The Holocaust, or Shoah (Hebrew), refers to the state-sponsored massacre of some six million Jews by Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hilter during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945. Massacres are nothing new to the atrocities of war but the Nazis exceeded every other such acts by the scale of their murders as well as the deliberation and methodical approach they took to it. Rooted in a deep-seated hatred for Jews (what is now often called "anti-Semitism") that seemed characteristic of many Western/European cultures until modern times, and inspired by a renewed pagan ideology of Aryan supremacy Hitler blamed the ills of the Germanic people on the Jews and set about systematically to exterminate them. When the truth about what the Nazis had done finally dawned upon the outside world, they were stunned. The shock was doubled when it was learnt that the German Church had known about it but had chosen to remain silent, thus conspiring in the crime.
The Holocaust raised a whole lot of different sensitive and painful questions for different people. For many Jews who had survived the horror, one particularly painful one is where was God when they and their families were rounded up like cattle and shipped off to the concentration camps to be gassed and incinerated. What does it mean to be "the chosen people" in the light of the catastrophe? For Christians it raised the question of how such an evil deed could have happened in a nation that gave us the 'first' Reformer of the Christian faith. How could the Church have kept silent? Eventually the questioning arrived at the front door of Christian theology: was the New Testament, and the Christian doctrince of salvation in Christ Jesus, anti-semitic and, therefore, responsible for engendering the anti-Jewish attitude that led to, or facilitated, the Holocaust?
Given the magnitude of the evil that the Holocaust is, it is very difficult to maintain a balanced view of it, and perspectives range from extremes of denial—that such a horror can happen can only mean there is no God, or that, if he exists he does not care at all— to rejection, especially of Christianity, and blame, especially of Paul, the self-hating Jews turned apostle, and Martin Luther, the German reformer whose writings supposedly nourished the German hatred of Jews. The difficult painful questions the Holocaust raises will, naturally, impact Western Christians, more than those from other nations not so directly involved in the European theatre of WW2. Nonetheless, these questions require sombre honest reflections.
An article on the Holocaust is in process. Meanwhile here are some articles we hope will prove helpful in your reflection.
Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust The Jewish Tragedy (London: Fontana, 1987).
John J. Johnson, "A New Testament Understanding of the Jewish Rejection of Jesus: Four Theologians on the Salvation of Israel," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43/2 (June 2000) 229-246.
John J. Johnson, "Should the Holocaust Force Us to Rethink our View of God and Evil?," Tyndale Bulletin 52.1 (2001): 118-128.
Gerard S. Sloyan, "Some Theological Implications of the Holocaust," Interpretation 39/4 (October 1985) 402-413.
©Alberith, 2016