Lutherans, Please Refute!

Extract

Symptomatic cures are rarely effective. Satisfactory treatment, medical or political, demands a knowledge of causes, as well as symptoms. So long as the cause is unknown, remedies are futile. Yet the Western Allies are striving to impose just such a symptomatic cure for Nazism, without ever investigating its causes; that, perhaps, is all political action can do. But to dismiss Nazism, in theory and practice, as a policy of anti-Semitism, concentration camps, imperialism, militarism and compulsory sterilisation, is not enough; all those abuses may be eradicated by A.M.G., but they are merely the symptoms, just as unemployment and degradation were merely the occasions, of Hitler’s revolution. The inherent disposition to Nazism will remain until its causes are diagnosed and treated. The writer believes this inherent disposition to come from tendencies engendered or encouraged by Luther, when he denied Natural Morality, and rejected the claims of the Church; without that rebellion, Nazism might never have occurred.

I do not enjoy making such bold assertions;. I should be glad to see them disproved; but there is no virtue in concealing the truth. Let me not be misunderstood, however. No one would make Luther a champion of Dachau and Buchenwald; one might as readily accuse George Washington of defending the atomic bomb; but Luther suffered from having disciples. In fact, only a chemist can detect the affinity between coal and diamonds, but none the less it is there; so with Luther and the disposition to Nazism.