The Roots of Antisemitism and Bonhoeffer’s Paradigm of Resistance

[Music]
300 years ago, war, disease and pestilence ravaged Germany. Death stalked through the village of Oberamagau.
Wherever one was stricken by the plague, the cross was marked on the door of the house.
With sorrow laden hearts, the faithful filled with the churches, crying to their God, and to be seeking him to deliver them from the dreads' scourge.
In the belief that a deed of piety would prove their salvation, the council of twelve in Oberamagau resolved to enact a passion play and repeat it every ten years.
Legend says that the pestilence abated from then onwards.
The Bavarian hamlet of Oberamagau presents its world-famous passion play for the first time in sixteen years.
Local citizens play all the roles in the eight-hour spectacle depicting Christ's life from his entry into Jerusalem to the ascension.
And they drew an eye unto Jerusalem. The whole Thay king cometh unto the meek and sitting upon an ass.
Inside for clothes that shristened long, at bold three detergent plus.
The life of Christ acted out in a German mountain village, applauded by Hitler and now accused of bias against women against Jews.
His history repeating itself, Pierre Saladjou with a Desquieting Report, the passion play when twenty-twenty continues.
The village is Oberamagau and its people have been obsessed with the passion play for centuries. They perform it roughly every ten years.
It is their life and their livelihood. Several years ago, the Roman Catholic Church repudiated the lingering image of Jews as Christ killers and unscrupulous money lenders.
A line of the play recommending the ostracizing of Jews has been taken out.
What lifts the passion play out of just symbol folk art in a small German village is the charge in his anti-Semitic.
In 1934, as Naziism was on the rise in Germany, Adolf Hitler praised the play as a convincing portrayal of the menace of Judaism.
And Oberamagau became a symbolic meeting place for leading Nazi officials.
The man who played Jesus Christ in 1934, Anton Pricinger, was a Nazi. He is head of the Conservative group in Oberamagau and he violently denies the passion play as anti-Semitic.
He said that the words in the play are strictly taken from the Bible.
Hitler saw the passion play in 1930. We have pictures of them there. We have pictures of them again in '34. So that was the specials, '100th anniversary'.
So before he was a chancellor and after he was a chancellor, he went there and he made this statement recorded one night during his after dinner talks.
I think it was 41-42, sometimes there.
And this was always we preserved because here you see the shining example of the Aryan man pilot standing up against this awful statement, the mock and myer of jury.
That is review of the passion play and it's stapled that it should always be preserved and show this.
All of this starts with the text of the New Testament and it's not the text of the New Testament is racially anti-Semitic.
But it is theologically anti-Jewish and that's who we have to be careful.
Hello everyone. This is Trip and we are back for episode 4 of the Rise of Bonhoeffer.
At the end of last episode we were shocked to hear just what voice the German Christian movement, the most energetic enthusiastic supporters of Hitler and the Nazi party,
sounded like and there we heard not just anti-Semitism but an anti-Semitism that wants to leverage political power and purify the church.
As we start this episode and eventually going to dig in to just how the church was wrestling with this challenge and how Bonhoeffer in particular addresses it.
I think it's important to take a deep breath in the honest about the church's legacy and it's ongoing support for anti-Semitism.
You know one of the things in the German context that we have to look at is how important Luther was as a cultural hero.
People may not have cared anything about him as a theologian but as a popular preacher figure who preached the purity of the German people over against the Jews,
Luther was profoundly influential for numbers of people not just in the Deutsche Christian, not just in the German Christian movement but in the Confessing Church and the segments of the church that didn't belong to either of those two factions.
But Luther, himself, responding to and was in the stream of 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism.
And this may be the most disturbing possibility for us to confront as people of faith is that the heart of Christian theology itself may be anti-Semitism, supersessionism,
he's a superiority to Jewish faith, to Jewish people that has been corrosive for a true understanding of the gospel.
To demonstrate and unpack just how this anti-Semitic possibility for Christianity is existed from the beginning, set down and talk to John Dominic Crossen, a legendary biblical scholar and someone who from the earliest days in the academy has been trying to track the emergence of passages in the New Testament and their reception that created this anti-Semitism.
In Mark's Gospel, Mark talks about the crowd and this is the crowd that goes up to get Barabbas out.
It basically is not going up to get Jesus crucified. It's going out to get their guy Barabbas freed.
You are obliged to release one man to us at this festival, released to us Barabbas and away with this man.
Pylatry is a palm off Jesus on the... No, no, no, no, give us Barabbas. If I were to ask how many people were in that crowd, let's think what they're doing.
They're going up to Pylat in the Tinder box atoms here of Passover to ask for a rebel, murderer from the Roman point of view, freedom fighter from their point of view.
If I was Pylatry, they'd probably grab them all, so here's more of them, put them all in jail.
So I'm going to say 6, 7, 8 people. We're glad they're bowing and scraping and yes, they're in your ex-sensit, he's not the rest of it. When somebody shows that as a whole people, all the Jews screaming...
crucifixion, crucifixion, that expansion is anti-Jewishism. Right there, it's the seedbed for racial, it's theological anti-Jewishism.
And that can become the seedbed for racial anti-Semitism. And you can see it in Matthew who reads his source, Mark, and is said of talking about the crowd, the crowd, the crowd talks about the crowds, all the people is blood be upon us and upon our children.
That's Matthew. That's a huge expansion of responsibility for the small group who want their hero, the freedom fighter Barabbas out. Not Jesus, whoever this Jesus is. We don't even know if they know who Jesus is. Mark is clear.
But then is you want to match you? Use Mark? Luke? Use Mark? And possibly John? Use Mark?
The responsibility grows and grows and expands. Right within the gospel sequence itself.
Crossons ability to point us towards these roots of anti-Semitism, existing in the gospel that the church is turned to over and over to legitimate its prejudice is important to reckon with.
I think the temptation for a lot of us who are Christians who don't want to be associated with this is to treat something like the Nazis is just an exception to our history.
This kind of anti-Semitism is just anti-Christian and we can just dismiss it as heresy, but the complicated legacy of the scriptures and our history makes that hard.
And that context is even more tenuous when you think about German Protestantism in the influence of Luther.
So maybe one way to start thinking about that is by using a Luther quote from his pamphlet on the Jews in their lives.
First, their synagogue should be set on fire. Jewish prayer books should be destroyed and rabies forbidden to preach.
The home of Jews should likewise be smashed and destroyed. And their residents put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies, to teach them.
They are not master in our land.
It's hard to overstate Luther's influence on German Protestantism as the Nazis came to power and sought to control and dominate the cultural sphere.
Its strongest ally within the life of the church was the German Christian movement.
Reinhold Kraus, one of its leaders, a high school teacher and Nazi party member, gave a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace that was so offensive.
In the way it inherited and dialled up this anti-Semitism in Luther that it actually marked the end of the German Christian Church's early power in Nazi circles.
It stated the ugly part out loud so offensively this early bid for Nazi power in the church was pushed back.
Here Kraus's own words.
But the path there is still a long one and the Führer has always refused to accept the role of Reformer.
Does this mean that we should not follow this path?
Absolutely not. Precisely during these days isn't the figure of the man from Wittenberg standing before us, not a perfect saint whose accomplishments one regards only his past history,
but the living Luther who wants to lead the way to the German god and the German church who has left us a precious legacy, the completion of the German reformation in the Third Reich.
Kraus goes on to say some things that are going to blow up the German Christian church in some ways. We'll talk about that later.
But for right now just think about the connections that are being made in Germany between Luther, the cultural hero, the political prophet, and Luther, the definer of Christian faith, or millions of Germans, a faith that it decidedly anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic.
With the history of the church in mind and the unique resonance Luther on his worst days is having among the German citizens, that's the context for all the debate the Aryan paragraph initiates.
So can you help us understand just what's going on in the political context and how it occasions a crisis of identity within the church?
It's not that this was imposed upon the German Christians, they welcomed it, they embraced it, they wanted to align themselves with the state, they wanted to be a part of this burgeoning new movement, it was going to make Germany great again.
It's not that this was forced on anybody, they took it readily, they were willing to accomplishes, they embraced a blood and soil identity, a bulgush church, and an allegiance to Hitler that was not necessarily shared by everyone in the German Protestant church.
So it's not surprising if we exist in a cultural milieu of anti-Semitism, of Christian supersessionism, that when Hitler is trying to bring all of German society to he also to speak, to align with his particular desires, then on April the 7th the Reichstagpacks passes the Aryan paragraph into law.
Now this one particular paragraph ordered the removal of all Jews and any persons of Jewish descent from civil service and that included the churches. German Christians, because of that milieu of anti-Semitism, were all too willing to go along with this particular wall.
It's happening there in the churches where the German Christians represent the leading part of culture, rallying to this Datsy vision of being German. That's happening all over culture.
It finds expression in the Aryan paragraph legally, but culturally more and more people are coming to find their identity as Germans in this Aryan vision.
What are we also doing in a time of social upheaval, social anxiety, Bonhoeffer has that statement about there's no ground under us right now?
Vicki Barnett wrote a book chronicling the story of bystanders in this period before the war and in it she says that bystanders is an activity not an identity because so much is in flux as the culture shifts and comes to rally behind Hitler and the Nazi party and the intricacies of that transition is something she unpacks here.
So there's not a singular group of people that we can identify as so-called bystanders. Let's say January 1st 1933, people who are not members of the Nazi party are nice people going about their business.
Six months later, they're being confronted at every term with decisions whether to join the party, whether to fire your colleague, whether to take the job that your Jewish colleague left behind so now you have a better income.
Whether to speak out for somebody, whether to hide somebody, there are always decisions in that situation to be made they continue throughout that era.
If you just look at the US between 33 and 39 before the war begins, you're looking at people who begin to move in one direction or the other.
I mean they begin to conform, they join the party, they make advances and as they do so, I think they kind of reconfigure their self-image to explain why this is all justified, why this is all justified.
Why they have good reasons for doing what they're doing. So it's not just a behavioral process, but an ethical process internally where you're creating an ethical narrative about why your life is unfolding as it is and why that's a good thing.
Similarly, there are people in Nazi Germany in January 1933 who begin to look for places to resist.
That too is a path that's going to help them reconfigure how they think about themselves and how they think about society.
It's not a group of people because people don't remain static, our lives unfold and we make decisions and that moves us in one direction or the other.
One of the most moving things when you read accounts by German Jews in 1933 is the shocks that they're under, they thought they knew.
They thought they knew their neighbors, they thought they knew their colleagues, they thought they had a place in German society.
There's this period in 1933 where people are wrestling and saying, "But we must belong here."
And they don't anymore and the trauma of that, the sense of isolation, the feeling that we would have if all of a sudden nobody would speak to us if people cross the street when they saw us coming, we had lost our job.
If simultaneously there were things happening to us where we needed help and yet you don't know who's going to help you because everybody is avoiding you.
The accounts of German Jews are just devastating in that regard.
Now I think it illustrates this process of what that looks like and by standards people who are not affected by these measures, by their very identity they can choose to forget about them.
They don't have to think about it and as time goes on they're less and less aware of the pain that their neighbors are enduring the circumstances, the sense of desperation that they feel.
And that distance really expands very quickly.
This is true from accounts we read of the camps is that you know you don't need a physical distance to have that kind of emotional distance in place that we human beings are unfortunately pretty good at creating emotional distance from things we don't want to know about.
And that's one of the things we see in Nazi Germany.
We asked Dr. Barnett about her own continued wrestling with this reality since the publication of her book bystanders knowing that in that time she stewarded the church resources and education programs at the Holocaust Museum in DC.
So I wrote the bystanders book some 20 some years ago. I think now I would probably use words like "S.No Nationalism and white supremacy" because that really is what this is about, which I think makes clear to Americans what we're talking about.
That the German Christians want what so-called "Arian country" they don't want foreign elements they see the German Jews as a foreign element they see them as racially different. This becomes very clear once the second world war begins.
But it's also it's already clear in their rhetoric in the 1930s and even in the 1920s this the Nazi party is coming up.
The racialism of that identity the way in which they conceive of themselves as a superior race compared to all these other races and that's part of the propaganda that's certainly part of the self concept.
When you look at Nazi propaganda in the 1930s I mean there's a whole series of newsreels for young women showing them how they should be physically fit and because they'll be better mothers.
There are lots of little things like that to design to get Germans involved. The faces on German posters and whatnot are always obviously supposed to be so-called "Arians".
The racialization of the anti-Semitism and the racialization of the anti-Semitic propaganda is really striking. There's been more work done on this in the past couple of years because there's much more work now that has been on blacks in Germany before 1933.
And how the Nazis dealt with race in other ways. And there was a conference a couple years ago in Holland where they actually looked at Nazi posters in the early 1930s.
So this is before they even come to power. And the one that just really startled me because I had never seen it before is an anti-Semitic one.
It's the stereotypical caricature of a Jew looking in the end of all one of these early illustrations that we're familiar with behind that is an equally offensive stereotypical image of what is supposed to be a native of Africa.
Bone through the nose I mean it is very offensive. And so the caption is never forget behind every Jew is a... they've got to German inward.
It's really stunning because it shows the extent to which the Nazi party they're working with all the different forms of hatred here but they're bringing it together in a deeply racial way.
The German Christians it's not just that they're anti-Jewish religiously but there is really this racial component to their thinking.
So we keep our net points as to a very very important dynamic in human society. The creation of our conscience. We had mentioned earlier a book by Claudia Coons called the Nazi conscience.
And this is one of the places that Fiki shows us that conscience is created. And so when she is talking about the relationship of neighbors to neighbors we had this situation then where previous to these political pressures.
You could look at your neighbor say for instance if he's getting or she is getting removed and taken off to prison. At some point your conscience says oh this is a horrible injustice that Hans is being taken to prison.
But with the pressure of Hitler and the anti-Semitic voices that were gaining power to determine and structure the reality of society.
Now it's no longer what an injustice that Hans is experiencing being taken to prison. Now it's all how unfortunate it is that Hans is a Jew and there's a very different conscience than the one that was existing for many people beforehand.
And that's part of the ongoing struggles that Viki Barnett also talks about that Bonhoeffer is experiencing when he comes through the issue of the church in the Jewish question.
This was noting that the pressures in early April that Bonhoeffer would have been aware of are things we should consider when we think about this as same.
The first one was that the Gimnazium, the secondary school he attended in Grunovall on April 1st when this law was enacted.
The person who had been the director of that Gimnazium was fired and he was immediately replaced by Nazi who immediately wrote with the parents of one that was somebody inside your children are no longer welcome in this school because they're not racially pure.
And this created a huge uproar in Grunovall so this is something that Bonhoeffer would have been aware of.
The other thing is it's closer to home because Bonhoeffer sister his twin sister was married to get her lipos who was considered a full Jew under Nazi law.
Lipos kept his job till 1935 as a professor in Goodingham which shows again the range of time during which this implementation of this measure was sort of iffy.
But his father and his brother both were civil servants in Berlin. They were both fired shortly after the law was enacted and 10 days later his father was dead.
And so Montfredeegant the scholar who's written most about lipos suspects but does not know that this was the death of the father was a suicide.
This is the famous funeral that Bonhoeffer refused to do and then later apologized for that refusal.
His brother and law's father died on April 11th 1933 and Gerhard asked him to conduct a funeral service but Bonhoeffer consulted with his general superintendent who urged him not to hold a service for a non-baptized Jew in this very tenuous moment in Germany.
And Bonhoeffer to his deep shame complied with that order.
Later on Bonhoeffer would write to Sabine and Gerhard and he would apologize deeply for his lack of courage and he told them,
"I am commented even now by the thought that I didn't do as you asked me as a matter of course. To be frank, I can't think what made me behave as I did.
How could I have been so horribly afraid at the time? It must have seemed equally incomprehensible to you both and yet you said nothing.
But it prays on my mind because this is the kind of thing that one can never make up for. So all I can do is ask you to forgive my weakness then.
I know now for certain that I ought to have behaved differently.
In this moment of weakness we find that Bonhoeffer himself is not immune from those pressures as Ficky Barnett pointed out.
In the middle of that he still wanted to say something about this imposition of the Aryan paragraph and the churches.
So he writes an essay, "The Church in the Jewish Question." And this essay is going to be much studied by Bonhoeffer scholars, students and followers of Bonhoeffer,
people who are interested in him for a number of different reasons, not the least of which is he lays out different paths to how to resist the state.
The Church in the Jewish Question is not just Bonhoeffer's response to the Aryan paragraph, the way in which the Church was betraying the Gospel by tending to this demonic energy at play in Germany.
But it's also a legitimation for resistance in the political sphere. It's a German, Lutheran, inheriting the two kingdoms vision that is so easily harnessed by this Christoph-Fasius authoritarianism.
What exactly is the space Bonhoeffer is attempting to make within the life of the Church for resistance?
I want to problematize this particular essay in some ways, because it starts out with two quotes from Luther.
And the quotes from Luther, we would still show them that Christian doctrine and asked them to convert and accept the Lord, whom they should by rights have honored before we did when they repent.
We wouldn't leave their usury and accept Christ, we would gladly regard them as our brothers. That anti-Semitic legacy even finds its way into this essay, and we'll talk about that, because there's some question as to whether or not the editor put these Luther quotes at the beginning or at the end.
In this particular essay, Bonhoeffer says that in a moment of crisis, in a moment of turmoil with the Church in the State, he says these words.
The State that threatens the proclamation of the Christian message negates itself.
There are thus three possibilities for our action that the Church can take vis-à-vis the State.
First, as we have said questioning the State as to the legitimate State Corrector of its actions, that is making the State responsible for what it does.
Second is service to the victims of the State's actions. The Church has an unconditional obligation taught the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.
Let us work for the good of all.
The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel, but to seize the wheel itself.
At first glance, this can seem fairly innocuous, however written from within a culture that saw an inherent connection of Church in State is almost an order of creation.
This last comment was in its own way, a bit radical.
But I think here maybe we can turn to someone to help us unpack this particular essay, The Church in the Jewish Question, and this particular passage, who has a good understanding of the impact of Lutheran theology on Bonhoeffer.
In my book Bonhoeffer on Resistance, I'd suggest that there are sort of broadly speaking three phases to his Resistance.
In the period that you're talking about, which is the early 30s, I see that phase is characterized primarily by the Church's Proclamation, the Church's Word.
At that point, he is hopeful that the Church's Proclamation is powerful enough that it can correct some of the actions of the State if it needs to, at that relatively early point, in the Nazi period.
The trick, of course, is to figure out how the Church is supposed to address the State if, as a matter of course, the Church isn't about State action, but is about preaching the Gospel.
So he has to, in that early period, set criteria from when it's appropriate for the Church to tell the State to correct its action.
He imagines two kind of related situations in which that's the case, and he articulates that in this Peace, the Church, and the Jewish Question.
So if he starts that Peace by setting up the proper relationship of Church and State, the State is about maintaining law, maintaining justice, treating it citizens well, and the Church is about preaching the Gospel.
There's sort of two ways in which the State can screw up.
It can, on the one hand, totally fail to do its job, namely, totally fail to be just and uphold the law and be fair.
And then another way in which the State can fail is by intervening too much into the Church's business.
So basically, the State can fail in one of two ways.
Either it can fail to do its job well, or it can try to do the Church's job for it.
And both of these issues are threats in the Early Resistance period around 1933.
On the one hand, there is the threat that the State's unjust treatment of Jews reveals that the State really doesn't care about just treatment of its citizens.
That's the one side, and then on the other side, there is the threat that the State will legislate into the Church some version of Jewish discrimination, which would undermine the authority of the Church.
Specifically, the authority of the Church grounded in the Gospel, which says that the Church is the community gathered by God's Word and not by race.
So in those two instances, then, the Church would be legitimate in speaking out against the State because the State is, on one hand, failing to do its job, and on the other hand, trying to do the job of the Church.
So the Church is set up sort of a series of escalating scenarios for how seriously the Church might react in response to the State, depending on how serious the State's action is in falling down on its job or trying to do the Church's job.
So the whole reasoning there is to sort of start up with the way things are supposed to go. The Church is supposed to do this, the State is supposed to do that.
And as a matter of normal operating procedures, the Church isn't going to be constantly commenting on the decisions of the State.
But if things reach a point where the State is just failing to be what it's supposed to be or trying to do what the Church is supposed to do, then the Church needs to speak, and the Church's input there is not to take over the job of the State, but rather to restore things back to standard operating procedure.
When the State does what it's supposed to do, and the Church does what it's supposed to do, because after all, that's how God works in the world. God uses the State to maintain justice and prevent chaos, and God uses the Church to preach the good word.
[Music]
So as Michael D. Allen helps us understand, this document comes out of a profoundly lootherened background about understanding the roles of the Church and the roles of the State.
And those two are very distinct in different roles. He says in this document that the true Church of Christ lives by the Gospel alone, and it knows the nature of State actions, but it doesn't interfere in the functioning of the State in this way.
The State has its own place, and in this early laying out of the steps it should be taken.
Even on the Jewish question, he says, "The Church cannot contradict the State directly, and demand that it take any particular course of action."
The Church must keep asking the government whether its actions can be legitimate.
And I think that's the important distinction is that at some point, what do we do if the State itself is no longer legitimate, no longer the source for law and order, no longer the protector of rights.
But becomes the remover of rights and the creator of disorder.
I think a lot of individuals will skip right through, step one and two, to Bonhoeffer's passage of the possibility of seizing the will of the State to set things back to right.
But when we think of this period, those first two steps are really important.
For those that haven't thought about the theological significance of baptism and Christian identity, the notion that the Aryan paragraph and that cultural energy would create a context where the State tells the Church who it can baptize and who can be its members is a profound overreach of the State that Bonhoeffer's calling out, that the identity of the Church are all those, Jew or Greek, male or female, you could say, who are baptized into Christ.
And when the State starts to legislate and start to determine who the Church may baptize, that's a theological question.
And then we see in that second step, he says that part of the vocation of the Church to be the body of Christ is to serve victims of the State's actions and that the Church has this unconditional obligation towards the victims of any societal order, even if they don't belong to the Christian community.
And there you can see that the identity of Christ's body is one that is to tend to the victims of the societal order, but both of those elements are statements about the Church.
Who is the Church? Baptized in the Christ. Who is the Church serving the victims of the societal order? Neither one of those steps are ones that legitimate a transformation or an interjection in the political order.
It simply calls for the Church to live out its identity in baptism and in service as a public witness of God's people to the State.
And that's the crux of the whole issue because it's profoundly compelling part of Bonhoeffer's story, like you said, many people will go automatically to the seizing of the wheel without really carefully reflecting Bonhoeffer's argument.
And noticing this first step is something that's going to really help us catch the transition and struggle in Bonhoeffer's life as we'll go on to see in future episodes.
He realizes there are limits to what the Church can do. Let's have alternative communities and there are limits of what alternative communities to do, what does an individual do in this context.
That doesn't come out of nowhere and right here at the beginning of this theological reflection on this moment, he's trying to find a way to have integrity within the limits of Lutheran political theology.
So Bonhoeffer is responding in his Lutheran way and is understanding the relationships between the Church and the State that he gets from Luther's notion of the two kingdoms that each fear, the spiritual and the worldly or the political each habits on sphere of influence about what the roles are.
But I wonder what this would look like to those. My understanding is that the suggestion that the Church should speak out against the State, which have to say from our perspective is a very modest suggestion, you know, living in a culture in which sort of as a matter of course on any given Sunday, the preacher is commenting one way or another about the State, but his suggestion that with the right escalation of events and within the right boundaries, the Church should speak out against the State was a relatively controversial position.
Within his context, even though it follows quite straightforwardly from the logic of the two kingdoms, which a lot of people in that context would have shared.
So I think he drew some conclusions from that framework that were a little bit more radical than many of his contemporaries would have been willing to draw, but they also probably appear to us, actually not that radical, given the traditions that we might inherit which are perhaps more prophetic in their voice toward the State or more eager to get involved.
And those kind of political discussions. The editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer works English edition alert us to do what's in the translation of the text that helps us to understand that Bonhoeffer is arguing that a State that deprived the citizens of their rights is lawless and it's very essence.
It's exercising a God given authority in an illegitimate way and the Church may be called upon the challenge of the legitimacy of that State.
So we're actually in the world of law and rights and who is afforded those in any particular civil community.
Vicky Barnett helps us wrestle with this passage.
The basic message of the essay is that when you take away the rights of a certain group that undermines the legitimacy of the State, I mean, that's the argument he makes.
The famous phrase that is in the essay and previous translations that when there's too much law in order to law in order, the Church has to speak out, is a mis-translation that we corrected in the Bonhoeffer works.
And so the two little law in order is not accurate. What the German says there is deprivation rights.
And so what Bonhoeffer is saying, "When you've got a legal precedent and emancipation laws for the Jews in Germany or a legal precedent to gave them rights," said you can't undo that.
And if you undo it, that undermines the legitimacy of the State. That's how you know a State is illegitimate.
And then what does the Church have to do and that's where we get to the famous spoken wheel section.
So it is a complicated document.
If you thought it was complicated before, we're going to complicate it just a little bit more with this quote from Bonhoeffer.
The Church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the chosen people which hung the Redeemer of the world on the cross must endure the curse of its action and long drawn out suffering.
The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere and scattered about all countries having no certain resting place.
But the history of the suffering of this people laughed and punished by God stands under the sign of the final homecoming of the people of Israel to its gut.
And this homecoming happens in the conversion of Israel to Christ.
This paragraph is disturbing. In fact, it's so disturbing because it might have found its way into any of the German Christian literature that was being produced at this time.
What are we to make of this Christian supersessionism, this anti-Semitism that shows up in the middle of a document meant to speak up meant to give people rounding to advocate for Jewish life.
And she may go a little deep in the weeds, but I think it's important that we really look at this particular paragraph as well as those quotes from Luther that begin and end and she helps us understand that perhaps a bit more.
In the middle of that essay is a blatantly anti-Semitic paragraph that you want a one paragraph summation of Christian anti-Semitism. This is it. It's horrifically offensive.
One of the things that has been debated ever since when the Bonhoeffer works German edition was published in the 1980s.
It became clear that this paragraph was not in any of the original graphs of the essay.
The ones he hand wrote and the final graph that he gets back from the publisher.
So Bonhoeffer writes this initial graph. He sends it off. It's typewritten and sent back to him. This paragraph is not there.
It's written between the last copy he gets and publication that paragraph appears. What happens? We don't know. I have done so much digging on that.
So two things. One is that there have been two attempts to have Bonhoeffer recognized at Yachtvishem.
One by the family in the 1980s and one more reason one around 2004 or so. So it was spearheaded by Stephen Wise who was the grandson of Rabbi Stephen Wise.
Stephen Wise when he did his attempt really try to get affidavits from people who could attest to Bonhoeffer's attitudes and perhaps his assistance to Jews.
The one affidavit he got from a woman named Analisa Schnorman mentions the essay. So Schnorman was a friend of Bonhoeffer knew her.
But I think she was also a friend of his sister. She was Jewish. She wasn't Christian. She ran a sort of youth club that Bonhoeffer supported.
She actually ends up leaving Germany and working with Anna Freud in England once she leaves not to Germany. But she said that Bonhoeffer tolls her after the essay had been published that he regretted having included that paragraph.
So even here in the ambiguity or the tension, the unknown aspect of this particular part of the church in a Jewish question that Bonhoeffer is writing, he himself is still struggling with his relationship with Judaism.
But Christianity continues to struggle with its relationship with Judaism.
This is one of the reasons that Bonhoeffer was not admitted to Yad Vashem to Holocaust Memorial in Israel because people did not feel that Bonhoeffer was a strong voice in the protection of Jews and the protection of Judaism.
And it applies in the face of some of the stories, some of the myths that have arisen around Bonhoeffer's work in Operation 7 that we'll talk about later on.
But for right now we want to just go ahead and say that there is a bit of a problem with Christianity itself that even Bonhoeffer and many of the Confessing Church is not able to escape.
The question supercessionism that still to this day continues to understand a Christian supremacy as one of the marks of the church.
Seeing the way this anti-Semitism exists in Scripture, it exists throughout the history of the church.
It exists here in the church struggle in Germany and in Bonhoeffer's own pen.
I think it invites all of us who are part of the body of Christ today to seriously consider how we engage and carry on the history we've inherited.
It invites us to a kind of discernment around the Gospel, one that as we've seen in the history is so often lapsed into a form of supremacy that the mothers and fathers of the very people who wrote the New Testament are alienated and cut off from the gift.
Of the vine love.
So we're at April 1933 and let's recap a little bit.
From the 1st of February 1933 to the summer of that year Hitler's minions moved quickly to secure the loyalty and support of what had been the German Protestant Church.
Those church officials and members along with Hitler helped secure this alignment.
They were very, very good at bureaucratic maneuvering, quick action, unquenchable ambition, supine surrender to Nazi.
They were very good at moving fast to consolidate their power.
But July Hitler's sympathizers had taken hold of local regional national church organs to stifle dissent, and the German Christians had won the day as far as the institutional church.
Resistance was hunted down and suppressed. Bonhoeffer himself was paid a visit by two Nazi security agents and told to stop the resistance to Reich Bishop Mueller's election, or else he would be sent to a concentration camp.
So when we get together the next episode, we're going to talk more about the formation of the Confessing Church, how it emerged from the pastors' emergence he lead.
Bonhoeffer's role in that, Bart's role in that, Bart Martin Neem Aller played, and we will come to a better understanding of some of the pressures that the faith was experiencing under Hitler.
[Music]