The Signs of the Times

Michael Fitzgerald has written an interesting study of a man who made an enormous impression upon the twentieth century. Adolf Hitler - A Portrait contains a series of essays upon aspects of Hitler's life and work. For example, Fitzgerald includes subjects such as Hitler the Artist, the Politician, the Messiah, the Warlord, and the Murderer. A fascinating chapter looks at Hitler the 'Green' leader and sees, in National Socialism, the first shoots of modern environmentalism. There were, apparently, many ways in which Germans were better off under Hitler than they had been under the Weimar Republic. Hitler made great strides in overcoming poverty, and in improving diet and general health. Nazism aslso swept away many if not all of the old class distinctions. Advancement on the basis of merit became the norm. Of course, such improvements were costly. The rapid, wholesale restructuring of society was only achieved because it was, largely, imposed by an authoritarian regime. That regime was, fundamentally, socialist. In this, Hitler was not a conservative, he was a radical. If his program had not been tainted by extreme anti-semitism, then he may have been remembered as a great innovator. Tragically, however, Hitler was driven by an anger that consumed millions of lives including, eventually, his own.

I recommend this book. Fitzgerald does not avoid the hard questions. He does not fail to denounce Hitler as a mass murderer on a truly horrific scale. He does, however, move beyond the rhetoric to capture more than a caricature. An important question deserves our attention: Why did the German people elect to office a man who had already demonstrated a tendency to use violence? Did they not realize that, by voting for the National Socialists, they were condemning their nation to yet another war?

Various reasons have been suggested for the short-sightedness of the German people. Some have argued that the Second World War was a necessary postscript to World War One, and that the injustices perpetrated by the victors at Versailles led to the re-assertion of a militaristic Germany, bent on revenge. Others have drawn attention to the failures of the proportional representative electoral system, which allowed government to be manipulated by those at the extremes. Some commentators have noted the threat of communism and the reactionary forces that propelled Hitler into power. For others, the weakness of Weimar, the vacillations of its leaders, and the senility of Hindenberg seem to explain the rise of Nazism's star. Still others have blamed the policy of appeasement adopted by Europe's grand old men, allowing the jackboot to swagger its way past every obstacle.

Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is that the German people, voters and politicians, allowed a psychotic meglamaniac to gain the reins of power. If there is a lesson for us it is surely the importance of vigilance. Within a relatively short space of time, the new German Chancellor had outlawed all associations other than those of which he approved. He came to dominate every aspect of national life, including those that had, initially, vigorously opposed him, including the army. Is it not possible that a modern Hitler could dupe us in just the same way?

Hitler benefitted from weak government, fear of foreign power (Soviet communism), and the financial havoc caused by the Great Depression. Many people either supported him, or failed to oppose him, because he was strong and confident, and because they believed that they would be better off with Hitler at the helm. It is the cancer of self-interest that allows charlatans and despots to claim authority to which they have no right. One could argue that six million Jews perished because ordinary people were more concerned about their standard of living than about doing what was right.

Deliver Us From Evil

During this season of remembrance, I've been re-reading Alistair Horne's superb book, The Price of Glory, a study of the battle of Verdun in 1916. It makes sobering reading. Like two stags locked in combat, the armies of Germany and France fought themselves to a standstill. The Germans, under the overall command of the dithering General Erich von Falkenheyn, attempted to bleed the French dry at Verdun. In one sense they succeeded, since the successful defence of 1916 was followed by the mutinies of 1917. Virtually every French settlement, large or small, was affected by Verdun. A generation of young Frenchmen was wiped out by their leaders' defence a outrance, the single-minded determination not to cede an inch of land or, having done so, to reclaim it as soon as possible. To this day, the names of some of the key features of the battle - Douaumont, Le Morte Homme, or Cote 304 - send shivers down the spine of France. Indeed, neither side 'won' at Verdun. It was, as Horne says, "an indecisive battle in an indecisive war." By the end of 1916, Germany had suffered a third of a million casualties and captured only a pathetically small strip of land. France lost a similar number, though no one will ever know for sure. Churchill put the French casualties as high as 469,000.

What struck me, 'though, was a metaphysical reflection (p.242-243). It seems completely out of place among the realism of harsh statistics. Horne writes about a common understanding, at the time, that events were being manipulated by evil.

In the last days of peace, there had seemed a point where the collective will of Eurpoe's leaders had abdicated and was usurped by some evil, superhuman Will from Stygian regions that wrested control out of their feeble hands. Seized by this terrible force, nations were swept along at ever-mounting speed towards the abyss.

I don't think that Horne is suggesting that responsibility for the mistakes of the war can somehow be transfered to a malevolent spirit; he is clear about the culpability of leaders. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the existence of evil. There is something for us, here. Perhaps in our post-modern sophistication, we have become blind to the shadows that stalk our world. We watch Twin Towers fall, and we are too clever, or too afraid, to call evil by its name.

Dachau

There are some things we need to remember, and there are some things we need to forget.

There are some things we need to forgive, and there are many things for which we need to be forgiven.

Art Katz in his testimony-book Ben Israel writes of his visit to the concentration camp at Dachau:

I was totally unprepared for what greeted me at this museum of death ... the gas rooms with the jets still in the ceiling. Here my brother-Jews had been herded like cattle into cars. Women and children. Stripped naked. Old men and young boys. Why was the ear of God silent to the shrieks and prayer of these helpless, innocent ones who were slaughtered like cattle? My stomach turned sick and my eyes blurred with tears ... Outside were the conveyor belts where the bodies were dispatched to the giant ovens ... the mutilated bodies were slowly and systematically fed into the flames. The huge smokestacks never ceased their ugly belching - twenty-four hours a day as the ovens were stoked with the House of Israel.

And later, on the train that took him on his way ...

In an instant the truth dawned: Katz, except for the accident of birth, the caprice of time and place, you might have been born a German Aryan. It could have been you stoking bodies into the ovens. He shuddered and looked long into the blue eyes of the German man opposite. "I have been to Dachau," he said quietly.

A photograph of Dachau, which was posted with this article, has been removed. My apologies; I did not realize that the photograph was under copyright.

Imago Dei

There's a touching story, today, in our local paper, the Brazosport Facts. Apparently, a store owner in Angleton, the county seat, noticed a pigeon which had got stuck on a sign. Some sort of twine, tied around its leg, had become entangled in a sign. The poor bird kept struggling to break free, but only succeeded in making matters worse.
Soon, the police department, animal control officers, and representatives from a local animal rescue group, gathered in the street. With the help of a bucket truck the pigeon was rescued, and will now spend quality time recovering at the animal rescue center.
What a great story! The store owner called 911 because he couldn't think who else to call. And the police responded magnificently, just as one would expect in small town USA. For a brief time, Brazoria County's finest had their attention focused on the fortunes of a frightened young bird.

Unfortunately, the same paper told the story of Edy Joel Jimenez-Ulloa, a 25 year old man from Honduras whose body was found in a ditch not far from Angleton. His body had been bundled into two black trash bags and left, just like trash, at the side of a country road. As yet, there have been no arrests.

Does no one see the frightening incongruity of these two stories? One demonstrates all that is good about human beings, whose compassion can even extend to a frightened bird; the other story demonstrates all that is bad about human beings, whose malevolence can be deadly. In the former, we remember our inheritance. The divine spark flares, if only for a moment. In the latter, God's image is defaced. The spark gutters and dies. And the most frightening thing of all is that we see ourselves in both stories. The hands that heal and the hands that hurt are, far too frequently, one and the same. They are ours.




First story: http://www.thefacts.com/story.lasso?ewcd=7d4ad9694341ad29
Second story: http://www.thefacts.com/story.lasso?ewcd=2f15cbd2b0550251

Friday's Child

He told us we were free to choose

But, children as we were, we thought -

'Paternal Love will only use

Force, in the last resort,

On those too bumptious to repent.'

'Friday's Child' - W.H. Auden.

Auden's poem, of this title, was written in 1958 in memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred at Flossenburg, Germany, on April 9, 1945. It's a strange attribution, given that the poem is both a wistful recollection of the death of Christ (Good Friday's Child) and a damning indictment of the ineptitude of God.

Auden seems genuinely bemused by the theological tension between divine sovereignty and human agency. He accuses God of having given away too much.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,

But it seems idle to discuss

If anger or compassion leaves

The bigger bang to us.


What reverence is rightly paid

To a Divinity so odd

He lets the Adam whom He made

Perform the acts of God?

His point seems to be that, since God allows us to make our own mistakes, and does not intervene, He is not worthy of our praise. In fact, God is irrelevant. For Auden, it appears not to matter at all whether or not God is real. We have no real way of knowing:

And must put up with having learned

All proofs or disproofs that we tender

Of His existence are returned

Unopened to the sender.

Even the resurrection of Christ fails to answer the question. Auden "dare not say" whether the seal of the tomb remained unbroken. Christ on the cross, like God in heaven, remains silent. Our questions remain unanswered. A God who will not intervene when His Son is suffering "a death reserved for slaves" deserves nothing from us. This is Auden's caustic judgment:

The self-observed observing Mind

We meet when we observe at all

Is not alarming or unkind

But utterly banal.

* * * * * * * * * * * *


How can it be that one man, sitting at ease, can spout such invective, whilst another, awaiting his death, places His confidence in the God revealed in Jesus Christ? To one, the ways of the Divine are childish and stupid; to the other they are wonderfully profound. Bonhoeffer was painfully aware of the tension between human evil and divine restraint. Most of his adult life had been lived in the shadow of unspeakable horror. Unlike Auden, however, who bolted from Europe to the sanctuary of the United States, Bonhoeffer returned to his native Germany. Auden chose to doubt, and blamed God for doing nothing. Bonhoeffer chose to believe, and did something.

Gods, Temples, and Blood

"Why are we here? (said Camaban). We know that the gods made us, but why? Why do we make things? You make a bow - to kill. You make a pot - to hold things. You make a brooch - to fasten a cloak. So we were made for a purpose, but what was that purpose?" He waited for an answer but neither Haragg nor Saban spoke. "And why are we flawed?" Camaban asked. "Would you make a bow that was weak? Or a pot that was cracked? We were not made flawed! The gods would not have made us flawed any more than a potter would make a bowl that was cracked or a smith would make a knife that was blunt, yet we are sick, we are maimed and we are twisted. The gods made us perfect and, and we are flawed. Why?" He paused before offering the answer: "Because we offended Slaol (the Sun god)."

You don't expect to find a statement of Christian anthropology in a secular novel, least of all in one set in the second millennium BC, but that's exactly what you get in Bernard Cornwell's Stonehenge.

I've read quite a few of Cornwell's novels, particularly from the Sharpe series, dealing with the Napoleonic wars, and the Warlord Chronicles, set in England in the early Middle Ages. I've yet to delve into the Starbuck Chronicles, which tell the story of the American Civil War. An Englishman, now living on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with his American wife, Cornwell is a natural storyteller with a fine eye for detail and a flair for the description of battle. There are very few references to Christianity in his novels. Rifleman Richard Sharpe, for example, seems to have been dragged up without any thought of God. Some of the villains, such as Sergeant Hawkswill, use god-fearing language, but their lives belie their words. It's only in Cornwell's later books (ironically, dealing with Sharpe's early career) that one encounters a sympathetic presentation of devout Scottish Highlanders praying the psalms before marching fearlessly into battle. Sharpe's early mentor in India, though a somewhat dour Presbyterian, is at least a man of great personal integrity. Then, out of the blue, in Stonehenge, we find a passage that is almost Calvinist.



Admittedly Camaban, the sorcerer, who speaks the words I have quoted, turns out to be as crazy as a loon, but that doesn't make his assessment false. Camaban, who was almost offered as a human sacrifice as a child, turns out to be flawed himself. He is not averse to murdering his older brother, or to stealing his younger brother's wife. This merely confirms his own hypothesis. For most of the characters in Stonehenge, life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Yet the search for truth remains. God is not to be found in the the cycle of the seasons, or the phases of the moon, or the progression of the sun. Though a blue-stone be brought from farthest Wales, or a cap-stone be set in place, four times the height of a man, these exertions do not bring Camaban closer to God. The construction of Stonehenge merely symbolizes the spritual quest, the striving for the divine that seems so much a part of the human psyche. Perhaps, in his novels, Cornwell also participates in the quest.

On his website, Cornwell confesses that he was raised, in East Anglia, within a Christian sect known as the Peculiar People, (a phrase taken from I Peter 2:9).

At some point he must have rebelled against their strict and regimented way of life. I have no idea what his religious affiliation is today, if any; but his novels still contain echoes of the homesickness of the soul, which is our longing for God.

Camaban has the wrong solution. A temple will not bring a god to earth, no matter how grand. Neither will the Ruler of the universe be impressed by the shedding of human blood. But his analysis has the ring of truth. We were made for a purpose; but we are flawed. We have offended against God's desire and design. Recognizing, somehow, that we were made to be worshippers, we have raised our monuments to the sky, but they have not reached to heaven.

The genius of Christianity is not just its anthropology, its understanding of the fallen nature of humanity, it is the unique claim that heaven has come to earth. Christ was not drawn down by our blood-offerings, but by our misery; and it is by His sacrifice that we are healed.

What Christians Believe Part II

1. Our Condition

Paul wrote: “…just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”
(Romans 5:12)

Before time began, God had a plan for the world, and for our place within it. It was a plan based upon His nature. He was not just playing with us. We are not experiments in a cosmic laboratory. God is still working on that plan. The world is moving, slowly but surely, towards the end He always intended. But there have been plenty of twists and turns along the way. You and I have chosen options that are not in line with God’s will so, yes, we have sinned. That’s what ‘sinning’ means. The result of our sin is that now there is a barrier between us. We are alienated from our Maker. Yet He longs for that barrier to be removed, and for us to be in a close, fulfilling relationship with Him.

You might ask, “How did human beings learn to disobey God?” That’s a good question. It is answered in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. There we are told about creation. Now, we don’t know all of the details, but we are told that God made the world out of nothing, and that everything He made was good. God made the angels and He made them holy, that is, they were in a perfect relationship with their Maker. So were our first ancestors, whom the Bible calls Adam and Eve. As representatives of God’s good creation, Adam and Eve were also in a holy state. They spoke freely to God, but they also looked up to Him, simply because they knew that He had made them. They obeyed God because they knew themselves to be creatures obeying the will of their creator. All was well.

God entered into an agreement with Adam and Eve. We call it a covenant because it was based upon God’s promise. In this covenant, Adam stood as a representative for all humanity. If he obeyed God perfectly, living according to His will, then Adam would live forever. On the other hand, if he did not obey, Adam’s sinful disobedience would lead to his death. This covenant, then, was based upon God’s promise and Adam’s faithfulness. We sometimes call this the Covenant of Works.

You and I know that we have failed to keep this Covenant. We have made wrong choices. We have broken our promises. We may try to blame our environment or our education; we may even try to blame God; but if we are honest we must admit that we have made our own bed. Now we must lie in it. Adam had the ability to decide whether or not to sin, that is, to disobey God. So did the angels. Some fell, through pride, and became enemies of God. One was even responsible for enticing Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. By this act of rebellion the Covenant with God was broken. Humanity lost its special relationship with the Creator. Sin came into the world, and with it came death. Through disobedience, humanity was stained with sin. We could no longer be called holy. We lost our ability to please God. Even our motives became suspect. We were lost. Instead of the promise of an eternity with God, in fellowship with the One who loves us, our prospects took a turn for the worse. Not only would our bodies die, we faced the hell of an eternity without Him.

What I’ve just described is the condition known to theologians as original sin. It is the human condition – yours and mine. I want you to notice that this is not how God intended things to be. God’s desire for His creation was good. We are the ones who spoiled it by our rebellion. Adam represents us all. We have all chosen to disobey God. The result is plain to see. We spend our lives looking for something that is missing. We know that there is a void in our hearts, but we don’t know how to fill it. We try ignoring it, but the ache won’t go away. We try to substitute other things – material wealth or bodily pleasures, you name it, we’ve tried it – but nothing takes the place of a broken relationship with God. We are hungry for peace with our Maker, our Heavenly Father, but it always seems just out of reach.

All of the self-serving, destructive and violent behaviors for which the human race is known find their origin in our alienation from God. Whenever justice is perverted, goodness is abused, or loveliness is trampled down, sin has its way. This is what can make our world such a miserable place. We are not as we were intended to be. There is clearly something wrong.

So, the Christian Gospel (the Good News) begins with bad news. Our condition is not what it should be. There’s something wrong. Fortunately, this is not the last word.

Cultural Amnesia

A few evenings ago, I watched Bill Moyers interviewing Clive James, the Australian journalist, on PBS. James has written a book entitled 'Cultural Amnesia,' which they were discussing, (or marketing, depending on your point of view). Apparently, the main thesis of the book is that something of great value will be lost if the West forgets its cultural heritage. I agree. Like a fish that fails to appreciate the water in which it swims, Western Civilisation depends, to a large extent, upon the intellectual inheritance birthed, first by the Renaissance, then by the Enlightenment. Unless an appreciation for the liberal arts is taught to a new generation, their benefits may be lost. Unless the rights afforded by democracy are championed, they are likely to be taken for granted, before being sold for a mess of potage or a bag of magic beans. I didn't hear the entire interview, but I did wonder whether James would be as vocal in his defense of the benefits won by the Reformation.
I have always enjoyed Clive James' writing. He has a penchant for le bon mot, and seems able to express complicated subjects in terms which make them accessible to ordinary people. He's an old-fashioned Socialist at heart, with Old Labour's disdain for anything approaching elitism. His writing is clear, insightful, and thought-provoking. He also has a great sense of humor. If writers are to be judged on the basis of whether one would wish to spend time in their company, then Clive James is near the top of my list.
Towards the end of the interview, Bill Moyers asked James how he would have ordered the world differently, if he were God. It was a good question to ask a person thoroughly immersed in the secularism of modern Europe. James' reply was revealing. On the one hand, he had no idea how he would order the world differently. On the other hand, he was quite sure that he would make a better job of it than God. When asked why, James laughed and replied that, if there is some kind of divine force, it is "obvious" that this god does not interfere in the affairs of men.
The horrors of the Holocaust made a lasting impression upon Clive James as a young man. To this day, he cannot understand how such evil could have been perpetrated without divine intervention. Neither can he understand how his father could have survived internment in Japan, during the Second World War, only to be killed in a tragic accident while being repatriated to Australia by the Americans at war's end. He would not accept that a loving God could allow such seemingly senseless human suffering.
As an expression of the argument from evil, James' words are nothing new. I remember a debate I had with Alan Dutton, one of my old philosophy professors in Birmingham, which followed the same course almost exactly. Alan wanted to believe. He found Christ tremendously attractive. But he could not or would not believe. "Evil trumps love," he used to say. Nevertheless, he was open to being proved wrong. We talked about not blaming God for human evil, and the context of human freedom which stays God's hand. The arguments on both sides are well-known. For myself, I remain convinced that suffering has to be understood in light of the Cross - God's self-identification with the pain of a fallen world through the person of His Son. I also remain sure that God, in His mercy, only allows evil because He does not want to compel us to do good. Unless we are to be no more than mindless automata, obeying without the action of our wills, then we must be free to choose evil. Finally, I believe that human suffering must be understood within a teleological framework that acknowledges history's goal. If human history is purposive; if God has a desired end in sight, then we cannot judge the play until the curtain falls.
What surprised me about Clive James was the arrogance of his laughter. To be fair, Bill Moyer did not invite him to debate. James was never challenged. It was not put to him that his position is as much an act of faith as is that of the theist. The difference is, of course, that James has faith in his own mental faculties, not in God. He does not see that "the fallenness of humanity," one of the key ingredients of Christian anthropology, has warped him, just as it made a demon out of Adolf Hitler. James fails to grasp that Western Civilisation requires Augustine, not just Aristotle.
Culture, we are told, depends upon a humanist intellectual inheritance, derived from Enlightenment thinkers from Rousseau to Voltaire. In one sense, this is true. The seeds of optimistic modernism have blossomed, but they have become the poisoned plant of postmodernity. Instead of Diderot we are left with Derrida. Yet the culture that gave birth to Erasmus also produced Martin Luther. We cannot lament the loss of cultural icons without recognising the part played by the Christian faith. That's why James' laughter is dangerous. He, and many like him, already have selective cultural amnesia.

Cabrera

I've just finished reading The Prisoners of Cabrera by Denis Smith. It's an interesting little book about French prisoners of war, captured during the Peninsula War, when Wellington was marauding around Spain and Portugal. Several thousand French troops were taken following a particularly inept manoevre by their leaders at the battle of Bailen. They were held, for a time, in an old fort, then left to rot on prison ships, old hulks, stripped of their masts. Eventually, however, the majority of them were moved to Cabrera (Goat Island) in the Ballearics, and left there. There was no hope of rescue by sea, because the Royal Navy had a squadron in the area keeping Napoleon's Mediterranean fleet bottled up. They received minimal supplies, weekly from the Spanish island of Majorca, but often the supplies were late, hindered by bad weather or political in-fighting. Over a period of about five years, twelve thousand Napoleonic soldiers, mostly French and Italian, were placed on the island. Over half of them died, mainly of a combination of malnutrition and preventable disease. When, eventually, they were returned to France, the vessels that carried them bore the Bourbon flag, the newly-restored monarchy against which many of them had spent their youth fighting in the name of the Revolution.
What strikes me most forcibly about the story is the ability of ordinary people to commit horrible crimes against natural law. The people of Majorca were overwhelmingly Christian, as were their Spanish overlords, and the British who prevented escape. Individually, they would never have countenanced leaving fellow-human beings to die on a barren rock, almost entirely devoid of shelter with only minimal supplies of water. And yet, that is exactly what they did when they acted politically. The Majorcans blamed the mainland Spanish for foisting this expense on to them; the Spanish blamed the English for not repatriating the soldiers, as had originally been agreed. The English blamed the ineptitude and corruption of the Spanish authorities. To a degree, they were all right. But they were also all wrong. Nothing could justify the neglect, the lack of basic human compassion, to which the soldiers of Cabrera were subjected. The people were largely blind to their fate, just as we are blind to some of the truly awful situations in our world today, such as in Dafur.
Perhaps, then, Calvin was correct to remind us of the corruption of the human heart, and of our tendency towards evil. Left to our own devices, we are capable of anything. That's why our trust must, ultimately, not be in a human institution, no matter how well-intentioned. Our trust must not be in ourselves, either, since we too are marred by the Fall. Our trust can only be placed, legitimately, in God. He is the only one whose love is untainted by self-interest.
Presbuteros