I am currently reading David Gushee’s reissued Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. The book is an analysis of the those gentiles who aided Jews in the Nazi Germany. Thus far (about 2/3rd of the way through) I do not see this as a work of Christian ethics as it is claimed to be but it is a challenging and disconcerting book.
The reference in the title is to the minority of Christians who resisted the murder of fully 1/3rd of all living Jews. But it was very much a minority, Gushee puts the figure at less the 1%. Some of the 99% overtly supported the genocide but most others simply did nothing. Gushee points the figure of culpability firmly at the the majority as being a necessary precondition for the mass-murder:
The success of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” depended to a very important degree on the cooperation, or at least the passivity, of the non-Jewish populations under Nazi rule. (185-92 Kindle).
Whilst not synonymous with Christianity it is clear that the majority of Christians were numbered within the 99%. It was they who allowed by their actions or omissions to occur. Gushee further quotes the Jewish theologian Eliezer Berkovits that the holocaust represents” the moral bankruptcy of Christian civilization and the spiritual bankruptcy of Christian religion”. Berkovits continues:
After nineteen centuries of Christianity, the extermination of six million Jews, among them one and a half million children, carried out in cold blood in the very heart of Christian Europe, encouraged by the criminal silence of virtually all Christendom including that of an infallible Holy Father in Rome, was the natural culmination of this bankruptcy … This has been a moral and spiritual collapse the like of which the world has never witnessed … for incontemptibility and inhumanity (2755-63 Kindle).
Berkovits has a point. Certainly Christianity was not solely responsible for the Nazi-conducted genocide and apologists who insist that there is a distinction between historic anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism but perhaps not that big a difference on occasion. However, whatever the historic culpability which is arguable the damning verdict is that when it counted so few Christ-followers interceded. I have always been aware and uncomfortable about that brute fact. In retrospect i think it is one of the reasons i find value in the theology og Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I am extremely ambiguous about the political acts he took and am not inclined to easily ascribe martyr status to his death at nazi hands. However, far more than even the Confessing Church (Barth expressed a profound regret that the resistance was not more explicitly supportive of the Jews) Bonhoeffer did try to grapple with the realities of the situation and take responsibility for them (interestingly in the context of this book Bonhoeffer has not been recognised as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem).
It maybe worth quoting what Gushee himself says regarding Bonhoeffer:
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who offered the most penetrating theological and ethical reflection in Germany both on radical perversity of Nazism and on the necessity for Christians to aid the Jews. His writings on Nazism ranged widely from 1933 to 1945; indeed, one can see all his theological word as, in a way, a response to the sickness of Nazi ideology and its penetration of Germany. But it was his discussion of the Church’s moral responsibility in the Jewish crisis that was unique in his context. No other theological voice in his context called for the Church to confront and resist the state for its gross political injustices against the Jewish people of Germany. And few other German theologians or Church leaders practiced what they preached. Bonhoeffer not only participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, nut also became involved in efforts to smuggle Jews to Switzerland. Arrested and imprisoned for his resistance efforts, he met his death at Nazi hands on April 9, 1945, just a few weeks before the end of the war (3043-51 Kindle) .
I remain influenced by Bonhoeffer but I do wonder if my interest together with much of the popularity of his work in the least few generations is in part a salve to avoid truly facing up to the sheer horror of the acts that were carried out in the name of or with a blind eye turned by the Christian Church’s as much as because of the actual insights of his theology. Bonhoeffer we can say is proof that the Church did not entirely lose its soul which, of course, may be true but it vastly underestimates the legacy of the tens of millions of Christians and Christian leaders who either participated or looked the other way to the barbarism in their midst.
[...] –On Christianity, the Holocaust, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [...]