Passion for Hope Not Hate

In late 1942, Joseph Goebbels lamented that the German people were doing an insufficient job of hating the English.  They listened to pirate English radio, accepted as truth English news reports and in general did a poor job of shunning the island neighbor and Allied opposition.  In an article in Das Reich, he went so far as to say that the war effort relied on Germans having enough contempt and hatred for the English.

In one of his German language broadcasts for the Office of War Information, theologian Paul Tillich encouraged the German people to resist hatred for the English and, while they were at it, to resist hatred for Hitler’s National Socialists as well.  That may seem an odd thing for a theologian so vehemently opposed to everything National Socialism would come to stand for in Germany and in history.  Nonetheless, Tillich tells his fellow Germans to resist “being just as the National Socialists want you to be, servants of hatred.”  When we hate as they hate, Tillich said, “we are identical to them to the degree to which you permit yourselves to hate them.”[i]

Those words and that sentiment were broadcast over an official United States government radio service during wartime.

Imagine a theologian, even one of Tillich’s profile and popularity attempting to broadcast into Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran a message similar to the one he shared with the German people seventy years ago.

He wouldn’t make it into the studio much less on the air!

We live in a time when the dominant political chorus is one of division and hate.   A time when your credentials as a citizen are measured not in devotion to the principles of the nation but your vocal hatred of a religious minority or an unpopular population.   Ours is a time when what you believe is far less important than what you reject; when we are defined by what divides rather than what unites.  Because, the chorus goes, if we don’t hate and reject them deeply and harshly enough, then they might just win.  Liberal or conservative, right wing or left wing, the chorus demands that we each take a side and, in taking it, hate the other whatever that other might be.

What Tillich reminded the German people, what he might yet remind us, is that hate can create nothing great, it can only destroy.  Hate leaves only emptiness.  It is passion that builds and passion that leaves hope in its wake. 

Yes, there are institutions and powers and principalities in the world today that demand our resistance.  But as followers of the passion of Christ, the passion of salvation, our goal must not be to defeat something hated but redeem something lost.  It is no coincidence that Hitler went after the church early in his evil rule.  He knew what we too often forget, that the antidote to the institutions of hate in the world is to relentlessly resist them with grace, hope and peace.  It was the light of that grace that Goebbels so feared and it is that same grace that the world needs to hear today.

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[i] Paul Tillich “How One Should View the Enemy” OWI Broadcast September 12, 1942