“When you enter the land
which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to
imitate the detestable things of those nations. There shall
not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his
daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one
who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a
sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a
spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.” (Deuteronomy
18:9-11)
This article will reveal similarities between the
philosophies prevalent in Germany that characterized fascism
and those of postmodern thinkers today. I am not suggesting
that because these similarities exist postmoderns would be
in favor of a new Hitler. I am suggesting that ideas
have consequences and that history ought to teach us how
serious they can be. The key issue is the rejection of a
transcendent God who has revealed moral law. The result of
such a rejection will most certainly be some form of
lawlessness.
Recently, radio host and friend Chris Rosebrough called
me and insisted that I read Modern Fascism by Gene
Veith. Chris suggested the book because it draws a parallel
between the ideas popular in Germany between World Wars I
and II and the ideas popular in America today. These ideas
now are called “postmodern,” a term introduced by Martin
Heidegger, a popular German philosopher who became a
committed fascist. Veith’s Modern Fascism unpacks the
philosophical ideas that led to fascism.
This review of Veith’s book will show that the
postmodern/emergent ideas that are popular today are
identical to those in vogue in post WWI Germany. [Note: I
also use the term paraphrase in the title, because I quote
extensively from Veith’s book and explain his ideas.] I do
not claim that those who promote postmodern theology are
guilty of promoting fascism, but I do claim that ideas have
consequences. As we examine the ideas that led to fascism,
we shall see why those ideas led to horrific consequences.
Once we see the parallels between those times and today we
can hope that today’s ideas will not lead to such
consequences. But we have no guarantees that they won’t.
Back to Nature
Postmodernism is a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism (that
reason alone will get us to truth) and the sense of
alienation that came from urbanization. This sense of
alienation included a desire to connect with nature. Germany
after World War I was characterized by a desire to reconnect
with nature that included a desire for pagan religious ideas
that were linked to nature. Gene Veith explains: “Because of
their Romanticism, fascists sought to overcome the
alienation between the human being and nature. Again, the
villain was modern civilization, with its scientific
technology and polluting factories.”1
This same sensibility characterizes postmodern thinking
today which, as I have claimed in another work, is a
resurrected version of Romanticism2
. People want to be connected to nature and to react against
the Enlightenment; to do so involves making decisions on a
basis other than logic and rationality. Most people would be
shocked to realize that their postmodern inclinations are
those of fascist ideology which led to Hitler, but I’ll
develop that connection later in the paper.Veith explains: “Whereas the traditions of the
Enlightenment sought to transcend nature, fascist ideology
made nature central to human life. In the words of Adolf
Hitler, ‘the folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the
innermost will of Nature’” (Veith: 39). The draw to nature
is a huge factor in our culture today as seen in everything
from political ads to those of larger corporations. Everyone
wants to be seen as being “green.” This mindset prevailed in
Germany during the periods between WWI and WWII, a mindset
that resulted in the belief that humans and Western
civilization are the problem.
Humans, it is thought, have undertaken an onslaught
against nature and ancient pagan thinking is seen as a
better approach. Paganism has always seen religion as
stemming from nature. The Judeo-Christian worldview believes
in a transcendent God who has spoken, has created humans in
His image, and has given them dominion over the rest of the
creation (Genesis 1:26). So what in our view is good and
from God is, in the postmodern view (that of the fascists
and Emergents), very bad; a thing to be rejected.
My maternal grandfather, Fred Saupe, lived in the same
time period as the rise of fascism in Germany. Grandpa Fred
served in the United States Army in WWI, and though he was a
great marksman, he was assigned to be a supply truck driver
so that he wouldn’t have to kill Germans (he was of German
descent). That assignment, incidentally, may have saved his
life.
After the war, Grandpa Fred became a farmer in Iowa near
where his father had homesteaded in the 19th century. On
that farm, where I grew up, I learned from him that nature
was likely to kill you unless you used all of your wits and
available technology to prevail over it. Fred was a
Christian man with a Biblical worldview. His beliefs were
the polar opposite of those that prevailed in Germany after
WWI.
The farm reflected the Biblical admonition for humans to
rule over nature, and the reality that the Fall meant that
with great labor man could live off of the land. Grandpa
Fred fought against possible destruction all of his life. He
lived through the Great Depression. He lived through the
dust bowl of the 1930s. He lived through drought,
windstorms, insect invasions, and fought weeds. When I was
old enough to understand the farm that Fred turned over to
my father, we had everything we needed to survive: a brooder
house to raise little chicks, a chicken house for when they
matured, dairy cows, pigs, and steer. We had cherry trees,
pear trees and apple trees, raspberries, strawberries and
many kinds of garden vegetables
Lack of water was the one persistent battle with nature
that Fred fought every year. Nearly every August the several
shallow wells on the farm would go dry and he would have to
haul water from elsewhere for his animals. So turning to
technology, in the 1940s he drilled a 400-foot well. We
never ran out of water again. And herbicides and pesticides
helped us declare war on other destroyers of the crops.
While all this was going on in America, Germany was
taking the opposite approach—that technology and Western
civilization are evil, that going back to nature was good,
and that humans (at least certain ones) were the problem. So
eugenics became important—the practice of selectively
breeding humans so that only the best reproduced.
Undesirable people were forcibly sterilized, and when that
proved inefficient the Nazis began mass killing. It was a
return to tribalism and ancient nature religions. Veith
explains: “Nature and the community assume the mystical role
they held in ancient mythological religions. Religious zeal
is displaced from the transcendent onto the immanent: the
land, the people, the blood, the will” (Veith: 17). The idea
that nature was like a goddess who would care for humans
replaced the idea that nature was fallen and that humans
needed to use the sweat of their brow to overcome the
natural tendency for thorns to choke out the garden (Genesis
3:17). Again Veith explains: “Fascists seek an organic,
neomythological unity of nature, the community, and the
self. The concepts of a God who is above nature and a moral
law that is above society are rejected” (Veith: 17).
The postmodern ideals prevalent in America today are
identical. The primary idol in our society is nature, and
many people harbor the romantic view that nature is a
“mother” who will nurture us. These postmoderns consider
humans with technology to be the enemies who are a threat to
the nature goddess. These inclinations drive the
postmodern/emergent understanding of theology.
They reject the transcendence of God, who has spoken and
given moral law and will in the end be the judge of all. In
His place they posit community and a return to nature.
Whether these advocates know that they are teaching ideas
that at one time led to fascism is uncertain. But they did.
For example consider this Emergent writer:
Perhaps interest in theologies of the kingdom of God is
related to the contemporary quest for holism,
integration, and a sense of interconnection. My
colleague, Dr. Linda Bergquist, has suggested that
renewed popularity of the “kingdom” language is related
to the emerging global narrative of the deep ecology
movement—a consciousness and awareness that everything
matters and is somehow interdependent.3
The deep ecology movement sees traditional Christianity’s understanding
of man’s uniqueness (as created in God’s image and given
authority over the earth) as a terrible cause of the earth’s
problems. Instead it derives its thinking from pagan sources
and a decidedly pagan worldview that values the
“interconnectedness of all things.” In its extreme, the deep
ecology movement wants to see most of the humans on the
earth eliminated and balance restored to nature. Veith
points to Finnish deep ecology proponent, Pentti Linkola, as
one who holds to fascist ideas: “Linkola, surveying the way
humanity has ravaged nature, considers human beings to be an
evolutionary mistake, a cancer of the earth” (Veith: 40).
One might ask how human beings can become anti-human. In
Nazi Germany the answer is that they become only “anti-some
humans” – those who are not the elite, not the right race,
or not fit to reproduce. It may shock many to realize that
the ultimate brutality of fascism was led, not by uneducated
savages, but by the educated elite. As Veith points out,
“Thus fascism attracted students, artists, intellectuals,
and the avant-garde. Fascists sought first of all to
demolish Western civilization, so that it could be replaced
with a new, organic, holistic culture” (Veith: 40). The
Judeo-Christian idea that humans were created in God’s image
and given dominion over the rest of the creation was seen as
an enemy to the natural, organic whole. Fascists hated Jews
because they were seen as the “inventors” of a transcendent
Creator God who gave moral laws like “you shall not murder”
that made human life something that must be protected.
Martin Heidegger the Fascist
The existential philosopher, Martin Heidegger, was a key thinker who
embraced fascism, and his mortal enemy was Western
civilization. Veith explains:
Heidegger’s attack on the West is repeated over and over
again by his followers today, who perhaps do not realize
its original Nazi context. Heidegger opposed democracy
and continued to do so even after the collapse of the
Third Reich. Heidegger was also an important
environmental theorist, whose critique of
technology—though rooted in National Socialist
organicism—has been enormously influential (Veith: 41).
Neo-orthodoxy is a religious version of existential philosophy such as
that of Heidegger and postmodern/Emergent theology is nearly
identical to it. Its enemies are the same: the
Enlightenment, Western civilization, technology, a
transcendent God who has given binding moral laws,
individuals as important in their own right, and humans
having dominion over nature. I was amazed that ideas
expressed by the postmoderns/Emergent are identical to those
of the fascists. It’s sobering to think about where these
ideas will lead.
One of Heidegger’s ideas very popular with the Emergent
movement is the challenge against objective truth. Heidegger
was influenced by Nietzsche who famously declared the death
of God. Heidegger (who invoked Nietzsche in a famous
address) realized the implications as explained by Veith:
“If God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority
of reference point for objective truth” (Veith: 85). Here is
Veith’s analysis of such thinking:
Heidegger’s conclusion has become accepted to the point
of becoming a commonplace of contemporary thought,
that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.
With the death of God, there is no longer a set of
absolutes or abstract ideas by which existence must be
ordered. Such “essentialism” is an illusion; knowledge
in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be
challenged. The scholar is not the one who knows or
searches for some absolute truth, but the one who
questions everything that pretends to be truth. (Veith:
85)
This is precisely the Emergent idea: we cannot know, but we
can rebuke those who claim to have knowledge. Consider
this Emergent statement: “We live in a post-Neitzschean
world of faith and spirituality. Nietzsche’s declaration
that God is dead still holds true, since interest in all
things spiritual does not necessarily translate to a belief
in a metaphysical God or the tenets and dogmas of a
particular faith.”4
The new “god” who replaced the “dead” one is only immanent
and has never revealed absolute truth that can be known. To
find out that Emergent ideas are those of fascists is quite
shocking.
So now knowledge has been replaced by questioning as it
was in the philosophy of the fascist Martin Heidegger. This
comes with some horrible consequences such as the end of
academic freedom. Veith explains:
In the same address in which he asserts that
“questioning itself becomes the highest form of
knowing,” Heidegger goes on to advocate expelling
academic freedom from the university: “To give oneself
the law is the highest freedom. The much-lauded
‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the
university.” (Veith 86)
This may explain something I recently experienced. In debating a
professor from a Baptist university about the promotion of
Zen mediation to their students, I pointed out that present
at the symposium were two Zen Buddhists and one Christian
who believed in Zen style meditation. There was not a single
traditional Christian who defended the Biblical definition
of prayer and meditation. I asked why no conservative
Christian had a seat at the table (I have asked that of
other Christian educators) and received no answer. But there
is an answer, and it is the one Heidegger explained:
academic freedom must go. Once the idea about certainty
concerning the knowledge of the truth is rejected, then the
freedom of those who want to express the knowledge of the
truth as revealed by God must be squelched. Everyone’s idea
is valid except that of conservative Christians.
Heidegger’s idea of giving oneself the law meant that
morals derive from the human will. Veith explains the
implication: “The concept that there are no absolute truths
means that human beings can impose their truth upon an
essentially meaningless world” (Veith: 86). But that would
apparently mean chaos with no guidance for deciding things
collectively as in society. The answer to that problem is
“the will to power” as understood by Nietzsche. The will to
power can and does become a collective will. Heidegger spoke
of “willing the essence” (Veith: 90). But he was speaking of
a collective will. The “essence” is not some pre-existing
transcendent truth revealed by God but something people will
into existence themselves. Once it is willed, it becomes the
guidance of “authentic” life. In other words, when a
collection of people commonly wills something, and if they
then live in conformity with that common will, they are
living valid, authentic lives. Whatever is thus willed
cannot be judged to be good or bad by any transcendent moral
law revealed by God.
Veith cites Adolf Hitler repeating the theme of the
collective will-power (Veith: 90, 91). According to Hitler,
the “dominating preacher” could win the masses over to a new
will, the collective one of his national socialism. Hitler’s
mass rallies were aimed at that. With the moral will of a
transcendent God removed, the collective will of the German
society became the new moral law. If that will meant the
killing of millions of people, there was no higher law above
the collective will to say that anything was wrong.
Veith cites the fascist film The Triumph of the Will
as a significant example of this idea. The title of the film
was provided by Hitler himself (Veith: 91). The collective
will of the German people is portrayed as having great
mythical qualities to be lived by. Morality is to be judged
by the collective will of the German people that was being
clearly manipulated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The
God of the Bible, who has spoken, had been declared dead by
the earlier Nietzsche and replaced by the collective will of
the people. Thus these people were unleashed to do whatever
they deemed correct—with no sense of guilt.
Veith makes two points about this. One is the practice of
abortion in America being justified because of a “choice” (Veith:
37). The Judeo-Christian ethic of “you shall not kill” is
set aside by the rationale that a collective culture has
decided to make choice a moral value. This is fully in
accord with the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger that
contributed to fascism. Another is to point out the irony
that the fascist slogan of the triumph of the will is
the total reversal of Martin Luther’s great work The
Bondage of the Will: “In simultaneously alluding to
Luther and contradicting him, The Triumph of the Will
invests Hitler with Luther’s mantle and replaces German
Protestantism with the new fascist spirituality” (Veith:
92).
What consequences will come when the human will (viewed
collectively) becomes the new source of morals for a
society? The answer is that it could be just about anything,
but it will be evil. Veith comments on Luther’s view and
validates it:
If the human will is unleashed, with no external or
internal restraints, Luther would expect not
authenticity, not self-actualization or humanistic
fulfillment, but an evil approaching the demonic. In
this respect, at least, those who celebrated triumph
of the will proved him right. (Veith: 93)
Whatever becomes of our current society will be revealed as history
unfolds, now that the moral law revealed by the transcendent
God of the Bible has been rejected. But we can expect it
will be a version of evil that approaches the demonic.
The Rejection of the Value of the Individual
One facet of fascism was a characteristic called volkisch which
is a German term for which no single English word has the
same range of meaning. It is usually translated “folkish”
but includes ideas of ethnic, folklore, populist, and
romanticism. The way it functioned in fascism was a
rejection of individualism. A person’s identity was found in
a communal experience and communal consciousness. As Veith
explains: “The individual human being is ‘nothing more than
the vehicle of forces generated by the community’” (Veith:
36, 37 citing Zeev Sternhell). This is a precursor to what
is now called “socially constructed reality” as used by
postmodern theologians such as Grenz and Franke5
. Individuals themselves cannot read historical documents
(because of language games that are communal) and understand
meaning. This cuts individuals off from meaning, which is
considered socially and culturally determined. They must
find their meaning from being a part of the “folkish” group.
Brian McLaren uses this postmodern approach as he rejects
the importance of the individual:
How do “I” know the Bible is always right? And if “I” am
sophisticated enough to realize that I know nothing of
the Bible without my own involvement via interpretation,
I’ll also ask how I know which school, method, or
technique of biblical interpretation is right. What
makes a “good” interpretation good? And if an appeal is
made to a written standard (book, doctrinal statement,
etc.) or to common sense or to “scholarly principles of
interpretation,” the same pesky “I” who liberated us
from the authority of the church will ask, “Who sets the
standard? Whose common sense? Which scholars and why?
Don’t all these appeals to authorities and principles
outside the Bible actually undermine the claim of
ultimate biblical authority? Aren’t they just the new
pope?
6
The rejection of the individual (“I”) is a reiteration of the
postmodernism of Heidegger and other fascist thinkers. Veith
comments on postmodern ideas: “Postmoderns ‘deconstruct the
subject’ by attempting to show that human consciousness
itself is constituted by social forces and structures of
power embodied in language. The self cannot escape the
‘prison-house of language,’ through which the culture
encodes itself and determines the very structure of what one
is able to think” (Veith: 37). McLaren’s attack on the
individual being able to understand the Bible is very much
postmodern. It is also very fascist (though he would not
call himself that).
The unimportance of the individual and the rejection of
individual rights led to horrific consequences in Nazi
Germany. Individuals who were deemed unfit to contribute to
the “folkish” community were eliminated. The older
understanding of “humanism” (not secular humanism) was that
individuals were important and had been given rights by
their creator (as articulated in the Declaration of
Independence). This sort of humanism was attacked by the
fascists. Veith explains: “Just as the postmoderns attack
‘humanism’ on these grounds, the fascists also attacked
human-centered values, including the concept of individual
rights. Since the culture determines the individual, the
needs of the culture must have priority” (Veith: 37). To
implement the idea of the priority of the volkisch,
Aryan, identity in community Hitler held mass rallies: “The
mass rallies, uniforms, and parades so favored by the early
fascist parties were all mechanisms for creating group
identity, giving people the experience of losing themselves
by becoming part of a larger collective existence” (Veith:
37).
The ideals of the United States (at least as the U.S.
used to be) are the polar opposite of those of fascism.
Fascists hated Western civilization, the Enlightenment, and
Judeo-Christian values. So do postmoderns of today.
Immigrants to America have typically come to escape
oppressive circumstances in their own cultures and to find a
new identity. Thus identity here was not volkisch,
but based on ideas such as expressed in our Constitution.
Veith writes, “Democratic nations were based not on a
cultural identity, nor on ethnicity, but upon a rational
plan—such as the United States Constitution” (Veith: 38).
Individuals, not certain cultures, were given rights. But
fascism and National Socialism were based on different
ideas: “Hitler’s racism was part of his Darwinism and his
Romanticism, his desire to ground culture in what he saw as
the natural order” (Veith: 38).
One consequence of fascist ideas was that once the
individual had no particular rights and was important only
in the context of the “folkish” culture, individuals were
expendable. Genocide and euthanasia were the result. The
return to paganism meant the return to tribalism. Tribalism
has always meant killing in tribal warfare. Veith also
comments on this:
The contemporary stress upon cultural identity is
accompanied by sustained critiques of “Western
Civilization” in favor of cultural and ethnic
consciousness. Primitive or tribal cultures are
presented as being more virtuous those “contaminated by
Western civilization” and modern technology. American
culture becomes guilty of “cultural imperialism,” it is
argued, by seeking to destroy the cultural identity of
other groups by making them assimilate to democratic
values. (Veith: 39)
But individual rights granted by a constitution as well
as democratic values that make it possible for various
immigrants to coexist without tribal warfare has been the
hallmark of America. Postmodernism was the hallmark of
fascism in Italy and Germany. Now that postmodernism is the
prevalent thinking in our institutions of higher learning,
what do we think will happen? Whatever the consequences will
be, they will not be good ones. Tribalism is a bad outcome.
The “noble savage” is a myth.
Veith claims that through the mass media, the creation of
a mass culture can contribute to the world becoming more
tribal: “Individual differences become homogenized. The
world becomes ‘retribalized’” (Veith: 149). He also says,
“The goal of fascism was the creation of an organic, mass
community” (Veith: 148). The idea was to surround the
individual with masses with the same opinion. The masses
with a same opinion, charged emotionally through mass
rallies, can come to assert a mass will that becomes the new
morality whatever it is. Veith insightfully writes: “Mobs
tend to be governed less by reason than by emotion, less by
moral restrictions and more by irrational impulses. That is
why Hitler loved them” (Veith: 152). By embracing the
postmodern philosophy that fueled fascism in Germany, we are
setting the stage for a similar horrific outcome, whatever
it turns out to be.
It is ironic that most current postmodern theologians and
teachers are promoting something akin to the social gospel
to make the world a better place. They would be horrified to
think they are promoting ideas that led to Nazi Germany. But
they are. Hitler intended to make the world a better place
through eugenics (the selective breeding of humans).
Margaret Sanger had similar ideas in America as cited by
Veith: “Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood,
summarized her goals accordingly: ‘More children from the
fit, less from the unfit—That is the chief aim of birth
control” (Veith: 108). The connection with Hitler and Sanger
goes beyond merely an ideological one: “Margaret Sanger
invited Eugen Fischer, Hitler’s advisor on race hygiene, for
a speaking engagement in the United States” (Veith: 108).
Ideas indeed have consequences.
The End of Transcendence
A key doctrine of Christianity is that God is both transcendent and
immanent (above and beyond the creation but also engaged
with it). This passage asserts this truth: “For thus says
the high and exalted One Who lives forever, whose name is
Holy, ‘I dwell on a high and holy place, And also with the
contrite and lowly of spirit In order to revive the spirit
of the lowly And to revive the heart of the contrite’” (Isaiah
57:15). In theological terms this means that God is
transcendent ontologically, but immanent relationally. God
is not contingent upon anything within the creation and
totally transcends as the eternal One who created the world
out of nothing. But God does providentially rule His own
creation and has spoken to us through inerrant and
authoritative spokespersons (the Biblical writers). God
relates to us in a saving way if we are contrite (repentant)
and trust in His Son, who died for sins.
Fascism is based on a complete rejection and denial of
transcendence. Veith says that one of the key reasons for
Nazi hatred of the Jews was that they “invented” the
transcendent God of the Bible who gave moral laws. It is
ironic that Hitler and his philosophical supporters
understood that Western civilization sprang from the Jews,
whereas nowadays most textbooks on the subject have
forgotten that fact. The problem was that Hitler believed
Western civilization to be an evil thing to be done away
with. So do most postmoderns today.
The Bible claims that God came to Mount Sinai and audibly
spoke “You shall not murder” to the Jewish nation (Exodus
20:13). That meant that the transcendent, Creator God spoke
a moral absolute that applied to every individual. Fascism
was inimical to any such thing: “A ‘collective and organic’
society must be based on different principles than the
‘individualist and atomistic’ ideals injected into Western
culture by the Jews” (Veith: 49). The consequent of wanting
to rid society of Western civilization was the intention of
ridding society of the Jews:
For those who reject transcendent moral absolutes—such
as “Thou shalt not kill”—there was nothing to prevent
the gas chamber. There was no higher authority than the
“collective and organic” society, which sought to rid
itself both the Jewish people and of their ideas. (Veith:
49)
If Christianity held to the transcendent revealed moral truth that it
inherited from the Jews, it became Hitler’s enemy as well.
But, sadly, many during that era joined the “German
Christian” movement which gained control of the
institutional church in Germany (Veith: 55). Veith aptly
comments: “Christianity could be reinvented, that is to say,
repaganized; it only had to be drained of its Biblical and
Hebraic content” (Veith: 55). There was a remnant, the
“Confessing Christians” who were persecuted and killed by
Hitler. The confessing Christians refused to give up the
idea of a transcendent God who issued moral truth that was
not dependent on the culture (Veith: 56).
Veith has an entire chapter about the church in fascist
Germany (Chapter 4: “Two Masters”) that chronicles the
difference between the German Church and the Confessing
Church. The issue was whether or not the church would
confess the truths that had been revealed by the
transcendent God of the Bible. The German Christians
were able to take control of the state church (Veith: 57).
Veith writes: “What this meant can be seen in a research
institute established by the new church government: The
Institute for the Study of Jewish Influence on German Church
Life” (Veith: 58). The Jews with their transcendent,
law-giving God could not be allowed to influence the German
church. The counter movement, the Confessing Church
issued a declaration affirming Reformation ideas such as
Christ alone and scripture alone (Veith: 60).
To apply the issues of postmodern, fascist Germany to
today, we have to see the gravity of the choices before us.
Will we deny transcendence as postmodern theology does and
place “truth” in the hands of the culture (socially
constructed reality), or will we confess the transcendent,
revealed truths of the Bible? Much of the church has fallen
asleep on this matter. The denial of the transcendence of
the God of the Bible who has spoken led to horrific
consequences in Nazi Germany. Now that the same concept of
transcendence is being denied in most “Christian”
educational institutions in favor of all things postmodern,
why do we think we shall escape the logical consequences? Do
we really believe that contemporary people are “good” and
can be trusted to do “good” even if they no longer have a
transcendent source of true goodness or a revelation of what
good really is from the Creator God? Adopting postmodernity
is naïveté at its worst. One definition of insanity
sometimes offered is of doing the same thing time after time
and expecting a different result.
To repeat: ideas have consequences. Veith traces a number
of fascist ideas back to the earlier Nietzsche. He cites
Nietzsche and then comments:
“A table of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it
is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the
voice of their will to power.” Moral principles are not
transcendent truths (as in the Judeo-Christian
tradition), but expressions of power. Change comes when
new tablets are imposed upon the people, and this is
done by the artists. (Veith: 119)
When I visited an Emergent convention last fall, art was emphasized. As
I attended the first session, an artist was creating a
drawing during the session. A video camera was trained on
her so we could see the process as we listened to the
speakers. There were other works of art hung in the
auditorium. It all looked rather strange to me until I
realized there was a theme. There was something in each
picture emerging, even though what it was seemed unclear.
They were using art to reinforce the postmodern idea of
God’s immanence in the creation causing something good to
emerge from it.
But what contemporary postmodern/emergent thinkers
overlook is the sin nature. To deny God’s transcendence and
then look for goodness to emerge from a process overseen by
the collective community assumes that goodness will come
from a collective of sinners willing as they see fit. There
is no moral law that guides them to even give a reasonable
definition of “good.” The Bible has been silenced through
the neo-orthodox idea that the reader determines the
meaning. What is to keep this group, which is creating a
socially constructed “reality,” from unleashing a ruthlessly
evil reality like Nazi Germany? Nothing. For now they live
off of the borrowed capital of the Judeo-Christian worldview
that they have rejected. The capital will soon be exhausted.
Anti-Semitism
The most well known aspect of German fascism is anti-Semitism. Veith
mentions two of the key reasons the Jews were so hated: 1)
their association with “banking capitalism” and 2) their
worldview (Veith: 43). Yes there was racial hatred as
history records. But Hitler was committed to paganism, and
the Jewish (and Jewish inspired Christian) Bible is the
polar opposite of paganism. The Church in Germany had
already largely been stripped of an authoritative Bible by
liberalism and then neo-orthodoxy, so the church could be
made safe for fascism (other than the confessing
Christians). But the Jews were seen as intractable. They had
to be eliminated. They were never going to give up their
monotheism.
The fascists viewed the Jews as cerebral and detached
from nature and the rich polytheistic world of ancient
paganism (Veith: 44). Veith describes a popular fascist and
what he had to say: “According to poet and fascist
propagandist Ezra Pound, the Jewish religion began when
Moses, ‘having to keep a troublesome rabble in order’ scared
them by inventing ‘a disagreeable bogie, which he . . .
[called] a god’” (Veith: 44). According to fascist thinking,
the Jews ruined the world by inventing one transcendent,
monotheistic God who was opposed to the immanent,
polytheistic gods of the pagans. Veith explains how they saw
the problem:
Jewish monotheism led to the decline of the mythological
consciousness in which religion, nature, and the
community were unified. Fascism sought to restore the
values of primitive cultures, with their social
solidarity, oneness with nature, and psychic
integration. The iconoclasm, antipaganism, and moralism
of the Judeo-Christian tradition must be eradicated so
that a more holistic spirituality could emerge. (Veith:
44, 45)
The similarities with many contemporary, postmodern ideas are striking.
The Jews with their monotheism and moral laws were
intolerable. They were the enemies of the re-paganization of
society. Veith comments: “In other words, the Jews with
their absolute morality invented intolerance; therefore they
shall not be tolerated” (Veith: 46). Veith astutely
understands the Old Testament dynamic that kings who did
evil were to be denounced by God’s prophets—and they were.
The sort of view revealed in Deuteronomy 17 that the king is
under and not above God’s revealed law is the foundation for
ideas cherished in the West and embodied in such documents
as the United States Constitution. The Nazis wanted to be
rid of such ideas, so they sought to be rid of the Jews who
first articulated them. I agree with this great statement by
Veith: “That a prophet could come into the presence of a
king and denounce him for oppression and bloodshed on the
higher authority of the ‘word of God’ was a conceptual
development of the profoundest importance for Western
society” (Veith: 47).
What a sorry thing it is that today the authority of
Scripture is being diminished in our churches and that our
society is thereby adopting the sensibilities of fascists,
if not their politics. If we do not accept the moral law of
God as true and binding, by what authority can we rebuke
“kings”? The new morality becomes the morality of the
Biblically illiterate masses who are drawn to their pagan
roots. “Good” can no longer be defined.
Veith articulately describes the results in fascist
Germany:
For those who reject transcendent moral absolute—such as
“Thou shalt not kill”—there was nothing to prevent the
gas chambers. There was no higher authority than the
“collective and organic” society, which sought to rid
itself of the Jewish people and of their ideas. (Veith:
49).
Christianity resists such things only if it retains the
Bible as authoritative because it was inspired by the
transcendent, Creator God. But Hitler found a cure for that
problem: “If Christianity could not be eliminated, it could
be changed. Cured of its ‘Hebrew disease’ Christianity could
be repaganized” (Veith 50). Thinking about how applicable
this is to what is happening today gives one chills. We
think we can be repaganized by going back to the ideas and
practices of a paganized version of medieval Catholicism,
rejecting the solas of the Reformation, reconnecting
to nature as if it were a goddess, satisfying fallen
humanity’s pagan urges, and do so in the name of God—but not
get any of the results that attended fascism’s return to
nature religion.
The Real Problem
I agree with Veith: “The problem is not alienation from nature, but
alienation from God through the rebellion of sin” (Veith:
51). The longing for a return to nature has never been
stronger in American society than I see today. The term
“natural” is deemed synonymous with “good” and “unnatural”
with “bad.” This ignores the problems that nature is fallen,
that nature is impersonal, and that nature, therefore, is
not a goddess who wishes to care for us. The deification of
nature common today places many contemporary Americans in a
philosophical league with the Nazis. They are blinded to
that fact. Our problem is not alienation from nature, but
from God.
The firewall we have against postmodernism (which is a
fancy name for paganism) is an inerrant, authoritative
Bible. Our sin problem finds its remedy through the gospel
that is revealed in the Bible. We find morals and restraint
from our sinful tendencies through the law of God revealed
by God through the Biblical writers. Western civilization
used to be based on such ideas. That is why Hitler hated the
Jews and the West. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. He came in
fulfillment of prophecies found in the Old Testament in such
places as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. If the Christian church
confesses Christ and the authority of Scripture, she shall
put herself in opposition to Modern Fascism as Veith
describes it. We will thus be seen as the enemies of
society.
We need to do that. We need to stand on the solas
of the Reformation and say “no” to postmodernity. We need to
say “no” to neo-paganism and nature worship. We need to say
“no” to the type of socialism that characterized Nazi
Germany. The socialism of the Marxist Soviet Union was not
the polar opposite to that of Germany, but a first cousin of
it (Veith: 34-36). In both cases millions died. Hitler saw
capitalism as a grave evil of the West, with the Jews as its
bankers. We need to say “no” to every pastor in America who
refuses to purely preach God’s Word from the pulpit. Those
who do not are complicit in contemporary postmodern ideas
just as the German Christians of Hitler’s day were complicit
in the postmodern ideas that undergirded fascism. When we
fail to confess what God has revealed, we fail. Period.
Conclusion
Gene Edward Veith’s book is more needed now than when it was published
in 1993. I thank God for His providence that led me to it.
The world around us and much of the church is being shaped
by the very ideas that led to fascism and the Nazi party.
“Ideas have consequences” (Veith: 78, 79). We are fools if
we think there will be no consequences this time. I do not
know what they will be. But they will be bad. Here is
Veith’s description of the consequences in Nazi Germany:
If Judeo-Christian transcendent ethics place
restrictions on individual behavior, they also liberate
the individual socially and politically. The fascist’s
ethics of immanence did the reverse—they unleashed the
animal impulses, while enslaving the population. (Veith:
50)
We need to fight against these ideas using the Scripture.
Our young people are being indoctrinated into postmodern
thinking in most of our colleges, be they secular or
Christian. Their parents have no clue that the ideas they
are being taught are the very ideas of the Hitler youth
movement. The only difference is that there is no particular
ethnicity that is claimed to be superior. That may save us
from National Socialism, but it will not save us from some
other version of it. But the idea that we need to be saved
from alienation from nature caused by human enterprise
rather than saved from our alienation from God caused by sin
is spiritually fatal. It will lead only to neo-paganism and
moral disaster.
Issue 118 - May / June 2010
End Notes
- DGene Edward Veith; Modern Fascism –
The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview; (Saint
Louis: Concordia, 1993) 39. All future citations from
this book will have bracketed references with this
article.
- Bob DeWaay, The Emergent Church –
Undefining Christianity (Minneapolis, Bob DeWaay,
2009) 204.
- Mark Scandrette, “Growing Pains – The
Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming,” in An
Emergent Manifesto of Hope Doug Pagitt and Tony
Jones editors (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007) 27.
- Barry Taylor, “Converting Christianity
The End and Beginning of Faith,” in Emergent
Manifesto of Hope 164.
- Stanley Grenz and John R. Franke,
Beyond Foundationalism – Shaping Theology in a
Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2001).
- Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy,
(Youth Specialties: El Cajon, CA, 2004; published by
Zondervan) 133.
To see the entire article
with the End Notes, please go to Issue 118:
Replace link:
http://cicministry.org
Copyright © 2006 Twin City
Fellowship
Other articles by Bob DeWaay:
True and False
Unity
Faulty Premises
of the Church Growth Movement |
Redefining the Church
Recovering Reformation Theology
|
Discernment in
an Age of Deception
The Dangers of "Spiritual
Formation" |
The Emergence of Imaginary
Eschatology
“Church Health
Award” from Rick Warren or Jesus Christ?
|
Theophostics |
Bob DeWaay is
the Pastor of
Twin City Fellowship, a
non-denominational evangelical Church in Minneapolis, MN:
"We are a
body of believers who attempt to live our Christian
faith according to Acts 2:42 by devoting ourselves to
prayer, fellowship, searching the Scriptures, and the
Lord’s Supper. Our mission is to equip the saints for the work of
ministry and to reach the lost with the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. We do this through expository preaching, study
of the Scriptures, publications, our website and
neighborhood outreaches."