The Church Against the Nazis

I've always been taught that Hitler was a Catholic and that the Catholic Church practically smiled upon the Holocaust or at least mindlessly acted as a puppet signing agreements with the Reich government. But I was reading today Pope Pius XI's Mit Brennender Sorge - "With Burning Concern" and it's very interesting to realize that it was the last message of the Pope read in all the Catholic parishes in Germany before their persecution by the Nazis (which was of course minimal in comparison to other religious persecution - Jews, and shared by Protestant Christians as well - see Confessing Church, Barmen Declaration, Bonhoeffer and Barth). I just found a few passages interesting that debunked what I'd been taught.

Against Racism
"10. This God, this Sovereign Master, has issued commandments whose value is independent of time and space, country and race. As God's sun shines on every human face so His law knows neither privilege nor exception. Rulers and subjects, crowned and uncrowned, rich and poor are equally subject to His word. From the fullness of the Creators' right there naturally arises the fullness of His right to be obeyed by individuals and communities, whoever they are. This obedience permeates all branches of activity in which moral values claim harmony with the law of God, and pervades all integration of the ever-changing laws of man into the immutable laws of God."

Against Deism and Spinoza
"7. Take care, Venerable Brethren, that above all, faith in God, the first and irreplaceable foundation of all religion, be preserved in Germany pure and unstained. The believer in God is not he who utters the name in his speech, but he for whom this sacred word stands for a true and worthy concept of the Divinity. Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, denies thereby the Wisdom and Providence of God who "Reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly" (Wisdom viii. 1). Neither is he a believer in God. "

Against Racism
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

THIS IS MY FAVOURITE:

On the Cross of Christ:

"26. The cross of Christ, though it has become to many a stumbling block and foolishness (1 Cor. i. 23) remains for the believer the holy sign of his redemption, the emblem of moral strength and greatness. We live in its shadow and die in its embrace. It will stand on our grave as a pledge of our faith and our hope in the eternal light."

Against "Secular" Morality/State Ethics and the banning of Catholic/Christian Education:

"29. It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man's morality is based. All efforts to remove from under morality and the moral order the granite foundation of faith and to substitute for it the shifting sands of human regulations, sooner or later lead these individuals or societies to moral degradation. The fool who has said in his heart "there is no God" goes straight to moral corruption (Psalms xiii. 1), and the number of these fools who today are out to sever morality from religion, is legion. They either do not see or refuse to see that the banishment of confessional Christianity, i.e., the clear and precise notion of Christianity, from teaching and education, from the organization of social and political life, spells spiritual spoliation and degradation. No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ.... A merciful God, who as Legislator, says - Thou must! - also gives by His grace the power to will and to do. To let forces of moral formation of such efficacy lie fallow, or to exclude them positively from public education, would spell religious under-feeding of a nation. To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations. "

I love my Church.

968 civilians dead in Iraq this month

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7378406.stm

This is a story I just decided to read today. I went to BBC news and just picked one of the many stories about tragedy. I was thinking about what it would be like to live in Iraq right now. I'm not writing this to say 'The US are murderers' or anything like that. I don't think it helps to blame anyone really. But it just made me think about life and theology as everything seems to.

I can't even imagine the panic and fear and bitterness that would occur in my country if near 1000 civilians were killed within 1 month. I think it's just awful. I see stories like this every day but somehow it doesn't affect me. I've become completely desensitized to all of it. If one of my parents died, my whole life would change till the day I died, everything would be different. I'm sure that 1 of those thousand people was a mother, a father, a child.

So much for moral evolution - as the humanists call it. So much for utopia. With all of recorded history mankind has not learned any lessons from war except how to kill more efficiently. I think of all those funerals, all that pain, all the distress and instability. I wonder what God thinks about it all. I honestly don't know. If anyone was desensitized to it, it'd be Him, he's watched it for alot longer than I have. What has the church done I wonder. I heard that the Iraqi Orthodox Church has suffered to the point of near non-existance, as attacks come to Christians for perceived ties between Christianity and the West. I don't think either side has really shown moral fervor.

It's strange for me to think about the story in Genesis 4 of Cain murdering Abel. How God says that the bloodstained ground cries out to Him. I wonder if it still does. Sometimes all there seems to be in the empirical data of the universe is apathy. However sometimes it feels like the darkness of life may indeed serve as a dark sky in which Good shines like stars which appear every once in a while. Hmm. I guess if the universe is created by a good God, the question is why is there evil? The real question to me is, if there was no creator or absolute moral value, why would we care? Why would it pain us so much.

I wish I could go to one of the funerals of the 968 dead. Maybe it would make it feel more real to me. Maybe if all of us lived in that kind of community and shared humanity, we would stop killing people. The crazy thing is, it would make sense if there wasn't enough to go around, then murder would be obvious. But why? according to my grade 12 education we have 30% surplus in life sustaining necessities. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Because they're real people. They aren't infidels, they are beings made in the image of God. Hmm. I don't understand alot of things. Life is so short.

St. James writes in chapter 4 verses 14-15 "you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’"

I think maybe we just lie to ourselves in thinking that because we are North Americans we are somehow invincible, we can fight anything, nothing can touch us as long as we have money, in God we trust it says on the american dollar. Strangely enough in life it seems that money is alot easier to trust in.

Something else I mark as strange is that the Epistle of St. James is all about living right. About the importance of a living faith. So my interpretation today is that he is saying to live right, faith working in love, but that ya life is fragile. Life is just a mist. But inspite of all that, have faith in God, and trust in his providence. In Ecclesiastes the author comes to the same conclusion:

"Fear God, and keep his commandments...For God wil bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil" 12:13-14

He starts off by saying that the earthly pursuit of pleasure is meaningless, He says "Nihil Sub Sola Novum" - Nothing is new under the sun. People just live and they die and it seems so meaningless. YET - this is the part where the conclusions differ between the Scriptures and ours, the modern world sees this and says 'eat drink and be merry' (ironically another bible verse) and the Scriptures say 'Fear God', Trust in his providence.

I guess the thing is that maybe somehow it is God's will that those 968 people died, many never acheiving their dreams, or getting to see the Carribean or driving a car even. But the point is that life viewed from our perspective seems meaningless, but our only hope is in believing God.

"the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster...but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself" Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-5

Christian Ethical Dilemmas and Christ Alone

"When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." -Deuteronomy 7

"God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God...You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also...“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. " - Jesus Christ (Matthew 5)

To me it disturbs me as I debate with others who know the bible and that God commands genocide. I know that they were 'sinful', but it still disturbs me greatly. I was watching a debate between Dr. Alister McGrath - a genius Anglican Priest and Scientist, and Christopher Hitchens -all around atheist douchebag (sorry about the ad hominem). Here it is:http://fora.tv/2007/10/11/Christopher_Hitchens_Debates_Alister_McGrath

McGrath keeps quoting St. Paul from Colossians saying that Jesus is the Image of the Invisible God and so he is the final revelation and that he is the final interpretation. He says reading the Old Testament in light of this makes it 'ok'. But how can you read those two statements and reconcile them. Hitchens is smart enough to know alot about Christianity and says that Christianity denounced Marcion who wanted to only leave Luke and Paul's writing in the bible and erase the 'jewishness' and in a way I think he's right that McGrath is a bit guilty of that.

So as I read the commands of God (the Father) in the Old Testament - whom I believe to be of the essence as Jesus (the Son) like any good trinitarian, I am deeply troubled as what appears to be a contradiction in character. Maybe God isn't all good, after all, "from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come" Lam 3:38. This sounds scarily like Calvinism's ideas that God arbitrarily assigns wrath to people and salvation to others... I am not sure if I am capable of worshipping such a God, not because I can disprove this from the bible, so much as it is simply awful.

So my conclusion is that I realize that Alister McGrath, and Karl Barth have taught me alot about Christo-centric theology. It is the idea that Christ is the basis of all scripture and the find their authority in Him. The Bible is only important in that it tells us accurately about Jesus and God's incarnation. This is the Old Protestant ideal: Solus Christus - Christ Alone. Jesus is the centre of everything, he IS the very WORD of God, the Logos, the great icon of Deity, he is the picture of God and his revealed character, it is as St. John of the Cross said "In giving us his Son, his only and definitive Word, God spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word, and he has no more to say".