A couple of days ago I was sharing with some of my friends troubling political ideologies arising again here in Germany and why I reject such movements as someone who attempts to follow JESUS…
Most people don't know that in 1922, a decade before Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, former Prime Minister of Bavaria Count von Lerchenfeld-Köfering declared in a speech before the Landtag of Bavaria that his beliefs "as a man and a Christian" hindered him from being an anti-Semite or from pursuing anti-Semitic public policies. In his response to a crowd in Munich, Hitler twisted Lerchenfeld's perspective of JESUS for his own sick purposes and declared:
"I would like here to appeal to a greater than I, Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last session of the Landtag that his feeling 'as a man and a Christian' prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognise more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."
In a later speech, in a 1928 he claimed about the national socialist party: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian."
Note, how Hitler claimed how he and the national socialist party were 'Christian's'. Sadly, I've likewise seen people who claim the name Christian these days slowly accepting and endorsing political ideologies that are equally based on fear and suspicion of 'the other' and that will ultimately lead to the call for hatred and violence - if not rejected in time - all the while claiming to fulfil a divine purpose.
The speech above makes it very clear that Hitler saw himself as the chosen divine vessel through which ultimately the world's perceived destiny would be fulfilled. His conception of GOD and the CHRIST-event are clearly exposed as being reframed in a narrative of power over others - especially those he considered his enemies (which makes sense if one knows the history of his upbringing). Sadly I have to acknowledge that this kind of thinking still tries to establish itself among those who claim the name 'Christian' (and there are numerous reasons for this, which I can't get into in such a short post).
This is why I shrink away from any form of 'Christianity' that is obsessed with changing its environment by force, getting rid of its 'enemies,' so that the 'righteous' can live 'in freedom,' scapegoating, accusing and blaming, while expecting a triumphalist solution to the problems of this world that are far removed from the revelation of the Crucified One (in Whom the true Divine purpose is clearly unveiled). For such a 'Christianity' has nothing in common with the Gospel of CHRIST, and the god it worships is not the ABBA of JESUS.
Comentários