In preparing to preach on Hebrews 8 this Sunday I stumbled upon a quote that floored me.
“Many Jewish survivor-victims of camps like Auschwitz and Dachau remembered with bitterness that their jailers celebrated Christmas and Easter.” Guthrie, G. (1998). Hebrews (p. 285). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.
It’s not like this is the first time I’ve ever thought about the Holocaust or the atrocities at the hands of those who professed Christ. I remember in school being confronted with the horrors of Block 11. But when I read that quote this morning I pictured a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in the guards office, and it was a chilling image.
How in the world could a people celebrate the birth of the God-man, rejoice at His resurrection, and simultaneously put people of his ethnic tribe—the very ones he wept over—into a gas chamber? How can you sing Joy to the World at the same time you are working to eradicate an entire people group?
It’s easy, really. Exalt tradition and sentimentality of a thing over what the thing itself represents. Christmas wasn’t about the advent of the Savior anymore. Neither did the resurrection mean freedom from death and the tyranny of sin. It became a cultural icon instead of living truth.
The same people behind Auschwitz tied a noose around the neck of the pastor who had the audacity to say this of their Christianity:
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Those concerned with expelling Germany of the Jewish people were engaged in their very own culture war. One could even argue that it was a war for Christian culture. Of course, it didn’t look very much like Christ but it certainly was passionate about preserving Christian traditions like Christmas and Easter. In fact many of the churches celebrated what the Nazi party was doing to preserve it’s freedom and heritage. Many took their statement concerning “positive Christianity” to be an affirmation of their Christian values:
“We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not jeopardize the state’s existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within on the basis of the common good before individual good.”
There’s a fallacy out there that has been dubbed reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s an attempt to invalidate someone’s view on the basis of saying the same view was held by Hitler and the Nazi’s. That’s not my intention here. All I’m attempting to do and say is that if we win the war for a Christian culture but in doing so surrender a Christian ethic, then we haven’t won a single thing. We’re just passionately preserving a type of Christianity which can erect gas chambers with Christmas trees.
When we think about a war on Christmas, I think we’d do far better to think about the war of Christmas. The advent of the son of God into history is an act of war against sin and death. That’s where the battle is found. I appreciate the words of Dean Inserra:
Sadly, in the name of tradition and good tidings, a Cultural Christian can have all the comforts of the Christmas season without being confronted with their need to follow the very One whose birth they acknowledge. (Inserra, The Unsaved Christian, 93)
I’m all for being excited that Joy to the World is playing in the mall and subtly proclaiming the One True King. But it’s not this ability to play the song which we are to be engaged in preserving, but the truth of the song. Because you can sing Joy to the World in Block 11, but you can’t consistently be confronted with the rule of this newborn King and celebrate Auschwitz.
A Christian culture without a Christian ethic isn’t truly a Christian culture.
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