The Most Precious Possessions of Mankind

Ideas and Opinions
Albert Einstein

Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. 

There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind.

The Figure of the Crucified

Bonhoeffer
Eric Metaxas  

Hitler, to whom mercy was a sign of subhuman weakness, arranged for the French to sign the terms of their surrender in the forest of Compiegne on the very spot where they had the Germans sign the armistice in 1918…

Hitler and Germany had waited twenty-three years for this triumphant moment, and if ever Adolf Hitler became the Savior of the German nation, this was it. Many Germans who had reservations and misgivings about Hitler now changed their opinions. He had healed the unhealable wound of the First War and Versailles. He had restored a broken Germany to her former greatness. The old had passed way, and behold, he had made all things new. In many people’s eyes he was suddenly something like a god, the messiah for whom they had waited and prayed, and whose reign would last a thousand years…   

In his book Ethics, which he worked on during this time, Bonhoeffer wrote about the way people worship success:

In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done…With a frankness and off-handedness which no other earthly power could permit itself, history appeals in its own cause to the dictum that the end justifies the means…The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. God was interested not in success, but in obedience.

Why Should It?

Eberhard Bethge

We now realized that mere confession, no matter how courageous, inescapably meant complicity with the murderers, even though there would always be new acts of refusing to be co-opted and even though we would preach “Christ alone” Sunday after Sunday. During the whole time the Nazi state never considered it necessary to prohibit such preaching. Why should it? 

Utterly Separated

Bonhoeffer
Eric Metaxas

Like many on the right side of the church struggle at this time, he [Martin Niemöller] utterly separated the issues of church and state. To him, the German Christians’ meddling in church affairs was one thing, but it was quite unconnected to what Hitler was undertaking elsewhere. So now—in the name of the Pastors’ Emergency League, no less—Niemöller even sent a congratulatory telegram to the Führer, in which he swore their loyalty to him, and their gratitude…Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. 

Personal and Structural

Bloodlines
John Piper

Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, in their book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, argue that, for the main part, evangelical Christians are blind to these structural dimensions of what they call the racialization of America. They give a good example of the difference between the merely personal and the structural approach toward racial change: Recall that in the Jim Crow era, “Most evangelicals, even in the North, did not think it their duty to oppose segregation; it was enough to treat blacks they knew personally with courtesy and fairness.” The racialized system itself is not directly challenged. What is challenged is the treatment of individuals within the system.

Marginal Events in a Nothing Town

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes
Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien

The importance of Palestine was entirely geographic. The taxes were not enough to influence the Roman budget. Palestine was not known for anything except trouble. But that region controlled the only land route to the breadbasket of Egypt and all of Africa. It was important that Rome controlled the land, but the activities that took place there were rarely of Roman interest. Pilate was more the main finance officer or tax collector than anything else. The events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, so important for Jews and Christians at the time, were marginal events in a nothing town on the edge of an empire with more important matters to consider. If we fail to recognize this, we can fail to recognize just how remarkable the rapid growth of the early church really was. For the first couple of centuries, Roman writers often referred to Christians as “Galileans,” indicating how nominal and provincial they considered the early Jesus movement to be.

Chronological Snobbery

C.S. Lewis
Alister McGrath

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. When some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as “the truth”–to be contrasted with the “superstitions” of the past–Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a byproduct of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual convictions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of “chronological snobbery,” and realize that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous…

We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

An Honorable and Sane Life

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

“It only takes one person to make a change,” you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen…

The fact of history is that black people have not–probably no people have ever–liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from slavery in the south from the charnel houses of the Civil War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the Second World War. History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.

Great Depression

Ruby Bridges, 1960