A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past

8. A Ray of Light in Their Darkness: The Church and Anti-Judaism

8 A Ray of Light in Their Darkness The Church and Anti-Judaism At its April 1948 meeting in Darmstadt, the brethren council (Bruderrat), which had so notably challenged Lutheran orthodoxy when debating Germany’s political course a year earlier, still adhered to a theologically conservative position with regard to the Jews. The brethren council stated that “since Israel crucified the Messiah , it rejected its own election and its own destiny. . . . Through Christ and since Christ, the chosen people is no longer Israel but the Church.”1 Although church reformers demonstrated in their “A Message Concerning the Jewish Question” that they understood the disastrous eªect of the church’s institutional failure to take active steps to combat racism and antisemitism, they showed no awareness of the consequences of the church’s anti-Judaic theology (see appendix 7). The brethren council continued to rely on the established dogma that the new people of God, the church, superseded the Jews as God’s chosen people. The council ’s four-page statement explicitly rea‹rmed the theology of the nineteenthcentury missionary movement by referring to Jews as the “straying children of Israel ” who lived under God’s judgment and would find salvation only by joining the church. They cautioned, “The fate of the Jews is a silent sermon, reminding us that God will not allow Himself to be mocked. It is a warning to us, and an admonition to the Jews to be converted to him, who is their sole hope of salvation.” Anti-Judaism was so deeply ingrained in church doctrine and tradition and so widely accepted by clergy and laity that it was virtually unthinkable in April 1948 that it might have played a role in the horrors that were coming to light daily. It was not exceptional, therefore, that the “Jewish question” message, issued one month before the founding of the State of Israel and only three years after the liberation of the camps, indicated no understanding on the part of the brethren council that these momentous events would have far-reaching significance for Protestant theology. Reflection and the passage of time were necessary before these churchmen would grasp the significance. In the meantime, the blindness in the Ger- man churches was not unique. Supersessionism, Christian triumphalism, and missionary thinking were orthodoxy in Protestant churches across Europe. The World Council of Churches declared in its 1948 statement, “The Christian Approach to the Jews,” that “All of our churches stand under the commission of our common Lord: ‘Go ye into the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’ The fulfillment of this commission requires that we include the Jewish people in our evangelistic task.”2 Even the 1950 Berlin-Weissensee statement (see appendix 8), which rejected the theory of supersessionism, was not, as one scholar claimed, the “Magna Carta” of the Evangelical Church on the “Jewish question.”3 Although it certainly marked a progressive transformation in the church’s theology, it was not the radical metanoia it at first seems. It concludes by declaring, “We pray to the Lord of mercy that he may bring about the Day of Fulfillment (Tag der Vollendung) when we will be praising the triumph of Jesus Christ together with the saved Israel.” The references to the “Day of Fulfillment” and the “triumph of Jesus Christ” indicate the belief that Judaism was not a way to salvation and that the church was waiting for the Jewish people to fulfill its destiny by joining in the triumph of the church. Although Christian triumphalism and missionary thinking permeated the church in the immediate postwar years, these years were anything but static theologically .4 The church struggle, the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and the nascent Christian-Jewish dialogue jarred some pastors and theologians into questioning traditional church doctrine on supersessionism and the relationship between Jews and Christians. Only after the profound political and theological shock of these events had had time to sink in were some reformist pastors and theologians prepared to abandon their former stance. They now recognized the need for a new approach, which was to lead them to adopt the controversial third sentence in the 1950 Berlin-Weissensee statement acknowledging the continued validity of God’s promise to the Jewish people. The process of challenging established doctrine on the “Jewish question” and institutionalizing tolerance was slow and intermittent. Thus, missionary thinking and practices continued in the 1950s and afterwards, although...