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My God and My Neighbor is a “Bible talk show” that looks at religious issues, Christian living and world events in light of the Word of God to give hope. This podcast is a ministry of Tennessee Bible College. TBC offers a bachelor's in Bible studies, a master of theology, and a doctorate of theology in apologetics and Christian evidences. TBC also provides Christian books, audio recordings on the Bible, and free Bible courses in English and Spanish. Tune in to My God and My Neighbor to experience the educational content that TBC has been delivering for nearly five decades!
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Kerry Duke: Hi, I'm Kerry Duke, host of My God and My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee Bible College, where we see the Bible as not just another book, but the Book. Join us in a study of the inspired Word to strengthen your faith and to share what you've learned with others.
In Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse nine, the Bible says, “That which has been is what will be, and that which is done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun.” And the great truth in that passage describes this look at the past 100 years of moral decline.
In Ecclesiastes chapter three, the Bible says in verse 1, “To everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven…a time to gain…” And that was certainly true of the 1920s during that decade that is known as the “Roaring Twenties.” Verse 6 also says that there is “a time to lose.” And that was certainly true in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Verse 8 says there is “a time to love, and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace,” and these words “a time of war” certainly describe the 1940s.
That was definitely a time of war—one of the worst that the world had ever seen. President Woodrow Wilson had said that World War I was the war that would end all wars. But it wasn't. Germany, under Adolf Hitler, felt that it had some unfinished business to take care of, and so the war began in 1939. Of course, the U.S. was drawn into the battle when a Japanese fleet attacked Pearl Harbor on December the 7th, 1941, a day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said would “live in infamy.”
As the U. S. and her allies advanced in the Pacific and in Europe, Hitler continued to wage war and to try to conquer the world. Here was a man full of hate and arrogance. He believed that the Aryan race was superior to all other people, and he especially despised the Jews. In fact, he murdered 6 million Jewish people—men, women, children, and older people. The Nazis worked out a plan they called the Final Solution. This was their way of getting rid of the Jews.
Hitler's men arrested, tortured, and killed Jews by the thousands in concentration camps,like the one in Auschwitz. The world eventually saw this evil for what it really was, because the Nazi ideology was a godless movement driven by pure hatred. How could this happen? How could people be this evil? Was it because the people of Germany were not intelligent people?
No, but Adolf Hitler used the crisis of the depression in the early 1930s to ascend to power. That was his excuse. And once he gained control, it was difficult to stop him. But someone might say, “Well, how could this happen since Germany had been such a religious country?”
Well, it once was. This was the home of many martyrs during the Dark Ages. The medieval underground of churches in Germany a thousand years earlier risked their lives and gave their lives for their beliefs. This was the home of Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation. But all this had changed by the 1900s. And our question is, how? Why did this occur? How could this evil even happen?
Well, of course, the answer is the same as it is with any other kind of evil. Sin is the answer. The devil is pure evil, and sin is real. Sometimes it shocks us when we hear about how heinous and how wicked man can be, but should it surprise us? Isn't this what we read from the beginning in the Bible? In the first human family, we find evil arising.
Cain killed his own brother, and the Bible tells us why. In 1 John 3, verse 12, the Bible says, “Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.” So out of pure spite and envy and hatred he killed his own brother. And what was the world like before the Flood? Well, Genesis chapter 6 verse 5 says, “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Throughout the Old Testament, we see the darkest side of mankind—hate, envy, pride, murder, torture, rape, and oppression of the most brutal kind. We read about mass executions and attempts at genocide in the Bible. In Exodus chapter 1, the Bible shows that Pharaoh ordered all male Hebrew children executed. In Matthew chapter 2, Herod slaughtered all the children two years old and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area.
And of course, Hitler was not the only mass murderer in the 1900s. Joseph Stalin killed millions of his own people. Estimates range from 20 million to 40 million, and even higher. And then there was, of course, the Chinese ruler, Mao Zedong, who caused the deaths of many millions in China.
Many believe that he killed more than Stalin and Hitler put together. So the basic answer to the question of the Holocaust is sin. But there were ideas that helped to make this evil possible. The mindset of Germany was not like it was in Martin Luther's day. Modernism had watered down religious convictions until there was little left.
There were certain ideologies that paved the way for Hitler and the Nazis. And when we look at what certain German scholars were saying years before Hitler, it's no surprise that these theories and doctrines culminated in one of the most horrific events of the century. Now, of course, not all the blame can be laid on German thinkers, but much of it can be.
And it's important to remember that the philosophical patterns that contributed to Germany's decline are the same trends of thought that have affected much of the rest of the world, including the United States. So what led up to the evils of the Nazi regime? Well, one contributing factor was humanistic, anti-God philosophy.
Let's begin with Immanuel Kant. He lived from 1724 to 1804. Kant was a German philosopher, and like his contemporary, David Hume, who was a British philosopher, Kant was a skeptic. He was an agnostic. He said we can't know if there's a God. In fact, he said, you really can't be sure about anything. Now, Kant was widely respected because of his intellect, and he was very influential.
He taught that no one can know anything about the world, and no one can possibly know that God and heaven and hell, or the soul, exist. Now, when people listen to this kind of teaching, how can they have any convictions about right and wrong? Because everything is up in the air. Every man is a law to himself like Judges 21 verse 25 says, “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” And in the case of Hitler and the Nazis might makes right. So Kant was one of the German philosophers that began to lead people away from God and away from the Bible. Now following him was the German philosopher Hegel. He lived from 1770 to 1831.
Hegel said that the God of the Bible doesn't exist. Now, of course, again, we're reminded of passages like Psalm 14, verse 1: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” We think about Psalm 19, verse 1: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utter speech, and night unto night shows knowledge.” We think about Romans 1, verse 20: “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”
But Hegel was even more ridiculous than atheists because he said that everything that exists is God. This is a type of belief known as pantheism, the view that God is everything and everything is God. Now again, we know what the Bible says in Genesis chapter 1, verse 1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” God is separate from, He is above, the heavens and the earth. God is the creator of the universe and the rest is the creation.
Now God is separate from and above the world, but in Hegel's day, people were beginning to turn more and more away from God. But the most ungodly part of Hegel's teaching was his view of what is called the dialectic. Hegel said that everything is constantly changing and developing.
He wasn't talking about things changing so much as he was talking about knowledge changing and developing, even ideas about good and evil. In fact, he said nothing is really evil in itself. For instance, one person may say that a thing is wrong and another may say that it's right. But Hegel would simply say that there's truth in both viewpoints when you really think about it.
So truth of any kind is relative. It's not absolute, according to Hegel. Even truth about morals. So in the end, Hegel taught that we really can't say that something is good or bad. We really can't say that something is right or wrong. Now, of course, this is foolish. If someone in his day had brutally murdered one of his loved ones, Hegel would have been the first to say that it was wrong, absolutely wrong.
But these professors oftentimes in a university sit in a corner; they write books that are out of touch with common sense, and the world thinks that they're being intellectual. Now, remember, this man taught in Germany and he had a big influence on how people thought. In fact, the theories of communism and evolution build on what this man, Hegel, taught. But his anti-religious teaching became fertile ground for the growth of Nazi supremacy.
Then we come to a German philosopher who had an even more direct impact on Hitler. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche. He lived from 1844 to 1900. Nietzsche was one of the most ungodly writers who ever lived. He is the German philosopher who said God is dead. Now he was an atheist, an atheist who hated Christianity. He didn't believe that God was once alive and then died. He said that God had never existed. When he said God is dead, he meant that belief in God was dying, that religion was dying, especially, Christianity was dead that it was useless because people were turning away from God and Christianity. Nietzsche's philosophy is often times called one of nihilism. That is, the idea that there is nothing beyond what we see. There are no morals, no God, no hereafter. According to him, there is no right and wrong.
In fact, he predicted that mankind was moving beyond such talk about things being good or bad. Now, that is what is clearly seen in the title of one of his books which was Beyond Good and Evil. Man is just an animal according to him and that's how he lived. In fact, he contracted a sexually transmitted disease from prostitutes and spent the last 11 years of his life in a mental ward and died at the age of 55.
And here's the interesting part. This arrogant, hate filled philosopher had an influence on Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Nietzsche had no problem with the strong overpowering the weak. He said that's just nature, and in fact, he wrote, “The strongest and highest will to life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a will to war, a will to power, a will to overpower.”
Now doesn't that sound exactly like what Adolf Hitler said just 30 years after Nietzsche had died? Nietzsche had also boasted of what he called the Superman—people like him who were above everybody else, intellectually especially, because they understood things.
The Nazis took this kind of ideology. They believed that the Aryan race was superior and it was only natural for them to conquer and to rule the world which they believed was theirs. This is the satanic thinking that led to, that contributed to the murder of six million Jewish people.
But what about the role of religion in Germany at this time? Why didn't this have an influence to keep the Holocaust from happening? Well, there were churches and there were Christians at that time. But many churches had been bought and paid for by the government, and even before Hitler many churches had given in to what we call liberal theology. Anti-God philosophy had affected religious schools.
This modernistic thinking led these seminaries to question and eventually deny the supernatural and the miraculous. Remember, these schools trained ministers, and they said miracles in the Bible didn't happen. Now, this movement is oftentimes called German Rationalism. It means these men pushed the Bible aside and exalted their own imagination.
In fact, German scholars attacked the Bible more and more in the 1800s. Now, remember, these were men who claimed to be religious, even Christian. Professors such as Schleiermacher, Strauss, and others preached a very liberal view of God, Christ, the Bible, as well as sin, and heaven and hell. So called Bible scholars like Graf and Wellhausen taught that Moses and prophets like Isaiah didn't really write the books of the Old Testament that we believe they wrote.
They said these books were written and revised and edited by many authors over the course of hundreds of years. According to them, when Jesus in Matthew chapter 15 verses 1 through 4 said that Moses gave the commandment to honor your father and your mother, or when Jesus cited what Moses said in Matthew chapter 19 verses 7 and 8, these German scholars [so-called] said that Moses really didn't write these things. When the New Testament quotes Isaiah, these rationalists said that Isaiah himself didn't write these verses.
Now the Bible is clear about this. The Bible says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” [2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17]. The Bible also says in 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 20, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation, for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
But these so called intellectuals and experts weakened religion in Germany and around the world. And once this skepticism was in the hearts of believers, once preachers stopped preaching the Bible and started criticizing it, the fire of faith died out. By the time that Hitler came to power, many churches and schools in Germany were too weak to say anything. Again, not every church in Germany believed this modernistic teaching, but many of them did.
So after a century and a half of being indoctrinated with skepticism and liberal theology, the national conscience was weakened to the point that it closed its eyes to what the Nazis did.
Now we can't leave out also the influence of science. Charles Darwin wrote his book Origin of the Species in 1859. In it, he talked about his theory of evolution. The full title was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Evolution, of course, is about the survival of the fittest, which meant the extermination of the weakest. To Adolf Hitler, he believed that other races were inferior, so Hitler took the superman envisioned by Nietzsche and the idea of favored races or species taught by Darwin and he came up with his idea of Aryan supremacy.
This meant that men were animals, and some animals are stronger than others, and so the stronger should remove the weaker. Should we be surprised at what happened? If men are taught that they are animals, they will act like animals. If they are convinced that they have no soul, then they will have no conscience in how they behave.
The Bible says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” [Proverbs, chapter 23, verse 7]. What is put into the minds of people affects how they live. Now this is what happened in Germany and it is still happening today. Years of skeptical philosophy, liberal theology, and false science lowered man to the level of a beast.
Ravi Zacharias wrote about this indoctrination in his book entitled, Can Man Live Without God? He cited the words of Viktor Frankl who was at Auschwitz, the feared and the infamous concentration camp. Here's what Frankl said about his experience there and his observation on how the Nazis could commit these kinds of atrocities.
“If we present men with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drive and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last state of corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz, the gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment, or as the Nazis like to say, of blood and soil. I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared, not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
Now, it's interesting that over 30 years after Hitler died, the atrocity of the Holocaust was used in a debate to show how ridiculous atheism is. In 1976, Thomas Warren, a gospel preacher, debated world-renowned atheist Antony Flew.
One of the questions that he asked Flew was whether the Nazis were guilty of real moral evil when they murdered 6 million Jews. Flew, the atheist, said of course they did wrong. But then Warren asked him, “What law did they break?” Was it U. S. law? British law? German law or some other law? The Nazis were not under U.S. law, so they couldn't have broken U. S. law. The Nazis were not subject to British law, so they could not have violated that law. And German law gave them the authority to execute Jews. So what law did the Nazis violate? That's when Warren cited the words of Chief Justice Robert Jackson, who said that they were appealing to “a law that transcends the provincial and the transient.”
And that law could only be the moral law of God. So these are some of the ideologies that paved the way for the Nazi massacre of the Jews. And, of course, media propaganda didn't help. That kind of indoctrination was like throwing gas on a lit match in Germany. Every day, everywhere Germans turned, they were flooded with bias against Jews in newspapers, in books, in speeches, signs, films, plays, radio, and every other form of communication. When people are not strong in their convictions, they will be swayed and brainwashed by misinformation. They'll hear it so often that they'll finally believe it. And that's what happened in Nazi Germany. The world used to call it a tragedy, but sadly, history is repeating itself in this way.
But after this terrible war ended, a war that was even more serious was just beginning at home in America. War has profound effects on the home. It has all kinds of effects on a society, but especially on marriage and the family.
In World War II, many children were without a father for months or even years. And some children never saw their father again. The sacrifices of the war left many homes unsettled. Now, added to this loss was the trend of mothers working outside the home. The war had placed a huge demand on supplies and equipment.
Many women went to work in factories. Before the war, some women worked outside the home, but during the war, far more did. And this is understandable. Our country was fighting a ruthless and a powerful force overseas. Our military needed the items produced in manufacturing plants. I once heard a WWII vet say that if it hadn't been for women working outside the home we would have lost the war.
That may be true. But the fact remains that the children of those mothers grew up without the guidance, supervision and quality time with their mothers, and in some cases, both mothers and fathers. This war was bound to produce a change in the next generation, which we call the baby boomers. When fathers did return from the war, many women continued to work outside the home.
They'd gotten used to the extra income. Meanwhile, children spent more time with other adults, less time with their parents, and their whole outlook was molded differently than the previous generation. This war had harmful effects on marriage. Prolonged separation is not best, even if it is necessary. Men and women can be tempted easily when they're apart, and that happened in World War II.
The men who went overseas were away from home. They weren't with the family and community and the church like they had been. They didn't know the people there and the people didn't know them. They felt free, in many cases, to do things they otherwise would not have done. Some did, and some didn't. But it was the lack of accountability that opened the door.
We all depend on other people to hold us responsible. And when we know that we have to answer to other people, that helps to keep us in line. Do you remember what happened to the prodigal son in Luke chapter 15 when he got his inheritance money? The Bible says that he went into a far country. Why? He wanted to experience the wild side of life, so he went to a place where he wouldn't have to face family and friends and neighbors after a night of partying and carousing. He went by choice, and the soldiers in World War II went out by necessity, but either way, the situation is the same. There are temptations. Some were single, some were married, but they were away from the setting that they were used to.
Some men drank and cussed. Some put up posters of pinup models everywhere that they could. Some partied and brawled and had sex with any willing female, or paid females. Not all of them did, but too many did. And far more men did these things than they would have otherwise had they been at home.
So the cost of the war can't be measured just in terms of money or even in lives. So when these men returned home, the nation celebrated because the war was over. But in reality, as we said, the war had just begun. Men that had cheated on their wives had to try to put their lives back together. Some did. They made things right with their wives, but others divorced. As a matter of fact, the divorce rate climbed during this period, just after the war and families were shattered. This set a trend for an even more carefree attitude toward marriage vows and even those that didn't divorce or weren't married sometimes loosened their convictions.
In other words, the nation won the war in one sense, but lost in another. The economy grew stronger, but morals became weaker. And men were not the only ones at fault, of course. Some women who accompanied the men at war were guilty. Some wives back home cheated on their husbands. Overall, the seeds of a lax, tolerant attitude towards sex out of marriage were being sown, and the next generation would plunge American morals to deep, dark levels never before imagined.
Had it not been for godly men and women and preachers and elders during this time who fought against this kind of evil, the nation would have gone downhill even faster. Many men in the 1940s became more and more obsessed with female beauty. This was an age of calendars and posters with famous pinup girls.
Then there were attempts by Hollywood to display lewd scenes of actresses. Even though the producers had agreed to follow the Hays Code, some pushed the lines as far as they could. One movie produced in 1943 and released in 1946 shocked God-fearing people across the nation. America was on the road to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Then, to make matters worse, in 1948, a study was released by an Indiana University professor named Alfred Kinsey. The title of the report was “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” Over 5, 000 males were interviewed in this 800-page report. Five years later, Kinsey released another report entitled “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.”
Notice the word human. In both reports, you see, Kinsey was actually a zoologist by training. Kinsey was an ungodly, immoral, perverted man who hated God and hated the Bible. He said that Christian beliefs about sexual purity were grounded in ignorance and superstition. To him, nothing was right or wrong about any kind of sexual behavior. He looked at human beings as animals, nothing more. This study said there's nothing wrong with premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, incest, or even pedophilia.
Now, when we think about this kind of ungodliness, we're reminded of certain passages. Hebrews chapter 13, verse 4, which says, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge,” Revelation, chapter 21, verse 8, which says that all fornicators shall have their part “in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone,” and Galatians 6, verse 7: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
Thank you for listening to My God and My Neighbor. Stay connected with our podcast on our website and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Tennessee Bible College, providing Christian education since 1975 in Cookeville, Tennessee, offers undergraduate and graduate programs. Study at your level. Aim higher and get in touch with us today.