The Church and the Holocaust

Because the Holocaust, the author contends, was at its core an extreme expression of a devastating racism, it has special significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor, clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the great tragedy that each community has experienced in its history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights movement, and the current status of African Americans.

This book discusses the Christian doctrine of sin in relation to sexual abuse of children and the Holocaust, allowing these pathological situations to illuminate and question our understanding of sin. Taking seriously the explanatory power of secular discourses for analyzing and regulating therapeutic action in relation to such situations, the book asks whether the theological language of sin can offer further illumination by speaking of God and the world together. The book is unusual in discussing the Holocaust in relation to Christian doctrine.

An endlessly perplexing question of the twentieth century is how "decent" people came to allow, and sometimes even participate in, the Final Solution. Fear obviously had its place, as did apathy. But how does one explain the silence of those people who were committed, active, and often fearless opponents of the Nazi regime on other grounds -- those who spoke out against Nazi activities in many areas yet whose response to genocide ranged from tepid disquiet to avoidance? One such group was the Confessing Church, Protestants who often risked their own safety to aid Christian victims of Nazi oppression but whose response to pogroms against Jews was ambivalent.

This is a thematically arranged text illustrating popular resisitance to Nazism in Germany from 1930-1945, and the affect of Nazism on everyday life. The book combines a lucid, synthesized analysis together with a wide selection of integrated source material taken from pamphlets, diaries, recent oral testimonies, correspondence and more. Different chapters focus on social groups and activities, such as youth movements, religion, Jewish Germans, and the working classes.

Adolf Hitler declared war on Christianity when he silenced the Catholic Church with a diplomatic treaty and arranged for a Nazi Army chaplain to become supreme bishop over the Protestants of Germany. The "Confessing Church" resisted. Pastors were muzzled, put under house arrest, jailed, and held for years in concentration camps. Thousands were drafted and sent to the war to die, while others were murdered outright. The result was a lack of "man"-power. Women stepped in. Pastors' wives replaced their absent husbands in the pulpits, and Theologinnen--theologically trained women--preached and assumed administration of the orphaned parishes. Women fought to save their civil rights, and freedoms of speech, assembly, press, and religion. Some went to jail. Some died. A social and theological revolution thus erupted when women stood by the side of men in leadership positions in the church.

The questions posed by the Holocaust force faithful Christians to reexamine their own identities and loyalties in fundamental ways and to recognize the necessity of excising the Church's historic anti-Jewish rhetoric from its confessional core. This volume proposes a new framework of meaning for Christians who want to remain both faithful and critical about a world capable of supporting such evil. The author has rooted his critical perspective in the midrashic framework of Jewish hermeneutics, which requires Christians to come to terms with the significant other in their confessional lives. By bringing biblical texts and the history of the Holocaust face to face, this volume aims at helping Jews and Christians understand their own traditions and one another's.

Over the centuries, New Testament texts have often been read in ways that reflect and encourage anti-Semitism. For example, the parable of the "wicked husbandmen," who kill the son of their landlord in order to seize the land, has been used to blame the Jews for the death of Christ. Since the Holocaust, Christian scholars have increasingly recognized and rejected this inheritance. In Parables for Our Time Tania Oldenhage seeks to fashion a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with memories of the Holocaust. New Testament scholars have not directly confronted the horror of Nazi crimes, Oldenhage argues, but their work has nonetheless been deeply affected by the events of the Holocaust. By placing twentieth-century biblical scholarship within its specific historical and cultural contexts, she is able to trace the process by which the Holocaust gradually moved into the collective consciousness of New Testament scholars, both in Germany and in the United States. Her focus is on the scholarly interpretation of the parables of Jesus. She sets the stage with the work of Wolfgang Harnisch who exemplifies the problems surrounding Holocaust remembrance in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s. She then turns to Joachim Jeremias's eminent work on the parables, first published in 1947. Jeremias's anti-Jewish rhetoric, she argues, should be understood not only as a perpetuation of an age-old interpretive pattern, but as representative of German difficulties in responding to the Holocaust immediately after the war. Oldenhage goes on to explore the way in which Jeremias's approach was challenged by biblical scholars in the U.S. during the 1970s. In particular, she examines the turn to literature and literary theory exemplified in the works of John Dominic Crossan and Paul Ricoeur. Nazi atrocities became part of the cultural reservoir from which Crossan and Ricoeur drew, she shows, although they never engaged with the historical facts of the Holocaust. In conclusion, Oldenhage offers her own reading of the parable of the wicked husbandmen, demonstrating how the turn from historical to literary criticism opens up the text to interpretation in light of the Holocaust. If the parables are to be meaningful in our time, she contends, we must take account of the troubling resonances between these ancient Christian stories and the atrocities of Auschwitz.

If you had a chance to speak to the Pope, what would you say? This is the question that 13 noted Holocaust scholars--Christians of various denominations and Jews (including some Holocaust survivors)--address in this volume. The Holocaust was a Christian as well as a Jewish tragedy; nonetheless, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has offered very little official discourse on the Church's role in it. These essays provide solid constructive criticism and make a major contribution to both Holocaust and Christian studies.

Identifying elements of the Christian worldview that have influenced our theories of tragedy, Steele demonstrates how these theories fail when applied to Holocaust literature. The challenge of interpreting Holocaust literature is highlighted by a close investigation of the extent to which Christian thought, especially the view of transcendence, has permeated theories of interpretation. The author appeals for a new theory of tragedy which would allow an understanding of Holocaust literature without Christian interpretive biases. This book will be of interest to scholars of Holocaust literature, religion, and literary criticism.

In the last half century, ways of thinking about the Holocaust have changed somewhat dramatically. In this volume, noted scholars reflect on how their own thinking about the Holocaust has changed over the years. In their personal stories they confront the questions that the Holocaust has raised for them and explore how these questions have been evolving. Contributors include John T. Pawlikowski, Richard L. Rubenstein, Michael Berenbaum, and Eva Fleischner.

The 19 essays of this book are exceptional in that, together, they cover the entire span of relations between Jews and Christians from the time of Jesus to the present. This lengthy period and complex subject required many experts and specialists, many of whom are famous in their fields. They have, however, created works of synthesis written in non-technical language and designed largely for the interested general reader and non-specialist as well as for students seeking to come to an understanding of one of the great issues of our time. Some of the themes highlighted in this book are: Judaism and Christianity in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Christian theory and practice towards the Jews from the Church Fathers through the Reformation; Judaism as interpreted in German biblical scholarship; modern antisemitism and philosemitism; policies and postures of the Allies and of the Vatican during World War II; and the several Christian attempts at reformulation since the Holocaust, culminating with Pope John Paul II.