Religion Reading List

My Episcopalian aunt (she is married to my wife's step-uncle) works in her church's Sunday school and is interested in improving her religious education so she asked me for a suggested reading list. Here are my recommendations. My criteria were books that are intellectually sophisticated that avoided the obvious polemics from either an orthodox or anti-religious positions. I also made a point of including books dealing with Church attitudes towards Jews and women. I would be curious as to what other suggestions blog readers would make. 


Bible:

Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal.

Prophets by Abraham Heschel.  

The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. 

In God's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Michael Walzer. 


Judaism:

Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Bunin Benor. 

American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna. 

The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised by Marc B. Shapiro. 

This is My God by Herman Wouk. 


Jewish and Christian Relations:

Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism by Daniel Boyarin 

Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism, 1500-1750 by Elisheva Carlebach.

Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages by Mark Cohen. 

Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times by Jacob Katz.

Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages by Hyam Maccoby.  

Early Christianity:

Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman. 

When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger. 


Medieval Christianity:

Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum. 

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements by Norman Cohn.  

Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages by Dyan Elliott.

Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 by R. I. Moore. 


Modernity:

Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. 

God is Back How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 

Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

United States:

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat. 

Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kathryn Gin Lum.

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll.  

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't by Stephen Prothero.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. 

The Unlikely Disciple: a Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. 

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer.


Psychology:

Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. 

Bringing Abraham Heschel to Israel

Haaretz has an article on Dror Bondi, who is writing his doctoral dissertation on Rabbi Abraham Heschel, on the challenges of applying Heschel's philosophy to the Israeli scene with its rigid lines of Haredi vs. secular and the challenges of the peace process:

Why is Heschel so unknown in Israel?

Bondi: "He's not known in Israel because here another God rules. A God we all believe in and deny. He has black clothing, a long white beard, he holds a book with small print, waves an Israeli flag up high. When Heschel speaks in the name of God, the secular person says, 'That's not for me, that's for the religious folks.' And the religious say, 'That's not my God.' In Israeli society, we're trying to solve our problems by means of the status quo. The religious have God, the secular have reality. Heschel upsets all that. He's not proposing religious liberalism or something milder than that. He wants to bring back God. The God who has died."


...

And how are you accepted in religious society?

"It's easier for secular people to hear than it is for religious people. Often when I meet religious people, I get the feeling that they find Heschel threatening. There's an initial apprehension. I hope it will get through to them, though, because Heschel expresses what we've managed to forget. I have hope that Heschel will free them from so-called 'religious society.'"

Bondi says he has trouble with the Israeli definition of the word 'religious.' "In English, when you say 'religious' you mean someone who has a connection with God in some way. In Israel a 'religious' person is someone who belongs to a sector that observes halakha. We've crowned halakha as the new god. This was a posttraumatic Haredi reaction, after the Enlightenment, after the Holocaust - come, let's focus on halakha. But it's not Jewish."

Would Haredim Make Good Terrorists? Some Thoughts on Radical Religious and Violent (Part II)

 (Part I)

It occurred to me that this argument, that successful terrorist organizations require agents with high defection constraints and this is best accomplished by recruiting candidates with long histories of service to the group's social welfare network even before they became terrorists, would explain why certain terrorist and counter-terrorism strategies used in television shows might not work in practice. In season two of 24, one of the major twists is the revelation that the point man in a plot by Islamic terrorists to use a nuclear device over Los Angeles is a blond haired blue eyed American female raised as a Protestant and whose family is unaware that she converted to Islam let alone has become an Islamic terrorist. If I were running a terrorist organization and had the good fortune to come into possession of a nuclear bomb (supplied by a conservative cabal looking to push the United States into a war with specific unnamed Muslim countries), would I be willing to trust this bomb to an American woman who was not raised in the system and has not even made the sacrifice of coming out to her family about her extremist beliefs? This would undermine the anti-profiling premise of this sequence of episodes. Certainly, if the government is looking for Middle-Eastern men I could recruit an all American white female, but do I have any that I can trust? If terrorists are dependent on people from very specific backgrounds then they would be vulnerable to profiling.

On the flip side, the show MI-5 (a British version of 24) has an episode devoted to a project designed to undermine Islamic terrorist cells in England by getting active members to turn and then agree to attempt to turn other members. The story focuses on the recruitment of a black convert to Islam by using his ex-girlfriend from his pre-Muslim days to get to him. If real life terrorist groups behave like Berman assumes they do then it is unlikely that they would ever allow a black convert to be in a position of serious responsibility where he could turn on the group. On the flip side, if I were a terrorist mastermind, I would look at the MI-5 episode as an excellent example of why I do not want to trust converts, no matter how sincere they sound and instead stick to people who have come up through the system.

Ultimately, there is both a liberal and a conservative side to Berman's argument. On the conservative side, he demolishes the common apologetic argument for groups like Hamas that they are primarily a social service network that only incidentally also maintains a militant wing. From Berman's perspective, it is precisely this social service network that is the foundation for terrorist activity so no separation can be made. This though also has a liberal face as Berman argues that counter-terrorism, instead of a military approach, should be focusing precisely on these social services by offering alternatives.

To step away from terrorism, this book is primarily about the economics of religion, particularly of the Haredi system, which is the inspiration for Berman's more general ideas. This book could be read as a study of the Haredi system, sidestepping any concerns about terrorism. Personally, I find Berman's study of Haredim to be a useful refutation of the sort of Haredi apologetics offered by Jonathan Rosenblum. Barring spectacular individuals, the Haredi yeshiva system is not useful as an alternative to secular college in preparation for competing in the job market. As Berman notes:

Israeli secular education in the 1990s had a return of 9.4 percent, a pretty good investment (a little higher than the U.S. return). Ultra-Orthodox education, on the other hand, was a terrible investment, at 1.8 percent. In other words, for every year in yeshiva a student was forgoing a permanent raise of about 7.6 percent, which they could have realized by spending that same year in a secular school. (pg. 73)

It is important that Haredi groups like Satmar do not get credit for their social services. The usual defense for Satmar is to point to their admittedly extensive social services, both in and even outside their own community. Kiryat Joel has the highest rate of poverty in the United States. Their philosophy of attempting to shut out the world is the greatest mass system of poverty creation that remains legal. As with the case of terrorism, the social service network is not something distinct from the extremism; it is the very foundation of the entire system that creates radicals and allows them to continue in their beliefs. (One of the reasons why I am a Libertarian and wish to eliminate government welfare is the knowledge that such policies will be the destruction of the Haredi community as they are faced with having to adopt Modern Orthodox policies or starving to death.)

This brings me to the big question that I came away from this book asking; for all this talk about the similarities between the social systems used by Haredim and Islamic radicals, would Haredim make good terrorists? In fact, Berman's major example of a failed terrorist organization is the Jewish underground that came from the Jewish settler movement. They lacked a system of culling out potentially untrustworthy recruits and were all too easily infiltrated by the Israeli government and neutralized. The Haredi system is very useful if you want to send out riotous youths to smash traffic lights and burn garbage cans or even to harass immodestly dressed women. This does not require any great planning, there is no valuable intelligence to sell, nor does it threaten any high-value targets. Imagine a Haredi youth calling the Israeli police: "hay I have a tip on a planned demonstration against chilul Shabbos. All I want is that you get me out of this life and give me a full year of college tuition with room and board." With something so basic, one could rely on moderately committed youths, motivated more by boredom than ideology.

As I see it, the Haredi system would not be effective for higher defection constant jobs like terrorism. It is not that they lack an effective social welfare system. The problem is that their system is almost too successful and is able to survive and even rely on free riders. The Haredi world is loaded with people who have been trapped into the system and would leave if only they were not dependent on the Haredi social system. (One of the few things that Unchosen got right.) In theory, these would be precisely the sorts of people who would turn traitor the moment they had something to sell. Would these people even be useful as drones, to be given specific low-level missions without any valuable intelligence to defect with?

If you insist you can do the cheap Jewish thing and have a friend lend you this book, do that. It would be hypocritical of me to complain. Better yet go out and purchase this book yourself. I look forward to hearing your reactions to it.

Patience with Frank Schaeffer

In discussing Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, James Pate suggested that I would be interested in Schaeffer’s upcoming book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion {or Atheism}, saying: “…it addresses people who aren't satisfied with fundamentalism or atheism. That kind of reminds me of what the top of your blog says: seeking a third path, other than secularism and religious fundamentalism.” I just got the book and read it over last night and this morning. I sincerely wished to like this book, since I see Schaeffer as being one of the people on “my” side. That being said, I found myself disappointed with the book as a whole, though there were parts that I found worthwhile. The fatal weakness of the book is that it lacks much in the way of a sustained argument. Rather it is a running meditation, one that fails to say anything that has not been said and better said in other places. This would not be considered a fault at all if this was a series of blog posts. If this was a blog I could just take it as is, the rambling chaff of an intelligent person written on the fly, which contains numerous valuable nuggets. I would like to pay my respects to those specific parts of the book worthy of consideration while acknowledging the larger failings.

The book opens with a beautiful prologue about Schaeffer feeling the need to pray upon holding his grandchild and a sober summation of the danger of our ghettoized media culture where everyone has created their own news and reality filters. The book itself is divided into two sections. The first part, containing the central thesis of the book, confronts both the New Atheists and Christian Fundamentalists, who Schaeffer sees as having a lot more in common with each other than they themselves would wish to admit. In particular, Schaeffer goes after Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, on the atheist front, and Rick Warren and the authors of the Left Behind series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, on the fundamentalist front. The chapters on atheism are the weaker ones. They certainly fail to match up to Terry Eagleton’s Ditchkins attack. Even here, Schaeffer has his moments. I particularly liked his comparison of Dawkins selling Scarlet A Letter pins to his mother’s Gospel Walnuts, which, much to Frank’s embarrassment, she used to start witnessing conversations with random strangers. “So Dawkins, it turns out, is my mother, circa 1959! Hi Mom!” (pg. 30) This illustrates an important thing about Schaeffer; he is strongest when talking about his personal life and experiences. There is also something to be said for Schaeffer’s discussion of Dennett, mainly because Schaeffer is actually quite positive about certain elements of Dennett’s thought even if he comes to different conclusions.

Patience takes an upward swing when Schaeffer turns to fundamentalism. Again, I think this is because Schaeffer is one of those writers who is best when there is something personal at stake. One may find it interesting that Schaeffer would target someone like Warren, who has risen to fame largely on his reputation for being a more “liberal,” social-action evangelical preacher. Schaeffer's main objection to Warren is that he sees Warren as an example of one of the principle weaknesses of the entire Protestant legacy, its lack of a tradition and the need, in the absence of such a tradition, to create larger than life cult-figures to stand in its place. This argument is one of Schaeffer’s valuable intellectual points and it is a pity that he, in both Patience and Crazy for God, does not delve more deeply into this issue. I would love to see Schaeffer do a book just on this point. It would make it even better if he did more to place this attack on Protestantism in the context of an explicitly Eastern Orthodox position. I suspect that Schaeffer fears, and probably rightfully so, that such a book would fail to reach a general audience. My thinking is that, in this religious climate, the most important thing for American Christians to see is a serious and vigorous Christianity, any Christianity, that is not Evangelicalism. Similarly, on my particular front of the religion wars, one of the key things to defeating Haredism is merely to show that such a thing as a serious non-Haredi Judaism even exists.

I loved the fact that Schaeffer discusses C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and the fact that the same Christian colleges that adore them would never put up with their drinking and their theology. I must object, though, to Schaeffer’s categorization of Lewis as someone who “ruined what could have been a decent literary career by slavishly working Christian propaganda into his ‘novels,’ especially once he began to cater to the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture after he became a star.” (pg. 102-103) Lewis, to the end of his life, was a professor of literature, who incidentally wrote books on Christian apologetics and one of the best-selling series children’s books of all time. Lewis never tried to make a living from being a “star” on the Christian circuit. Even Lewis’ most propagandistic novels, the Chronicles of Narnia, are filled with elements from pagan mythology. Lewis, long after he became a "Christian star," wrote Till We Have Faces, a reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth that remained explicitly pagan, and a Grief Observed, in which he muses over whether God is a cosmic sadist, torturing us for his own amusement. One of Lewis’ strengths was that he did not sell out; he was willing to put people out of their comfort zone. As a Tolkien fan, I will treasure Schaeffer’s description of one of his school teachers, Bubble:

Having Bubble for a master was something like having Gollum for a teacher. Only Bubble didn’t disgust us by gnawing raw fish. Rather, he revolted and riveted us by snorting huge quantities of filthy, face-staining snuff, he never bathed, and he smelled oddly of pepper and was clearly drunk at times, although he did know a lot about music and made science interesting. (pg. 132)

Schaeffer’s attack on LeHaye and Jenkins also deserves mention. Schaeffer remarks:

If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. (pg. 109)

Schaeffer’s primary concern with LaHaye and Jenkins, though he knows them both and personally finds them to be decent people, is that they feed a radical element that could easily turn to violence in order to bring their particular version of the end about. Schaeffer again makes an important point about the religious right and its failings.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” (pg. 113-114)

The second half of Patience is largely a rehash of material from Crazy for God, with some more theology thrown in. At this point, it is still interesting to hear Schaeffer talk about his life, even if it is beginning to wear a little thin. This takes time away from talking about belief. All the pity, because it is precisely this element that could have used more elaboration. It is fair enough to say that belief is something that goes beyond reason, but if one is going to go this route one needs to make all the greater effort for clarity and, dare I say it, “rationality” in one’s writing in order to avoid the obvious counter-argument that one has lost the argument and is now trying to cover up that fact by hiding behind mystery. Every chapter of Patience is headed by a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, the Christian thinker who best exemplifies this notion of faith as a leap into the absurd. It is unfortunate that Schaeffer did not make the effort to integrate Kierkegaard more into the book itself.

For those looking to understand how Kierkegaard can be made relevant to modern religious issues, Abraham Heschel wrote a book comparing Kierkegaard and Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk called a Passion for Truth. I would particularly recommend this book to readers of this blog. It is about analyzing a type of religious “fundamentalism” that instead of walking lock stock and barrel behind the establishment, attacks and ultimately rejects the religious establishment precisely because the establishment fails to live up to the true standards of the faith. This is the sort of thinking that tells you that anyone sporting clothing that costs thousands of dollars in a world in which children are starving is not a real Christian regardless of how “orthodox” the gospel he preaches sounds. On the topic of Jewish thinkers influenced by Kierkegaard, another person who comes to mind is Rabbi Josef Soloveitchik. I first learned about Kierkegaard from reading Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith which discusses Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Probably the greatest flaw in the book is the fact that it lacks any footnotes or even an index. For example, I would be interested in finding out Schaeffer’s source for Baruch Spinoza (yes Schaeffer refers to him as Baruch and not Benedict) being offered one thousand florins to remain within the Jewish community. Such a story smacks of legend to me. This indicates a book that was rushed to print without much thought or effort. In the end, in judging this book, I feel like I am in the position of a teacher being handed a B paper by a talented student, whom the teacher knows could have done an A paper if only he had put in the effort. My inclination would be to hand the paper back and say: “Please go back and write the paper that I know you can.” Mr. Schaeffer, you have written a mediocre book. From most people, I would accept this, but I know you can do better. You have the talent to write the sort of defense of non-fundamentalist religious beliefs that needs to be written. Could you please go back and write that book!

Just Say No to Polytheism: Why it is Important to Believe in a Singular Non-Physical Deity (Part I)

A recent post of mine made passing mention of my concerns regarding Chabad, whether or not they were monotheists or if their brand of theism crossed a line into Trinitarian territory. I would like to elaborate on this issue. I do not view myself as being anti-Chabad per se. Most of my objections to Chabad apply in one form or another to Haredim in general. Monotheism, the belief in one God, is at the center of Jewish belief. We need to consider what that means and why it is important. I would argue that the belief in the oneness of God is intimately connected to what type of relationship one has to God; does one relate to God in the hope of gaining some sort of benefit, earthly riches, and eternal life, or does one seek to form a relationship with God because they believe in God’s goodness and wish to further his project in this world? The one person is interested in God for his own self-interest, the other because he believes in the cause.

To describe a model of paganism, traditional pagan religion worshiped its gods as a means to an end. One does the necessary rituals and receives the necessary rain and fertility from your particular version of Father Sky and Mother Earth. If one desires victory over the enemy, there is a god of war to turn to. There is nothing ethical or particularly spiritual about such actions. They are means to ends, no different from the day to day human interactions that are necessary to gain the essentials of life. There is nothing ethical or spiritual about talking to my boss in the hope of a raise or to lobby a politician. The fact that polytheism recognized many gods furthers this mercenary relationship with the divine. If there are many gods then these gods can be played against each other. Children learn very quickly that their parents have different opinions and that they can be played against each other. If the gods are like human beings then they can equally be played. They can be flattered by one who knows their temperament. If the gods are in some sense physical then they must, after some fashion, have physical needs even if those physical needs are nothing more than to be praised and flattered. This is the essence of magic, that one can extend the amoral relations that define day-to-day human interactions to the divine and the supernatural. (Admittedly, this model fails to completely account for paganism in practice. There can be monotheists in pagan guise, such as Socrates, and pagans in the guise of monotheists.)

The Abrahamic Revolution is not just that God is one but that he is a righteous God. This one God has no rivals to play against him. As a non-physical being, he has no need for anything and nothing that anyone does can benefit or harm him. This is one of the hardest concepts in theology to come to terms with; there is no way to bargain with God, there is nothing to bargain with. This vision of God is most clearly articulated in the Prophets where God is the righteous protector of widows and orphans, who cannot be appeased with the mere burnt flesh of bulls and goats. (See the Prophets by Abraham J. Heschel.) This is a God who is willing to strike down his own temple and let his name be a mockery among the nations of the world because Israel failed to live up to the calling of being his nation.

As Maimonides argues in the Guide to the Perplexed, the Bible serves as a way to transition people from a pagan mode of thinking toward the ethical rationalism necessary in comprehending the will of the monotheistic deity. As such, one is going to find in the Bible things that on the surface seem to be part of the pagan model. For example, the Bible commands the use of animal sacrifice, part of the pagan model. A pagan god would have physical needs that could be satisfied through a sacrifice. At the very least the god could be honored by sacrifice. The monotheistic God has no need for sacrifice but allows them as a concession to human weakness. While the Bible makes the pretense of allowing and even mandating animal sacrifice, it robs animal sacrifice of its theological value and justification, leaving animal sacrifice as a hollow edifice to be undermined by the prophets.

If one looks at the concept of reward and punishment in the Bible one sees a similar pattern. The concept of reward and punishment is there, even physical non-gnosis reward. The monotheistic God is capable of bringing miracles about and affecting the world to the benefit or detriment of individuals. That being said, this is an incidental belief for the monotheistic religion. The rewards and punishments in the Bible are overwhelmingly about one’s descendants or about the people as a whole, not about personal gain. As Maimonides explains, the rewards and punishments in the Bible are consequential. If the Israelites pursue an understanding of God they will pursue rational solutions to their problems and be successful as a state. Alternatively, if the Israelites pursue the magical solutions offered by paganism, the state will fall.

(To be continued …)

God for Nazis: A Review of the Aryan Jesus

Ohio State’s eHistory has just put up my review of Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. I would like to thank Dr. Steven Conn for giving me the opportunity to write the review and the free copy of the book to go with it, for being a wonderful editor and for coming up with the title for the review. As I did go over the requested length, he did have to shorten it slightly. You are free to follow the link to the shorter version of the review or you can read the full version here.

Susannah Heschel is the daughter of the Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Aryan Jesus is in many respects the historical counterpart of Abraham Heschel’s book, the Prophets. As Susannah notes in the introduction to that book, her father, having gotten his doctoral degree in Germany during the 1930s was in part responding to currents within German Protestantism that sought to move against the Old Testament and remove any Jewish element from Christianity. The Prophets is a ringing defense of the continued relevance of the Old Testament and is unapologetic about its very Jewish character. Like much of Abraham Heschel’s work, The Prophets was written not for a Jewish audience but for people of faith in general. Writing during the era before Vatican II, Abraham Heschel was challenging his Christian readers to confront Judaism as a living organism and not simply as a relic of the Old Testament and to look in on their own Christianity as something very Jewish.

Susannah Heschel seeks to bring out this pro-Nazi Protestant German Christianity, which her father had to confront as a young man, from the obscurity of the archives. Quite reasonably she focuses her attention on the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, essentially a German Christian think tank that operated during the war, and its head Walter Grundmann, a New Testament scholar and professor at the University of Jena. This is then used as a window into the wider world of German Christianity. Being a German Christian and accepting Nazi anti-Semitism and racial ideology required one to overcome a number of intellectual hurdles. How can one accept Nazi claims of Jewish inferiority if Jesus himself was Jewish? How can one reconcile Nazi claims of a German master race with Christian universalism? What should be done to the Old Testament, a Jewish book? German Christians argued that Jesus was not really Jewish, but someone who fought against Judaism. Jesus was the Son of God so he was free of any Jewish biological taint. Alternatively, many argued that the Galileans were really genetic Aryans as opposed to the Judeans, who were genetic Jews. So the Jewish Judeans crucified the Aryan Jesus as part of their racial war against Aryans. Just as God created a hierarchal order in creation so too did he create a hierarchy in races. The Christian spirit finds its ultimate expression within the Aryan race. Many German Christians wanted to point-blank get rid of the Old Testament. The real source of Christian values for them was not Judaism and the Old Testament but “Aryan” religions such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.

As a work of intellectual and social history, Aryan Jesus is quite remarkable. Meticulously researched, Aryan Jesus manages to capture the intellectual milieu of Nazi Germany, offering a fascinating glimpse into academic culture under Nazi rule. As with all good intellectual history, Aryan Jesus succeeds at presenting and analyzing ideas, even offensive ideas, clearly without polemic or judgment. Grundmann and his colleagues may have been anti Semites, racists and bigots, but that is incidental to this work. For Susannah Heschel, they were scholars living under Nazi rule and products of nineteenth and twentieth-century German Protestant scholarship and racial theory.

While Aryan Jesus is first-rate as historical analysis, it does suffer from the lack of a clear argument and thesis. The problem, I suspect, is that Susannah Heschel found herself unable to write the book that she really wanted to write. One gets the sense that Susannah Heschel wanted to write about Christian responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust. From this perspective, Grundmann and his colleagues should be part of the Christian anti-Jewish tradition, dating back to the Middle Ages if not to antiquity. Their thought should be representative of Nazism in general and they should be favorites of the likes of Hitler and Himmler. Finally there should be a direct connection between the Institute and the Holocaust. Grundmann and his circle should be directly taking part in the planning and the process of eliminating European Jewry. Susannah Heschel was unable to write such a book because the evidence for such claims does not exist. While Grundmann and his circle saw themselves as part of a Germanic tradition of anti-Judaism that included Martin Luther, it is very clear that they were products of nineteenth and twentieth-century German scholarship, something quite distinct from the Middle Ages or even Luther. While one can easily see how the Institute might have been useful in justifying the annihilation of Jews, there is no direct link between the Institute and the Final Solution. German Christianity did not equal Nazism. While the Nazis were willing to use German Christianity to further their own aims, we do not see any heartfelt support or identification with their Protestant ideology. There was even a law passed banning the use of swastikas in churches. The dominant attitude toward Christianity displayed by the Nazi leadership was that of Alfred Rosenberg, that Christianity was a Jewish religion. Throughout the years of Nazi rule, German Christianity was on the defensive, trying to show that “real” Christianity was diametrically opposed to Judaism. The impression one gets about Grundmann and his circle is that of some geeky misfits in school, vainly pleading to be let in and accepted by the in-crowd. They may be tolerated to some extent, mainly out of amusement, but are generally held in contempt.

Susannah Heschel sincerely wants this to be a controversial book that will challenge the consciousness of Christians so she tries to dance around these issues, implying things but making no hard claims. For example, she states:

One cannot prove that the Institute’s propaganda helped cause the Holocaust. However, the effort to dejudaize Christianity was also an attempt to erase moral objections to Nazi anti-Semitism. Institute-sponsored research, by describing Jesus’s goal as the eradication of Judaism, effectively reframed Nazism as the fulfillment of Christianity. Whether the Nazi killers of Jews were motivated by Institute propaganda cannot be proven, but some did express gratitude for Institution publications, apparently for alleviating a troubled conscience. Institute publications were not as widely disseminated as the propaganda issued by the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, or the publications of Julius Streicher, who was hanged at Nuremberg for editing Der Sturmer, a weekly anti-Semitic propaganda rag. Yet the moral and societal location of clergy and theologians lends greater weight to the propaganda of the Institute; propaganda coming from the pulpit calls forth far deeper resonance than that spoken by a politician or journalist. (pg. 16-17)

This is hardly the sort of damning case to keep Christians up at night. The only time that Susannah Heschel manages to score any serious points is with her discussion of the post war period, during which time the members of the Institute, by and large, managed to do quite well for themselves. They managed to survive the denazification process in Germany and were accepted back into the fold of mainline Protestantism. How someone like Grundmann managed to be accepted by mainline Protestants after the war, I agree, is a good question and should disturb people.

If I were a conservative Christian the story that I would see in Aryan Jesus is how a bunch of “supposedly” Christian theologians tried to reinvent Christianity in order to make it conform to the values of the time and place, 1930s Nazi Germany. They turned Christianity on its head, hoping that secularist Nazis would embrace their Christianity. In the end, all they did was to serve as useful idiots to the secular Nazi regime and failed to do anything for Christianity. My conservative Christian would close Aryan Jesus and think about how liberal Christians who support abortion and gay marriage are morally no better than Grundmann and justifiably go to sleep comfortably with a clear conscience.