Abstract
The Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph, co-authored by Lutheran theologians Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, has proven controversial. Scholars have typically interpreted the document’s recommendation regarding the place of Jewish Christians in the church according to an inclusion/exclusion binary model. However, the Erlangen Opinion actually reflects a dialectical theology of Jewish existence that Althaus had developed during the Weimar years. Following this dialectic of pathology and performance, Althaus envisions neither the total inclusion nor total inclusion of Jews in the German state church. Rather, he proposes an inclusive quarantine of Jewish persons, who represent both a mortal danger to and indispensable factor for all communities—both societal and ecclesial. By probing the logic of this important artifact of Protestant theology’s complicated relationship to National Socialist ideology, the article sheds light on the ambivalent nature of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism.
Highlights
The equivocal nature of the Erlangen OpinionIn the spring of 1933, Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus (1888-1966) greeted the rise of National Socialism as a “gift and miracle of God.”[1]
Having served as a military hospital chaplain among German expatriates in Poland during the First World War, he was a nationalist for whom the discipline and order of Nazism did look like good news
He was by no means the only one; at the twilight of the Weimar Republic many clergy hoped that the new government would usher in Germany’s spiritual and moral renewal
Summary
In the spring of 1933, Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus (1888-1966) greeted the rise of National Socialism as a “gift and miracle of God.”[1]. I further argue that Althaus fits this wider theological vision to a microcosmic scale in the Erlangen Opinion: Christians of Jewish descent emerge as a necessary danger for “German” Christians and must be confined to the margins of the church. In this way, Jews, on account of their dialectical relationship with Germans, are suspended precariously between total belonging and total alienation, marginalized to an inclu-. 18 Paul Althaus, “Die Frage des Evangeliums an das Moderne Judentum,” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 7 (1930), 196
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