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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 8:01 AM (GMT -6) |   |
A reader writes:
I am an Eastern Orthodox seminary student studying to become a priest. I want to thank you so much for this quote yesterday:
"Imagine a libertarian Christianity, which urged individuals to give away as much of their property as possible to the poor, to forget about the sex lives of their neighbors and focus on their own, to pray more than politic and to forgive more than to judge. Imagine, in other words, Christianity, and remind yourself how alien Christianism is to it."
My Church is currently being flooded with ex-Evangelicals who "want something more". I'm happy to have them return to the embrace of more ancient Christianity, but they have also brought their baggage and bizarre political agendas. This is currently causing a great deal of strife in our Church in America as one faction wants to be Christians as you described above, and the other wants to be people who march in political rallies, send letters to congress, and hold public guilt ("prayer") services for victims of abortion.
Thank you so much for expressing so clearly what Christianity is, and for calling out all of us who fall short of it. I think many Christianists would label you somehow as an enemy of Christianity, but really, in demanding that Christians practice what the scripture actually preaches, you are the greatest friend of all of us who struggle to do so. Many thanks from a long-time reader and devout and faithful Christian.
That small quote did so much to bolster my spirits and it gave me energy to get back to fighting the good fight on behalf of those in need.
At one point, Christians will look back on this period, I believe, with horror. The desire to control others' lives and souls through politics is so anathema to the Gospels it will one day have to be exposed and ended. Until then, we just have to keep our spirits up and attend to our own failures as Christians, which, of course, are many.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2011 8:04:30 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 8/7/2011 8:16 AM (GMT -6) | | D: The desire to control others' lives and souls through politics is so anathema to the Gospels it will one day have to be exposed and ended. Until then, we just have to keep our spirits up and attend to our own failures as Christians, which, of course, are many.
J: I think the writer is right, but maybe not for the real reason. The reason why I think politics is a loser strategy is because there simply aren't enough people to even vote in political libertarianism, much less something as just with higher standards. I doubt most activists don't even want true justice.
But government IS about imposing standards on people. So if we are to be involved in the political process, we just ARE involved in imposing standards. So that, per se, is only a problem if mere voting is a problem.
So as it turns out, the reason why the writer's approach make sense is because of how few those who seek truth and justice are. They are too few to make the kind of changes they think politics is capable of. The writer, then, seems to be right about the best strategy to make the MOST difference however trivial that difference ends up being in the scheme of things. To God, it's not trivial even if it is trivial politically.
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 11:04 AM (GMT -6) | | Quotes from Richard Wurmbrand.
Wow.
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"In our darkest hours of torture, the Son of Man came to us, making the prison walls shine like diamonds and filling the cells with light. Somewhere, far away, were the torturers below us in the sphere of the body. But the spirit rejoiced in the Lord. We would not have given up this joy for that of kingly palaces."
"In solitary confinement, we could not pray as before. We were unimaginably hungry; we had been drugged until we acted like idiots. We were as weak as skeletons. The Lord’s Prayer was much too long for us—we could not concentrate enough to say it. My only prayer repeated again and again was, 'Jesus, I love You.' And then, one glorious day I got the answer from Jesus: 'You love me? Now I will show you how I love you.' At once, I felt a flame in my heart, which burned like the coronal streamers of the sun. The disciples on the way to Emmaus said that their hearts burned when Jesus spoke with them. So it was with me. I knew the love of the One who gave His life on the cross for us all."
"One great lesson arose from all the beatings, tortures, and butchery of the Communists: that the spirit is master of the body. We felt the torture, but it often seemed as something distant and far removed from the spirit which was lost in the glory of Christ and His presence with us. When we were given one slice of bread a week and dirty soup every day, we decided we would faithfully “tithe” even then. Every tenth week we took the slice of bread and gave it to weaker brethren as our “tithe” to the Master."
"I have seen Christians in Communist prisons with fifty pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers, in whose throats spoonfuls of salt had been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold—and praying with fervor for the Communists. This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was poured out in our hearts."
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I remember reading Tortured for Christ in seminary...and sheddin' mad tears over it.
I ask now as I asked then...Lord, empower me to be a real Christian. I can't do it with you. Lord, have mercy.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2011 11:11:15 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 12:13 PM (GMT -6) | | Similtude:
Those LIGHTS were not seen by many people. They made no obvious difference in the political order. But those lights SCREAMED OUT a truth that only the darkest of hearts could deny. And THAT glorifies God.
That's EXACTLY RIGHT, Jeff. These saints testify to the Loderian idea of the "Holy" in their transparent love relationship to God in the midst of the forces of the Kierkegaardian "sickness-unto-death" provoked by "Void". In other words, their lives enact manifestations of the "Holy" that provoke ambivalence in despairing people living in ego-centric or socially-dominated forms of "Void", which makes an undeniable numinosity that both causes awe and offense. Hence, how even in the midst of their degradation and decimation, they were arousing, amazing, and even converting their torturers.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 12:18 PM (GMT -6) | | The power of the Holy is not pious wishing, but solid truth, as illustrated by the case of Julia de Beausobre, author of "The Woman Who Could Not Die" and "Creative Suffering." She was taken into a Russian prison and subjected to severe and systematic torture. Her sadistic training officer was a master at breaking down every defense; yet she continued to search for ways to find meaning in her absurd situation. When she tried to fight back, she whetted his sadistic appetite. Finally, she prayed and found herself asking the right question: "What are you [God] doing in this situation?"
Praying in this way, she found herself "permeating the situation with consciousness." By such permeation, she began to look at the training officer with a new awareness of the dynamics of his selfhood. Yet if she became even subtly sentimental toward him, or overly indulgent of his perversity, he brutalized her all the more. Furthermore, if she became self-pitiful, or overindulgent of her own plight, he did the same.
The upshot was that she gradually found a place between indulgence on either side, a fine edge of serenity which she said was founded on a divine "Rock." This place was the Presence in her, on which the core of her personality was founded and of which she was a part. This shining center of herself, she learned, was strengthened and brightened with ever new act of brutality. She found herself so grounded on and so much a part of the Rock that she grew perfectly quite despite the pain. Realizing he could not disrupt here serenity, the training officer lost interest. This was not only merciful but redemptive, because the Presence of the Holy in her freed the sadist from his obsession and freed her for centeredness in God.
The root significance of the Hebrew word Qadosh ( "holy" ) is "separate." There is no compromise of that separateness in saying that in the midst of the deepest extremity a sense of the Holy in us cries out for a manifestation of the Holy beyond us. This describes the quality of the Presence of the Holy as that which is indeed separate but not unknowable; rather, it is separate and remaking us in its image.
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De Beausobre experienced the Presence of the Holy as that which grounded her selfhood beyond her context of nothingness. Thus, she experienced the fourth dimension of human being that is always intuitively present; in her case, it was manifest directly, or "revealed" in the face of nothingness, was transformed and the whole matter became redemptive.
James Loder
The Transforming Moment
Pp. 85-87
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 12:25 PM (GMT -6) | | "The tortures and brutality continued without interruption. When I lost consciousness or became too dazed to give the torturers any further hopes of confession, I would be returned to my cell. There I would lie, untended and half dead, to regain a little strength so they could work on me again. Many died at this stage, but somehow my strength always managed to return. In the ensuing years, in several different prisons, they broke four vertebrae in my back, and many other bones. They carved me in a dozen places. They burned and cut eighteen holes in my body. When my family and I were ransomed out of Romania and brought to Norway, doctors in Oslo, seeing all this and the scars in my lungs from tuberculosis, declared that my being alive today is a pure miracle! According to their medical books, I should have been dead for years. I know myself that it is a miracle. God is a God of miracles. I believe God performed this wonder so that you could hear my voice crying out on behalf of the Underground Church in persecuted countries. He allowed one to come out alive and cry aloud the message of your suffering, faithful brethren."
Richard Wurmbrand
I believe it, too!! 
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 8/7/2011 12:30:15 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 8/7/2011 12:58 PM (GMT -6) | | More Loder...
"If truth is stranger than fiction, as we sometimes say, it may be that we live in a state of estrangement from the truth. Suppose it were all turned around and the fictions by which we lice were suddenly and starkly thrust, as on the Damascus road, into the light of a Truth so splendid we would cringe and hide our wounded eyes from it. Suppose we can only bear one glimpse of the Truth at a time. Then the Truth would be wonderful and terrible, and we would cherish our moments before it and long for more—yet we would be afraid lest we get too much all at once.
But suppose further that the Truth took on the nature of our fictions making—incredible!—our fictions bearers of the Truth. Who could conceive such a thing, even in retrospect? Perhaps only those who have once been partially blinded by the Truth—whether suddenly or gradually—come to the breath-taking realization that the One who sits at table and breaks bread and drinks wine with us is the One through whom and for whom all ten billion light years of creation, including our own come-lately, here and now existence, have their being. To sit at table with Him is more wonderful and terrible than a blinding light since it allows us no fictional existence in which to shroud ourselves, no place to hide from the relentlessly gracious claim that our very existence, fractured and fictionalized as it is, is of infinite worth, potentially a bearer of the very Truth which we fear could so easily crush us under the weight of it’s glory.
But suppose, finally, that this awesome condition in which we may find ourselves has in it a kind of comprehensive intelligibility we had not dared to consider before, a reason about reason, a supra rationem, that is so inclusive of us and the universe that we couldn’t see it unless it were shown to us in a gigantic mirror. If even cosmic chaos has in its hidden order, as we are surprisingly coming to understand, how much more astonishing and compelling is that greater intelligibility which unites all creation—even the turbulence and unpredictable upheavals of natural and human existence—to its creator. Such a union would have to be full God and fully human. Yet this remains ancient text and obscure doctrine until, in that breathless moment, we see ourselves, the full dimensions of our existence, reflected in the Holy One at the table with us. In the broken bread and wine, He becomes a mirror in whom we see simultaneously the embodied chaos of human existence in a vast and meaningless universe, and the hidden order and sacred destiny which He by His Presence—and not separable from that Presence—in a moment of epiclesis would beget in us. Then—though we could never say how—we see that the fragment could contain the whole, we are captivated by the intelligibility of His nature which we long to embrace, and it draws us to the edge of the abyss of uncreated light, the inner life of God.
But alas—to lay hold on that remarkable intelligibility by which one’s fragmentary existence becomes the bearer of the whole, that intelligibility through which all things have been made---to lay hold on that by faith is to touch the ark of the covenant, it is to hear “the sound of a mighty wind,” as “the roar of the New Jerusalem”,” and it is to die. Who wants to die so that the uncreated light and life of God may indwell human flesh and turn everything we do into the work of God’s Spirit?
Holy in its nature, the life of the Spirit is stunning in its impact; the depths of its mysterious centered silence remains unmoved, intensely personal, even in its rush through the walls of the upper room, its pause to console, its power to disclose and to heal, and its provocation to joy and exuberant praise. This is marvelous and dangerous; ordinary human flesh should not have to consider such alternatives.
If we do die, then all that we saw in Him and in ourselves because of Him as He sat at table with us, now becomes in our death the transformation of ordinary existence. We become in our individual and common life the outer expression of His invisible nature, including the darkness of dereliction as well as the light or the transfiguration—that by which condemnation is condemned, false light is itself falsified, and daily life is a continuing intra-mundane ecstasy. Who will die to bear witness to the inner life of God, to become an expression of this higher order? Not many—or perhaps, in another way, somewhere inside, all of us know we are supposed to die. In moments of deeply centered reflection we know the death instinct is not biological but teleological—we have been given life so as to die for what is so much more important than our own lives.”
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