The Grey Book | Page 2

- constituted a kind of additional gospel of messianic redemption that ostensibly strengthened Christianity as an institution and as a religion of revelation. Secondly, this pseudo- messianic and pseudo-religious authority that the Nazi regime arrogated to itself was able by means of its repressive measures to curtail the influence of the Church and even to reduce it to silence. This danger was perceived at an early date by the "Bekenntnissynode der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche" in its Botschaft (
Part I, par 2, 5) adopted by the Conference held in Berlin-
Dahlem 19-20 October 1934, which stated: "The National Church that the Reich's bishop has in view under the slogan: One State - one People - one Church, simply means that the Gospel is no longer valid for the German Evangelical Church and that the mission of the Church is delivered to the powers of this world.... The introduction of the Fuehrer principle into the Church and the demand of unconditional obedience based upon this principle are contrary to the Word of Scripture and bind the officials of the Church to the Church regiment instead of to Christ... [3]
Towards the end of the period that is dealt with in the sources collected in this volume, in the year 1943, we also meet with a clear expression of the Church's opposition to this pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character of Nazism in the "Pastoral concerning National Socialist Philosophy" that was sent in Holland:
... to parochial church councillors to give them the necessary basis for their opposition in the struggle against National Socialist ideology, and especially against the intangible, but all the more dangerous religious ideas and expressions of National Socialism which will exercise an influence even after the war."
In its penetrating analysis of the totalitarian character of Nazism this Pastoral observes:
"...It is not surprising that National Socialism has the power to become the religion of the masses, and its assemblies to take the form of a kind of popular worship in which a great deal of latent religious emotion is released.... In carrying out its ministry the Church must therefore make its work in this connection even more definite in character, and must tell its members very clearly and resolutely that what is at stake here is the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods besides me...!" [4] This pseudo-religious and pseudo-messianic character of Nazism was by no means accidental or the product of mass hysteria induced by some skilful propagandists. It was rather an ideological structure that was consciously given definite patterns and developed within a conceptual system in accordance with its own laws of logic. In this development the traditional theological concepts of Christianity were retained but given an altogether different meaning. Values that had previously been regarded as relative in the culture of Christianity and of the West now became absolute; and values that had formerly been considered absolute, being interpreted as metaphorical or visionary, became relative. Phenomena with an imminent historical essence were lifted to a meta-historical plane. Means were converted to ends, and ends were endowed with absolute authority in so far as they sanctified the means. In this manner the fundamental concepts of religion were not invalidated nor the integrative functions served by these concepts impaired, such as those cohesive factors that hold together the social structure and ensure its normal functioning. The Nazis retained these concepts and their functions as a legitimate part of their racial theory and, after depriving them of their authentic historical content, turned them into political expedients to be used in their attack against humanism, religion and Christian values. Basic theological concepts such as God, redemption, sin and revelation were now used as anthropological and political concepts. God became man, but not in the theological Christian sense of the incarnation of the Word: "...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us..." (John 1. 14) or in the Pauline conception of the incarnation of God in Christ in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2. 9). In the new conception God becomes man in a political sense as a member of the Aryan race whose highest representative on earth is the Fuehrer. This change in the essential meaning of the concepts God-man is, from the standpoint of cognition, effected by converting the relative into the absolute and, from the standpoint of theology, by transferring the Pauline conception (Ephesians 4. 24; Colossians 3. 10) from the plane of metaphysics and eschatology to that of nationality rind politics. It was this radical change from Christian doctrines to pagan myths that aroused the Churches to express their protest against Nazism, and also against the persecution of the Jews, in the above Pastoral of the year 1943:
"And there is now a return to the worship of life and power by accepting and