The Nazi at your neighborhood church
Gerhard Kittel helped out Hitler and remained a Christian superstar
When I was growing up Christian, I was surrounded by Nazis. Many, indeed, were found on the pastor’s bookshelf, and quoted in sermons and books.
I’m looking up the horror story of Gerhard Kittel, who was a key player in Hitler’s rise to power, becoming the face of Christianity in Nazi Germany.
To Christians to this day, he’s affectionately known as ‘Kittel’, the famous editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.
Kittel was born in 1888 in Poland.
His father was a noted Bible scholar, and he became one too. He married in 1914. He was remembered as a kindly man. He helped people. He helped Jews. He never had any kids.
His work in Bible scholarship was pro-Jewish. Many Christian scholars at the time were arguing that Christianity was utterly different from Judaism, even arguing Jesus wasn’t Jewish at all.
But Kittel reaffirmed the Jewish references behind Jesus. He didn’t even see Christianity and Judaism as all that different. He thought of religion as basically just a force for ‘morality’.
