According to the author, Christianity offers a powerful system of rewards and incentives to create cultural uniformity. Those who do not join in this cultural uniformity become anathematized, oppressed, marginalized, and ultimately removed from the Christian circle of moral obligation. Using culture studies as a framework for analysis, Steele investigates the ways in which Christianity created cultural conditions based on a theology of violence and the use of sacred violence to foster behaviors that would lead to the involvement of millions of perpetrators and bystanders during the many instances of extreme violence used against the Other over the centuries. As the original Disconfirming Other in the Christian cultural world, Jews often served as the primary target. Thus, there was a system of definitions, rewards, incentives, and victims already in place when the Nazis came to power. Calling for a re-evaluation of the cultural practices and values that have developed within Christianity over time, this important new book helps account for the phenomenon of the Nazi perpetrators and bystanders during the Holocaust. Framing the Holocaust as a late but logical development in a long series of violent responses by Christianity to the Other—those who stand outside the Christian world, either by geographical accident, religious tradition, or some other factor—the author attempts to show how the Holocaust, while not a specifically Christian event, was nevertheless sanctioned and conditioned by other events in the history of Christianity. Using culture studies to frame his analysis, Steele focuses on historical antecedents that help account for the apathy of bystanders and point to the preexistence of a moral framework supporting and empowering the perpetrators of the Holocaust. This unique perspective concludes that the Nazis invented almost nothing with regard to the Shoah, and that, instead, a long-standing insistence on cultural hegemony played a much bigger role in the attempted destruction of the Jewish community.

This text develops the work of Jewish scholarship to discern resonances between central Christian and Jewish beliefs. Offering fresh approaches to contentious and sensitive issues, it argues that God's basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity, but with humanity.

How does Christianity relate to contemporary Judaism? In this book a respected Jewish theologian learns a lesson from recent Christian theology: God's love of Christ and the church does not replace his love of Israel and the Jews. Ochs engages leading postliberal Christian thinkers George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Daniel Hardy, and David Ford, who argue this point in their work. He analyzes recent thinking in Christology and pneumatology and offers a detailed study of the movement of recent postliberal Christian theology in the US and UK. Ochs's realization that some Christian thinkers retain a place for the people of Israel opens up the possibility of new understanding and deepens the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

How culpable is the Christian Church for its anti Jewish dogma. Have ideas and beliefs changed since they accepted blame for this terrible tragedy for humankind.

Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center. Based on years of archival research, The Aryan Jesus examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years. The Aryan Jesus raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

Current scholarship in the study of ancient Christianity is now available to nonspecialists through this collection of essays on anti-Judaism in the New Testament and in New Testament interpretation. While academic writing can be obscure and popular writing can be uncritical, this group of experts has striven to write as simply and clearly as possible on topics that have been hotly contested. The essays are arranged around the historical figures and canonical texts that matter most to Christian communities and whose interpretation has fed the negative characterizations of Jews and Judaism. A select annotated bibliography also gives suggestions for further reading. This book should be an excellent resource for academic courses as well as adult study groups.