Churchill knew that Hitler hadn’t lost sight of the ultimate but that he had formed answers within his own mind, shaped by the spirit of his age. Hitler truly believed he was in the world to advance the Aryan race – the supreme outcome of human evolution – and therefore the empire of the Aryan race. To Hitler’s mind, the purpose of life was not merely survival, but the survival of the fittest. And he and the Nazis knew who the fittest would be.
Whither are we going? To the glorious Third Reich, Hitler said, which would usher in, not Augustine’s City of God, but the City of Man writ large, the superhuman global empire of the Aryans.
Churchill well knew that the survival of Christian civilization required a dynamic balance between the ultimate and the immediate. Repeatedly he set the big picture before the British people, reminding them why they had to fight on despite the loss of loved ones, homes and institutions, and even despite the risk to their own lives. At the same time, Churchill maintained a focus on the immediate. As minister of defence, he daily assessed the strength of materiel and personnel in all the branches that would ‘fight on the beaches, … on the landing grounds, … in the fields and in the streets’.
Conflating means and ends
In his speech before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, said that Hitler’s dictatorship ‘employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people’.36 Through such scientific achievements, ‘eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual.’37
Most terrifying was the absence of thinking that would have enabled people to use value judgements to distinguish between means and ends. In the absolute realm of scientism, the person who asks questions is marginalized; and when the levers of that scientism are in the hands of a dictator, a critical mind could lead to one’s execution. ‘Telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where … they were executed uncritically,’ said Speer.38
By contrast, Churchill’s actions were challenged constantly, in both the War Cabinet and the House of Commons. There was little room for the conflation of ends and means in the political climate in which Churchill functioned as prime minister. His every recommendation, and every possible motive behind it, was scrutinized repeatedly by his peers, the press and the British people. Hitler never had to worry about serious internal political resistance because he repressed anyone within Germany who opposed him. Churchill, on the other hand, had to face down votes of no confidence in the House of Commons, as well as disagreements within his coalition War Cabinet. This, however, is the price of a free society, and Churchill gladly bore the cost. During one period of intense battle over his leadership within Parliament, Elizabeth Nel noted the stress on her boss: ‘I know that despite his lifetime of experience and his enormous strength and self-control in bearing trials, he was still human enough to feel worked up inside.’39
Removal of transcendent accountability
In a December 1931 article published in The Strand Magazine, Churchill wrote: ‘We have the spectacle of the powers of weapons of man far outstripping the march of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence proceeding far more rapidly than the development of his nobility… . It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.’40
In his remarks, Churchill describes perfectly the scientism that had infected genuine scientific inquiry.
There are secrets too mysterious for man in his present state to know; secrets which, once penetrated, may be fatal to human happiness and glory. But the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind.41
Tyrants always must remove any contrary power that might be perceived to be above them. They rule by fear, and fear is stoked by the shocking truth that the oppressors can do whatever they wish because there is no one to whom they are ultimately accountable. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, said, ‘There is … an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world view.’42 Clearly, if the Nazis had won the war, they would have sought to remove the influence of the Church from the European continent.
Europe’s spiritual and philosophical soil had long been under cultivation for tyrannical absolutism, and it was well-ploughed, in the Germanic territories especially, for the sowing of Hitler’s malicious seeds.
Alfred Grotjahn, a professor at the University of Berlin, was among the framers of the Zeitgeist into which Hitler was born and through which his thought was shaped. Grotjahn described his own experience of being severed from the idea of the transcendent while reading Force and Matter by Ludwig Büchner. Grotjahn said that the influence of Darwinian materialism ‘swept my brain clear of metaphysical conceptions at an age decisive in the development of my world view and freed me up to receive positivist views and this-worldly ethical values’.43 He went on to become a leading voice in the German eugenics and social hygiene movement that underpinned Nazi philosophy.
THE LOSS OF TRANSCENDENT WONDER
The initial fragmentation of revelation and reason occurred in the philosophy of ancient Greece, which the Nazis intermingled with their own world view. In the fifth century BC, Protagoras provided what would later become the mantra of scientism: Man is the measure of all things. What cannot be subjected to human reason is considered invalid. A major consequence of this philosophy is the limitation of wonder and awe to the observable, measurable world. Ultimately, it means that only that which exists on the scale of human reason can be worshipped. Anything transcendent is ruled out a priori.
Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, describes the ‘disenchantment’ of the world that ultimately leads to ‘a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing’.44 In a Nazi-controlled Europe, Hitler would decide which humans should ‘flourish’ and which would be considered obstacles to that happy state. Not only would the ‘fittest’ survive, but they would be able to establish the new value codes. It astonishes us now, but both Hitler and Stalin considered themselves and their systems to be moral.
The Middle Ages, during which the foundations of modern science were laid, had embraced transcendent wonder. In the seventy-plus cathedrals erected without modern gadgets, Europe is still festooned with evidence of the exuberance for transcendence that characterized the medieval period. The visionaries who gave the world the great structures wanted to lift up the eyes of worshippers to almighty God, who is over all. They saw the confluence of natural philosophy and theology, and the scientifically engineered cathedrals were dazzling testimonies. The words inscribed on the doors of the twelfth-century Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris are revealing:
Whoever thou art, if thou seekest to extol the glory of these doors,
Marvel not at the gold and expense but at the craftsmanship of the work.
Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights,
To the True Light where Christ is the true door.
In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines:
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material
And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion. 45
The biblically minded scholars of the Middle Ages took to heart the words of Psalm 8.3–5:
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honour.46
These thinkers considered God’s handiwork and the place of humanity within th
is context. They gazed in wonder at the cosmos, and it created a sense of wonder about themselves. But it was not a self-created wonder. Rather, human greatness came from God, just as the glorious splendour of nature was from his hand. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and Anglican priest, writes that one of the experiences ‘fundamental to the pursuit of science is a sense of wonder’.47
Hitler’s scientists had lost touch with the beautiful balance in Psalm 8 between the divine and the human. They gloried in themselves and saw other human beings as inferior, with no reason for being kept alive except for their utility. When wonder before the transcendent God is removed from the pursuits of science, the restraints are removed and the worst of scientism lies ahead.
This was among the prospects that troubled Winston Churchill the most.
Presumptuous arrogance rather than humble inquiry
The spirit of true science was revealed when Sir Isaac Newton, among the greatest scientists in history, said, ‘If I have seen a little further then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’48
Scientism knows little of such humility. Austin Hughes, distinguished professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina and a veteran of scientific inquiry, writes of ‘the folly of scientism’ and its ‘temptation to overreach’. One aspect of science that attracted Hughes to his career was ‘the modesty of its practitioners’. What made this attitude appealing to him was that the attitude of true science ‘stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which practicing scientists were uncomfortable’.49 Hughes continues:
The temptation to overreach … seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.50
If overreach is a symptom of arrogant scientism, then Hitler and the Nazis were consumed by the disease. Albert Speer contends that, if observers in Hitler’s era had looked more closely at the grand buildings, arenas and monuments he envisioned for Nuremberg, they would have realized the extent of his megalomania. Primary among the effects of scientism is its presumptuous delusion. Hitler, says Speer, ‘trusted his inspirations, no matter how inherently contradictory they might be, and these inspirations were governed by extreme contempt for and underestimation of the others’.51
Hitler would never have acknowledged that he ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’. He was the only giant. But he did trust in his science. He had remarkable ‘communications apparatus at headquarters’, writes Speer. He could direct all the theatres of war straight from his table in the situation room. ‘The more fearful the situation,’ Speer recalls, ‘the greater was the gulf modern technology created between reality and fantasies with which the man at the table operated.’52
As Churchill viewed the rise of Hitlerism, he may have recalled his 1906 visit to review the Kaiser’s military might and the ‘impressive scale of mechanism’ he had observed even eight years before the outbreak of the First World War. Between the two wars, Germany was home to some of the most brilliant scientists in history – including Einstein and Heisenberg – as well as masters of other disciplines. Many were Jews who, like Einstein, left Germany before Hitler’s policies came to full fruition. Perhaps Churchill realized that the perversion of science would come through those who remained, whose only restraints would be the delusions foisted on German culture and scholarship from Hitler’s corrupted mind.
The Babel mentality
Scientism perverts true science through its haughty presumption and vast overreaching. Its first shadow in human history was cast on the Plain of Shinar, where the ancients gathered to build a tower that would reach to the very heavens. Their motive is stated in Genesis 11.4:
Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’53
The three aims of the Babel agenda are for human beings to (1) reach heaven on their own terms and by their own effort; (2) make a name for themselves; and (3) circumvent God’s original intent for humanity to disperse, not cluster.
The first objective is to build a city. The Greek word polis (which is part of our English word metropolis) refers to a community structured through the order of a particular world view and set of values. The would-be Babel-builders had lost the City of God and now were seeking to recover paradise, the City of Man, through their own ingenuity.
The city of Nuremberg was very symbolic for Hitler, and he planned for it to be the capital of the Third Reich, the world city. There he envisioned a rally site larger than the palace of the Persian kings in Persepolis, with a statue forty-six feet taller than the American Statue of Liberty and a 400,000-seat stadium twice the size of Rome’s Circus Maximus. The entire complex would encompass an area three times that which was occupied by the Great Pyramid of Giza. Looming over everything would be the two all-pervasive symbols of Hitler’s regime: a swastika clasped in the talons of a huge eagle.
Once Germany had triumphed and Nuremberg had been established as the crown jewel of the Reich, the entire world would be Hitler’s oyster.
The Führer expresses his unshakeable conviction that the Reich will one day rule all of Europe… . And from then on the road to world domination is practically spread out before us. For whoever rules Europe will be able to seize the leadership of the world.54
In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman entitles her chapter on pre-war Germany ‘Neroism is in the Air’ because many Germans at the time believed that their culture ‘was the heir of Greece and Rome’.55 Tuchman also shows how war was the natural outcome of Hitler’s Darwinian world view.
Darwin’s findings in The Origin of Species, when applied to human society, supplied the philosophical basis for the theory that war was both inherent in nature and ennobling. War was a conflict in which the stronger and superior race survived, thus advancing civilization. Germany’s thinkers, historians, political and military scientists, working upon the theory with the industry of moles and the tenacity of bulldogs, raised it to a level of national dogma.56
The path of repentance
The mercy of God always invites us to return to God and his truth through repentance, leading to restoration and renewal. At least one high Nazi official seems to have entered into that mercy. The former general field marshal Wilhelm Keitel had been second only to Hitler as the leader of Germany’s military command. But in the wee hours of a dank October morning in 1946, he faced execution by order of the Nuremberg war tribunal.
Keitel was trying to maintain stiff composure when a US Army captain, Henry Gerecke, entered his cell. Gerecke was the chaplain selected to minister to the Nazi war criminals who were jailed in Nuremberg. He had visited Keitel often, and the former German officer felt comfortable with him. Gerecke was carrying a Bible, and he invited Keitel to join him in prayer.
The two men went to their knees, and Gerecke, an American son of German immigrants, prayed in German. Suddenly, it seemed to hit Keitel that he was really about to die. He trembled and ‘wept uncontrollably’ as he ‘gasped for air’. Just before he was hanged, Keitel received Communion, served by Gerecke. As the chaplain later recalled, Keitel, ‘with tears in his voice’, said, ‘You have helped me more than you know. May Christ, my Savior, stand by me all the way. I shall need Him so much.’57
As far as we know, Adolf Hitler never repented of his sins or asked God for mercy. Having rejected God’s grace again and again, eventually he reaped the consequences of his actions. But
until that time, Hitler tramped on, believing devoutly in the technical wonders contrived in the laboratories of his practitioners of scientism.
Hitler knew that at some point he would have to do with the Christians what he was doing with the Jews. The feisty pastors in what was known as the Confessing Church challenged him and dared to preach against Nazism until they were carried off. Eventually, he would need to rid himself of Christians altogether, but first he would co-opt the official German Church and make it a servant of Nazi ideology and a legitimizer of its evils.
9
Hitler and the Corruption of the Church
In Germany the search for a new religion became an endemic phenomenon, and it is no exaggeration to describe it as a philosophical psychosis.
LEON POLIAKOV, THE ARYAN MYTH
AS A SEEDBED OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION, Germany was historically a deeply spiritual nation. Josef Goebbels and the other visionaries who created the Nazi pageantry worked hard to tap into the mysticism. They played on wounds in the German soul with their racial theories and visions of Aryan ascendancy. Hitler’s followers (without saying so – that would come later) created a modern mythology of the Führer as a new messianic figure, surrounded by ‘apostles’ (his inner circle) and ‘disciples’ (those who took Mein Kampf and Hitler’s proclamations as revelation).
As Hitler consolidated his power and built his mystique, some leaders in the state Church began to fall under the Nazi spell.
PASTOR AND PROPHET
A true and functioning Church is crucial for forming and sustaining a healthy Christian society. The authentic Church provides both pastoral care and a prophetic voice in a vibrant culture. When the Church falls down in either of those two functions or loses the crucial balance between the two, society begins to break down and the culture develops problems.
Even in the midst of tragedy and the abandonment of its true mission by the establishment Church, there is always a remnant who remain faithful to God and his revelation. Such passion compelled the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer both to leave the safe haven that his friends had tried to create for him in America and to return to Germany, where he took up the role of prophetic voice against Hitler.
God and Churchill HB Page 16