By David P. Goldman in PJ Media
Baden-Baden has been a spa town
since Roman times, drawing tourists for its therapeutic waters, and more
recently for a festival hall that features prominent classical artists. It also
has a Faberge museum, which seems appropriate at this time of year: Christmas
in Germany is like a brightly decorated eggshell with no egg inside. The forms
of the holiday are merrily observed, but not the faith. To declare one’s belief
in a personal God counts for proof of mental defect here as well as in most
parts of Europe, especially among educated people. Nonetheless there is more
faith left in Germany’s Protestant establishment than among America’s mainline
Protestant churches, and it’s something for a visiting Jew to rejoice about
here at Christmas time.
The Presbyterian Church USA, the
flagship church of America’s fading Protestant mainline, voted to boycott the
state of Israel earlier this year, and nearly voted to prohibit the use of the word “Israel” in its prayers.
The new Marcionism of the mainline churches justifies its
aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies by rejecting a link between the living
Jewish people and the God of Abraham. By contrast, both Pope John Paul II of
blessed memory and Benedict XVI emphasized that God’s covenant with the Jewish
people never was revoked.
That is also the firmly-stated view
of the German Evangelical Church, the main body of German Protestantism, and it
was front-page news in Die Welt, one of the country’s quality
dailies, this morning. Its new chairman, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, told the
newspaper,
“We speak today of the continuing
Election of Israel. The new covenant for which Jesus Christ stands does not in
fact replace God’s old covenant with the people of Israel. On the contrary,
Jesus Christ brings the so-called heathen into the covenant. For us Christians
he is the person in whom we experience God. But that in no way diminishes God’s
covenant with Israel.”
Dr. Bedford-Strohm emphasized that
his church had moved beyond Luther, the founder of German Protestantism,
because Luther’s Jew-hatred could not be dismissed as a “minor error.” He puts
the American Protestant mainline to shame. There is Jew-hatred in Germany, to
be sure, mainly among Muslim immigrants. But when it showed itself, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced it before a
rally in Berlin, emphasizing that anti-Semitism could not hide behind attacks
on the state of Israel.
Last October, Dr. Bedford-Strohm
declared that Israel’s right to exist was the “absolute precondition” for
reconciliation in the Middle East. I don’t know his politics — and I don’t much
care — I take note that he is righteous with respect to the Jewish people, unlike
some of his American peers.
It isn’t just Merkel, or the German
Protestants. When German secularists tried to ban circumcision, the German Catholic Church backed the country’s tiny
Jewish community. German attitudes towards the Jews are complex. “They will
never forgive us for Auschwitz,” quipped an Israeli psychiatrist, and many
Germans are tempted to equate Israel’s occupation of Judea and Samaria with the
Nazi occupation of Europe. (When a German tells me this, I take out my leather
wallet, wink, and say, “Human skin — just like the Nazis.” That ends the
conversation). As post-nationalist liberals, Germans are horrified by any sort
of national feeling, and feel more comfortable with the Israeli left (whose
novelists sell here like Pfannkuchen) than with religious nationalists like me.
Nonetheless, there is still a mood
of repentance that must be acknowledged–in contrast to the smug, narcissistic
progressivism of the Presbyterian Church USA, for example. I’m no Christian,
and I don’t love my enemies, but I respect the grandchildren of my enemies who
strive to come to grips with the past.
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