{"id":850,"date":"2009-06-29T07:32:26","date_gmt":"2009-06-29T14:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=850"},"modified":"2009-06-29T07:32:26","modified_gmt":"2009-06-29T14:32:26","slug":"eschatology-the-holocaust-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2009\/06\/29\/eschatology-the-holocaust-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Eschatology: The Holocaust Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently we watched the movie Freedom Writers<\/a>, which is about a high school teacher who works with inner city students.\u00a0 It’s a little hokey, but not a bad movie.\u00a0 At one point, the teacher brings the kids to a holocaust museum, and they meet with some camp survivors.\u00a0 A somewhat incongruous thought struck me at that moment:\u00a0 can my theology handle the Holocaust?<\/p>\n

Of course, no theology, no reasonable system, can “handle” the Holocaust.\u00a0 That kind of evil by definition defies reason.\u00a0 What I mean is, does my theology provide a system of justice that can account for the victims\u00a0 of the Holocaust?<\/p>\n

I’m starting to think of this disturbing question as the “Holocaust Test.”\u00a0 A theology that can’t pass the Holocaust Test seems too small.\u00a0 Human history is filled with holocausts.\u00a0 The Nazi Holocaust is unique in its focus on the Jewish people.\u00a0 Yet we can also speak of African slavery, of communist dictatorships and gulags, of the killing fields of Cambodia, of Rwanda and Uganda, and so on.\u00a0 What does our theology say about the innocent blood — the blood of men, women, and young children — that cries out from the ground of human violence?<\/p>\n

I’m afraid the very conservative brand of Evangelical theology I’ve inherited fails the Holocaust Test.\u00a0 The individual eschatology in this system is simple:\u00a0 those who have heard and responded to the Gospel are in Heaven; those who have not are in Hell.\u00a0 Anne Frank, and the millions of other Jewish children who died in the Holocaust, simply are lost (assuming they passed the “age of accountability,” whatever that might be).\u00a0 All of the Jewish adults who died in the Nazi camps, simply are lost.\u00a0\u00a0 We should state the logic of this theology in terms that are as unflinching as its teaching:\u00a0 the residents of Berkenau and Auschwitz went straight from the gas chambers to the flames of Hell.<\/p>\n

Obviously, I’m not the first person, or the first Christian, to realize that this view of eschatology is grossly inadquate.\u00a0 There are many ways of thinking about Christian eschatology that avoid the simplistic poles of hyper-exclusivism and universalism.\u00a0 On the Roman Catholic side, after Vatican II, there has been much reflection on how the grace extended in Christ through the Church can spill over to non-Catholics and non-professing-Christians.\u00a0 On the Protestant side, there is Barth, who was a universalist of sorts, and more “evangelical” voices such as Billy Graham, John Stott, Dallas Willard, and others who are by no means universalists, but who strongly suggest that the mystery of God’s salvation cannot be circumscribed by what is visible to us in the human context.<\/p>\n

The Holocaust Test forces us to tread in some difficult waters.\u00a0 I don’t think the Biblical witness, or the Tradition, or reason or experience, support true universalism.\u00a0 It seems abhorrent to me to suggest that Anne Frank and Hitler share precisely the same fate, whether in Hell or <\/em>in Heaven.\u00a0 Freedom means that we have freedom to reject God, and many do reject God, which is the definition of being “lost,” now and in the eschaton.\u00a0 But, at the same time, the crabbed little “four spiritual laws” view of individual eschatology can’t possibly be the whole story if there is such a thing as divine universal Justice.<\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently we watched the movie Freedom Writers, which is about a high school teacher who works with inner city students.\u00a0 It’s a little hokey, but not a bad movie.\u00a0 At one point, the teacher brings the kids to a holocaust museum, and they meet with some camp survivors.\u00a0 A somewhat incongruous thought struck me at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,26,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-science-technology","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-dI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}