By What Means God Is Made Known Unto Us (I)
Article 2: By What Means God is Made Known Unto Us.
We know Him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, His eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul saith (Rom.1:20). All which things are sufficient to convince men, and leave them without excuse.
Secondly, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to His glory and our salvation.
Nazi Perversion of Christianity:
Making (Nazi) History a Source of God’s (Gracious) Revelation
(quotes from Nazi apologist theologian, D. Cajus Fabricius,
Positive Christianity in the Third Reich [Dresden: H. Püschel, 1937])
“It is true that Christendom is not of opinion there is no other Divine revelation except through Jesus Christ. On the contrary we know that God’s hand is to be traced in history and in Nature” (p. 69; italics added).
“… our German Volk is a part of the Aryan race; German blood courses through our veins, and we live on German soil. We love this Volk with all the surrender we are capable of, and we love precisely his people of ours today, raised as it has been from out the depths of direst need by an overwhelming act of Divine Providence. And in this great happening we look upon the fact that the Führer, Adolf Hitler has been given to us as a very special mark of God’s mercy towards us. We shall never be weary of thanking God for this special ordering of our history in the great happenings of the world” (p. 46).
“One fact in this struggle for existence has become to them an overpowering reality: the Führer. In him they have experienced the incontestable fact that all great happenings in history do not originate in the universal but in the particular, not in crowds but in some great personality. In him too, they have experienced that great historical deeds are not only planned in the magnificence of royal palaces, or at the official boards of parliaments and ministries, or even in the buildings of large banking-houses, but may have their source in one simple life that started in modest circumstances, having to struggle onward through poverty and privation, and after much hard fighting finally reaches the height, and even on the height thinks only of self-denial and sacrifice” (pp. 70-71).
“The Führer himself belongs to those who fulfil the will of God and realize the life of Christ in this life in an extraordinary degree. The Führer in uniting the nation and helping it to rise from the laxity and neglect into which it had fallen, to a sense of moral discipline, fulfils the law of Christ respecting love in a way few mortals could ever hope to emulate … And when he [i.e., the Führer] himself in the strength of his trust in God places the destiny of the whole nation in the hands of the Father, he manifests the Spirit which through the coming of Christ has become a living power in the world” (p. 71).