Karl Barth: The Church's Struggle in 1933, Theology for Today 6 & Final

I was driving to class sometime in the early eighties with my mind on a couple of things. I had just a few nights before seen a wonderful play at Warehouse Ministries, the church I was attending at the time. It was a play about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I was also thinking about my reading assignment which was something out of The Portable Nietzsche. God’s timing was perfect.

I turned on the radio to a Christian station and heard what pretended to be a sermon by a Christian minister. What I heard instead was a tirade against the Jewish people. Later I called the radio station and asked about the speaker, and was given the man’s name and telephone number. I called him and discovered that Dr. Gorden L. Ginn is a Holocaust Revisionist. That is he denies that the killing of six million Jews by Hitler and the Nazis ever happened. He was unhappy when I would not agree with him and even more so when I doubted his Christianity.

Later when I had written an article for Christian Research Journal, “Identity: A "Christian" Religion for White Racists” Ginn vehemently protested to the editor of the journal. Under the title “CHRISTIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE: (Sad Demise of Dr. Walter Martin's Ministry),” he posted a letter he wrote to the editor. I found, at the time, that someone could call themselves a Christian minister and yet deny the very roots of the Gospel, the covenant that God made with his people Israel as he prepared to being forth a Savior, from them, for humanity. Hatred of the Jews is not a sign of Christianity.

In the midst of writing the “Identity” article for Christian Research Journal I was watching television one afternoon and discovered an oddity. On what was at the time the television channel for the Sacramento Faith Bureau, a liberal ecumenical group, a program was airing with a preacher setting at his desk with an American flag behind him. He was doing an in-depth Bible study, verse by verse, but he kept referring to a group of people he called the 'Kenites.'

The paper I was writing “Identity: “A Christian” Religion for White Racists,” is about white ethnic groups that see themselves as the real Jews and believe that the Jewish people of today are the offspring of a sexual union between Eve and Satan. As I listened to the speaker on TV I found that he was simply substituting the word Kenites for Jew and that he was in fact an Identity preacher. Arnold Murray, who has a satellite ministry, was on this particular station nine hours a day preaching his poison.

Because Murray was free, and because the two ladies running the station could not comprehend what he was teaching, one was a Unity School of Christianity preacher, the other a Seventh Day Adventist lady who followed the Old Testament food laws, I could not get them to do anything about the programming. Finally a Jewish Professor I knew at California State University Sacramento and Fremont Presbyterian Church which I now attend were able to get the programming changed. Discernment is a gift God gives by the Holy Spirit through his Holy Scriptures. Without God’s word and his Spirit we all can fall into gross error.

As I begin to do a great deal of research on these various racist groups I also became interested in the Confessing Church in Germany. As I have pointed out that is the group that withstood the onslaught of Hitler and the Nazis. One of the books I read was The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, edited by Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke. In his introduction Littell wrote:

American Liberal Protestantism is sick, and the theological form of its sickness can be summarized by saying that it stands solidly on ground but lately vacated by the ‘German Christians’ … who collaborated with Nazism.

The evitable result of such initial academic aloofness and doctrinal uncertainty in the German universities and churches [as now in the universities and churches in
the United States] was the fatal weakening of the two centers which might have been the chief barriers to the Nazi system. More than that, they predictably produced a generation that came to power amiably inclined toward spirituality and religion-in-general but ill-informed as to the particular claims of the Christian faith and hostile to the particularism of Judaism. (24)

Littell goes on to write of the stance taken against the unchristian spirituality of the Nazis. He writes:

The men of the Christian resistance did not view holy history or doctrine so lightheartedly, although they did not always speak as bluntly as the Lutheran
theologian Hermann Sasse: ‘The Evangelical Church has to start every discussion with the avowal that its doctrine is a permanent affront to the morality and ethical feeling of the German race.’ Nevertheless, they spoke plainly enough to be accused constantly of meddling in politics, to be charged with ‘fundamentalism’ for asserting doctrines not negotiable, and to be answered by a swarm of pamphlets like that of the neo-Lutheran ‘Ansbach Counsel’ (June 11, 1934), which affirmed a general revelation made manifest in the nation and its divinely appointed fuhrer. (Bold Mine) (25)

My point here is that just as the above extremely conservative and heretical teachers such as Arnold Murray have embraced their various kinds of anti-Semitism, in the same way those Progressive theologians, pastors and laity of today who believe nothing but a vague kind of spirituality will inevitably embrace some revelation with damnation writ across its face. That is not to say it will be Nazism.

Karl Barth has suggested that inevitably those who seek a revelation in anyplace but holy Scriptures will resent, not only those whom God has chosen in Jesus Christ, but almost always, first, those he chose to bring forth the gift of his Son. Because of a posting Are Progressive Christians Nazis?, on another blog, I am choosing to end this series with some words from Barth’s essay, “The Jewish Problem and the Christian Answer,” taken from the book, Against the Stream: Shorter Post War Writings 1946-52.

It is in their existence that we non-Jews come up against the rock of divine choice, which first passing over us is primarily made by Another, a choice which can concern us only in that it firsts concerns Him and cannot affect us except in Him and through Him. In the ‘lost-ness’ and in the persistence of the Jews that Other One looks down on us; the Jew on the Cross, in whom is salvation for everyman. We refuse to accept that and many a man refuses it who yet would not
like to be suspected of anti-semitism. Even the Jews refuse to accept it. Yet they should remember that this is just that other bit of sense in all the non-sense, this is just the other root of anti-semitism! Whoever refuses to accept this, let him see to it that he does not become an anti-semite; he is already well on the way to becoming one.

….

Without any doubt the Jews are to this very day the chosen people of God in the same sense as they have been so from the beginning, according to the Old and New Testaments. They have the promise of God; and if we Christians from among the gentiles have it too, then it is only as those chosen with them, as guests in their house, as new wood grafted on to their old tree. The Christian community exists in the same way as the Jews; miraculously sustained throughout the years, it too is a people of strangers; and just as the anti-semites are offended by the Jews, so the Christian community will necessarily arouse the same feelings.” (200)