The following is an excerpt from an excellent article by Gary DeMar at Godfather Politics:
A similar scenario confronted the Christian people of Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler. Richard V. Pierard comments:
In the nineteenth century . . . German Lutherans made a strong bifurcation [separation] between the realm of public and private concerns. . . . Religion was the domain of the inner personal life, while the institutional and external, the public, so to speak, belonged to the worldly power. Redemption was exclusively the province of the church, while the law, determinative for external conduct of human affairs, was solely the province of the state. Religion was a private matter that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order — nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft — operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.
For decades before the rise of Hitler, Christians were subjected to arguments [from] pastors and theologians based on a private-public, two-kingdom theory…
While many Germans might have been opposed to Nazi policies at a personal level, they had been conditioned to believe — because they were Christians living in two kingdoms operating with two sets of standards — that they could not do anything about these rapidly implemented policies at a political level.
