Concordia and Koinonia

The following is from the most recent edition National Review (January 24, 2011) and the italicized remarks in parentheses are my own:

The fashion of calling Christmas the “winter solstice” began with Hitler.  He liked to hold that Christianity had weakened the human spirit, and wished that Europe had instead adopted militant Islam. (Why militant Islam?  Answer:  it was, and is, as anti-Semitic as the Nazis and the Nazis had a natural ally with the militant Islamists:  see History of Hitler and the Muslim Waffen SS video-Pr. Schroeder)  His Third Reich introduced pagan festivals.  Photographs taken by Hugo Jaeger, one of this several official photographers, have just come to light showing Hitler and his cronies celebrating Christmas in a Munich beer cellar in 1941.  Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, emerges as the Norse god of war Odin, and a swastika replaces the customary angel at the top of the Christmas tree erected behind Hitler (The photos below are of the winter solstice celebrations in Munich) In these photographs Hitler, Goering, and others can be identified already looking gloomy–as well they might.

Why might Hitler and company be looking gloomy at such a celebration?  They were exterminating God’s Chosen People and from His people, trying to also exterminate His Beloved Son:  they thought they had no fear from the “wrath of the Lamb” (see Scripture below).  No one can take Christ out of Christmas, not Hitler, not militant secularism, not militant Islamists.

Revelation 6:   ¹²When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, ¹³and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. ¹⁴ The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. ¹⁵Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, ¹⁶ calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, ¹⁷for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”