Language:
English
Year of publication:
2012
Titel der Quelle:
Harvard Theological Review
Angaben zur Quelle:
105,3 (2012) 280-301
Keywords:
Heschel, Susannah.
;
Grundmann, Walter,
;
Schlatter, Adolf,
;
Church history 20th century
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Jews History 1933-1939
Abstract:
A revised version of a paper delivered at the AAR Annual Meeting in Atlanta, October 2010.
Abstract:
In Susannah Heschel's "The Aryan Jesus", she attacks the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life and its leader, Walter Grundmann. She also criticizes the anti-Jewish views of Grundmann's mentor, Adolf Schlatter, as bordering on Nazi racial antisemitism and objectively assisting the Nazis. Indeed, Grundmann himself said that "Schlatter built the path [for the Protestants] from theology to National Socialism". Heschel's book caused protests on the part of Church historians, who regarded it as slander against the outstanding Tübingen theologian. However, argues that an examination of Schlatter's writings supports Heschel's findings. Despite Schlatter's disgust concerning Nazi biological racism (in particular, he compared the Nazis to the Jews in their rejection of the true Jesus), he shared many tenets of the völkische ideology, supported "German Christians" in their rejection of Christians of Jewish origin, and his criticism of "Jewish materialism" went far beyond purely theological condemnation, e.g. declaring that Jews were parasites. While disagreeing with Grundmann's view of Jesus as an "anti-Jew" and even an Aryan, Schlatter rejected the Jews as the ontological negation of the Christian order. His complicity in bridging anti-Jewish polemic and virulent racial hatred is evident.
DOI:
10.1017/S0017816012000119
URL:
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