Essays that challenge Christians to make the Holocaust a turning point in their thinking and in their relations with Jews.

Originally published: New York: Doubleday, 1997.

God and Humanity in Auschwitz synthesizes the findings of research developed over the last thirty years on the rise of anti-Semitism in our civilization. Donald J. Dietrich sees the Holocaust as a case study of how prejudice has been theologically enculturated. He suggests how it may be controlled by reducing aggressive energy before it becomes overwhelming. Dietrich studies the recent responses of Christian theologians to the Holocaust and the Jewish theological response to questions concerning God's covenant with Israel, which were provoked by Auschwitz. Social science has dealt with the psychosocial dynamics that have supported genocide and helps explain how ordinary persons can produce extraordinary evil. Dietrich shows how this research, combined with theological analyses, can help reconfigure theology itself. Such an approach may serve to help dissolve anti-Semitism, to aid in constructing such positive values as respect for human dignity, and to point the way to restricting future outbreaks of genocide. God and Humanity in Auschwitz surveys which religious factors created a climate that permitted the Holocaust. It also illuminates what social science has to tell us about developing a strategy that, when institutionally implemented, can channel our energies away from sanctioned murder toward a more compassionate society. The book has proven to be an essential resource for theologians, sociologists, historians, and political theorists.

How did the Holocaust take place in a nation of rich Christian history and cultural achievement? What ideasspiritual and intellectualcontributed to the nightmare of Adolf Hitlers Third Reich? What theological forces contributed to the confused witness of the Christian churches? How do Christians respond to the accusation that the Christian faith itself, even its own Scriptures, contributed to this modern tragedy? What can Christians today learn from those who did, in fact, stand in the evil day? In Christ, Faith, and the Holocaust, Richard Terrell responds to these haunting questions in a work of cultural apologetics that takes up the challenges and accusations that Christianity itself was a major cause of Nazisms destructive path. Here, the Nazi movement is exposed as a virulently anti-Christian spirituality, rooted in idolatrous doctrines that took every advantage of distorted theology and emotional pietism that had evolved in German thought and church life. Here you will find the drama and importance of ideas and stories of personal witness that will sharpen the contemporary Christians sense of discernment in the arena of spiritual warfare.

This volume sheds light on the transformed post-Holocaust relationship between Catholics and Jews. Once implacable theological foes, the two traditions have travelled a great distance in coming to view the other with respect and dignity. Responding to the horrors of Auschwitz, the Catholic Church has undergone a “reckoning of the soul,” beginning with its landmark document Nostra Aetate and embraced a positive theology of Judaism including the ongoing validity of the Jewish covenant. Jews have responded to this unprecedented outreach, especially in the document Dabru Emet. Together, these two Abrahamic traditions have begun seeking a repair of the world. The road has been rocky and certainly obstacles remain. Nevertheless, authentic interfaith dialogue remains a new and promising development in the search for a peace.

Williamson challenges churches and theologians to become aware of the inherited ideology of anti-Judaism that has distorted their teaching, even on such key matters as Jesus, the Scriptures, the church, and God, and suggests a radical, constructive alternative to the "teaching of contempt".

American readers, too often burdened by their own stereotypes about Germans, can benefit by reading these papers and coming to a better understanding of how Jews and Germans are working together to overcome the tragic history that continues to affect the modern world.

Sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, pondering the enormity of that event. This book explores how inquiry about the Holocaust challenges understanding, especially its religious and ethical dimensions. Debates about God's relationship to evil are ancient, but the Holocaust complicated them in ways never before imagined. Its massive destruction left Jews and Christians searching among the ashes to determine what, if anything, could repair the damage done to tradition and to theology. Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews and Christians have increasingly sought to know how or even whether theological analysis and reflection can aid in comprehending its aftermath. Specifically, Jews and Christians, individually and collectively, find themselves more and more in the position of needing either to rethink theodicy -- typically understood as the vindication of divine justice in the face of evil -- or to abolish the concept altogether. Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the contributors to Fire in the Ashes confront these and other difficult questions about God and evil after the Holocaust. This book -- created out of shared concerns and a desire to investigate differences and disagreements between religious traditions and philosophical perspectives -- represents an effort to advance meaningful conversation between Jews and Christians and to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries. The contributors to Fire in the Ashes are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight, the symposium's Holocaust and genocide scholars -- a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational -- meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.

If you had a chance to speak to the Pope, what would you say? This is the question that 13 noted Holocaust scholars—Christians of various denominations and Jews (including some Holocaust survivors)—address in this volume. The Holocaust was a Christian as well as a Jewish tragedy; nonetheless, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has offered very little official discourse on the Church's role in it. These essays provide solid constructive criticism and make a major contribution to both Holocaust and Christian studies.