Posted on 06/04/2006 11:02:13 PM PDT by goldstategop
"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did *you* remain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that the man who voiced it was, as he put it, "a son of the German people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record for shedding Jewish blood.
And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League said that the pope had "uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise reported that he "did not make any reference to modern anti-Semitism."
In truth, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti-Semites are driven by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of God-based ethics they first brought to the world.
"Deep down, those vicious criminals" -- he was speaking of Hitler and his followers -- "by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world."
The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with "a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful." Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience, would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and Auschwitz is what it leads to.
"Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God in Darfur?
For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being murdered or raped or abused?
The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be a world without freedom -- and life without freedom would be meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Gestapo.
The God "who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn't God's fault. He didn't build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from committing their horrific crimes.
It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on 9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens when the God who says "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and women refuse to listen.
Yes indeed. WWI was not initiated by Germany, although they did end up being the considered historical 'evil', and those of the group of nations planted the seedbed of what then followed. NOT an excuse for what happened but WWII cannot be discussed or described without the previous 2 + decades being part of the discussion.
This same question can be asked of the Pope during WW II.
A simplistic perspective.
In studying Scriptural perspectives on good and evil, there are two types of good: human good and divine good. Human good in even the best of conditions is temporary and only lasts maybe several years to a century. Divine good has eternal consequence. Divine good is recognized in heaven. Human good is merely parlayed into evil by HaSatan in his attempt to counterfeit perfect environment.
None of the biblical miracles violate free will or the laws of nature. In a fallen world, Man's responsibility is to perfect it in partnership with God. The world has never been a paradise. One day it will become that and more but only if we are worthy of it. Then too, the Messiah will come.
God creates both good and evil. Evil in its positive form, is God being a strict judge. The world would not long endure if it had only justice so mercy became its handmaiden. This is the good side of God as a loving parent, concerned with but never indifferent to human welfare. We need both qualities to overcome our limitations just as God and the laws of nature assure that chaos will never overwhelm the ordained order that ensures the world will continue to exist. Maybe the next world will be perfect; but as long as we are mortal, we can see only part of the picture in front of us - never the whole of it.
Good and evil are issues of morality. Satan has a policy of evil in counterfeiting God's plans in an effort to substitute himself for God and also in an attempt to overturn the immutable judgment of God.
Evil in the since of chaos was created by God, but not all good and evil is God breathed. On the contrary, most good and evil works made by man are counterfeit to His plan and will. Accordingly, they will simply be burned up upon divine judgment.
The words for good in reference to mercy might be better translated as 'kind'. His judgment is perfect. His Holiness is composed of His perfect Righteousness and His Perfect Judgment. Wherever He encounters unrighteousness, His perfect righeousness demands perfect judgment.
There are no dualistic powers. There is only One God and all flows from Him. Then again, we humans cannot see all His mysteries. We do not know why there is suffering and hardship and cruelty in the world. We can alleviate it with kindness and a helping hand and with love. We can mitigate the evils of nature but with the evils of Man we have to master our own passions. It is the only way to bring the world we dream of into being. And only then will God complete it through us and with us.
To stop all evil, God would have to kill us all. We live under grace.
Thanks for posting this and for the fascinating discussion!
I have always dealt with that issue in this way:
To have the chance for growth, we have to live in a universe where change does happen.
Change is not always good.
Yet even the horrid things that happen allow humans to act in the very best way, by reaching out.
In very real ways, we have the poor, the needy, the injured, the unlovely in part so that we can be those who reach out, and be those who are in need.
None of this could happen in a static universe.
For some people, the fact that bad things happen to good people is evidence that either there is no God or that God is not loving.
The answer God gave Job is "When you can see things with my wisdom, then I'll explain it to you." Or, put in another, ruder way, "This is the way I set it up. Deal with it."
And our choices are simple. We can curse God and die, or grow into the people we wants us to be.
Auschwitz is an example of Man spitting at God. The tsunami is an example of a world where things are not static.
We have the freedom, because of the way the universe is created, to respond to both of them, in whichever way we choose.
Which Pope ?
"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week.
Well HE was one of the Hitler Youth, NOT me.
EXCELLENT COMMENT!~
I hope for the sake of your credibility and character that you can prove he actually did that.
Oooh, more potshots at the Vatican. Perhaps Pius XII was a little busy saving 860,000 Jews from sonderbehandlung in the death camps.
A big AMEN to that!
I remember reading a bit about biblical mythology in relation to this. In Revelations, there is a passage that an angel eats a scroll that tastes sweet but is bitter when swallowed. This scroll is the title deed to the earth and whoever posesses it is able to control the events on earth. Adam was first given it and paradise resulted. But then Adam fell into temptation with Eve and as a result Satan was given the title deed. Now, Satan is also known as "The Prince and Power of the Air." This makes sense since the majority of the worst natural disasters are tornados and hurricanes, of which Satan might cause them. Now admittedly God has helped at times, but only in extreme situations (slavery of the Jews in Egypt, Sodom and Gammorah, Noah, etc.)but ultimately Satan has been given the majority of control and influence.
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