Betrayal Read online

  Because of his significance as a theologian, Hirsch represents an important bridge between the heritage of nineteenth-century German theology and the horrors of the National Socialist regime that earned his support. Both as church historian and systematic theologian, Hirsch was extremely conversant with the Protestant theological tradition. He grew up in the so-called Luther Renaissance led by Karl Holl, proclaiming himself a part of the "young, national Lutheranism." He described the political stance of this group as follows: "In the inner German struggle, it [young, national Lutheranism] placed itself with passionate determination on the side of those who could not inwardly accept the condition brought about by the defeat and revolution of 1918. In struggle against the ideas of 1918, against the dream of an international world culture of democratic or Marxist orientation and pacifist ideology, the dream of a leveling of peoples, they wanted to protect the will of the German Volk to itself, to a German

  Hirsch knew the ideas of the nineteenth century very well. He knew Hegel and analyzed Marx in light of Hegelian metaphysics. He knew the attractions of Tolstoy and his pacifist idealism. He knew the challenge of Nietzsche to Christian, middle-class moral values. He became Germany's leading expert on Kierkegaard, the father of twentieth-century existentialism. As Hirsch worked his way through this intellectual heritage, he fell back not only upon Luther but upon the Germanness of Luther and the German romantic nationalism prolific in the previous century: "Everything that a Fichte, a Kleist, a Heinrich von Treitschke expresses concretely about the relationship of Volk to fatherland is as if it were burned into my heart. I know along with them that God meets me through Volk and fatherland. God encloses me with a binding and consecrating and exciting reality, sustaining my life from the primordial depths and shattering my self-sufficiency.""

  Hirsch, Althaus, and like-minded colleagues, drawing upon their pride in Luther and the heritage of the nineteenth century, created a theology enthusiastically committed to German nationalism and to the mysterious idea of the Volk. This theology assumed that each separate Volk organically creates its own norms, its own law, and that this becomes a part of God's law for that Volk .2' Given the significance of nation in this understanding, Hirsch felt no need to apologize for his patriotism and its overlap with his understanding of politics and Christianity. He believed in a "God of history," in a God who speaks anew to each generation through history; and he believed that his nation's history had been blighted by the humiliation of World War I and the Versailles Treaty: "We were a world Volk, a noble Volk, perhaps the most flourishing and best of all. We now stand in danger of being humiliated or even destroyed as a Volk, so that only a formless mass of workers in the service of foreign interests When Hitler emerged as the selfproclaimed savior of the German Volk, it was difficult or impossible for theologians such as Hirsch and Althaus to stand aside.

  Once they merged their volkisch ideas with Hitler's, however, the implicit racism of a theology of the Volk became increasingly clear. When they spoke of God's special concern for the German Volk, when they claimed God's endorsement of those committed to "save" Germany, they fully accepted the antisemitic Nazi idea that there existed an underlying "Jewish question." Jews could not be a part of the rebuilding process. The true German Volk was an Aryan, Christian community. Jews were the problem, or at least a big part of the problem, and not a part of the solution. Hirsch readily accepted the idea that Christians of Jewish descent should be denied a role in the Christian ministry. They were "foreign" by race and history, and it was perfectly suitable for a Volk church to apply racial criteria to its clergy roster, that is, to insist that only members of the Volk should serve.''

  In 1939 Hirsch carried the racist implications of his volkisch theology much further. In attempting to describe the "essence" of Christian teachings, Hirsch picked up and argued the crude antisemitic case that Jesus himself was not Jewish but really Aryan. How could this intelligent theologian, this prolific scholar, this Kierkegaard expert for the German-speaking world sink to the level of a charlatan? It is interesting to note that the evidence that Hirsch gathered, stretched, and bent to his purpose has at least some shred of plausibility. He credited German theological scholarship with the discovery that Galilee had been "heathen" from the fall of the Northern Kingdom until it was reconquered about 100 B.C.E. He suggested that implausible and inconsistent New Testament stories about Jesus' birth represent an early Christian attempt to cover up this fact. Matthew 2, for example, invents the story of Herod's wrath to explain Jesus' departure from Bethlehem to Egypt and his eventual home in Nazareth in Galilee. Hirsch also noted that the genealogical tables in Matthew and Luke do not match. Finally, he cited a first-century Jewish nickname for Jesus, "Son of Panther," and the derogatory gossip that Mary had an adulterous affair with a Greek of that name. Hirsch concluded that early Christians knew Jesus was not Jewish but that they covered this up in order to maintain the son-of-David messianic claim.2

  On the surface this might look like a scholarly-if radical-thesis. It is impossible to imagine, however, that Hirsch would ever have posed this question about Jesus' racial background or proposed an "Aryan" answer without heavy antisemitic impetus. That is why it is embarrassing, why this work is never mentioned by the Hirsch Circle today, and why no one since 1945 has pursued this historical topic. In the extremely unlikely case that Jesus had non-Jewish ancestry, no one today would care, and no one, then or now, can possibly remove Jesus from the Jewish religious and cultural tradition in which he grew up.27

  Another work by Hirsch on Judaism has not suffered the same ignominy. In 1936 he wrote a book, Das Alte Testament and die Predigt des Evangeliuuis, which appeared in a fiftieth anniversary edition in 1986, edited by Hans Martin Muller, professor at Tubingen and one of Hirsch's enthusiastic supporters. In this book Hirsch wrestled with the question of how the Old Testament should be understood by Christians. He wrote that as a young man arriving at university, he had already recognized that the Old Testament was "no Christian book."" Therefore, when his Old Testament professors expressed the same point of view, it did not shake his belief system but only helped fill out his knowledge of the legendary components and the borrowings from other religious traditions to be found within the Hebrew Bible.

  Hirsch then argued that within Christian theology, the "flaws" of the Old Testament are not adequately understood or transmitted to contemporary teaching and preaching. Making frequent use of his two favorite words, "honesty" and "truth," he suggested that the Old Testament is an embarrassment to Christianity unless its proper place is recognized. Then he set it up as the very image of legalistic religiosity against which the gospel of the New Testament can properly be understood as God's real truth.

  Hirsch acknowledged that his message might be seen by some as part of the political landscape sown by National Socialism. Some enthusiasts in the antisemitic camp had attacked the Old Testament by calling it a Jewish book, but that was not his impetus.2 In 1937 he commented, "the Old Testament ... is no longer a genuine religious point of contact, and not just since 1933."" He believed that the contribution of historical-critical analysis on the one hand and law versus gospel theology on the other was to reveal Judaism as only a negative counterpoint to the truth of Christianity.

  In 1928, in the midst of controversy over the publication of a revised Luther Bible, Hirsch accepted the idea that Luther had distorted the Old Testament in his German translation in order to make it point more clearly toward the New Testament. In light of these issues, Hirsch eventually concluded: "First, it became necessary to show that the struggle of Jesus against Pharisaism and his crucifixion, pushed forward by the leader of the Jewish church, as well as the Pauline message about Christ as the end of the law ... [all] understood in the sense of the Lutheran dialectic of law and gospelthese ... are the essential, the most decisive expression of the historical relationship of the Old Testament-Jewish and the Christian religion."" This expressed Hirsch's reiterated thesis that law and gospel stand in dramatic opposit
ion to one other, that the absolute essence of Christianity is gospel, that Jesus showed this in his attack on the Pharisees, that Paul showed this in his development of the Christian message, and that Luther retrieved this message in his reformulation of Christian teachings. According to this view, the Old Testament and Jewish religion can only represent evil reliance upon law and religiosity, against which the pure truth of the gospel must constantly be directed.

  Hirsch's goal was to distill this message more fully than Paul or Luther had been able to. "Secondly, it became necessary to place into the correct light the fact that honesty required a giving up of the New Testament use of prophesy as proof. Paul's use of the Abraham legend [claiming Abraham as the father of Christianity] and the entire New Testament treatment of the Old as a Christian book which did not belong to the Jews-all this had to go."" Note that this goal seems very close to that of the most radical Deutsche Christen in Germany: "dejudaizing" the New Testament.

  Is this goal antisemitic? Hirsch himself denied that he was motivated by the politics of 1933, but rather by a long theological tradition now reaching its logical conclusion in his work. Hans Martin Muller, in the process of bringing Hirsch's work once more before the public, acknowledges the question of antisemitism-just long enough to dismiss it. The crisis of Old Testament interpretation, Muller writes, "is not caused, according to Hirsch, through 'factors of most recent date which are outside theology and church' [i.e., the rise of National Socialism] ... but [it is] based in the thing itself.""

  Muller then quotes a passage, circa 1964, in which Hirsch maintained his interpretation of Judaism and Christianity as two antithetical forces: "The relationship of the Old to the New Testament becomes identical with that of law to gospel. One is an earthly religion and the other a living faith in God focused on eternity."' Muller notes approvingly, "Hirsch held fast his entire life to this insight achieved so early. It determined his frequently criticized insistence that the Old Testament equals law and the New Testament gospel."" Muller adds that the motive is clear, as it was for Hirsch already in the 1930s: "No anti-Jewish effect but the concern that Christian preaching could sink into the proclamation of a spiritualized law and an earthly kingdom of God.""

  Charlotte Klein would not agree with Muller's confident assertion that there is no "anti-Jewish effect" in Hirsch's theology of the Old Testament. In the mid-1970s, while teaching a course on Judaism in the period between the Old and New Testament, she discovered that her German students could not recognize the richness and diversity of Jewish thought two thousand years ago. Instead, they turned to the stereotypes provided by Old and New Testament Christian scholars who continued-despite Auschwitz-to propound the biased ideas of their predecessors from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Klein writes, "It is notable how little impression the historical events of the last decades have left on university teachers; only in a very few cases have they led to any attempt at a new interpretation of the relationship between the Jewish community and the early Christian Church and to a better understanding of the role of Judaism."" She goes on to give her view of the typical attitude of these postwar theologians, who assume they have "the right to pass judgment on Judaism, its destiny, and its task in the world" and who make judgments "without bothering about the Jewish interpretation of the sources or considering how the Jews see themselves."" Klein complains that these Christian authors "never use the word 'Torah,' but only its pejorative Greek translation: nontos, 'law.' 'Torah,' however, means much more than 'law': it means instruction, path, God's word and call to Israel as his part of the covenant; it is also Israel's grateful response to this covenant.... [Among German theologians] the Torah is made to appear in Jewish understanding merely as a collection of legal prescriptions and summed up in terms of works and their reward. This preconceived judgment assumes that unmerited grace and 'justification by works' are irreconcilably opposed to one another.""'

  Another scholar, Willy Schottroff, has concluded that Hirsch corrupted his theology by accepting the theological significance of blood. For example, Hirsch wrote, "If the blood spoils, the spirit will also perish, for the spirit of the peoples [Volker] and of humans grows out of the blood.""' Schottroff argues, "It hardly requires further proof that here, in an underhanded way, the antisemitic cliches of the time flow into and ... determine the theological discussion.""

  It is also important to note the nonresponse of Emanuel Hirsch to the issue of antisemitism. He cannot have been unaware of the brutal antisemitic rhetoric of National Socialism when he gave his enthusiastic support to Hitler. When the Deutsche Christen advocated the Aryan Paragraph and consequently suffered widespread opposition, he took their side. When Jewish colleagues were removed at Gottingen University, he raised no protest. On the contrary, by his fervent endorsement of Nazi politics in the university, he revealed his implicit acceptance of the purge of Jews. At no time before or after 1945 did he indicate convincingly that the antisemitism of the Hitler era violated his wishes. He employed the Nazi language and concept of blood, and his attack on the Old Testament as a non-Christian book went further than most. Can we possibly assume in retrospect that no antisemitic prejudice colored his views?

  Hirsch's response to criticism of his book on the Old Testament, written as an "Afterword" in 1937, carries us further. After making sarcastic and dismissive comments toward some of his critics, he suggested that the prominent theologian Johannes Hempel recognized the real issue: the question of the "entire sense" and "entire character" of the Old Testament. Hirsch then explicitly stated his view: "The central point of the Old Testament is belief in the selection of the Israelitic-Jewish people by Yahweh, which takes place in the covenant by which Yahweh becomes God of this Volk and this Volk becomes the Volk of Yahweh. Both in a special sense create a situation in which the entire ordering of the Volk in its service to God and in its morality, law, and justice are placed under the idea of the fulfillment of the law of the group but also under the realization of the will and rule of Yahweh.""Z Hirsch argued that everything in the Old Testament, both law and prophets, fits under this rubric, and that this rubric fits the "Old Testament-Jewish religion" and no other. "We cannot escape the fact that the Old Testament is a document of the Old Testament-Jewish religion, which is another religion and not Christian; and we cannot make of any figures in the Old Testament something other than what they are: they are all believers and servers of a religion which we hold to be untrue.""

  For his part, Hempel tried to show that the Old and New Testaments stand in closer historical and religious relationship to each other than Hirsch had allowed. Hirsch admitted that truth about the "hidden" God can be found in Judaism, as it can in all religions. He even admitted there are particularly close connections between Judaism and Christianity. But this place of the "similar and shared" is exactly where the battle over what is different must be fought: "And this, exactly this, I have defined as the essence of the historical relationship between Old and New Testament. The similar and shared which show up are to me the similar and shared of all religion, and the special historical contact in expression and form of this similarity can only be understood when it is seen as the other side of the most passionate religious opposition known in all of religious history.""

  What Hirsch argued in this debate with Hempel is that the "question of absolutes," the absolute claim of Christianity to truth, ultimately undermines any connection between Christianity and Judaism. He brought Hempel to the point where, Hirsch argued, he must agree that the content of Jewish faith is different and inferior to the content of Christian faith. Then Hirsch concluded that he and Hempel did not really disagree in substance. He was convinced that his emphasis on the antithesis of law and gospel, Old and New Testament, remained the best way to understand the true message of the Christian faith. It is very clear that Muller agrees.

  This, I believe, highlights the connection between Hirsch's theology and mainstream Christian theology, whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century. In fact, Hi
rsch's analysis of the Old Testament has been compared, by mainstream theologians outside the Hirsch Circle, to the work of Bultmann, Friedrich Baumgartel, and Karl Barth. That is because each of these men read the Christian Bible in light of the gospel and with an assumption that Christian truth is absolute, just as did Hirsch." Schottroff notes that Wolfgang Trillhaas and A. H. J. Gunneweg are among the theologians who find Hirsch's Old Testament theology fruitful." He also notes that Hirsch borrowed from Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, published in 1843, Kierkegaard made the Abraham and Isaac story a paradigm for Christian faith. Later he revised that view, however, asserting that Abraham's faith was still "Jewish," that is, rooted in the kingdom of this world, not the kingdom of God."

  Hirsch tied Kierkegaard to his study of the Old Testament by quoting two passages as prologue. One reads as follows: "Christianity could have had no other religion as precursor, for no other but Judaism could establish, by means of negation, so definitely, so decisively what Christianity is."°" Although it may seem shocking to find that Kierkegaard's words suit Hirsch's purposes so well, they add simply one more connection between the nineteenth-century heritage-in this case Danish-and Hirsch's theology. Hirsch, the same man who could write about an "Aryan Jesus," cited Kierkegaard to help establish his negative view of the Old Testament and earned the respect of Muller, Trillhaas, Gunneweg, and other postwar theologians.

  Schottroff is not happy with this result. He emphasizes that a post-Holocaust Christian theology must carefully analyze its own part in the brutal policies of Nazi Germany, rather than ignore and dismiss any connection whatsoever. He also argues that Hirsch's belief in an extreme contrast between Christianity and Judaism does not match the historical evidence. "The Jesus movement and the early church show to be an inner-Jewish messianic grouping, of which there were many. The conflict, which the Jesus tradition documents, was an inner-Jewish, not an anti-Jewish, dispute. And the Bible, by which Jesus and his followers lived and which so decisively formed them, was the Hebrew Bible-a self-evident possession shared by the early church and the synagogue."a° Schottroff clearly thinks Christian theologians should research this common bond rather than stress difference. Hirsch's emphasis on Jews and Judaism as alien to the German Volk and his stress on the antithesis of law-Judaism and gospel-Christianity allowed him to fit very comfortably within the antisemitic world of his fellow Nazis.