“I'm cleverer, true, than those fops of teachers,
Doctors and Magisters, Scribes and Preachers;
Neither scruples nor doubts come now to smite me,
Nor Hell nor Devil can longer affright me.”
--Doctor Faust, Part I, Goethe’s Faust
Cajus Fabricius. Positive Christianity in the Third Reich. Sacra Press, 2025.
An ongoing issue within the Christian retrieval project – seeking to reprint and popularize older works of Christian political theology in order to address the issues of our modern age – is the attempt by some parties to smuggle in white nationalist thought in the hopes of baptizing an explicitly racial political program.
One of the most recent episodes in this recurring problem is Sacra Press’s decision to publish Cajus Fabricius’ 1937 tract Positive Christianity in the Third Reich. Sacra Press is a relatively new and small publisher that self-identifies as “Reformed, right-wing, and classic” that defines its mission as “renew[ing] the Christian West by publishing the sacred truth for a new day.” On face value none of this seems personally unedifying, in particular as a conservative Anglican.
However their decision to publish Fabricius’ Nazi apologia makes it obvious what they mean by right-wing or classic. This has restarted the conversation on what constitutes responsible retrieval. Naturally when we decide to engage in ressourcement, we’re engaging in a decision on what exactly to retrieve. If we should go ad fontes, it raises the question, “Which sources should we go back to?”
Rather than adjudicate claims about whether or not the proper approach to retrieval should be “libertarian” or not or delve into seemingly byzantine and tribalistic divisions of friends and enemies (lines that sometimes appear to be drawn and redrawn with the consistency and integrity of quarreling school children), this piece will simply focus directly on Fabricius’ work and witness. The question is actually quite simple: is Cajus Fabricius’ work something Christians should read and (more importantly) commend as a source of wisdom? Does it provide, as one defender puts it, “very good and helpful theology”?
The answer is even simpler: No. Fabricius’ tract has nothing to commend it to a Christian and its attempt to theologically defend Hitler’s regime is utterly bankrupt. If Fabricius’ work and the wider Positive Christianity movement can be useful in correcting modern errors, it is as a cautionary tale about the error of the Faustian bargain and the foolishness of those who try to make a fellowship between righteousness and unrighteousness.
Positive Christianity: The Swastika and the Cross
Since early 20th century Germany was still a nominally Christian country, the National Socialists made an active attempt to portray themselves as a Christian party. Historian William Sheridan Allen explained in his seminal work, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935, that without this Christian appeal, the Nazi party could not have achieved much political power. Though many Nazi ideologues and officials were often strident anticlericalists or neopagans, Hitler and the platform officially endorsed Christianity but with major caveats (Hitler was likely an atheist and certainly was not an orthodox Christian by any standard). The second to last point of the Nazi Party Program “advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination.”
Positive Christianity deemphasized or outright denied the basic creeds of the Christian Church, the Hebrew Scriptures of the Bible, the Jewish nature of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and His divinity. Additionally it held up Hitler as a definitive model and source of authority for German Christians. In short, “positive Christianity” was a malformed heresy that was subordinated to the ideology and needs of the Nazi government.
Fabricius Meets Faust
Many German Protestants and Roman Catholics remained skeptical of what was obviously a cynical ploy for control. However at least one Protestant theologian, Dr. Cajus Fabricius attempted to develop a more sincere and systematic defense of this new syncretist approach to Christianity and National Socialism. Fabricius was a Prussian scholar of the 19th century Lutheran theologian Albrecht Ritschl, whose work on Christ’s divinity could be summed up as less than strictly orthodox. Fabricius wrote his tract in order to combat those who would “foist neo-pagan cult experiments on the German Volk,” and to present a unified case why his duty as a Nazi and his duty to Christ did not conflict but rather supplemented one another. He defined Positive Christianity as “real Christianity” but notably rejected a substantial credal definition. For him it was enough that the Nazi Party stood for the churches to be a moral influence on the German nation, which stood ready to be sanctified.
Furthermore, Fabricius argued that the tenets of Nazism had Christian foundations. Since Hitler “sometimes” finished meetings with prayers, Fabricius suggested that Nazism is “closely connected to…the Christian life.” For him, this Christian-Nazi policy synthesis can be found in the fact that the Nazi party platform promoted collective obedience over individualism, provided employment and social assistance for the needy, and opposed family abolition. Rather naively, Positive Christianity in the Third Reich proposes that a Nazi foreign policy was centered on promoting peace and goodwill between nations without jealousy.
Judging Positive Christianity by its fruit
While reading Positive Christianity, three impressions stand out. One is that some elements are remarkable in their extreme blandness. Fabricius extolled Nazism for first rejecting atheism, Marxism, and liberalism and secondly promoting the common good and God’s sovereignty over all. If these are the profound insights that a modern Christian is supposed to glean, one hardly needs to retrieve the work of an obscure Nazi theologian. In the 20th century alone, western Christianity was blessed with multiple thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper, Pope Leo XIII, and Archbishop William Temple. Reading these generic platitudes in a tract that aimed to synthesize Hitler and Christ smacks of burying the lede in the extreme.
Secondly, what’s telling is what is not in Positive Christianity. Fabricius proposed that this Christianity was the “real Christianity” both historically and spiritually. Yet almost nowhere is Christ’s death and resurrection mentioned, even in his section devoted to redemption. The incarnation is mentioned in passing, though understandably Fabricius likely wanted to avoid discussing Jesus Christ being born of a daughter of Israel. In fact, while Positive Christianity rejects a conflation of Hitler and Christ, it has no place for Christ’s righteousness, whether imputed, infused or imparted. Instead righteousness to regenerate the nation is found “from within” the Volk.
Lastly, what truly stands out is Fabricius’ Faustian foolishness. Like Marlowe and Goethe’s scholar, he puffed himself up as an expert and authority on both Christianity and National Socialism, setting himself for a stricter judgement. While we could be tempted to be charitable and assume that perhaps Cajus Fabricius was simply naive in 1937, this ostensible authority was in reality, as Saint Peter wrote of the scoffers in his second epistle, willingly ignorant and thus complicit in the evil he was endorsing.
While Fabricius assured his audience that Hitler would grant the Church, “the liberty to preach the gospel,” by 1936, his regime had arrested hundreds of pastors and had murdered Friedrich Weißler, a Jewish convert to Christianity, at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1937, the Minister of Church Affairs lectured Protestant clergy by admonishing them that while some “tried to tell me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God... Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed .... [but] is represented by the Party .... the German people are now called ... by the Führer to a real Christianity .... The Führer is the herald of a new revelation.”
It’s notable that while Fabricius painted Nazi Christianity as anti-liberal since it embraced collective coordination (Gleichschaltung) and rejected individualism, Positive Christianity does not reject and indeed embraces a “multiformity of views” as “consistent with the essence of a truly great and living National Church.” Fabricius’ indifferentism to creed and confession helped pave the ground for Hitler’s anti-Christian domination of the German churches.
While lauding love for neighbors as “the greatest of all virtues,” by 1937 Fabricius' heroes had already been running a campaign of forced sterilization of tens of thousands. This eventually grew into a comprehensive euthanasia program of mass killing that included thousands of children. As Positive Christianity’s pages defined love as our duty to “feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick, go to the prisoners, [and] to shelter the stranger,” the Reich had instituted the first concentration camps. By 1937, thousands were held in these camps, most notably in Sachsenhausen, where Pastor Martin Niemöller was imprisoned, and Buchenwald, where Father Otto Neururer was murdered by crucifixion.
The total sin committed by the government that Fabricius’ sought to bless would comprise, in the words of the prosecutors at the Einsatzgruppen trial, “of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.” His modern defenders may want to downplay or even deny these crimes. As Ian Kershaw in his The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945 notes, Nazi authorities admitted that:
the atrocities that we have perpetrated on enemy soil, and even in Germany. Have we not slaughtered the Jews in their thousands? Don't soldiers tell over and over again that the Jews in Poland had to dig their own graves? And what did we do to the Jews who were in the concentration camp...After all, what does human life amount to in Germany?
“Fiendful Fortune may exhort the wise”
Like Faust, the devils Fabricius served dealt with him in the end. Despite all his defenses, despite subordinating his scholarship to the Nazi program (even going so far as to try to dismantle Old Testament studies and shut down professorships), he was eventually arrested, threatened with life imprisonment in a concentration camp and was expelled from the party. He died in 1950. Tragically there is in fact wisdom to be learned from Dr. Cajus Fabricius and the wider Positive Christianity movement. All attempts to deviate from the truth in the pursuit of making allies of good and evil will dramatically fail. Unlike the defenders of Nazi Germany we do not need to resort to novel and destructive ideologies to criticize the errors and sins of our age. If Christians insist on retrieving Fabricius’ error like a dog to vomit they will ultimately follow him in his failure. Cody Justice, of Sacra Press, asks us to charitably discern Nazis in “their own thinking and actions.” We should take up his challenge. However any critical eye compels us to see clearly the self-destructive fruit of their own project.
But as always, the final humiliation and disillusionment always begins with downgrading Christian truth. By dismissing the need for creed or or confession, Fabricius unmoored Positive Christianity from our Cornerstone. Instead of boldly confessing the faith once received, the tragic doctor’s modern heirs risk once again betraying the gospel for their temporal ambitions, only to lose both.
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