Transcript
GORDON: Well, let us pray together. First of all, in the prayer that you'll find on the agenda. And we'll then with the Lord's Prayer. Let us pray. "Grant us, O Father, such delight
in the freedom given to us by Thy dear Son that we may serve Thee with joy. Continue to deliver us from evil, from the captivity of sin, from the imprisonment of the self, from the control of pride, and from the bondage of fear. In the (inaudible). May we participate in the liberating action of Thy gospel that imprisoned fellow believers may be released and the broken victims of oppression
be set free in every part of the world through Him who in so brief a time achieved so much freedom for so many. Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory, now and forevermore. Amen." Well, I'd like to give a paper which I think sets the theme of this conference. I've entitled it, "Out of Chaos," because we are living in chaotic times which may well be the last times. But in the midst of this chaos, God is providing us with wonderful opportunities and it's up to us to take advantage
of those opportunities that are provided for us. I have the feeling that the denominational church, if one may call it that, in this country is very much asleep and has been asleep for far too long. But these may be days of awakening and renewal and revival, not only in the churches in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and even in China, but also in
the various denominational groupings in this country as well. And, as you know, to be a Christian means something. This something has been well-demonstrated in Communist countries where the Marxist principles of alienation, rejection of the church and western democracy, the reduction of human beings to cogs in a social machine, the deification of the state
and the abolition of personality have been practiced. We witnessed changes or attempted changes occurring in Communist countries, all the way from Tiananmen Square in Beijing to Romania, Bulgaria, and even Albania. Do these changes and hoped-for changes indicate that all is well except for the problem of [Kuwait?] In my youth, intellectuals and others
embraced Communism as the only answer to the national socialism, fascism, and Nazism. Has the pendulum swung back to the point where capitalism is the only answer to Communism? Is the choice for the world only Marx or mammon? Is the failure of the Marxist ideology proof of the superiority of the western one? Who can tell us?
Our bankers? Our politicians? Our economists? Our anthropologists? Our ecclesiastical bureaucrats? Solzhenitsyn, in his address to the Harvard class of '78, thought they couldn't and was severely -- very, very severely criticized for saying so. The subject of his address was "A World Split Apart." A world split apart. In it, he stated, "A decline
in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. Must one point out that from ancient times a decline
in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?" He points out that freedom has become freedom for evil, freedom for evil, based on the assumption that man qua man does not bear any evil in himself. Thus hedonism in every form, including raw, ugly greed is simply the fault
of inadequate social conditioning. Isn't such a condition a characteristic of Marxism? This may indicate that we are witnessing in these days a convergence of powers, a convergence of ideologies with little difference between them. Why then was there a Berlin wall? And an Iron Curtain? I think it's important to realize that "Mind [is?] at the End of its Tether"
in the west, to quote the pessimistic title of H.G. Wells's last monograph. The romantic utopias devised by the thinkers of the late Enlightenment in Europe are nowhere to be found except in the ruins of western morality and the Berlin wall. So far as the United States is concerned, the evidence of secular humanism as ultimate, was affirmed by the
so-called "Death of God" cult in the '60s. Some of you are old enough to remember that. The magazine, Time, dedicated its front cover to the announcement of God's death. Appropriately, the cover was all in black. Maybe that was the symbol of mourning and maybe of the black abyss of nothingness. Thus is looked at, though the ideas of the late Enlightenment
in Europe had become the basis of acceptable religious and secular thinking. It was the nineteenth century romantic, namely Nietzsche, you'll recall, who used the phrase, "God is dead." in his "Thus spoke Zarathustra." In doing so, he was criticizing what he called the "slave ethic" of Christianity, combined of course with the worship of the German state.
His superman was the person who transcended both of these pulls in German culture. What Nietzsche does is to prophesy the emergence of European nihilism, which follows the rejection of the belief in God. With this rejection he points out everything is permitted and nothing is true. What is left is the desert of freedom, which
T.S. Eliot has described in his "Wasteland" and which Solzhenitsyn classifies as the consequence of the freedom for evil, the freedom for evil. In this wasteland, then, what is expected of us as Christians in the moral and spiritual chaos of our time? Well, first of all, we have to differentiate between Christian existence as obedience to
Christ and Christendom as nationalism sprinkled with a few drops of holy water along with a degree of Christian civility. Those of you who are familiar with Kierkegaard will be familiar with this differentation [sic]. It reminds us of the situation existing in many denominations where Christ is neither followed nor obeyed, although His name may be mentioned in the Sunday bulletin
or the occasional Christmas service. Secondly, it follows that we are to take the time as individuals to be attentive to the living word addressed to us in and by Christ Himself through the record of Himself in the New Testament, the teaching of the Holy Spirit who brings to our attention all that Jesus said and did, and the tradition of the community of faith, the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit. To be authentic followers of Jesus is to share in the scandal of His particularity. He was a man, a man who lived in the days of Pontiffs Pilate, who was sentenced by him to be executed by crucifixion, who died and who rose again on the third day. After His resurrection, He ascended to rule
at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Yet, although He ascended, He is also with us, here and now. In the days of His incarnation, He was with His disciples in the flesh. They knew Him in the flesh, and loved Him in the flesh. He is, however, with us now in the Spirit, even as He said He would be before His ascension. Only He who
is God can be with us in space and time as well as in eternity. You will recall that St. Paul had to tell the fractious Corinthians of this scandal of particularity in these words, "This doctrine of the cross is sheer folly to those on their way to ruin, but to us who are on the way to salvation, it is the power of God."
Scripture says, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothingness the cleverness of the clever. Jews call for miracles. Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ. Yes! Yes, Christ nailed to the cross and though this is a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks, yet to those who have heard this call, Jews and Greeks alike, He is the power of God
and the wisdom of God." Well, as you know, the Greeks of old were familiar with the concept of the Hero who Would be God, like Nietzsche's superman. That is, the superman who achieved deity by the reason of his earnability. Usually that was his ability to conquer other people by force of arms, but the idea that God became a man,
a particular man at a particular place and time was unthinkable. Indeed the revelation that God humiliated Himself to the extent of being a man and as a man, died a slave's death on a Roman cross, seems absurd to us today. To the secular mind in every age, this revelation is unthinkable. It was, as you remember,
unthinkable to the disciples. When Jesus told them of his forthcoming executions, Peter protested by saying, "Oh no, Lord! No, Lord. This shall never happen to you." Judas presumed that Jesus would destroy the united kingdom of Israel and Judah as it had been in the days of the hero king, David. The mother of James and John pleaded with Jesus for her sons that they might become His chief executive officers
when He achieved the glory of a monarch. All but the beloved John fled to their hiding places when it became known that Jesus's throne was to be a Roman cross on the garbage heap of Golgotha. So unpopular has been the reality of the God who became a man that some of His professed followers have sought to correct the image by courting the favors of Caesars, czars, kings, presidents
and the secretary general of the Communist Party. I mention all of this simply to remind you that the Way who is Jesus is not the popular way. He never made it on the polls. When Caesar returned to Rome victorious from the wars, he led a triumphal procession of captives as proof of his prowess.
The crowds cheered Caesar and jeered the captive slaves. I think it is glorious the way that St. Paul reverses the picture in these words from his second known letter to the Corinthians: "But thanks be to God who continually leads us about, captives in Christ's triumphal procession and everywhere uses us to reveal and spread abroad
the fragrance of the knowledge of himself." What a reversal of beliefs. Followers, authentic followers of Jesus, that is, are not to be seen in the honored places of worldly power, but in the ranks of the captives who are claimed by the Prince of Peace. The Prince of Peace who once was a victim of the temple and the state. Since then, there have been
and there are many, many victims; victims who are victors, however, because they shared in the triumph of the cross, and in the glory of our Lord's resurrection. Few of us care to bear the burden of this scandal of particularity. I couldn't help but note when I went to Washington to initiate CREED's mission in 1981
that many formerly-confessed, born-again Christians were trampling over one another in their desperate efforts to gain places close to the seats of power. And when I say this simply to back up my statement that few of us care to bear the burden of the scandal of particularity. We like to be counted in the ranks of the powerful and the popular.
The third requirement made by Jesus of His followers in the midst of contemporary chaos is that they listen to Him. Not to what the mass media says. Remember that the Holy Spirit is the teacher of truth and He will remind us of all that Jesus has taught His disciples in the days of His flesh. I was very conscious of this in prison camp, by the way, that we were victims of grace
as it were, that we were caught in the net of the grace of God. But how were we to articulate that? And we found that the articulation of the action of grace is to be found in every page of the New Testament and that is why the Bible today in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe is so precious. It is worth its weight in gold and diamonds.
Well, those who have chosen to be captives of the Word become Flesh also choose to obey Him. I think there are two basic commands of His, which are inescapable. The first command is the command to love, and second is the command to witness for him. The first command of our Lord is to love. This is how the major theme of St. John
in both his gospels, in his gospel, and in his letters. Think of how he underlines the new and ultimate law of God in his upper room discourses. "If you love me, you will obey my commands." "And this is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you." Think of how magnificent is this declaration of John in his first letter:
"God is love." "God is love." "He who dwells in love is dwelling in God and God in him." There is no room for fear. That is, of course, the fear of the judgement, because in love, perfect love banishes fear. In our chaotic world, the word "love" means anything from copulation to liking a cat or a dog and so much garbage in-between.
There is no question, however, about what our Lord means. He has demonstrated love by His living and by His dying. And here is the rub. He expects us to love as He loves. There's no doubt about that. The corollary to His love for us is our love for one another and this is summed up in these words of His: "Greater love has no man than this
that a man lay down his life for his friends." Sounds simple, isn't it, that is until you try it. Doesn't this imply that He expects to go as far as the cross in the way that He did and that this is what cross-bearing is all about? We don't wear a cross around our neck. We hang on it. Throughout history
there have been a lot of crosses on which the martyrs have witnessed to the love of Christ and their love for their friends in Christ. Some of you who are familiar with Father Gleb Bakunin and Lev Regelson's appeal to the delegates to the World Council of Churches when that council met in Nairobi in October, 1975, will remember that in their preamble, they expressed a hope
that the delegates were as convinced as they were that only at the foot of the cross can be born a love passionate enough to overcome the strife which alienates denominations from one another and prepare Christian hearts for genuine unity. Only at the cross, and through the cross, can we be free to love in the love of our Lord.
We noted that same quality of love in the letter our dear friend, Vladimir Rusak back there, sent to the assembly to the World Council of Churches when it met in Vancouver in the summer, I think it was, of 1983. In sending that letter, he realized that his lot would be similar to that of Gleb Bakunin, namely, a rigorous prison camp
and it was. I love this line of his appeal. He writes: "It is very difficult for us to reach you. Much, much more difficult than to reach God. Still I dare not remain silent. I dare not remain silent is in the spirit of the greater love." Had it not been for this greater love by men who befriended me, I would not be here today.
My bones would be lying in the ground of a former prison camp in Thailand. Our recent international conference of October 5-8 in Hungary, there we had one other example of this greater love. You will recall that pastor Laszlo Tokes of the Reformed Church who cannot be with us today because he is in hospital in Budapest as a consequence of a motor
accident early in the summer. Well, you remember that Pastor Laszlo Tokes of the Reformed Church in Timisoara set a match to the kindling that had been laid by Nicolae Ceausescu's tyranny and caused the revolutionary fire at the children's revolutionary in Romania. To discredit him, the Securitate organized a counter rally in Budapest at which the professional
false witnesses of the Securitate chanted, "We want the blood of Laszlo Tokes. We want the blood of Lazslo Tokes." And he came forward, this good professor of mathematical physics, a quiet, gentle professor, suddenly appeared on the platform. He knelt down with hands folded as if in prayer
in full view of everyone including the TV cameras, and said, "Take my blood instead of the blood of Lazslo Tokes." A life for a life. Blood for blood. He told us, in doing that that he experienced a great sense of freedom and peace and love. The glory of the greater love that he displayed spoke more loudly of Jesus Christ than a score
of American evangelists. Our Lord's command, when it is obeyed in the midst of chaos, is a means of redemption. You may recall how Dostoevsky expressed this redemption in the words of Father Zosima, "Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of divine love, and is the greatest love on earth. . . . If you love everything -- if you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things."
And isn't this true. We don't know Christ unless we love Him. We don't know God unless we love Him through Christ. We don't know our friends, our parents, our spouses, our children and grandchildren, unless we love them through Christ. There are so many barriers of the flesh and of the pride that stand in the way of an authentic relationship with others, even though as we
think, we love. I need hardly remind you that no one may command love; that is, no one can force another to love her or him. Only God in His infinite freedom may demand our love. Our love for Him is our ultimate act of freedom. This freedom of love inspires all of our creative actions.
It is the completion and fruition of our faith and so unlike the faith of worldly people is this command to love our enemy. He meant it when He said it, to love our enemy, and He demonstrated that, love our enemy and pray for those who despitefully use us. Again, only God, only God can make such a command. And the second command, of course, is so obvious
but it's one that seems to been forgotten; forgotten because the courage of love has been lost amidst the confusion of denominational trivia. It is, "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you, always,
even unto the end of the world, or the end of the age." In words slightly different from those used by St. Matthew, St. Luke reports in the first chapter of Acts, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will bear witness for me in Jerusalem and all over Judea and Samaria and away to the ends of the earth."
This command was not issued to ecclesiastical councils or committees, but to gruff Galileans. Nowhere in the history of the church have I found that the expansion of Christ's mission on earth was achieved by churchly bureaucracies. The ambassadors of reconciliation in those early days were fishermen, slaves, women, children,
merchants, outcasts, dissidents, and defectors. The church of the apostolic period and after was a fellowship of fellowships reaching out to each other and united primarily by their obedience to Jesus Christ. The Christians in Jerusalem viewed themselves as an interim community soon to be absorbed into the reality of the kingdom of God on the victorious return
of their Lord. Such a view was modified as the church expanded through Judea, Samaria, and the pagan world of those days. The universality of the Gospel, however, embraced everyone. Everyone, everyone who responded to the invitation of God in Jesus Christ, beginning in Jerusalem, and moving on through Antioch to Philippi,
Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, Marseilles, Lyon, and even Armenia and India. Whenever the devotion to world mission failed, the church life became weaker and less challenging as it did in the ancient city of Laodicea, about which we read in the book of Revelation, chapter 3, verse 14. Thus it seems that when the church is actively engaged in missions, she flourished by the doing
of God's will and that she withers when she stays at home, secure in the comfortable pews. So far as we're concerned in the west at this time, the church flourished in the nineteenth century because of an enthusiasm for world mission. William Carey began the contemporary mission in India in Bengal in 1793. David Livingstone initiated
the expansion of the church in Africa in 1840. In 1853, James Hudson Taylor intensified the missionary expansion in China by the formation of the China Inland Mission. At this same time, however, from the 1840s on, there was a counter-movement, a movement of Antichrist in the form of Communism.
Engels, in his letters to Marx in the 1940s, [sic] writes with enthusiasm about the subject of the world revolution which he believes to be imminent because of the new worldview created by Marx. The 1848 Manifesto of the Communist party is indeed an invoice of revolution.
The basis for this opinion is that Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power, and that Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement. That last sentence, by the way, is a straight quotation from the Manifesto. "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement."
At this point in time, the worldview of Marx is untenable. It has signaled the end of western positivism. In doing so, however, it has left the church with the task of addressing a neo-pagan world because the pagans of old turned to Christianity and they did so remarkably quickly and enthusiastically
because it was the fulfillment of a heart-felt hope. The neo-pagans, however, are the product of the late Enlightenment in Europe and in its rejection of Christ and of Christian civility. Yet in this period of neo-paganism, Christianity in its various forms is still professed - - and listen
to this, by the way -- you can get this is any world almanac. It's still professed by 1,669,520,440 people. That is 32.9 percent of the world's population. Surely this provides a reasonably broad base for mounting the evangelization of the remaining
67.1 percent. Compared with only twelve men just after Jesus's resurrection, the odds in favor of the Christian worldview are excellent. The codicil to this evaluation is, of course, not about the quantity of Christians, but about their quality. And it is this which makes the difference. The saints
and the martyrs are those who followed St. Paul's advice to "shine like stars in a dark world." To shine like stars is the vocation of Christians as it has been defined by Jesus. You are a light for all the world. Those Christians who have been classified as dissidents in Communist countries have been and still are stars shining
in a dark, dark world. As Solzhenitsyn has reminded us in the second volume of the Gulag Archipelago, that as many as 66 million Russians were exterminated between the time of the October revolution and 1959. That was the year, you remember, that Khrushchev renewed and intensified the persecution of dissidents.
And our Russian brethren today as of this present time have upped that number to about 100 million or more. I can't think of 100 million bodies sacrificed to the Antichrist. Can you? It's horrible. One dead man's an awful sight, and I saw too many dead men in World War II and afterwards, but
100 million. And we've been indifferent. That's why, by the way, that CREED came into being, because of the indifference of people in this country, particularly churchly people, to the reality of the situation in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China. And so according to many experts in the USA, glasnost and perestroika are purely the outcome of economic
factors. I'm sure you've heard this so many, many times. Well, I'm of the opinion, however, that it is the light of the Christian Democrats shed upon the chilly darkness of Communism's winter that has contributed to the overcoming of its darkness. A few years ago, a Russian defector explained to me that the power of evil in the Soviet Union was dying in its contest
with the light and truth of the Christian faith. The history of the past two thousand years upholds this opinion. Many empires have risen and fallen, but Jesus Christ remains the same, yesterday, today and forevermore. We are now living in the last days of judgement and judgement is all around us, or at the beginning
of a new era and we must not exclude the possibility of this new era. This is the subject raised by Nicolas Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher in his book, Towards a New Epoch. It was published in 1947, a year before his death on the outskirts of Paris. He states in his introduction that "a spiritual struggle must be waged
against the darkness of the heart of which the rays of light are extinguished and the seeds of a better life cannot grow." At the end of his final chapter, he expresses the hope that people in the west will have learned from the old and new forms of atheism, thus these atheistic expressions, he writes, "are but the darkness which precedes
new religious illumination." And, as you know, the people of Communist countries have looked into the heart of that darkness. As a consequence, they may well become the leading victors in the conflict of light against darkness. The 73 years of atheism in the Soviet Union have provided a valid period of experimentation,
an extremely costly one as we have noted. Thus, Berdyaev ends his "Towards a New Epoch," with the following two sentences: "A new attitude of mind, and new forms of Christianity are going into the makeup of the period which lies before us. This new Christian outlook has been prepared in Russia and this new Christian outlook has been prepared in Russia."
This opinion was expressed earlier in his "Russian Idea," and again in "The Origin of Russian Communism." I think it is worthwhile repeating what he wrote in the latter book. And so he writes, "The problems of Communism stimulate the awakening of the Christian conscience and should lead to the development of a creative, social Christianity in the sense of revealing Christian truth and justice
in relation to social life. But this, this can only be done by a rejuvenated Christianity which is true to its prophetic spirit and which is turned toward the kingdom of God." Dostoevsky, in his meditation on the Russian monk and his possible significance in his great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," saw the best of monks
as those who "keep the image of Christ fair and undefiled in the purity of God's truth. And when the time comes, they will show it to the torturing creeds of the world. That is the great thought," he writes, "That is the great thought. That star will arise out of the east." Solzhenitsyn is of a similar opinion in his essay on
"Does Russia Have a Future?" And he writes about this in a series of essays which was produced, I think, about 1961 or '62, entitled "From Under the Rubble." "Yes," he replies, "Yes. If the past half-century has enriched us with experience that no other country has yet acquired, Russia has passed through death and may hear the voice of God, but God
makes history through people and it is we, every one of us, who may hear His voice. Of course, we may not hear it, and remain as corpses in the wilderness that will cover the ruins of Russia." That was addressed primarily round about '61 to the intellectuals in Russia. As members of Christ's
body, we have the responsibility of doing our utmost to work with our fellow members in Communist countries for the redemption of the world our Lord died for. We mustn't forget that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Our Lord created the
cosmos out of chaos and created it so that in the fullness of time, He sent His own Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to purchase freedom for the subjects of Law, in order that we might attain the status of sons and daughters. So far, the Christians in Communist
countries, particularly in Russia, have suffered the agonies of the cross in their confrontation with evil. Our bounden duty is to work with them as partners in the creative effort of the divine agape to bring order, freedom, peace, and love out of the existing chaos. And there is chaos all around us. It is described daily in the New York
Times. What is impossible for political and ecclesiastical bureaucracies is possible when we are partners in God's creative actions. Thus as He was facing execution, St. Paul could write to his friends in Philippi and say, "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me." And only God can
do that. This is the spirit which is characteristic of the rejuvenated Christianity which brings peace and freedom and creative order to the worldly chaos of our days. Contemporary events are calling us to be the body of Christ in the world, suffering when other members suffer; rejoicing when they rejoice; and working together with God
for the reconciliation of the world unto Himself.