What is widely overlooked today is that a worldview based on naturalistic evolution can provide no reasonable foundation for either the universality or the permanence of human rights; it was precisely such naturalistic theory that underlay the Nazi repudiation of the inherited biblical morality of the West. It is well to recall that Hitler opposed Christianity, as Gilmer W. Blackburn remarks, because, despite the weakness of its churches, it resisted the exploitation, enslavement and elimination of presumably “inferior” races (The Portrayal of Christianity in the History Textbooks of Nazi Germany, p. 345). Hitler’s program aimed at destroying especially the Confessional Churches, a major means toward that end being the denial to the churches of any role in educating the younger generation. While Germany’s National Socialist schoolrooms ignored Christianity in the lower grades, they attacked it in the upper levels and promoted social Darwinism. Medieval, Reformation and early German history were rewritten to show that the ideas of self-abnegation and love for all mankind are what had weakened German genius. Anti-Semitic spokesmen castigated Christians for worshiping the same God revered by Jews. Hermann Rauschning recalls Hitler’s comment: “The Ten Commandments have lost their validity.… Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity.… We must trust in our instincts.” The emphasis on “a tremendous revolution in moral ideas and in man’s spiritual condition,” notes Rauschning, was a major part of Hitler’s rhetoric (The Voice of Destruction, pp. 24, 222).
History as studied in the German schools, Blackburn points out, “served a metaphysical purpose, and those who prepared the history textbooks served as priests of the Nazi Weltanschauung, a creed whose basic tenet, whether pseudo or real, repudiated the anthropological unity of the human race. Such a repudiation was compatible with the Nazis’ hierarchical view of the races of mankind as well as a necessary prelude to the domination of the world by a superior species.… The new textbooks pressed adherents of the new Germanic creed into combat with those of the traditional faith” (“The Portrayal of Christianity in the History Textbooks of Nazi Germany,” p. 445).
Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 6 (Crossway Books, 1999), 152.
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