What are we like? Is humanity the answer or the problem?

The question at the heart of the film The Zone of Interest is also at the heart of evangelism.

It’s a holocaust movie that begins with a picnic. In the Oscar winner, The Zone of Interest, we only hear the horrors of Auschwitz; what we see is the normality of family life. The family in question is that of the Camp Commandant, Rudolph Höss. They live in the ‘manse’, so to speak, only yards outside the gates of the concentration camp. In the bedroom, Rudolph’s wife, Hedwig, tries on fur coats that belonged to the victims. In the dining room, crematorium design is discussed as a triumph of engineering. Outside, the children play while ash clouds blow over from the chimney stacks beyond the garden wall.

That wall is significant. It separates the horrific from the everyday. It signifies the ways in which we try to block out an evil that is ‘out there’. But it turns out that the evil is ‘in here’ – with us. We are the problem, and there is not a wall on earth that can keep it out.

In my evangelism, I’ve found that thinking out loud about this problem with friends and family can be fruitful. The question ‘What are we like?’ helps us plumb some profound spiritual depths.

Stephen Glazer, the film’s director, has said: ‘The central principle [of the film] was to show our similarities to the perpetrators rather than our similarities to the victims – and the discomfort of that, and the challenge of that.’ He accomplishes his goal masterfully. It’s a harrowing watch. Other holocaust movies make us relate to those inside the camp. The Zone of Interest makes us question, ‘How am I like the guards?’ Even more insidiously, how am I like the Höss family – so ordinary and yet so complicit in evil. What are we like?

This is a question that’s well worth asking in evangelism. What is humanity, after all? Because the Nazis had one kind of view. Höss’s hero, Heinrich Himmler, said ‘man is but a part of this world’. Nature is a brutal struggle for survival and, according to Nazi ideology, humanity is simply a part of that struggle. When Joseph Goebbels was encouraged to think of the humanity of the Jews he replied: ‘Certainly the Jew is also a man, but the flea is also an animal.’ You can imagine his shrug of the shoulders. Appealing to a common ‘humanity’ meant nothing to the Nazis because, in the absence of a Biblical framing, ‘humanity’ is just one more species competing for supremacy. Reflecting on this led the poet T.S. Eliot to write: ‘If you remove from the word “human” all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.’

After the war, and in reaction to National Socialism, the West has tried to maintain an exalted view of ‘humanity’ but without regard for God. Unfortunately this involves us in absurdity. War criminals like Höss were tried for ‘crimes against humanity’, but without God this cannot work. ‘Humanity’ cannot be the victim and the perpetrator and the judge and the executioner and the standard! In order for ‘humanity’ to mean what we need it to mean, there has to be a kind of humanity that stands above us in order to judge the mass of humankind. It would have to be a true humanity that is also above humanity – a just humanity that is also Judge. Only Christ makes sense of this.

And this is where conversations with friends can be fruitful. I’m always trying to probe what we mean by ‘humanity’, or what is ‘humane’, or what is ‘humanitarian’, etc, etc. When your friends speak of ‘humanity’ in unambiguously positive terms, latch onto that. And perhaps suggest a viewing of The Zone of Interest. To see the depths to which humanity can sink – to which I can sink – reveals the problem. But it also makes us crave the solution: a good ‘humanity’ that comes to the rescue. Once we’re thinking in those terms, there really is only one candidate for the job!