Re-Writing God’s Word: China Is Following The Nazis’ Playbook In Its Tactics Against The Church

Re-Writing God's Word: China Is Following The Nazis' Playbook In Its Tactics Against The Church - Harbingers Daily

Altering the text of Scripture to conform it to the evil objectives of a morally…

Harbingers Daily

In 1939, the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was founded by pro-Nazi “theologian” Walter Grundmann. Located at the University of Jena — the institution from which Karl Marx received his doctorate — the goal of the Institute was to demonstrate that Jesus was actually an Aryan. Mary, you see, was a descendent of Assyrians and Jesus’s real father was a Roman soldier.

The Institute produced a book titled, “Germans with God: a German Catechism,” that eliminated all references to the Hebrew prophets’ foretelling of Jesus and presented His life as an effort to fight against the Jewish people in the Palestine of His day [under the British Mandate prior to Israel’s re-establishment in 1948]. As described by Dartmouth scholar Susannah Heschel in her book “The Aryan Jesus,” “Germans with God” “omitted traditional doctrinal positions regarding miracles, virgin birth, incarnation, resurrection, and so forth, in favor of positioning Jesus as a human being who struggled on behalf of God and died not only as a martyr, but also a ‘victor’ on the cross, despite being a victim of the Jews.” Grundmann and his pro-Nazi Lutheran colleagues even developed a new series of commandments (12 instead of 10), including one that called on Germans to “Honor your Führer and master.”

While these things are so absurd as to invite derision and so irreverent as to provoke contempt, in our own time, something very similar is happening in China. As Family Research Council’s Arielle Del Turco reported several years ago, China’s President Xi Jinping has begun “a campaign to ‘Sinicize’ religion to make it more compatible with the teachings of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” Included in Xi’s plan is “retranslating and annotating” the Bible in an effort to “find commonalities with socialism and establish a ‘correct understanding’ of the text.” One example that has reached the West is a retranslation of the story in John 8 about Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. The “Sinicized” version has Jesus identifying as a sinner and then stoning the woman Himself!

Not merely content with re-writing God’s Word, China’s communist regime is even extending its reach into churches themselves. Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wrote last year that in Henan province, “local CCP officials forced Protestant churches to replace the Ten Commandments with Xi Jinping quotes. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,’ became diktats like: ‘Resolutely guard against the infiltration of Western ideology.’”

In one sense, Christians can take these efforts as confirmation of the truth of Scripture: Were the written Word of God not so transformative, why bother trying to “correct” it to comport with political ideologies? In seeking to undermine it, Xi only vindicates its power…