Monday, March 24, 2008
Very thoughtful piece by Dexter Van Zile of CAMERA: Keeping the Anastasis Empty
...One recurring image invoked in these sermons is the Empty Tomb which, alongside Christ's appearance to his mother and disciples, is offered as proof of Christ's resurrection and God's power and sovereignty, and concern for humanity. The potent image of the Empty Tomb transforms Christ's suffering and crucifixion into a story about victory over death and human sin.
For all its potency, however, the Empty Tomb is not a symbol that can be invoked in the modern era without a wounding, sorrowful wince. While Christians are used to singing about the angel who rolled the stone away, recent history requires them to consider what they will find behind that stone.
During the Holocaust, respectable Christians throughout Europe marched two-thirds of Europe's Jews and millions of other victims into the Empty Tomb of Christ. Baptized Christians forced Jews to dig their own graves, and then shot them standing alongside the pits they dug. When the murderers realized they could save space in these graves by instructing their victims to lie down in the pits before shooting them, they did that too. The officer who came up with this method of killing was given a promotion...
...Today - despite sporadic attempts by Christian scholars and activists to ensure other wise - the Empty Tomb is again being filled, this time with rockets, mortar rounds and fertilizer ready to be converted into explosives for the next round of attacks against Israeli civilians.
These items have been loaded into the Empty Tomb in broad daylight by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, in full view of anti-Israel activists in so-called peacemaking groups who tell the world that Israeli concessions and withdrawals will lead to peace in the Middle East - despite the fact that Israel has been attacked from every inch of territory from which it has withdrawn since Oslo...
I agree with both the rhetoric and the content here, though many in the pews are far less deserving of this rhetoric than are those among the leadership of mainline churches. Imo, from the pews there is too much naive acceptance, an acceptance both of what is heard from their leadership and what is heard from the MSM (Reuters, AP, BBC, etc.) and other outlets as well (e.g., academe) - and to be sure those in the pews cannot be absolved of that naivete and its consequences. Nonetheless, it's primarily the ecclesial and lay leadership that reflects a more knowledgeable, more active and more conscious involvement in promulgating poor and malign perceptions when it comes to the M.E.
“The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.”
“In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international Nazi church – a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols – the swastika and the naked sword.”
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt October 27th, 1941
It was not a respectable or true Christianity which persecuted the Jews and other innocents during WWII in Europe, it was an Atheistic Nazi State - "National Socialism" - which did so. In order to proceed with his evil, Hitler first ensured a separation of God from Church in his Nazi state rather than a separation of Church from state.
I believe we are witnessing a similar but earlier stage separation of God from Church in some mainline Protestant denominations in America today, and that really scares me; but don't confuse the beauty and the truth of Christ's empty tomb with the death-wish of totalitarianism.
The attempts to connect christianity to Holocaust are simply wrong. In germany it is traditional to baptize your child soon after birth. The only religious nazi that I know of was Hess. (And he belonged to an egyptian branch of christianity.)
There were probably more religious christians, but they where a small minority.
You can't blame christianity for the Holocaust. When you read the diaries of Goebbels, you'll see that pure envy has been the cause of the Holocaust.
If you want to blame christianity for something, use the crusades - as everyone else does.
That connection of the empty tomb of jesus to the graves of jews is sick. Sorry.
It is even more sick, than those connections of israels 40 years in the desert and the palestinians today.