Part of the problem was religious: while Wagner continued to use mystical imagery in his operas, Nietzsche had become a militant atheist for whom ‘belief in God [was] no longer possible, due to such nineteenth-century factors as the dominance of the historical-critical method of reading Scripture, the rise of modern science (and thus the rise of incredulity towards anything miraculous), the growing sense that Scripture is merely a human product, and the idea that God is the creation of wish projection.’31 As Nietzsche himself wrote:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?32
The Nazis created a god in their own image and used him to manipulate and control the masses. Hitler’s disciples wrote new scriptures supportive of Nazi thought, and they force-fed the hungry German soul with their newly revealed insights into ancient wisdom.
Another of Nietzsche’s ideas added to the poison: the will to power. According to Nietzsche, the passion for power over others drives every human thought and behaviour. No matter how noble or how seemingly altruistic an action is, the motive is always to impose one’s will on other people. For Nietzsche, every individual is an egotist.
From this, the Nazi theoreticians deduced that power is the justification for all things because it is simply the way things are.
God and Churchill HB Page 18
