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https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://medium.com/the-panopticon-publication/many-western-christians-are-going-the-way-of-the-reich-church-c2430d5c803c>
"There's an internet adage known as Godwin's Law that states the longer an
internet argument progresses, the probability that someone will invoke Hitler
or the Nazis into the discussion will inevitably happen.
It's a fair point given that anything that most people despise in the modern
era will result in being compared to the Third Reich or Hitler. I've never been
one of those guys fascinated by World War II, despite my grandfather having
been a paratrooper during the war. Instead, when I became a Christian I started
reading a Lutheran pastor and theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I first
read his seminal work,
The Cost of Discipleship, and was floored by the
concepts within which led me to read every single one of his works, including
his letters from prison. Bonhoeffer landed in jail—and was subsequently
executed—because he was an anti-Nazi dissident who worked to overthrow the
Third Reich and started the Confessing Church.
The Confessing Church became a small resistance movement that rejected state
control and insisted that Christ — not the nation, not the Führer — was the
head of the church. Bonhoeffer warned that when the church confuses moral
clarity with political expediency, it forfeits its witness entirely. Studying
Bonhoeffer's life and witness fascinated me and he quickly became one of my
heroes. But to study his life honestly also requires understanding why he began
his resistance and what had happened to the German Church writ large — which is
where, I suppose, Godwin's Law enters this article, not by design, but by
history.
Many people wonder how an entire nation of so-called Christians and the German
Protestant Church could get behind Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the murder
of six million Jews. The truth is the German Protestant Church didn't collapse
all at once.
It drifted."
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
