Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  In Baur’s history of the early Church, Jews — including Jewish Christians — stand in for the Orientals in Hegel’s more sweeping narrative of world history. According to Baur, “the fundamental divide within early Christianity” pitted “the (despotic, fleshly, backwards, Eastern) Jewish Christians” against “the (free, spiritual, dynamic, Western) Hellenistic Christians”. In seeking to discover why Spirit unfolded itself in the first century AD in such a way that “Christianity entered into the world at this particular time and no other,” Baur helped to launch “the quest for the historical Jesus” that contributed mightily to the nineteenth century crisis of faith.294

  That crisis was a response to a troubling theological paradox. On the one hand, historical criticism revealed “that Jesus could be seen as an essentially Jewish figure whose teachings were in line with those of other Jewish sages of the time”. On the other hand, “[t]his realization clashed with the central dogmatic claims about the uniqueness of Jesus and of Christianity”.295 This was more than an intellectual puzzle. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Christians were placed on the defensive. The emancipation of the Jews, in particular, meant that the Christian character of the German nation could no longer be taken for granted. Christendom had been reduced to a state of mind. And, because emancipated Jews were widely believed to have an undue influence in German cultural life, conservative Christians “wished to keep Jews politically, socially, and economically ghettoized”. By contrast, theologically liberal Protestants wanted “to see Jews convert to Christianity in order to effect the second coming and complete the eschatological process of salvation”. They thought that the best way to encourage conversion was to grant “the Jews total freedom through emancipation” and to engage “with them theologically”.296 All sides recognized that the “Jewish Problem” undermined the spiritual foundations of Christian monarchy.

  Liberal theologians such as Baur, therefore, felt bound to deny Jesus’s Jewishness. His work aimed to show that Jesus Westernized “the Oriental aspects of the Jewish law”. He conceived Jesus’s teaching as a spiritualized and universalized expression of the Messianic ideal which had been corrupted by “his shallow, hypocritical, unspiritual, literal, Jewish opponents”. In Baur’s hands, the historical Jesus became little more than a disembodied, spiritualized manifestation of the Hegelian Idea in history. The “internal spiritual meaning” of “the external form of the crucifixion” was then revealed in the Hellenized Christianity preached by the apostle Paul, who, according to Baur, was opposed to the “very principle of Judaism”.297

  The Aryan Jesus in the People’s Church

  In effect, by portraying Christ as an avatar of the Spirit of Hellenism, Baur abandoned the quest for the historical Jesus. Nevertheless, the search continued under other auspices. By the mid-nineteenth century, Christians were astonished to learn that Jesus in the flesh was not even a Jew. In pursuit of the historical Jesus, the higher criticism constructed an Aryan Jesus. It was the French scholar Ernest Renan who, in his Life of Jesus, “provided a vocabulary and a logic…to transform Jesus as a figure who was said to have criticized the Judaism of his day into one whose religiosity was determined by his Aryan identity, an identity he achieved by ridding himself of Jewish dross”. Renan’s biography is a story of “racial purification through mutability”. By purging himself of his Jewishness, Jesus reveals himself as a divine gift to the Aryan race which is transformed and enriched by the creative spirit of Christianity. For Renan, race is a social construct, a matter of culture and ethnicity, not of biology. He declares explicitly that there is no point in trying to ascertain “what blood flowed into the veins of him who has contributed most to efface the distinction of blood in humanity”. By the end of the century, however, Jesus’s Aryan identity was seen to run in the blood. Indeed, Houston Stewart Chamberlain asserted that because Jesus was a Galilean there was “not the slightest foundation for the supposition that Christ’s parents were of Jewish descent”. Convinced that the majority population of Galilee was Indo-European in the time of Christ, Chamberlain declared that it was “almost a certainty” that “Christ had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins”.298

  While differing about whether it was Spirit or blood that made Jesus an Aryan, Renan and Chamberlain agreed that his Passion was the climax to a deadly struggle between Aryans and Jews. It seems to have been common ground that Jesus had lost the battle against Jewish depravity. The higher criticism led inexorably to the conclusion that Jesus was a failed Messiah. First century Christians clearly hoped that Jesus would come again “soon” in clouds of glory to create a new heaven and new earth. But the higher critics took it as given that they were doomed to disappointment. Christ’s plans miscarried when the Jews rejected his Kingdom and demanded his execution. As Jesus hung dying on the cross, he was compelled to admit that “it is finished” (John 19:30). Irredeemably sceptical, the higher critics took it to be self-evident that the parousia was delayed. They, like first-century Jews, associated the eschatological hope of Israel with an earthly kingdom. For German higher critics, therefore, the humiliation and death of Jesus merely ended one chapter in the cosmic conflict between the Aryan Spirit and the Jewish Spirit and set the stage for more to come. In twentieth century Germany, the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans turned a fateful corner when Hitler set out to purify the German Volk by reversing the emancipation of the Jews.

  Among historians, there is considerable debate about whether leading Nazis were or were not Christians. Perhaps the best answer is: It depends upon what you mean by “Christian”. Certainly, as early as 1920, the NSDAP Program aligned itself with “the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession”. The “positive Christianity” of German National Socialism pledged to overcome the negative image of a weak, suffering, defeated Christ in the fight against “the spirit of Jewish materialism”.299 Once in power, however, the Nazi party rebuffed the efforts of its many Christian supporters to foster an identity of interests between the Church and the regime. After 1936 churches were forbidden use of the swastika symbol on their buildings and altars. Despite such rebuffs, members “of the German Christian movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen), most of them Protestant lay people and clergy, regarded the Nazi revolution…as a golden opportunity for Christianity”. Together with many other Protestants, the Deutsche Christen (DC) expected the new order “to inspire spiritual awakening and bring the church to what they considered its rightful place at the heart of German society and culture”.300

  Unfortunately for German society and culture, the DC movement’s simplistic, one-dimensional conflation of Spirit, blood, and Volk alienated many fellow Christians. Race-as-theology was swallowed up whole in a völkisch rendition of race-as-biology. German Christians accepted as an article of faith that “The Volk is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Sanctification takes place in the communal life of the Volk”. What then, one might ask, of the Father and the Son? German Christians seemed all too willing to combine both roles in the divinized figure of the Führer. DC confirmation examinations sometimes presented Hitler as Jesus, the Spirit incarnate, destined to rid “the temple of the German Volk” of modern-day Jews and Pharisees.301 Leading DC theologians assured German Christians that “We also know from men who are close to the Führer that he knows of his inner connection with God. He knows himself to be the instrument of God”. Indeed, some Christians reported “that a magic power radiates from him…completely consistent with his higher commission”.302 Pastors, theologians, and lay people in the DC movement were utterly convinced that “recognition of the sacred meaning of race was Germany’s gift to the twentieth century”. They were confident, therefore, that God was at one with the German people in their war to seize resources and living space owned and occupied by other races. Liberal-minded Protestants such as Karl Barth were appalled at such presumption and warned that by setting up both the Volk and its Führer as idols, the DC movement was opening
“the floodgates to a torrent of non-Christian and anti-Christian beliefs, attitudes, and activities”.303

  Such charges are difficult to deny. Doris Bergen demonstrates that the DC movement recklessly blurred “racial and religious categories” by defining “their people’s church as essentially and primarily anti-Jewish; their identity depended on the contrasts they established between themselves and Jews”.304 Like Renan’s quest for the historical Jesus, members of the DC movement were determined to purge Christianity of any and all traces of Jewishness. Unlike Renan, however, these German Christians had no love for the romanticized, feminized, suffering Jesus who submitted meekly to crucifixion. They wanted a manly Messiah. At the same time, they could not escape the consensus view of the higher critics that Jesus was an eschatological failure. Paradoxically, the abiding contempt that German Christians directed at the Old Testament blinded them to the providential meaning of the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. It was then that the apostle Paul expected Christ to “hand over the kingdom to God the Father”. At the same time, all the “dominion, authority and power” once vested in Old Covenant Judaism was to be annulled (1 Corinthians 15:24). Had German Christians adopted the preterist (Latin, præter meaning “past”) view of fulfilled eschatology, a manly Messiah would have been revealed in the reality of Christ’s final victory over his enemies in Old Covenant Israel.

  Theology is an imperfect science but it still remains possible to acquire deeper insights into the meaning of scripture. A preterist reading of the Bible supports two truths that German Christians never understood. First, all of the promises made by Yahweh to Old Israel were fulfilled in Christ’s New Covenant creation. To know what those promises were and when and how they were made, Christians must read and understand the Old Testament. Second, the Judaism of Old Covenant Israel, centred as it was on the temple in Jerusalem, was superseded by the spiritual kingdom of New Covenant Israel. Talmudic Judaism, therefore, is not the Judaism of Old Covenant Israel in the first century AD. Those who call themselves Jews now (or in Germany during the 1930s) have no proprietary claim to the Old Testament. It was the Talmud that became “the defining document” of those who insisted that the advent of Christ had changed nothing and that the Old Covenant remained valid. Two versions of those rabbinical writings developed over several centuries; the one reached its final form in fifth century Palestine, the other was completed in Babylon in the seventh century AD.305 Orthodox Judaism as we know it is a man-made, indeed counterfeit, cult that emerged well after the birth of Christianity.

  German Christians, however, failed to recognize that the meaning of Jewishness had been radically transformed by the advent of the Messiah. The synagogue of Satan conspired to kill Jesus. Consequently, in the eyes of God, the co-conspirators ceased to be Jews. For centuries, prophets had warned that such a crime would bring the destruction of Israel after the flesh. But some German Christians were so fixated on the allegedly primordial, racial dimension of the Jewish Question that they called for the entire Old Testament to be excised from the canonical scriptures. They also worked to remove traditional Hebraisms from the Christian hymnal. Simply put, they dissolved Spirit and water into the blood of the Volk. They also reinterpreted the sacraments by “transforming baptism into a celebration of the unity of blood”. Baptism did not mark membership in a confession of faith; it was based instead on “the law of blood and in the race”. Baptism, therefore, could not turn a Jew into a German. Nor could baptism “make a Jew a Christian”.306 Not only did DC members demand an end to evangelical missions to the Jews, they also campaigned to prevent “baptized Jews” from holding pastoral offices in the church.

  Clearly, the DC movement “denied the universal claims of Christianity and attacked the notion of the church itself as independent from the nation”. In practice, of course, Hitler’s “nation” became synonymous with the “party-state”. German Christians were interested in a socially enforced code of racial solidarity not in seemingly abstruse theological issues. They thought doctrinal disputes could only breed dissension among Protestants while deepening the confessional divide separating them from Catholics. Chief among the theological issues avoided by the DC movement were questions as to the relationship between the persons of the trinity — in heaven and on earth.

  In the end, the DC movement’s “antagonism to doctrine ensured that the church they promoted would be a hollow affair, prone to collapse”.307 The theological failure of the Deutsche Christen was, in part at least, responsible for the fatal inversion of German National Socialism into the mirror image of the predatory Judeo-Bolshevism Hitler had sworn to destroy.

  Conclusion

  The crushing defeat of Nazi racialism did not restore a trinitarian social order; it merely set the scene for the Cold War confrontation between rival versions of the one-dimensional mass society produced by modern industrial capitalism. Both Soviet-style Communism and the now-triumphant neo-communist Empire declare to the world that God is dead. Accordingly, “those who pray” sit on the sidelines of the secular history-making process watching “those who fight” pursue careers within the all-embracing statistical category of “those who work”. A transnational, managerial/therapeutic regime now aspires to create a totally-administered society within which behaviour replaces the speech and actions of free men. The meaning of life is found in individual life-style choices.

  In the emergent Empire “deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behaviour, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is their capacity to illuminate historical time”. Hannah Arendt, one of the leading theorists of mass society, knew that “[s]tatistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence”.308 The managerial drive to achieve statistical uniformity comes up against real limitations however when it is forced to accommodate the reality of racial differences. Blood will win out in the end. So too will Spirit and the life-giving power of water.

  Should Spirit, water, and blood recombine here on earth in new institutional forms, one unexpected result may be the miraculous renaissance of Christian nationhood. In The WASP Question, I imagine how the hard-wired, triadic social orders characteristic of the archaic Indo-European race will re-express themselves in the New Dark Age.309 As the statistically predictable uniformity of everyday life unravels, it will be both necessary and desirable to recreate embryonic Christian nations within the interstices of an Empire in crisis. For that to happen, each of race-as-biology, race-as-ethnicity, and race-as-theology must play its own distinctive role.

  It seems certain that the transnational corporate state will continue to promote the demographic displacement of the white race. In England, the silver lining in that cloud will be the inevitable disestablishment of the monarchy and the Anglican Church, returning both institutions to the care and custody of Anglo-Saxon Christian peoples around the world.

  Re-invented as the fidei defensor, a postmodern Anglo-Saxon king will renovate the Anglican Church. It will become a confederal Volkskirche, the spiritual heart of a global network of Anglo-Saxon tribes. Standing outside and apart from the imperial structures of failing corporate states, a Christian king will endow “those who pray” with the institutional authority to explain to “those who fight” and “those who work” what it means to be reborn as a Christian people. The church has been there and done that long ago. It can do so again when White advocates come to appreciate the emancipatory potential of Christian nationhood. Based in resilient local communities around the world, Anglo-Saxon Christian tribalism will generate novel forms of political, social, economic, and cultural activism.

  No doubt other white ethnicities will emerge to cope with the crisis in their own distinctive manner and in alliance with their Anglo-Saxon brothers in Christ. The “essence of ethnicity, and the social structures that sustain it may flo
urish without reference to political nationhood at all, as until recently was the case for Jews, Gypsies, Sikhs, and American blacks”. Throughout an Empire in crisis “systems of religious thought” may help many white ethnicities to “breaks the chains of custom by making new and revolutionary demands, dissolving myths, and declaring a transcendent ethic not identifiable with any existing society or social institution”. Indeed, according to Timothy L Smith, this is exactly what happened during earlier waves of mass immigration in the United States. It was not at all unusual for Southern blacks migrating to the North or former Eastern European villagers in American cities to use churches and synagogues “to promote education and upward mobility as well as to define, rationalize, and revitalize ethnoreligious identity”.310 Recovering their historic identification with the Christian faith will help many whites to recover stable ethnic identities in the coming Dark Age. Those who sink further into apostasy will be swallowed up — like ancient Israel — in an alien and hostile world.