Last week we learned that America's Prophetic Seedbed was cultivated over three millennia of time, resulting from prophetic words, both spoken and written. This week we will look into the ideas and prophetic words that formed the evil empire of Nazi Germany. We do this not only to draw the stark contrast between two world views, but more importantly, to demonstrate that prophetic-idea seedbeds foster both good and evil.

Eden and Beyond. As with America's seedbed, the prophetic seedbed of Nazi Germany can be traced back to the garden of Eden. When God's enemy, Satan the serpent, spoke those infamous, three little dark prophetic words, "hath God said," (Genesis 3:1) into Eve's ear, a chain of events commenced which plunged the entire human race headlong into a freefall toward an eternity in hell. From that moment forward, darkness has gripped all of humankind who have not yet been inwardly transformed by the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, the Deliverer. At the same time God was setting His covenantal plans into motion, Satan continued with his counteractive measures to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). He even attempted to annihilate the Son of God himself. But Christ "spoiled principalities and powers, [and] ... made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it." (Colossians 2:15).

During the Dark Ages, the Devil held the established church in bondage for over a thousand years, and nearly succeeded in snuffing out the Living Word among God's people. Satan has always put forth false ideas to counter the true work of God in the earth. Prior to the Christian Reformation, the Western World began to emerge from the Dark Ages into an era known as the Renaissance. A fresh stirring began in the heart of man to know and understand truth. Renaissance thinkers sought to recapture the classical thought of the Romans and the Greeks. Philosophers elevated human reason and claimed reason capable of achieving all knowledge. Humanism originated in this time period. Influential thinkers and writers include Petrarch, a man who sought a blending of classic culture and Christianity. Another influential prophetic voice belonged to Machiavelli, a man who worshipped power and proclaimed, "to be feared gives more security than to be loved."

Humanism and Reason. By the time Luther and his fellow reformers were working to shape a new world with their ideas and words, the Renaissance was winding down. Among Luther's contemporaries were men such as Desiderius Erasmus, a humanist philosopher and critic of both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation, Sir Thomas More, a Catholic humanist who authored Utopia, a word meaning "not place" or literally nowhere, and René Descartes, a French philosopher who based the certainty of his own existence upon the fact that he could think. "I think, therefore I am."

Like the Christian Reformers, Renaissance and post-Renaissance philosophers projected their prophetic vision into the stream of culture. They spoke with a prophetic voice - an ungodly prophetic voice, but a prophetic voice nonetheless. Each of these non-Christian philosophers fell prey to the subtle lie that "good and evil" could be known outside of a relationship with God. (Genesis 3:5) Each pursued some area of knowledge outside of the counsel of God's Word. As a result, their ideas were skewed from the truth and their Prophetic Voices spread false messages.

Clockmaker God. The Enlightenment followed on the heels of the Renaissance, reducing God to a "clockmaker" who had set the world in motion, then stepped back and let it run by itself. Prophetic seeds sown in the Renaissance came to fruition in the Enlightenment through violence and bloodshed. The bloody French Revolution capped the Enlightenment period with treachery and faithlessness. Enlightenment philosophers include Robespierre, a man, who through violence, seized power from the Catholic Church in France during the Revolution. His deeds included the murder of priests. George Hegel, a German philosopher, proclaimed that leaders of nations possessed total freedom to use whatever means necessary to propel their nation's "world historical mission" (national destiny). And Jean Jacques Rousseau is credited with the founding of pure democratic thought - a flawed idea which places all power in the hands of a simple majority without regard for the standard of truth to guide and direct.

Survival of the Fittest. Later, Charles Darwin's work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, opened up the scientific world to an entirely new possibility of man's beginnings. With a seemingly plausible alternative to the Genesis account of creation, those who chose to adhere to Darwin's ideas could now cast off the restraint of God's laws and become laws unto themselves. The ideas of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" almost justify and call for aggressive behavior. Darwin's prophetic voice still speaks loudly today.

Aryan Supremacy. In 1853, Arthur de Gobineau penned Essai sur l'Inegalite des Races, an essay on the superiority of the Nordic-Aryan race. His work received no immediate response but became fodder for future writers and thinkers.

In 1888 Guido von List, a Viennese occultist and writer, published a novel titled Carnuntum. This romanticized tale of the Germanic victory over Rome, which ended the Roman Empire 1500 years earlier, catapulted von List into the Austrian Pan-Germanic movement of the late nineteenth century. Von List despised Christianity and espoused anti-Semitism. His writings, speeches and ideas seeded the Nazi movement and his contemporaries labeled him "the re-discoverer of ancient Aryan wisdom."

In this same time period, writers Ernst Krause, Otto Ammon, Ludwig Wilser, and Ludwig Woltmann touted the ideology of Aryan superiority - providing a foundation for the Nazi philosophy. They also practiced occultism.

Eugenics. Then, Francis Galton, a late nineteenth century scientist, fathered the modern eugenics movement. Eugenics is a philosophy that promotes improvement of the genetic makeup of the human species. The practice of eugenics can range from a thoughtful and studied mate selection to the mass annihilation of a race of unwanted people such as the Nazi's "final solution" and Jewish holocaust.

Nihilism. Frederich Neitzsche, remembered most for his statement "God is dead," sowed the idea seeds of meaningless and hopelessness in his writing. Neitzsche's false prophetic nihilistic ideas spawned many others to write with the same morbid themes. Kragler's Drums in the Night (1918) and Kazantzakis' The Saviors of God (1927) represent the spirit of literature that has arisen since Neitzsche's day.

Webster defines nihilism as "a viewpoint that all traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that all existence is consequently senseless and useless . . ." Nihilism, simply put, is a belief in nothingness.

In summary, Nazi Germany sprung from a dark prophetic seedbed, rife with ungodliness. Consider the following historical and ideological strand:

• Human reason can achieve all knowledge (Renaissance).
• God is not involved in His creation (Enlightenment).
• The Aryan race is supreme (von List).
• Life is a survival of the fittest (Darwin).
• The quality of life can and should be improved genetically (Galton).
• Life carries no real meaning or purpose - nihilism (Neitzche).
• Military and political power can be justifiably used to achieve a nation's world historical mission (Machiavelli and Hegel).