Dr. Carl Trueman is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

From the blog at http://www.reformation21.org/blog/.org (August 2010) he writes three short posts:

Luther and the Jews I: The Problem

Most preachers and teachers have what one student of mine calls `the candy cane class’ — that sermon or lecture which is in the back pocket, so to speak, committed to memory and there to be pulled out at a moment’s notice if, on a Sunday morning, somebody requests that you preach or teach at the last minute. For me, it’s what I call my Luther shtick: a brief account of his life up to 1518, culminating in an exposition and application of his teaching on what it is that makes a theologian of the cross.

Some years ago, I became aware, however, that each time I gave this talk, one of the first questions to come from the audience would be some variation on this basic theme: `But didn’t Luther hate the Jews and write pamphlets about them that led to the Holocaust?’

Of course, if like Rousas Rushdoony — for those at the creepier end of the Christian Life and Worldview spectrum, the doyen of historical scholars (`scholar’ being their term for him, not mine) — you don’t think the Holocaust happened, this isn’t a problem (see my posts of some years back); back on Planet Earth, however, the question has some urgency for those of us who want to make the case for Luther’s continued relevance. We can’t really dodge this one by referring to a few skinhead historians or writing foaming-at-the-mouth taxi-driver style blogs accusing our opponents of being educationally sub-normal bleeding heart liberals.

Indeed, given the fact that racism and genocide played prominent and evil roles in the history of the last 100 years, such a question is, of course, always more than just a question of the `Didn’t Luther suffer from constipation?’ variety. If Luther did hate the Jews, then surely he was a racist; and if he was a racist, couldn’t this be seen as a good gauge of his theology? And should we not therefore dismiss it as bad — at best a dead end, at worst an ideology of evil?

Certainly this view has found some significant supporters. Most famously, the American journalist, William Shirer, a man who witnessed the rise of Hitler while working in Berlin in the 1930s, proposed a positive and direct connection between Luther and the German anti-Semitism which fueled the Holocaust. Then, if you care to spend any time researching Holocaust Denial on the web, on the myriad anti-Semitic sites out there, you will find quite a few which link to Luther’s writing on the Jews. In addition, certain strands of the New Perspective on Paul, have posited links between Luther’s theology of justification and racism. This is all significant evidence that, yes, there may well be a huge theological problem here.

To put the case in a nutshell, the piece of writing which stands at the heart of the question is On the Jews and Their Lies, a work from 1543. Now, anyone who has read any of my recent posts will know that, when it comes to uncritical fans of Luther, I am right up there with the best of them; but even for a benighted Lutherophile like myself, this book is vile. Its rhetoric is revolting, and many of its suggestions — not least locking up Jews in their synagogues and burning the buildings to the ground — are not only horrific in and of themselves but, in light of events in Europe between 1933 and 1945, horribly prophetic.

Thus, the question I became accustomed to being asked at Sunday School hour is indeed a good one: did Luther and his theology in some way inspire or cause the Holocaust? If he did so, and this connects directly to his theology, then clearly such theology is morally repugnant.

There is the problem in a nutshell. Tomorrow, I hope to offer some lines of reflection that, if not absolving Luther of being in this regard a vile bigot, at least point to the fact that the tirade of 1543 is an aberration from his overall theology, not an integral part of it.

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Luther and the Jews II: The Context

In my last post, I tried to summarise what we might call `the Shirer thesis’ which posits tight connection between Luther and the Holocaust. In this post, I want to start to offer an avenue of critique.

The first thing any historian needs to do when looking at a text is ask: `Is this text typical of the time or unusual?’ The typical never really needs any explanation, after all — it’s exactly what one expects, what everyone was doing at the time etc. Rather, it is the unusual, `the dog that did not bark,’ as Sherlock Holmes once said, that peaks the interest. So, is Luther’s treatise typical or atypical of the time in which it was written?

In fact, sad though it is to acknowledge, the 1543 tirade against the Jews is pretty typical of medieval and Renaissance rants against Judaism. Of course, nasty comments about Jews are the stock in trade of Christian writers right back to the Apostolic Fathers of the late first and early second centuries (e.g., The Didache; the Martyrdom of Polycarp); but by the late Middle Ages anti-Jewish diatribes were something of an established form, with their own themes and idioms.

Looked at in this way, Luther is not actually doing anything unusual. In fact, he even uses typical elements of late medieval anti-Jewish literature: for example, he talks about the `Blood Libel,’ a claim that Jews kidnapped Christian children and used them for ritual sacrifices. It was nonsense, of course, and most unpleasant of Luther to use it; but in so using it, he nonetheless indicated that his work was not unique but part of an ongoing tradition.

The second thing a historian needs to ask is: are the categories of the sixteenth century the same as today? Put more simply: we think of the hatred of Jews as an example of racism, and racism is the bogus idea that someone if inferior based on the biological category of race. Is this the case with Luther? Did he write against Jews because he was racist in the modern sense?

The answer is no. Race as we think of it today is really a concept of relatively modern provenance, something that arguably emerges in the nineteenth century as interest grew in biology, evolution etc. The ideology of the Holocaust was undoubtedly racist in this sense: the Nuremberg laws of 1935, which effectively paved the way in judicial terms for what became the Final Solution, made it clear that conversion to Christianity did not exempt someone: for the Nazis the matter was one of blood (albeit built on completely fallacious science) not of religion. For Luther, however, Judaism was a religious category. He had no real grasp of racial identity and no concern for the kind of racial issues which dominated Nazi ideology. And this points some of the way towards a resolution of our consideration of the Shirer thesis which we shall state in Part III

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Luther and the Jews III: Lessons

In yesterday’s post, I pointed to the fact that, while we today find Luther’s 1543 work, On the Jews and their Lies, extraordinarily vile and offensive, it was, sadly, in many ways a rather conventional piece for the time. I also noted that Luther was also not operating with racial categories: he considered Jews evil because they opposed the gospel, not because they were racially inferior. Conversion to Christianity would have solved the problem. This does not make his hate any more acceptable, but it does mean that the road between Luther and Auschwitz is a complicated one which defies direct and simplistic attempts to make him one of the primary historical culprits.

I also noted on Friday that it is the unusual, not the usual, which is often most interesting to the historian. Luther’s 1543 treatise is not unusual; but this was not the only book he wrote on the Jews; and the other book, the earlier one, is much more unusual. That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) is a remarkable piece of work. In it, far from calling for the Jews to be incinerated in their own places of worship, Luther calls on Christians to be good and loving neighbours to them, to help them, to extend hospitality to them, to reach out to them with the love of Christ. In the context of the times, this is what we would now call an incredibly progressive position. So why the change? From enlightened gentlemen to foaming at the mouth extremist in just 20 years?

The reason lies with Luther’s understanding of the times in which he was living. Scholars have become increasingly aware over the years that Luther is part of a late medieval culture of eschatological expectancy. To put it simply: he thought his rediscovery of the gospel was a sign that history was about to end, with the triumph of the church and the return of Christ.

This connects to his early attitude to the Jews. The 1523 treatise was written in the context of great hope for the gospel, and his advice then is to reach out to them as positively as possible, to win them for Christ. When we move forward to 1543, by contrast, Luther is old, ill, and, above all, disillusioned both by the divisions among the Reformers and the way in which the gospel has not carried all before it. In such a context, he looks for those who are responsible; and, among them, he sees the Jews, those who have the Holy Scriptures but who adamantly refuse to see Christ therein. It is this that drives him to write such a bombastically bitter and hateful treatise against them.

What lessons can we draw from this? First, I would suggest that the connection between Luther and the Holocaust is clearly very complicated. Luther was no racist in the modern terms because he did not have the categories; rather, he was fairly typical of the kind of anti-Jewish sentiment which later morphed through a complex of contexts into modern, racial, anti-Semitism. His treatise of 1543 is grim reading and has been appropriated by various neo-Nazi and racist groups; but the history of textual reception is different from the original textual intention. This, of course, is not to excuse the 1543 work or ameliorate its viciousness; it is simply to point out that the story is more complicated than many have made it out to be.

Secondly, there is no necessary connection between his doctrine of justification and his hatred of Jews. Indeed, in the early years, his doctrine of justification was part of what made him break with the standards of his day and reach out to the Jewish community. The connection is rather more with his eschatology, and the failures of the Reformation project as a whole. This is important because his hatefulness to the Jews does not mean we cannot learn positively from things he said and did elsewhere.

Third, the whole matter should be a salutary warning that Christians need to pray continually that they will finish well. It is sad that Luther’s 1543 treatise overshadows that of 1523, but quite understandable, given the content. What a tragedy that a man used for such great good in the church could also become in popular culture associated with something as vile and evil as the Holocaust. Few of us, I expect, will make errors as public and influential as his; but that is a sign rather of singular lack of importance and stature on our part, not any particular moral superiority. Those with the greatest gifts in the church are often those with the greatest flaws. As we age, and as the dreams and aspirations of youth are snuffed out one by one like so many candles, and as the darkness of death starts to encroach, the temptation to bitterness and recrimination no doubt increases. At that point, more than any other, we need to seek grace to remain faithful and gracious. The sins of youth are terrible enough; for some, the sins of old age are even worse.