Barth, Israel, and Jesus

Karl Barth's Theology of Israel

Mark R. Lindsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317176138
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The attitude of Karl Barth to Israel and the Jews has long been the subject of heated controversy amongst historians and theologians. The question that has so far predominated in the debate has been Barth's attitude, both theologically and practically, towards the Jews during the period of the Third Reich and the Holocaust itself. How, if at all, did Barth's attitudes change in the post-war years? Did Barth's own theologising in the aftermath of the Holocaust take that horrendous event into account in his later writings on Israel and the Jews? Mark Lindsay explores such questions through a deep consideration of volume four of Barth's Church Dogmatics, the 'Doctrine of Reconciliation'.

Chapter One Jewish–Christian Relations Since 1945

DOI: 10.4324/9781315568737-1

In the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of the Second World War, possibly no subject has received more attention from scholars, artists, poets and novelists than the Nazis’ war against the Jews. As long ago as 1980, George Kren and Leon Rappoport estimated that by the end of the twentieth century, more would have been written about the Holocaust than about any other subject in human history.¹ Having entered the twenty-first century, their claim may or may not now be sustainable. What is without dispute, though, is that the Holocaust, or Shoah, as it may be more appropriately termed,² has continued to generate enormous debate as people have endeavoured to comprehend its magnitude, its motivation, and its ramifications.

1 G. Kren & L. Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 1. 2 This is not the place to enter into a sustained discussion on the linguistic history of the word ‘Holocaust’, nor on its problematic usage when referring to the Nazis’ war against the Jews. Suffice it to say here that, while ‘Holocaust’ continues to be the most commonly used term to describe Hitler’s genocidal program, it is becoming less and less popular amongst scholars. Shoah (a Hebrew word meaning total destruction) and/or the Yiddish expression Churban (catastrophe) are increasingly being employed as more appropriate replacement terms. Throughout this book, I use Holocaust and Shoah interchangeably, aware on the one hand of the disturbingly sacrificial overtones inherent in the term Holocaust, but aware also that scholarship, let alone public usage, has yet to fully embrace its Hebrew alternatives.

With the obvious exception of the many Jewish communities throughout the world, it is arguably the case that nowhere has the fallout from the Shoah been more acute than within Christian theology and, more particularly, in the relationship of the Church to the Jewish people. Admittedly, this is a contentious claim. Some modern German historians would argue that the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry is mirrored only by Germany’s collective post-war experience. A curious consequence of Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 study, for example, is that by ‘restoring the perpetrators’—that is, the German people themselves—‘to the center of our understanding of the Holocaust’, Germany becomes the only nation capable of sharing with Jews an understanding of the magnitude of the Holocaust’s effects.³ Historians of some other countries that suffered under Nazi occupation could, however, make a similar point. Richard Lukas, for example, argues that the experiences of non-Jewish Poles ‘provide a somber reminder that [they] were just as likely as Jews to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, who viewed them with nearly equal contempt.’⁴ Poland, in fact, presents a most interesting case. With the Aktion Reinhard death camps of Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, as well as Auschwitz-Birkenau, being located in Poland, it was long believed by Poles that the Holocaust was in fact a specifically Polish tragedy. This belief was compounded by the ‘more than forty years of state-imposed ignorance’, that disenfranchised the possibility of a uniquely Jewish experience.⁵ It has only been in Poland’s relatively recent past that such attitudes have begun to change.

3 D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1996), 6. 4 R.C. Lukas (ed.), Forgotten Survivors: Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), front-cover material. 5 C. Rittner & J.K. Roth, ‘Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy’, in F.H. Littell, A.L. Berger & H.G. Locke (eds), What Have We Learned? Telling the Story and Teaching the Lessons of the Holocaust, (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 382.

These arguments against the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust have merit. On the other hand, Goldhagen’s attempt to place the German people at the centre of Holocaust perpetration has hardly received general consensus. Similarly, the history of the relationship between German and/or Polish non-Jews to their Jewish countryfolk is both ambiguous and contentious. Periods and places of extreme antisemitism co-exist with periods and places of surprisingly harmonious interaction. In consequence, the ramifications of the Holocaust on German–Jewish and Polish–Jewish relations can only be understood if one accepts that, as destructive as it may at times have been, neither German nor Polish history as such conspired to make the Holocaust inevitable.

It is at this point, I believe, that one can legitimately argue that the impact of the Shoah has fallen more heavily upon Christianity than upon any other group or institution other than the Jewish people themselves. Unlike Germany or Poland, the pre-Holocaust history of the relationship between the Church and the Jews was anything but ambiguous. Rather, popular antisemitism throughout the generations was shored up by official antisemitism that routinely emanated from the various seats of Christian authority, from Rome to Luther. This history, so tainted by anti-Jewish vitriol, has meant that in the wake of the Holocaust the Church has been unable to avoid a confrontation with its past.

Franklin Littell, Alice and Roy Eckardt, and John Conway are just some of the many Christian scholars of the Holocaust who have articulated the dilemma.⁶ In the same way that European—and especially German—Christianity, was wrenched by a crisis of credibility after the First World War, the Church and its theology have been decisively ruptured by the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War. After centuries of contemptuous teaching about the Jews, including their (alleged) social malfeasance and rejection at the hand of God, the Church has been forced to reconsider and revise its age-old position. In the words of Richard Harries,

6 See for example: F.H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), 2; A.L Eckardt & A.R. Eckardt, Long Night’s Journey Into Day: A Revised Retrospective on the Holocaust, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988); J. Conway, ‘Christianity and Resistance: The Role of the Churches in the German Resistance Movement’, paper presented at the Birmingham conference on Resistance and Christianity, April 1995.

the Shoah, has quite properly, shocked the Christian churches into asking searching questions about its responsibility for what happened and about its historic relationship to Judaism.⁷

7 R. Harries, After the Evil: Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8.

This necessary questioning has been, and continues to be, a long and at times tortuous journey, characterized by ambiguity and mutual mistrust as much as by genuinely harmonious and fruitful dialogue. Hannah Holtschneider has pointed out that there are three rough phases in the post-Holocaust history of Jewish–Christian relations. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, there was a general sense of shock, especially in relation to the evidence of the Holocaust, which rendered serious critical reflection almost impossible. As John Conway has observed, it was

[not] until the middle 1950s, as the details of the crimes perpetrated against the Jewish people became more fully known, did Christians begin to realise that the events of the Shoah posed vital and inescapable questions about the complicity and culpability of the churches, not least concerning the sins of omission and lack of compassion and charity.⁸

8 J.S. Conway, ‘The Changes in Recent Decades in the Churches’ Doctrine and Practice Towards Judaism and the Jewish People’, in …und über Barmen hinaus. Studien zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 537.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, official encounters between Jews and Christians provided the impetus for the various Church pronouncements that repudiated both the Holocaust and the antisemitism on which it was based. Since the 1980s, confessional declarations have been largely replaced by the fruit of academic theological discussions.⁹ Throughout these three phases, there have been many high-points of interaction, perhaps most notably the visit by Pope John Paul II to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in 2000. On the other hand, such progress as has been made has occasionally been undermined by insensitivities, such as the convent controversy at Auschwitz in the late 1980s, and the canonizations of Maximillian Kolbe (1981) and Edith Stein (1998).

9 K.H. Holtschneider, German Protestants Remember the Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory, (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 37.

Obstacles Along the Way

Father Maximillian Kolbe’s canonization was, at one level, undeniably deserved. A Franciscan priest from Poland, he offered to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, a fellow inmate in Auschwitz who was married with children but who had been selected for summary execution. Kolbe’s offer was accepted by the camp commandant—a sacrificial death by which Gajowniczek was saved. On the other hand, Kolbe’s attitude towards Jews was far less savoury. At best, he was a ‘conversionist’ (that is, he believed that Jews could only be saved if they renounced their Judaism and became Christians); in the opinion of others, he was ‘rabidly anti-Semitic [sic].’

Edith Stein’s memory is similarly problematic. She was a Jewish philosopher from Breslau who converted to Catholicism in 1922, became a member of the Carmelite Order, and perished in Auschwitz in August 1942. Rachel Brenner has argued that Stein battled with the co-existence of two religious identities within herself. While her conversion was undoubtedly authentic, she ‘remained loyal to her Jewish roots and publicly proclaimed her Jewish identity.’¹⁰ In 1933, for example, Stein wrote that ‘God ha[s] once more laid a heavy hand upon his people—my people.’ Later, in her final testament which she wrote in 1939, she prayed ‘for the Jewish people…for the deliverance of Germany and peace throughout the world…for all my relatives…may none of them be lost.’¹¹ Clearly, there was a degree of duality to Stein’s identity. From the perspective of the Nazis, she was imprisoned and murdered because she was a Jew; from the perspective of the Catholic Church, she died as a Christian martyr. From a Jewish perspective, however, Stein’s name evokes both the recollection of a heroic Jewish woman and a rejection of Judaism. It is little wonder, then, that both Kolbe and Stein, notwithstanding the impressive force of their personalities, provoke such deeply contradictory responses.¹²

10 R.F. Brenner, ‘Edith Stein, the Jew and the Christian: An Impossible Synthesis?’, in Littell, Berger & Locke, 226. 11 W. Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. B. Bonowitz, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 64, 95. Cited in Brenner, 226. 12 See J.E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust, Memorials and Meaning, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 145.

Having said this, however, it is quite clear that in its decision to canonize Stein and Kolbe, the Vatican was well within its rights. While aspects of their lives were, and remain, sources of confusion and concern to Jews, both individuals also demonstrated undeniable courage, humanity and integrity of faith in the most nightmarish of circumstances. Moreover, both died in genuinely sacrificial fashion. To withhold appropriate acknowledgment from them would have been, in its own way, offensive to their memories.

The Carmelite convent controversy at Auschwitz was, on the other hand, a quite different matter, and one that was far more damaging to Catholic–Jewish relations. John Roth and Carol Rittner have said, indeed, that the controversy ‘seriously jeopardized’ the fruit of previ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jewish–Christian Relations Since 1945
• 2 Barth and the Jewish People: The historical debate
• 3 Karl Barth and Natural Theology: A case study of the Holocaust as a theological locus
• 4 Karl Barth and the State of Israel: Between theology and politics
• 5 The Function of ‘Israel’ in the ‘Doctrine of Reconciliation’
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index