ABSTRACT
Introduction: The Problem YetRemains In her important study of German military chaplains in the Third Reich, Doris L.Bergen relates the following incident:
Another Catholic priest at the front contrasted his (silent) opposition to the Holocaust with the enthusiasm of his co-religionists. He recalled his shock at hearing Hitler in a radio speech proclaim that "Jewry must be destroyed, and not only in Germany. The hour of reckoning has come:' The priest himself witnessed a forced transport of Jews from a marketplace piled high with bodies; he saw train cars jammed with people he knew were to be killed. But what surprised him the most was the discovery that "various people welcomed the destruction of the Jews:' Even a fellow priest toldhim at the time, "There isa curse on thispeople eversincethecrucifixion of Jesus when they cried: 'Let his blood be on our heads and the heads of our children.'" 1
More than fifty years after the horrific events of the Holocaust/Shoah, how are good-faith Christians to deal with contemporary implications and understandings of Matthew 27:25 in a world that continues to practice genocide, not only against Jews, but against anyone who falls "outside the universal of moral obligation" (to use Helen Fein's felicitous phrasel.s How will religiously committed Jews, interested in dialogue with their Christian neighbors in a world in
which support for the very survival not only of the State of Israel but the Jewish People itself appears to be diminishing, move forward, still burdened by the events of this past and knowledge not only of Christian complicity but of New Testament foundational complicity as well? Beyond both, how can good people of conscience-whatever their religious traditions and/or orientations--eontinue to affirm any manner of scriptural literalism of the past and its relevance to the present, given its continuing use againstindividual persons and communities? Further, in a modern world that continues to experience a growing and incresingly violent and textually based fundamentalism, not only by Christians but by Jews and Muslims as well, where are the religious voices of reason, moderation, and tolerance to be found rather than drowned out in these same communities? Questions such as these-and there are others-gnaw at the very essence of what it means to be human in the aftermath of such genocides, and raises the pain-filled question of whether religion, both institutional and theological, has proven itself so morally and ethically deficient and bankrupt as to be both meaningless and irrelevant in this twenty-first century.
