Before Auschwitz
Subtitle: what Christian theology must learn from the rise of Nazism
By: Paul R. Hinlicky
Publisher: Cascade Books
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Eugene, Oregon
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
ISBN-13: 9781620321034
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: National socialism and religion; Doctrinal Theology; History; Protestant churches
Other titles: What Christian theology must learn from the rise of Nazism
Description: What can Christian theology in North America learn from the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s? This book explores an explosion of scholarship in recent decades that has reopened questions once thought to be settled about the relationships between Nazism, Liberalism, and Christianity. In the process of criticizing the retrospective fallacy and urging a properly hermeneutical historiography, its method in historical theology causes us to reflect back upon our tacit commitments, suggesting that we are closer to fascism than we are aware and that, although the devil never shows its face twice in exactly the same way, the particular hubris of grasping after "final solutions" along biopolitical lines-that is, the "racially scientific" version of fascism that was Nazism-is and remains near at hand today, within our horizon of possibilities unrecognized in just the ways that it was unrecognized by Germans before Auschwitz. The book takes a fresh look at the theology of Adolf Hitler and finds themes that are disturbingly familiar. It summons to the renewal of Christian theology after Christendom in the form of critical dogmatics, where the motif of the Beloved Community replaces the fallen idol descended from Charlemagne.--Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-228) and index.
Table of contents: title: Can theology learn from its past?; title: Hitler's theologians; title: The peril of conservative apologetics; title: Seeing how we saw; title: The not so strange theology of Adolf Hitler; title: Contested topics in theology; title: Inheritance, decay, and renewal; title: Appendix: "The philosophy of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Hitlerism" (1937) / Samuel Štefan Osuský.