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Parent Post: Comment With Your Hardest Questions About Christianity
minute.before.midnight
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3/10/2025, 6:38:46 PM
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Great topic @johnny As someone who has been wrestling with Political Theology for more than a decade, I have a hard time understanding the question, and many German theologians, like Metz and Moltmann who influenced me, struggled with the same issue. How can we speak about God after Shoah? This is from the introduction of my book, which I think encapsulates how I feel and my struggles: People often ask me about the meaning of political theology. Political theology is the ultimate point where you are contested with the most profound questions as a believer and a scholar. It is a place where you are bound to reconcile the victims of war and the most gruesome atrocities of humankind, the Holocaust, the dictatorships, and the heinous crimes with the existence of God, his omnipresence, omnipotence, and all-knowing! It’s a battle from which you either return as a firm believer or a most outspoken atheist. If you are serious about taking this venture, be prepared for a transformative journey. You will be challenged, broken down, and rebuilt. It’s an abyss that stares back at you with the horrifying look that most theologians want to avoid - a place where Niche would find himself at home; Sartre inspired his existentialism, Becket wrote the “Breath.”, and McCarthy imagined the grim reality of “The Road.” It is an unsettling endeavor that dares to relate the truth of the Holocaust and Auschwitz, the scaffolds of ex-Yugoslavia, atrocities in Rwanda, and the darkest alleys of human nature with the existence of God and the validity of theological discourse.
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johnny
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3/12/2025, 4:57:23 PM
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Thank you so much. That is indeed a difficult one. Do you have a short answer that you give to non Christians who ask? I’m not sure I have anything more than a prosaic and not satisfying answer myself.
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minute.before.midnight
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3/13/2025, 1:31:29 PM
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In all honesty, I don’t think I have the short or long answer. What is the purpose of Shoah and how it relates to God’s omniscience? Did God allow it because they rejected Christ the Messiah? The entire purpose of Political Theology after the WWII was to emphasize the importance of remembrance and victims; fight the oppression against the totalitarian systems and use the theology as a tool to fight for justice and equality. There’s a quite of bit of Critical Race Theory in the entire dialectical dynamics, which is why I steered from the concept to use the theology as the critique of Cultural Marxism but I’m digressing now…
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