31. The Question That Must Not Be Avoided

The Christian Statement

The Holocaust — the Shoah — is the central theological wound of the 20th century and the question that no honest Jewish-Christian conversation can avoid. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered in an industrialized genocide, in a historically Christian nation, by people who had been baptized, while much of the institutional church remained silent or accommodated the regime.

The disciple who enters this conversation without having engaged this question is not ready for the conversation. And the disciple who engages it defensively — trying to protect the reputation of Christianity or to explain it in ways that minimize the horror — has failed the Jewish person in front of them.

The first response to the Holocaust is not a theological argument. It is silence. Then grief. Then the honest confession that what happened cannot be theologically justified, cannot be assigned a divine purpose that makes it acceptable, and cannot be used as raw material for any argument that diminishes its weight.

Only from that posture can the deeper theological questions be engaged: where was God at Auschwitz? What does the silence of God during the Shoah mean for any claim that God is the God of Israel? How can any Jewish person trust a God who permitted this?

32. Where Was God at Auschwitz?

The Christian Statement

Elie Wiesel, in his memoir Night, describes a scene at Auschwitz that has become one of the most quoted theological moments of the 20th century: three prisoners are hung, including a young boy. As the assembled prisoners are forced to watch, someone behind Wiesel asks "Where is God now?" And Wiesel hears a voice within him answer: "Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows."

Wiesel has said he did not intend this as a Christian theological statement. He has described it as the death of his God — the moment his faith in a God who intervenes was destroyed. And yet the image he chose — God hanging on a gallows alongside a murdered child — is, whether he intended it or not, one of the most powerful expressions of what the cross actually claims.

The Christian answer to "where was God at Auschwitz?" is not: God was watching and had a plan. It is not: the Holocaust was permitted for reasons we don't understand. It is: God has already been where those children were. He has been arrested and tortured and murdered by a state apparatus. He has been stripped of His dignity and hung before a crowd. He was there at Auschwitz because He has been inside the worst that human evil can do — from the inside — not as a distant observer but as a participant.

This does not explain the Holocaust. It does not make it acceptable. It does not answer every question. But it means that the God of Christianity is not the God who watches suffering from a safe distance. He is the God who entered it. Who bears it. Who is, in the most literal sense, familiar with grief.

"He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness; people hid their faces from him; he was despised, and we considered him insignificant." — Isaiah 53:3 (NET)