Carnal Reason

Historian Philip Friedman provides the following eyewitness account of what happened to a young Jewish girl living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

Zosia was a little girl … the daughter of a physician. During an “action” one of the Germans became aware of here beautiful diamond-like eyes.

“I could make two rings out of them,” he said, “one for myself and one for my wife.”

His colleague is holding the girl.

“Let’s see whether they are really so beautiful. And better yet, let’s examine them in our hands.”

Among the buddies exuberant gaiety breaks out. One of the wittiest proposes to take the eyes out. A shrill screaming and the noisy laughter of the soldier pack. The screaming penetrates our brains, pierces our hearts, the laughter hurts like the edge of a knife into our body. The screaming and the laughter are growing, mingling and soaring to heaven.

O God, whom will you hear first?

What happens next is that the fainting child is lying on the floor. Instead of eyes two bloody wounds are staring. The mother, driven mad, is held by the other women.

This time they left Zosia to her mother….

At one of the next “actions” little Zosia was taken away. It was, of course, necessary to annihilate the blind child.

Gregory Boyd, God at War p 33-34

Boyd tells this story as part of an argument against the idea that God exercises meticulous control over all events, as per Augustine and Calvin. I want to ask again whether Christian exclusivism holds. Did God send the Jew Zosia to hell? Does God continue forever the torture the Nazis could only begin?

Christians give different answers when pressed. Some argue that there is an age of reason or accountability, and that children who die prior to that age are spared hell. So far as I know, there is not a shred of biblical support for this view.

Others, out of sentimentality or lack of doctrinal understanding, refuse to believe that God could do such a thing. Some get angry that someone could ask so tactless a question. A minority take annihilationist or universalist views.

The well-informed traditional believers, typically Calvinists or evangelicals, will staunchly affirm that all are corrupted by sin, even children, and consign Zosia to hell. They will also maintain that God is good. God’s goodness, unlike man’s, encompasses the torture of children.

Posted on May 24th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: religion