Reply #31: the 'German Christians' did...they wanted to dump the OT and replace it [View All]

[bobbieinok]

with Norse mythology

they said the OT was Jewish, not German

the above is a simplistic description; below is a link to a review about the group

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewstr17.htm



Doris L. Bergen. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Cloth $39.95 ISBN 0-8078-2253-1; Paper $16.95 ISBN 0-8078-4560-4. Published by H-German 27 September 1996

The German Christians were a relatively small but highly disruptive element within German Protestantism which pursued the goal of harmonizing Christianity (or what they understood Christianity to be) with National Socialism. Their project was to "arianise" both Holy Scripture and the person of Jesus Christ; in short, to rid traditional Christianity of all putatively Jewish components. The German Christians were thus committed to a cult of the Volk, to the idea of racial purity and to adulation of the Führer. All these things, so they argued, were inherent in the being of the true unadulterated Germanic people. Their religious practice consisted in preaching a manly, anti-effeminate, essentially Germanic gospel, and the singing of patriotic songs and hymns of praise to the Fuehrer who was equated with the Saviour. It was a movement without serious theology, which refused to countenance any intellectual debate or dogma. Its only binding principle was a sentimental feeling of belonging together.

There are many reasons to welcome Doris Bergen's diligently researched and clearly written investigation of this curious movement. First, it shows that even in the country where theological studies had been developed to their most sophisticated level, there could emerge a totally unscientific, irrational and essentially anti-Christian movement which claimed that there was no essential difference between National Socialism and the Gospel of Christ. This raises the problem of how academic theology is received at the grass roots, indeed, how people, including pastors, appropriate "twisted" ideas, regard them as normative, and actually base their lives on them.

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