At the beginning of the twenty-first century, artifacts of lost religious spirituality lay about us in archaeological ruin. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the bombed out shells of the rural parish house and city villa of his family, which had sheltered three generations of Lutheran ministry, symbolized a Christian civilization destroyed by Nazi fascism. He looked forward to the reconstruction of Christian civilization in Germany after the defeat of Hitler. [See my essay on heritage.]

The Nazi racial program represented a political movement whose participants had abandoned their ethical engagement with the world.

Although opposed to the Nazi anti-Semitic program of the 1930s, Bonhoeffer apparently did not know about the Holocaust. We do not know whether he would have thought that Christian complicity in the Holocaust had so corrupted Christianity as to make a true Christian civilization unobtainable, or even undesirable.

Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian, was one of the first non-Jews to be removed from his university post by Hitler's government. He came to the United States, where he continued to speak out about the Nazi persecution of German Jews. In a public address delivered before the horror of the Final Solution unfolded during the War, Tillich said that, without Judaism, Christianity was barbarism.

Tillich made the single most important point about twentieth century Christian spiritualism, and religious spiritualism generally.

Judaism is the originating and continuing source of ethical universalism in Western monothesism. Western religions, including Muhammadanism, cannot achieve authentic religious spirituality until they cease killing Jews—at once, everywhere, forever.

Universal, immediate, unconditional cessation of killing Jews is the radical ground required for the reconstruction Western civilization.