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After publishing ten books as well as numerous articles, a great deal of them concerning Christian-Jewish relations and the Holocaust, John T. Pawlikowski is considered one of the most learned and influential scholars in the field of theodicy and the Holocaust. In The Holocaust: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Ethics, Pawlikowski discusses the ideas of many famed scholars and their views on the post-Holocaust relationship with God, while formulating his own ideas as well. In this incredibly compelling article, he touches upon the idea embraced by scholars such as Greenberg, Rubenstein, and Cohen. The proposal that creates an umbrella for each of his assertions is that Christianity will never be the same as it was pre-Holocaust because it will forever be forced to face up to the realization that Christian-based anti-Semitism did play a vital role in the extermination of nearly six million Jewish men, women, and children . Pawlikowski refers to the idea that the Nazis proclaimed that God was dead , that he was no longer the ultimate ruler, the Nazis were. This belief that God was no longer the governing force for mankind gave the Nazis the strength they needed in order to annihilate not only the Jews, but millions of others in the process. Yet what Pawlikowski presents Irving Greenberg as stating is that it isn't possible, "covenantally speaking- , to demand that one step forward and surrender his life. When one is in a covenantal relationship, all acts are voluntary, whereas the Holocaust did not include submission by the Jewish people. Greenberg asserts, and Pawlikowski is in agreement, that, essentially, God was telling the world that it needed to stop the Holocaust, that it needed to bring redemption, that the world needed to make sure that a Holocaust never happened again . These claims also give way to Greenberg's argument with reference to the "assumption of power on the part of the human community- and the co-creatorship of this atrocity, placing God as the "junior partner- in the entire scheme.
