A Consuming Fire

No catastrophe challenges treasured beliefs and cherished hopes more than the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's genocide against the European Jews during World War II. Fueled by virulent, racist anti-Semitism, that disaster, which targeted Judaism as well as every Jewish life within the Third Reich's lethal grasp, still underlines the fragile status of human rights and ethics, still undercuts optimism about human ""progress,"" and still undermines confidence about God's moral authority, providential engagement with human history, and even God's existence itself.

Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016, was one of the relatively few Jews who survived Auschwitz. Before and after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he wrote profoundly in varied genres about the reverberations of the Holocaust. In A Consuming Fire, John K. Roth, a Christian philosopher transformed by Wiesel's writings and friendship, explores how to cope constructively with the daunting realization that Christianity and Western philosophy were deeply implicated in the Nazi genocide--so much so that, in the case of Christianity, one can credibly argue: No Christianity = No Holocaust.

A Consuming Fire is not a biography, a literary analysis, a philosophical critique, or a history. Instead it offers a story all its own--one that seeks to enliven a post-Holocaust Christian humanism, an outlook that Roth shares by underscoring his own journey, his quest to be responsible and accountable, as he responds to Holocaust challenges intensified poignantly and insistently by Wiesel's testimony.


""Elie Wiesel's legacy lives on through the writings that inspired John K. Roth to write A Consuming Fire, a book about the challenges posed by the Holocaust to all of us and, in particular, to the contemporary Christian. Through a reading of Wiesel's texts, Roth bears witness both to the horrors of the Holocaust and to the hope that in its aftermath we may better learn to care for the Other.""
--Leonard Grob, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Fairleigh Dickinson University

""With probing openness, John K. Roth describes how Elie Wiesel's burning questions have provoked and guided his own search for a credible post-Holocaust Christian faith. A Consuming Fire remains a summons--especially for Christians--to examine 'from the roots up' who we are and ought to be.""
--Henry F. Knight, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Keene State College

""The reissue of John K. Roth's A Consuming Fire: Encounters with Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust is at once timely and urgent. With each passing year, more and more voices of witnesses such as Elie Wiesel--voices that spoke from the depths of a whirlwind of fire--fall silent. Now, as much of the world seethes with the flames of destruction, the need for Roth's testimony and insight is greater than ever.""
--David Patterson, Hillel A. Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

""John K. Roth's eloquent and sensitively written book is both personal and provocative, for it reveals the impact that Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust have had on him as a Christian--and as a scholar and teacher. Like Wiesel, his Jewish friend, Roth has become a messenger of hope amidst despair. Reading A Consuming Fire will make you think about the past for the sake of the future; it may even inspire you to become a messenger too.""
--Carol Rittner, RSM, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Emerita and Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor of Holocaust Studies Emerita, Stockton University


John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust,