These clarifications produced a Christian theology of Judaism in which the Old Testament had been systematically rehabilitated; in particular, the relationship between law and gospel was no longer divided between the New and the Old Testaments. Although still historically critical, exegesis now dealt with the question of Judaism's continuity in Christianity. At the same time, the hypothesis of the Aryan Jesus disappeared, as did the thesis of the Christkillers. However, this removed primarily the excesses of the German Christians. The classic theological ideas about the newness of Jesus' message, the blindness of the Jews as witnesses, and therefore, the Christian church as the new Israel were retained. Liberal theology already had taken these positions during the period between the wars, and they remained consistent with the dialectical theology of the Bultmann school. In fact, it can be said that early postwar Christian theology had returned to where Pauline-oriented dialectical theology had been in the era between the wars. Although explicitly opposed to antisemitism, this theology contained a systematic anti-Judaism, even though that stance was neither inspired by race nor expressed in antisemitic terms. Theologians now acknowledged that the historical splitting off of the Old Testament had been an error and that the resultant allocation of law to the Old and gospel to the New Testament contradicted the spirit of Jesus and the apostolic Scriptures themselves; but the Protestant churches would not give up their emphasis on the distinction between law and gospel or their claim that the theme of love in Jesus' life and preaching had overcome Jewish legalism. Only when Protestant piety confronted the historical reality of industrial mass murder did there emerge a new impulse in theological thought.
Consider the Confessing Church Council of Brethren's 1949 Darmstadt Declaration. Despite its explicit repentance and its rejection of German Christian doctrine, this statement interpreted the Holocaust as an expression of God's wrath against Jewish disobedience, thereby reinforcing the anti-Jewish element within Christian doctrine. Darmstadt expressed nothing less than a sweeping historical-philosophical thesis that attributed the deaths in the gas chambers to God, thereby validating the supremacy of the new, "true" Israel of Christian faith and implying, by logical necessity, that the murderous deeds of the SS had invalidated the Jewish faith.
In fact, in an earlier "Statement on the Jewish Question" from April 1948, the Reich Council of Brethren of the Evangelical Church of Germany had already asserted that Israel, since it crucified the Messiah, had counteracted its election and rejected salvation. The death and resurrection of Christ was said to be the sole hope for Israel, and the statement added, "that God will not be mocked is the silent sermon of the Jewish faith, a warning to us, a reminder to the Jews about whether or not they want to convert to Him in whom alone their salvation stands."'
These offensive and absurd theses, with their recurrent demand that a God of love be transformed into a God of revenge, were crassly naturalistic in their method of argument and could not be sustained. A theological interpretation of the Holocaust was needed, as was a reevaluation of Judaism in its own right, no longer as merely an aspect of Christianity. The offensiveness of the anti-Judaic interpretation of the Shoah, blaming Jews for their own murder, left no other option than the revision of all assumptions about Jews in the modern Christianity shaped by Luther. These assumptions held that God's wrath had been provoked because Jews were unwilling to accept Jesus' gospel of love and freedom and preferred to continue to submit to the fatal and pharisaic law, but precisely these assumptions had allowed Christian hostility to Jews and helped make their massacre possible. Therefore, theologians began to consider counterassumptions-that the genocide was not God's punishment, that Jews were not guilty, and that, despite their rejection of the message of Jesus, they remain God's chosen people, retaining divine loyalty and love. This thesis led to a reconsideration of the doctrine of law and gospel and to the acknowledgment that the Jewish religion, not just the Old Testament, is also gospel.
Here the question of the role and person of Jesus arises anew. If Judaism is equal to Christianity as a religion based upon the Bible, then what, one might ask, is the need for Christianity? Of what does the belief in Jesus as Messiah consist, if not the belief in his newness? In the end, is Jesus only one path by which people find their way to the God of Israel, in accordance with the prophetic promises? In fact, the debate has now reached a point, in some circles, where Christian identity is in question and where it can seem as though the Jewish people have taken Jesus' place.
steps toward a 'Revision
Early postwar confessions of guilt came from individual regional churches as well as from joint meetings at Stuttgart and Darmstadt. Furthermore, after the war the famous Martin Niemoller, a former German nationalist turned early adherent of the Confessing Church, lectured across Germany on questions of guilt. (Partly because of his concentration camp imprisonment as a personal prisoner of the Fiihrer, which lasted from 1937 to1945, during the Nazi regime he had never made a statement about the relationship of the Confessing Church to Jews and Judaism.) But only in 1950 at the EKD synod in BerlinWeissensee did the first theologically sophisticated declaration emerge on the issue of Christians and Jews. It expressed guilt and called for change, but it also reflected the difficulty inherent in rethinking long-held doctrine:
We believe in the Lord and Savior who came as man out of the people of Israel. We confess a church, which out of Jews and Gentile Christians is joined together into one body, and whose peace is Jesus Christ.
We believe that God's covenant with his chosen people of Israel also remains in effect after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
We acknowledge that, through neglect and silence before the God of compassion, we too are guilty of the crimes committed against the Jews by members of our people.
We warn all Christians against the wish to offset that which has come upon us Germans as the judgment of God against that which we have done to the Jews; for in judgment, God's mercy seeks those who are contrite.
We ask all Christians to renounce all antisemitism and, where it rises anew, to resist it vigorously, and to encounter Jews and Jewish Christians in the spirit of brotherhood.
We ask Christian congregations to protect the Jewish graveyards in their areas, insofar as they are untended.
We ask the God of compassion to bring about the day of fulfillment, when we, with the rescued Israel, will sing the praises of the victory of Jesus Christ.'
This document, quoted here in its entirety because of its subsequent importance, expressed arguments that were theologically central to the official church but that could not be easily found in earlier teachings. These include the emphasis on Jesus' descent from Israel and Israel's continued election. Today we cannot tell whether new, deeply felt convictions were being articulated here, or whether this statement was simply a political expedient. In fact, the main topic of the Weissensee synod was not the relationship of Christians to Jews, but the future of peace in Europe. During the meetings, participants quickly concluded that without an initial statement about the Jews, no subsequent declarations would be credible, particularly to the foreign community.
In this declaration, only the affirmation of God's ongoing promise to Israel was truly new and dynamic. To acknowledge that Jesus was born a Jew simply reflected a core element of Christian belief. However, what had not been common in the Christian tradition was the self-evident conclusion-that antisemitism, with respect either to Jews or to Christians of Jewish descent, had to be rejected. Barth contributed to this postwar reassessment, as did his student, Hans Joachim Iwand. In a 1967 letter to Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's biographer, Barth asked the following questions with regard to the National Socialist era: "Was it basically correct that the church, as the Confessing Church, mind you-the official church applauded, as is known-was silent about the Nuremberg laws? Was it right, as happened at the time, to say: the granting and denial of civil rights is a matter for the people and the state alone, and does not concern the church? Was it right that in 1
938 the persecuted Jews were not at all or hardly prayed for?"' The implicit criticism in this series of questions was already apparent in the Weissensee statement of 1950.
In the Catholic Church, comparable statements came considerably later, beginning with Vatican II in the 1960s and this passage from "Nostra Aetate": "Although the Jewish authorities ... together with their followers demanded the death of Christ, nonetheless, one can neither place this burden without differentiation upon all the Jews who lived at that time nor upon the Jews today. The Church is certainly the new people of God. Still, the Jews may not be portrayed as rejected or cursed by
This Vatican declaration is remarkable for its relatively late date and the fact that its appearance was probably connected to continued pressure on the Catholic Church to address Pius XII's action or inaction in response to National Socialism. In addition, placement of this statement under the title "Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions" undercuts the idea of a special relationship between Judaism and Christianity, even though a special relationship was conceded as historical fact.
In November 1975 the collective synods of the dioceses in the Federal Republic of Germany produced a declaration that built upon "Nostra Aetate." It is quoted here in its entirety because of its significance:
We are the land whose most recent political history is darkened by the attempt to eradicate the Jewish people. And, as a whole during this period of National Socialism, despite the exemplary behavior of individuals and groups, we were a church community which continued to live too much with its back turned to the fate of this persecuted Jewish people, with gaze fixed too strongly upon the threat to its own institutions, and which remained silent about the crimes done to the Jews and Judaism. Many became guilty through sheer fear for their lives. It weighs especially upon us that even Christians participated in this persecution. The practical honesty of our willingness for renewal depends upon the admission of this guilt and the readiness to learn from our nation's painful history and our church's guilt as well. It requires a particular alertness from our German church against all tendencies to reduce human rights and misuse political power, a special readiness to help all who today are persecuted for racist or other ideological motives, and, above all, the assumption of particular obligations for the burdened relation of the entire church to the Jewish people and their religion. We Germans in particular are not permitted to deny or play down the connection between the salvation of God's people of the old and the new covenants, a connection the Apostle Paul himself saw and acknowledged. For in this sense, too, we in our country have become indebted to the Jewish people. Ultimately, in light of a hopeless horror like that of Auschwitz, the credibility of our talk about the "God of hope" rests upon the fact that there were countless people, Jews and Christians, who repeatedly named and called upon this God, even in such a hell. Herein rests a task for our people, also with respect to attitudes toward the Jewish people among other peoples and in the world community. We see the German churches as having a special obligation within the universal church precisely to bring about a new Christian relation to the Jewish people and its religious history.
This statement is well-meaning and it shows a great self-assurance within the Catholic church. The bishops assume German responsibility for the National Socialist crimes much more clearly than in the Vatican declaration, and they address the co-responsibility of German Catholicism without further elaboration. At the same time, however, there is a hint of ambiguity. Why does the statement emphasize that German Catholics may not deny or play down the theme of salvation in its relationship to the Old and the New Covenants [sic!]? Are non-German Catholics given an implicit freedom to remain hostile to Jews, to "play down" the connection between Jews and salvation? Admittedly, the statement does end with a reference to German Catholics teaching the universal church on this issue.
If one compares the official Catholic and Protestant declarations, it is striking that Catholicism seems more concerned with correcting the theory that substitutes the New for the Old Israel, that is, the theory that replaces the synagogue with the church. On the Protestant side, the focus is more upon retracting the anti-Judaic theme of God's condemnation of Jews. Both approaches have the same basic goal: a strict adherence by the church to the Apostle Paul's regulations about the relationship between the Jewish and Christian congregations. It appears, however, that the Catholic approach is more fully accepting of the Old Testament and the unity of both Testaments than is the strongly Lutheran-influenced Protestantism of Germany, with its greater emphasis on and contrast between law and gospel and its aversion to "works" in response to the law.
In 1975, the same year as the declaration of the German Catholic bishops, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, the Council of the EKD published a study that provided a strong orientation for the Christian-Jewish relationship, even if it made no theological or liturgical commitments. As members of the "Evangelical Church of Germany's Study Commission on Church and Judaism," a number of renowned scholars worked on the document, including Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin Hengel, Peter von der OstenSacken, Martin Stohr, and Rolf Rentdorff.F Citing Paul's words in the Letter to the Romans-"Remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you"-this study, written between 1973 and 1975, took positions on a number of matters. It addressed the common roots of Christianity and Judaism, the one God, the holy Scripture, the people of God; it also reflected upon the divergent attitudes of the two religions toward history and fulfillment, the relation of the Christian congregation to the people of God, the different forms of Jewish experience in Israel and the Diaspora, the state of Israel, and theologically problematic areas such as encounter and witness. The study traced the division of the Jewish and Christian congregations in a historically sensitive way, noting in particular the problematic nature of the Christian mission to Jews. At no point does it ignore the history of antiJudaism and antisemitism or, in particular, the issue of the National Socialist mass murder. Still, the complicity of the Protestant churches under National Socialism-especially of the Confessing Church-is not acknowledged, at least not with the same clarity as in the Catholic bishops' declaration.
At the same time, there emerged in Protestant thought an odd historical and philosophical judgment: "The catastrophe of genocide and annihilation [Holocaust] is, for the Jewish people in Israel and in the Diaspora, bound to the name of Auschwitz in Poland, the largest extermination camp. Like Hiroshima, Auschwitz became a symbol for the experience of the horror of annihilation and a turning point in historical and theological thought, especially within Judaism.""
This statement accurately reflects attitudes during the early 1970s. As an antisemitic, racist, self-contained means of murder, Auschwitz was compared with the wartime use of the atomic bomb over Japan, a morally questionable act but not one that challenges the heart of Christian doctrine. Furthermore, Auschwitz was viewed primarily as a theme of Jewish existence, and not as the central challenge to Christianity that brings everything into question. This was also true of the first German responses to so-called Jewish post-Holocaust theology, which appeared in a 1982 German anthology."' Only in light of this still relatively naive point of departure can we understand how the Study Commission on Church and Judaism pondered Christianity's future attitude toward Jews:
After all that has happened, there is great diversity of opinion today about how Christian witness toward Jews can be formed in the right fashion. In past years, discussion about this revolved mainly around the two terms mission and dialogue. Often, these were understood as opposites that ruled each other out. In the meantime, however, the insight has grown that mission and dialogue are two dimensions of the one Christian witness.... Not only the term mission but also the term dialogue, as a description of Christian witness, is a loaded term for Jews. Because of this, Christians today face the task of reflecting anew, with regard to the Jews, about how they are to understand their conviction that Jesus Christ means salvation for all p
eople, how they name it and what shape they want to give it."
The grammatical logic of the last sentence, which speaks explicitly of "all people," permits no other conclusion than that, according to the convictions of the authors of the study, salvation through Jesus alone holds "objectively" for Jews as well as Christians. The only perceived difficulty appears to be a subjective one, based upon the lost credibility of Christians after the Holocaust: How can more authenticity be won? The possibility that the real problem of Christian witness to Jews is an objective one is not even considered. Since the mid-1970s, then, theological work on this problem represents the essential, original achievement of a Christian post-Holocaust theology in Germany and, with that, the most important contribution of German theologians to a new understanding of Christianity in principle.
Auschwitz, and the Crisis of Christian Theology
In a 1977 essay that remains groundbreaking, Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz found the decisive words. Here Christian theology was no longer directed solely at what theologians had done or left undone, but at the substance and transmission of the Christian faith: "The question as to whether there will be a Reformation, a return to shared roots in the relationship between Christians and Jews, will always be decided ultimately, at least in this country, on how we Christians stand on Auschwitz, how we Christians assess it for ourselves. Whether we allow it to be truly the end, . . . the catastrophe of our history from which one finds his way out only through a radical change, with new standards, or whether for us it is only a monstrous accident in our history that does not affect its course."'2
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