+++
A few months ago, I came across this absolutely shocking tweet:
Why do I consider the tweet shocking? Well, this is why:
Lowell C. Green’s book Lutherans Against Hitler: the Untold Story, provides a helpful summary:
One thing that greatly troubled the Germans in 1933 was the ruthless advance of world Communism. Germany stood geographically much closer than the United States to the savage measures of Soviet collectivization and its horrible atrocities. Germans had personal contact with Soviet people who were being terrorized by Bolshevik brutality. Beginning in 1928, Joseph Stalin had begun to push through his program of abolishing private property and collectivizing agriculture and industry under the Soviet state, and he arrested and deported to Siberia those who disagreed with his policy. The Soviet government confiscated the food raised by the peasants; as a result, millions starved to death. The famine became acute among the Volga Germans by 1933. Bruder in Not (Brethren in Need), a Berlin publication, reported that in 1933 the evangelical churches in Germany had received about 100,000 letters from German-Russians describing the famine and appealing for help. Therefore, when the National Socialists presented themselves as the only viable alternatives to Bolshevism and excoriated the Center Party of Heinrich Bruning as being soft on Communism, they won many votes from people who were not otherwise in favor of Nazism (42-43).
Many good people initially were very supportive of Hitler and his National Socialist Party. Especially many prominent voices in the LC-MS:
“In 1933 the church press enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s rise to power. Soon after his accession Walter A. Maier praised Hitler as a natural-born leader who understood the true needs of Germany. In his editorial entitled ‘Hitler Shows the Way,’ Maier lauded Hitlers’s rejection of communism, his attacks on immorality, and the intense national feeling he brought back to the German people. Similarly, the Lutheran Witness welcomed the Nazi regime with an editorial ‘Germany Teaches Us a Lesson.” The lesson learned from the Nazis was the proper method of dealing with communists, nothing that after the Reichstag fire, toleration of communism in Germany had ended. Der Lutheraner defended the infamous book burning in Berlin in April 1933 as a sign of Hitler’s opposition to Bolshevism, and an indication that what was previously tolerated would be no longer. Hans Kirsten, a pastor of the Lutheran Free Churches in Germany who wrote regularly for the Walther League Messenger, thanked God for sending Hitler to deliver the German people from Bolshevism. Instead of curbing freedom, Kirsten viewed Hitler as restoring German freedom by destroying Marxism and wresting the country from the terrible clutches of postwar chaos” (Kenneth C. Barnes, “The Missouri Synod and Hitler’s Germany”)
Seriously, crappy American education aside, anyone who is even moderately informed on this issue will find McManus’s admission startling.
Fast-forward a few months. I come across the piece “I am a Racist” by the eloquent and infamous Corey J. Mahler. In it, he says:
“We are not German, Scottish, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, or American according only to the flesh or as accident of birth; to each man belongs his race as a precious, inestimable, irreplaceable gift from the hand of God and preserved by faithful ancestors. To betray one’s race ranks amongst the greatest of evils, worthy of a place in Hell beside Judas, Brutus, and those who betrayed their family, friends, and nations to the Red Terror. Once lost, a race may never be recovered. Our race ranks among our most precious possessions; we should be — and are — willing to make any sacrifice to preserve this precious deposit God has entrusted to our care. Against all the prophets of modernism, against all the evangelists of internationalism, and against all the acolytes of Marxism, Communism, and Judaism, we will maintain both the reality and paramount importance of race. A Turk cannot create more Germans or a Haitian more Americans any more than a rat could create more eagles or a gorilla more tigers. It is God Who has set the borders of nations, and He has done so to preserve the purity of blood without which no nation can endure. Those who seek to or corrupt the blood of a nation are chief among murderers, for they murder not just individuals, but entire families, clans, tribes, nations, futures. The internationalizing Jew and the miscegenating Marxist are both enemies of all that is good and beautiful and true. Against such evils, no weapon or tool is morally impermissible.”
Mahler says more, but this is the core argument of the piece, an argument that I will not address here.
I will however, note that the other day I, unaware of his piece at the time, tweeted out the following:
I received an interesting reply to that from the oxymoronic “Lutheran Leftist”, which I countered with my own heartfelt reply:
He said more, and you can click on that tweet to see what he said, but I don’t think it matters.
Leftists hate the 7th commandment (well, all of them, but this is what they are best known for):
You shall not steal.
What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not take our neighbor’s money or possessions, or get them in any dishonest way, but help him to improve and protect his possessions and income.
They’ll take a hard pass on that.
What am I getting at then? Do I really need to tell you?
Now, perhaps you want to say to me:
“Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every fire started has an equal and opposite fire? Why do you think socialism and communism arose in the first place?”
But that is fallacious. It is one thing to brazenly assert and defend something like: “Men have the right to be ruled by the law of God. By a godly prince who punishes evil.” And, given the evil that remains in the world even among Christians, it is another thing to more meekly state that it is good that men who call themselves Christians must, for the most part, be permitted to worship Him according to the dictates of their conscience (in accordance with their imperfect understandings of the Bible).
Obviously it is yet another thing entirely to completely exclude God from the equation, which is the only history of creation-and-authority hating socialism and communism that we know. By the way, can you see what is happening here?:
So, a few questions:
-Did you, btw, read my post about forbidden reading and hate facts the other day?
-Do you understand why I titled this blog post as I did? Who started the fire?
-Do you think history repeats itself, or at least rhymes?
-Given that I have written a blog post like this, does that necessarily mean that my position is the same as Mr. Mahler’s? If so, why? Do you think he would/should consider me a friend or enemy? (if you would, do me the honor of reading this before answering)
-Do you think it is a bad idea for me to listen to regularly listen to Leftist podcasts in order to check and constantly re-affirm my biases, my unchecked assumptions and more well-thought-out presuppositions?
-Do you think socialists and communists should be members of good standing in LCMS churches today? Why?
Thanks for reading.
FIN
theology like a child 