Matthew 16:21-28
Matthew 16:5-12
The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for his two volume work DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, published in 1835
“I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”
In 1944 Friedrich A. von Hayek published the book
“The Road to Serfdom” (back page of the book)
“The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production.
For F.A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors
of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.”
Erwin Lutzer in his book «Hitler’s Cross» Subtitle: HOW THE CROSS WAS USED TO PROMOTE THE NAZI AGENDA writes:
“The story of Nazi Germany is one of conflict between two saviors and two crosses. “Dein Reich komme,” Hitler prayed publicly – “Thy Kingdom come.” But to whose kingdom was he referring?
“Some people think that philosophers sit in ivory towers and spin theories that have little to do with the life of the ordinary, hardworking citizen. But in point of fact, philosophers have often ruled entire countries (Karl Marx is but one example).
Germany has had its philosophers too, brilliant men who gained a wide audience through their teachings and writings. They prepared the soil and planted the seeds of nationalism and fanned hatred of the Jews. Whether they knew it or not, they were preparing the way for Hitler. Let’s meet just two of them.
GEORG HEGEL (1770-1831) held the chair of philosophy at Berlin University. His dialectical philosophy, which inspired Marx, preached the glorification of the state, saying it was “God walking on earth”. Individual rights, he believed, simply got in the way of the state as supreme authority. The state, he said, is “the moral universe….and has the foremost right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state…for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges.”
War, Hegel taught, was the great purifier that was necessary for the ethical health of the people. As for private moral virtues such as humility and patience, these must never stand in the way of the state’s agenda; indeed the state must crush such “innocent flowers.”
As might be expected, Hegel denied the uniqueness of Christianity and argued that the Old Testament had to be rejected because of its Jewish roots. A pure Christian faith could be had only by a pure race, namely the Germans.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, wrote a bitter assault on Christianity accusing it of weakness and of being the cause of Germany’s ills. In his ANTICHRIST, he wrote, “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one moral blemish of mankind…I regard Christianity as the most seductive lie that has yet existed.”
Nietzsche wrote: ‘Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead and we have killed him.’
Nietzsche faced the frightful implications of atheism without blinking. Listen to how he describes what the death of God means for man: ‘How shall we, the murderers of all murderers comfort ourselves? Who will wipe the blood off us? What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?
Nietzsche knew that with God’s death there was no answer for man’s guilt, no one to wipe the blood from our hands. Since God was dead, a successor would have to be found. Nietzsche knew that in an atheistic state the strong would rule the weak. A coming elite would rule from which this superman would spring. He and those around him would become ‘lords of the earth.’
With God out of the way, humans would be unrestrained; there would be no fear of judgment, nor belief in the virtues of morality. When humans realize that history was based on raw power, there would be universal madness.
Nietzsche reinforced the prevailing philosophy in Germany that a genius was above the law, that he should not be bound by the morals of ordinary men.”
Viktor Frankl, the great psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust has this so say:
“The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or, as the Nazis like to say, “Of Blood and Soil.” I’m absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desk and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
On July 14, Hitler decreed that the Nazis would be the sole political party in Germany.
How did Hitler justify his actions? “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this; in this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people. I became the Supreme Judge of the German people.” (From the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)
