Faith, Power, and Peril: The Church’s Complicity in Hitler’s Rise
This exploration uncovers how the early Christian church’s attitudes, particularly supersessionism, not only laid the groundwork for anti-Semitism but also tragically facilitated the Holocaust.
This essay has been rewritten from the ground up.
Some of you read the earlier version. Thank you. Your engagement, your comments, your willingness to sit with something uncomfortable — that is what made me go back to the text and push harder. The original was too polite. It summarized where it should have prosecuted. It gestured at a paper trail instead of following it.
The new version follows it.
It opens on November 10, 1938, the night synagogues burned across Germany — on Martin Luther’s birthday — and a Protestant bishop celebrated by distributing 100,000 copies of Luther’s antisemitic writings to his pastors. It traces the theological chain from Augustine’s witness doctrine through Luther’s 1543 blueprint through the Reichskonkordat, using primary sources: Hitler’s own speeches with dates, Luther’s own seven-point program, and Sha’ul’s (Paul’s) own Greek in Romans 11 that dismantles the entire supersessionist project in a single word — ametamelēta (ἀμεταμέλητα — irrevocable).
The argument ends where it has to end: this theology is not history. It is still preached.
Read the full essay here: The Theology That Built the Gas Chambers
If this table matters to you, if having a place where Scripture is read with Hebraic eyes and hard questions are not softened for comfort matters to you, I am grateful you are here. Every share, every conversation this starts, every person who reads the full essay and sits with it — that is the work.
If you want to support it: buymeacoffee.com/mrdesoto. Every dollar goes directly to people in crisis — aged-out foster kids and others who fell through the system. No overhead. No salaries. No building fund. Just people.
Thank you for being at this table.
Shalom v’shalvah — your brother in the Way,
Sergio
if always been fascinated by the church’s response,
I do definitely agree with some of the things presented, especially theological supersessionism.
It’s quite unfortunate that even some of the greatest theological minds fell into that hole/mindset. Some people i know personally believe this doctrine themselves, and while they mean well, i don’t think they understand the magnitude of the problem with the doctrine and the evils it has resulted in.
I also agree with hitler’s twisting of early church teachings, he didn’t stop there though, he even used texts from jewish era texts (specifically the OT) and twisted them as well.
(i’m not denying the credibility of the OT, i believe they are perfect and God’s holy and inspired Word, and i completely affirm them as equal to NT texts etc. I’m simply stating it’s ironic that he used texts written by people of that heritage, in order to “justify” annihilating them.)