Daily Verse | 2 Thessalonians 3:13
And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right.
Thursday’s Reading: 1 Timothy 1-6
In Dennis Prager’s provocatively-titled column this week (If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God) he addresses the topic of Holocaust denialism. I think he was provoked by the recent news that Nick Fuentes had dined with Donald J. Trump, along with Ye (Kanye West) and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Fuentes “aggressively” denies that the Holocaust happened.
After laying out the effort of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and other Allied generals to document the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, Prager writes that there may not be “a more documented single event in history than the Holocaust.”
He then gives three reasons why denying the Holocaust “is evil”: 1) it’s a Big Lie that can cause more violence, 2) “it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism,” and 3) it’s a “slap in the face of all the Americans who died fighting the Nazis.”
Prager closes his essay with this:
As a college student, I dated a woman whose parents were Holocaust survivors. She told me on a number of occasions how often she would hear her father scream in the middle of the night as he dreamed about watching his family be murdered. Unable to live with these memories, one night, her father hanged himself.
That man is one of millions of reasons Fuentes — and those who ally themselves with him — will go to hell. If there is a just God.
Dennis Prager supports evangelical Christians even though he is not one himself. He also recognizes that Christianity is the key to Western civilization and to the value of liberty (see his article here, for example). Prager is a strong defender of America and of evangelicals against the liberal Left.
I greatly admire Prager and his thinking. However, both his column’s title and his concluding paragraphs are wrong. Denying the Holocaust does not send someone to hell and I’m surprised Prager insists that it must be so — or there is no (just) God.
Prager writes,
It is a central tenet of moral theology that there are gradations of sin. To argue that God views stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child as moral equivalents renders God a moral fool. And doing that to God is a sin. If we mortals perceive the universe of difference between such actions, it goes without question that God does, too. The idea that we have greater moral clarity than God is logically and theologically untenable.
In the pantheon of evils, among the worst is Holocaust denial.
God, he says, grades on a curve. And because Holocaust denial is among the very worst evils in this world, God will punish such sin with a one-way ticket to hell.
Leaving aside the question of how Prager knows that Holocaust denial is among the very worst sins, it’s clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sin and redemption. I’m not denying that some evils are worse than others (sometimes exponentially so) since they clearly are. Stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child are not moral equivalents. One is worse than the other.
But the mistake Prager seems to make is thinking that one of those acts (raping a child) is worthy of hell while the other one (stealing a towel) isn’t. Surely the rapist will go to hell, won’t he? Surely God wouldn’t send a guy who pilfered a hotel towel to hell for such a minor infraction, right?
Wrong. We say, “this sin is worse than that sin.” God says, “They’re both sin.”
The truth is that they both evidence a sinful soul in rebellion against God’s moral standard of perfect holiness.
Jesus said,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18)
Our default condition apart from Christ is living under condemnation. Jesus didn’t come to condemn us because we were already condemned. That’s what sends someone to hell.
The fundamental problem we all face is that we stand condemned “already” apart from Christ, not that we’ve sunk to new lows of sinfulness. What matters is not the gravity of the sin, but whether a person has put their trust in God or not.
Jesus said that not everyone who calls him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). Hell will welcome a lot of “nice” people who didn’t sin much according to the standards of this world. Conversely, heaven will welcome at least a few notorious sinners who repented and acknowledged that Jesus is Lord.
Denying the Holocaust is vile. It is extremely hurtful to Jewish people who have been affected by it. Denying that it happened is to deny the immense violence done against the Jewish people. It is to pass without a care by a man mauled by a lion and to emphatically deny the mauling while standing in front of him.
It is irrational and viciously unkind. But it does not, by itself, condemn a person to hell. It is the condition of the soul from whence comes the vile denial that does.
Great column , Dave! Thanks for your clear response rebuttal. I think you are spot on
Well said.