Quote of the Week
Christians, who condemn the communists for their godlessness and anti-religious persecutions, cannot lay the whole blame solely upon these godless communists; they must assign part of the blame to themselves, and that a considerable part. They must be not only accusers and judges; they must also be penitents. Have Christians done very much for the realization of Christian justice in social life? Have they striven to realize the brotherhood of man without that hatred, and violence of which they accuse the communists? The sins of Christians, the sins of the historical churches, have been very great, and these sins bring with them their just punishment. Betrayal of the covenant of Christ, the use of the Christian Church for the support of the ruling classes, human weakness being what it is, cannot but bring about the lapse from Christianity of those who are compelled to suffer from that betrayal and from such a distortion of Christianity.
–Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism. trans. R.M. French (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), 171.
What a wonderful quote, Henry.
Very wise
“They must be not only accusers and judges; they must also be penitents. Have Christians done very much for the realization of Christian justice in social life? Have they striven to realize the brotherhood of man without that hatred, and violence of which they accuse the communists?”
Comments from Gil Bailie tape series, “The Dionysian Revival – Liberation into Slavery”:
The realization that we can no longer rely on a hegemonic discourse is a Christian realization. We can no longer impose moral or biblical principles on people – it just won’t do (or work).
The admonition in the New Testament to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world is based on the following realization:
A) the universality of the Christian message;
B) sooner or later the whole world would have to learn that message (whatever they might call it) because the structures that made it possible to live without that message were dissolving; and
C) ‘go preach the gospel to the whole world’ and we usually think this means that the alternative would be sitting on your duff and not doing anything, but anthropologically it means that the alternative is actually imposing those principles. In other words, Western civilization since Augustine imposed them and made Western civilization out of the imposition. Now we are at a place we no longer can imposed them anymore. And that means that there is only one way for them to be in play in the cultural order and that is if they are proclaimed. They have to be persuasively proclaimed, which is hard to imagine in the world we live in. We can’t impose it anymore for the act of imposing it is the same thing as betraying it. The charismatic injunction in the New Testament, to go and preach the gospel to the whole world is a tremendously urgent one, because it is the only way it will have an effect anymore.
END OF BAILIE COMMENTS
So finger pointing just won’t get it.