In Germany, the place of the Old Testament (OT) in churches was questioned from the 19th century onward. Theologians regarded it as a mistake on the part of the early Church to retain the Old Testament. The pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (German Christians) argued that it was wrong to read “Jewish stories” and wanted to replace the OT with Germanic myths and an “Aryanized” New Testament.
Liberal theology in the 19th century changed the way the Bible was viewed by introducing new philosophical starting points.
– The greatest weakness of this perspective is that the Bible is then no longer seen as the Word of God; rather, the view becomes that it merely contains the Word of God. It then becomes up to the spirit of the age and each individual to interpret and determine what actually is the Word of God, says Karl-Henrik Wallerstein, who, together with Professor Ingrid Faro from Chicago and a lecturer at STH, as well as Peter Wessberg and Joseph Roskvist, has written a Swedish study book on the Old Testament (OT), published by Scandinavian School of Theology.
The book is intended primarily for theology students, but also for pastors, priests, preachers, and laypeople interested in the Old Testament.
– It was not new archaeological discoveries that caused the Bible to no longer be described as credible. It was new philosophical starting points, he observes, and describes how there are a great many strong archaeological arguments for the credibility of the Bible.
– Not least the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, but new archaeological discoveries are being made quite frequently nowadays, notes Karl-Henrik Wallerstein, who completed his doctoral dissertation on Old Testament exegesis at Åbo Akademi University.
In Germany, where liberal theology had a strong foothold, the place of the Old Testament in the churches was questioned in the 19th century. Prominent scholars influenced by the intellectual climate of the time began to analyze the texts as historical documents rather than divine revelations. Many considered the Old Testament’s view of God to be “primitive.”
The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1764–1838) considered the OT to have limited value for the Christian Church and, in practice, believed it should be regarded as an addition or appendix to the NT. He believed that the OT lacked an independent, normative status for Christian doctrine.
The liberal theologian and church historian Adolf von Harnack argued along similar lines in the early 20th century. He regarded it as a historical mistake on the part of the early Church to retain the Old Testament.
Those who later formed the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen believed that it was wrong for the German people to read “Jewish stories” and wanted to replace them with Germanic myths and focus exclusively on an “Aryanized” New Testament.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, the pro-Nazi church movement Deutsche Christen took control of the Protestant Church through a church election in which Adolf Hitler urged everyone to vote for the Deutsche Christen. At a mass rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin in November 1933, the chairman of Deutsche Christen in Greater Berlin, Reinhold Krause, delivered a famous speech in which he openly demanded the removal of the Old Testament, dismissing it as a collection of “Jewish stories of reward and revenge” that had no place in a German national church.
All passages in the NT that emphasized Jesus’ Jewish origins or the apostles’ Jewish roots were also to be removed.
The event marked the beginning of the Confessing Church, a Protestant resistance movement within the German Evangelical Church that operated between 1934 and 1945 against the Nazi regime’s attempts to control the Church and adapt the Christian faith to Nazi racial ideology.
The renowned German liberal theologian Rudolf Bultmann, although anti-Nazi, removed Jesus’ statement “Salvation comes from the Jews” from the German Bible, based on the same anti-Jewish biblical interpretation.
The year was 1939, and Bultmann’s actions legitimized the Nazi Bible and provided support for Hitler’s Holocaust, STH founder Anders has stated in the book *Salvation is from the Jews*, published by the prestigious academic publisher Brill.
– If one wants to be a Christian, one must be rooted in the OT, because it is the Bible that Jesus and Paul read and referred to. The first Christians, the apostles, quoted the Greek-Jewish Bible translation, the Septuagint, because they wanted to use the language that was spoken at the time.
– As a biblical scholar, it is interesting to delve into how the first Christians used the Old Testament, he continues, noting that it is impossible to understand the NT without the OT, since the NT is essentially a commentary on the OT. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches that he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.
Karl-Henrik Wallerstein believes that it is important to have a credible foundation for faith in the Bible at a time when many are critical of Israel.
– It is impossible to be a Christian without having love for the Jewish people, because as a people they are, in a particular way, bearers of the OT, he says, pointing out that evangelical Christians and rabbinical theologians are remarkably united in their view of the credibility of the Bible.
