“Thus the fear of concentration camps and the resulting insight into the nature of total domination might serve to invalidate all obsolete political differentiations from right to left and to introduce beside and above them the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely; whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.”
Hannah Arendt
The Origins Of Totalitarianism – pg. 442
If there is one thing that Christians need to realize it is that the greatest threat from outside of us is the totalitarian state. The totalitarian state is the idol of our age. It is the idol around which men are marshaling themselves in league against the Lord Christ. It is the idol that would usurp the crown rights of King Jesus and would claim for itself the sovereignty of God. The totalitarian state is Babel reincarnated. The totalitarian state aspires to be God walking on the earth. The totalitarian state is content to build itself on the blood of peoples conquered and Empire extended. The only rationale of the totalitarian state is to become increasingly totalitarian. The totalitarian state brooks no challenges. It hears no reason. It knows no mercy.
Standing for Christ today means standing against the totalitarian state.
I’ve read Witness, Road to Serfdom, and Russian gulag books, so I never understood the past 20 years of URC and Reformed lay-down, Ostrich mentality. The fruits of that thinking are now becoming evident.
They looked left, saw and heard the screeching, starting with the Catholic priest abuses in the late 90’s, and decided that Ned Flanders was the best model for winning people.
Kurt,
That’s part of the problem. The clergy corps doesn’t read books that are anything but abstract theology books. Now, I think being able to think in abstract terms is important but not to the exclusion of books that give concrete application.
Your line about Flanders is both funny and accurate.