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 The left is the most Christ centered religion in the world; they are perfectly centered on making the historic Jesus Christ and the faith He inspired in millions, go away.
In his new book, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Bible, Joe Keysor, a scholar and authentic truth seeker who has lived in various countries and speaks several foreign languages, goes toe to toe with some serious advocates of the "Christians are dangerous potential fascists" theory, such as Jim Walker, owner of the website "Hitler's Christianity", and Richard Steigmann-Gall, author of “The Holy Reich.” Keysor points out that while Christians have effectively fought back against anti-Christian attacks like the novel The Da Vinci Code, the myth of Hitler as a Christian has gone largely unchallenged. He believes this is because few know what Christianity really is and even fewer approach the issue from the standpoint that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that tampering with it has dire consequences.
In a world in which Christ’s message has been distorted, to the extent that even ruthless baby killers like George Tiller can serve as an usher in a church, the anti-Christian movement has had easy going. After all, Hitler confessed Christian faith during his political campaign, signed a Concordat with the Vatican very early on (1933) conceding the ecclesiastic and hierarchical authority of the Church, and had his minions participate in photo-ops with various church leaders.
The Germanic Christians helped Hitler sell his ideology of Germans as a master race through their doctrine of "Christian positivism," which Christians had a duty to support Hitler. This was based on two crazy doctrinal notions: 1) that Jesus had come to do battle with the Jews, and 2) that the Nordic "race" was chosen by God to oppose Jewry.
But Keysor points out that these doctrines have nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible, according to which Jesus was sent to die in atonement for sin and the Jews were the first to whom He ministered and for whom He died. This seems elementary to Biblical Christians, but the Bible has been adulterated since Christ's time and Christianity has been distorted by false teachers trying to make Christ fit their agenda.
Keysor notes something that no other historians seem to have noticed despite the fastidious research into the Third Reich, namely, the salient effect of secular influences on Hitler and the major secularizing influence of modernist theology on biblical Christianity in Germany long before Hitler emerged. Keysor points out that the secular philosophers who influenced Hitler most were Kant, Fichte and Hegel, as well as certain others. But the Folkish tradition, "with its uniquely German interpretations of Darwinism, added immensely to the respectability of the movement" as "...articulated in the writings of the eminent German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel."
Keysor writes that, while historians constantly point to supposed religious fanaticism (Crusades, Inquisition) as a dangerous ingredient in politics, no one points out that "the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol Pot, are much more relevant to our own times and even some centuries ago, and much greater in terms of the numbers slain..." and yet they "are not held up as examples of the dangers inherent in trying to organize society by reason alone."
In the context of Nazi history, Keysor may be unique in his analysis of the state of Christianity in the 1930s, which he shows had been practically decimated by the teachings of such 17th and 18th century theologians as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf Harnacke and Julius Wellhausen, all of whom "diligently undermined the Bible and the historic Christian faith and had a great responsibility for the Protestant churches' collapse before National Socialism." Thus, ironically, "while nominal 'Christians' did in fact prepare the ground for Hitler's rise, they did so by no means as true representatives of Christ, but in fact by destroying faith."
By 1933, German theologian Rudolf Bultman "dispensed with Christ altogether and advocated nothing more than secular existentialism,... he rejected original sin, any supernatural influence of God's Holy Spirit, the divinity, atoning death, resurrection and the return of Christ."
In those few churches that had managed to hang on to the last vestiges of Christianity, there were heroes, some of whom paid with their lives for their opposition to Hitler's extermination of the Jews.
Keyser shows that, once Hitler's intentions were clear, it was no longer sympathy for him (which many credulous churches felt initially) but rather fear that brought Christians (both Bible-believing and liberal) to silence and extorted loyalty from clerics.
This book is a vital component in the arsenal for combating one of the most insidious lies and distortions of the Left.
Today as we contemplate the murder of George Tiller, a late-term abortionist who was serving as an usher in his church, curiously, it is clear that next to nothing has been learned from the history lesson that was the Third Reich.
Joe Keysor knows better than most why that is so.
Donald Hank is a former language teacher, currently operating a technical translation agency in Wrightsville, PA. A former language teacher, he holds an undergraduate degree in French and German from Millersville State University (PA), a Master’s degree in Russian language and literature from Kutztown State College (also in PA), has studied Chinese for 3 years in Taiwan at the Mandarin Training Center, and is self-taught in other languages, having logged a total of 8 years abroad in total immersion situations. He is also the founder of Lancaster-York Non-Custodial Parents, a volunteer organization that provides Christian counseling for non-custodial parents.
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