Essays

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse: Liberty

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I love my country and over twenty years ago I wrote an essay expressing my gratitude to her. It was one of the first pieces I every published and describes immigrating to America when I was a young boy.

May God this great country from those who would do harm both within and without.

“Wake up,” my father whispered. “We’re almost there.”

It was a cold March morning. I was six years old. My family was sailing from The Hague, bound for New York,a single Dutch family aboard a ship crowded with Hungarians in exodus from their abortive revolution.

The voyage had been thrilling, at least to the wide eyes of a six-year-old. My parents, my two sisters, my brother, and I had spent the trip in a cabin the size of a small bedroom, but I had enjoyed virtual free run of the ship and its seemingly endless maze of hallways. We roamed for hours at a time, peering behind each open door. Occasionally, a Hungarian family would invite us into their cabin. There we would sit, not understanding a word that was spoken, but basking in the warmth of welcoming smiles.

One night, during a storm, the steamer’s engine failed. The ship began to drift. My father took me to the bridge, where we watched the great waves slam rhythmically against the bow, the ship lurching high on the crest of each mountainous wave and plummeting deep into the valley of the next.

The ship was tempest-tossed. Crew members raced about hauling huge coils of rope, with which they secured everything that wasn’t nailed down. Many of them disappeared into the cavernous dining room; I decided to investigate. Behind the dining-room door I saw the largest web of rope ever spun. Chairs were tied to tables, tables to walls. Nothing moved.

That night, the crew issued sideboards and harnesses to every family. I wore a harness, which was dipped to the cabin wall to keep me from being thrown out of my bunk as the ship heaved and rolled.

The storm lasted but one day; the rest of the voyage was calm and uneventful. Yet aboard that ship was a pervasive sense of uneasiness, loneliness, even anguish, all of which, I now realize, had less to do with fear of the sea than with the violent uprooting of lives, and with the uncertainties awaiting us in our new lives and new country.

My parents had been deeply shaken by the horrors of World War II: the havoc wrought by conquerors and liberators alike, the occupation of their homeland, the barbarism of Hitler’s “final solution” for their Jewish friends and neighbors. My father had served in the Dutch resistance movement, had for a time been imprisoned in a concentration camp from which he escaped.

Eleven years after VE Day, he led his family to America not so much in search of a better life as in flight from a life that had lost its loveliness.

I shivered as I stood on deck beside my father. It slowly dawned on me that we had entered New York harbor, that this day was to be the last of our voyage. I listened to the blasts of foghorns and the chugging of tugboats. The harbor was shrouded in late, winter fog. America, it seemed, was to be a gray, wet world. My father pointed to a faint shadow in the distance.

“There it is,” he said. “It” materialized out of the fog, an enormous statue of a woman holding a torch. “It’s the Statue of Liberty,” my father said. “Always remember this, because it’s important.”

Liberty. Justice. Equality. A six-year old does not understand such words. He does not know that history bears witness to but a precious few societies that have nurtured such principles, and to a tragic many that have mocked them. What he does understand is that when his father tells him something is important, it usually is. And so I have remembered.

Last summer, I saw the Statue of Liberty again, in the company of my wife and my parents. We took a ferry from Manhattan. As it pulled away from the pier, I climbed alone to the uppermost deck and stood among the sightseers. En route to my perch, I heard at least seven different languages.

Our first years in America were difficult, although we children never really knew it. We adapted swiftly, learning English in about one month by playing with the other children in our neighborhood. By 1962, my parents, too, had made a home of their new country, and we at last settled down in suburban Eden Prairie, Minnesota. That same year, we became American citizens. Now I stood once again on the deck of a ship, amid foreigners speaking strange tongues and staring in awe at the Manhattan skyline and the world’s most potent symbol of freedom and new beginnings.

The great lady seemed remarkably unchanged by the years, or by the remarkable changes I have undergone. She remains an imposing figure, and a graceful one. Her robes cascade like a waterfall; her torch is held confidently high; she is frozen in mid-step, a portrait of resolve. (Physically, the years have been something of a trial for Liberty; she is now undergoing a two-year restoration.)

As we docked at Liberty Island, I rejoined my wife and my parents. We climbed to Liberty’s crown (an exhausting but inspiring exercise that yields one of the best views of the city), then went to visit the museum at her feet.

The museum is one large, winding hallway that chronicles the history of American immigration. The forced immigration of millions of black Africans (a disgraceful episode of which only a free society would dare remind itself) is reviewed first documented with slave ship drawings and diagrams, handcuffs and chains, personal histories.

Farther on, we came upon the area devoted to the great European migration. Between 1840 and 1940, more than 34 million Europeans resettled in the United States – the greatest migration of human beings in history. America allowed unrestricted immigration until 1921; since then, we have become ever more selective about who may enter.

The pictures that hang from the museum’s walls show hundreds of weary immigrants passing before the watchful eyes of doctors and Customs officials. In 1915, my wife’s Greek grandmother limped past those doctors. They stopped her, and refused her entry until her brother explained that her affliction was the legacy of a childhood accident, not a congenital defect. Others were less fortunate. When officials rejected a would be immigrant, families were confronted with a soul-shattering choice: to abandon their dreams of a new life, or to send a loved one back home, alone.

The photographs tell a dramatic story Immigrants hobble wobbly-legged down gangplanks, carrying everything they own in one suitcase. Many wear their best clothes; this is the most important day of their lives. Nervousness and worry crease many faces. Most of them have no friends in America, and no relatives, and nowhere to go.

Our stroll through the museum was solemn and, for the most part, silent. There is very little that one can say when confronted with the sort of courage illustrated there — especially when one has experienced the immigrant’s fears, confusions, and second thoughts firsthand.

Back on the ferry I asked my father if he remembered leading me onto the deck that cold March morning. Stupid question. My thoughts turned to my kinship with the millions of others who passed through these waters before me, the millions who have followed me, and the millions more who still dream, often in vain, of a new life in a new land.

This article was published in Twin Cities Magazine. It was written before the Statute of Liberty Museum was moved to Ellis Island.

Church vs. Reich

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What happened to Christians under the Nazi Regime? The traditionalists went to concentration camps, many fell away and adopted the Nazi neo-paganism, and some clergy actively supported the Third Reich. From the essay:

[T]he persecution of the Church was camouflaged as “positive Christianity,” which claimed through the use of quotations from the Bible to be fulfilling God’s commandments: “They thus built up an enormous propaganda-machine, which resulted in a general inflation of values, because it sanctified anything it wanted to, so that finally nothing remained sacred” (p. 98). Only then did the full persecution come.

Source: The Living Church | Leander S. Harding

Man’s Disorder and God’s Design, published by Harper and Brothers in 1948, is a remarkable collection of essays prepared for the first assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam. The authors include some of the most respected theological voices of the 20th century: Karl Barth, H. Richard Niebuhr, George Florovsky, Gustaf Aulén, and Lesslie Newbigin. Sober reflection on what European churches learned from Nazi persecution and the war years is a dominant theme in the book.

A powerful section, “The Shame and the Glory of the Church,” provides one of the most moving accounts of Church life which I have ever read, written by Edmund Schlink, who was a professor of systematic theology at Heidelberg. This essay on the life of the Church under Hitler speaks, as the editors say, “for the Church upon whom fell the first and the hardest part of the struggle to manifest God’s glory amidst man’s disorder” (p. 77).

Schlink reminds us that at first the persecution of the Church was camouflaged as “positive Christianity,” which claimed through the use of quotations from the Bible to be fulfilling God’s commandments: “They thus built up an enormous propaganda-machine, which resulted in a general inflation of values, because it sanctified anything it wanted to, so that finally nothing remained sacred” (p. 98). Only then did the full persecution come. The Nazis shut down the Church’s influence on public life, banned the printing of Bibles and hymnbooks, prohibited large Church assemblies, and pressured men and young people to join the party. Theological faculties atrophied, hundreds of evangelical pastors and Roman Catholic priests were sent to the camps, some to suffer martyrdom, and “even the women and children who went to church were watched” (p. 98).

Schlink reports that there was a great falling-off among Christians. Many people became ashamed of the name of Christ and stopped attending church. Some preferred the neo-pagan ceremonies offered by the state to baptism and marriage in the Church. “Families were torn asunder: children denounced their parents, husbands opposed their wives, brothers and sisters took opposite sides in the cleavage between faith and error. Love grew cold in many hearts. Its place was taken by delusions and hardness of heart” (p. 98). The defections reached into the clergy: “Many became preachers of the anti-Christian myth and entered the service of the Nazis to replace the loyal pastors and church leaders that had been deprived of office. Many became false teachers and then persecutors of the Church” (p. 98).

For Schlink, even more stunning than the apostasy was “the way in which it was usually taken for granted with an easy conscience. When the Nazi philosophy began to influence Christians, many of them did not even notice that this Nazi talk about ‘the Almighty’ and His ‘providence’ had nothing to do with the Living God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but that it was directly opposed to Him. … It became evident that people were not all that clear about Christian teaching. In many churches, even before the Nazi regime, preaching had become an arbitrary religious explanation of personal destiny and world events. Otherwise, when the crucial moment came, it would have been impossible for a man of our own time to gain such an ascendancy and for him, with his personal philosophy, to become the object of such widespread faith and hope” (p. 99).

The German Church’s accommodation of the Nazi regime reveals an appalling failure of basic Christian preaching and teaching. In Schlink’s understanding the failure of the churches was not so much caused by the persecution as revealed by it. “The forces outside the church showed up what was real in the life of these churches, and what was only an empty shell” (p. 100).

By God’s grace an astonishing renewal of the Church occurred as well. “The renewal began when the Church recognized the enemy’s attack as the hand of God … and when resistance to injustice became at the same time an act of repentance and of submission to the mighty hand of God” (p. 100). As the contrast with anti-Christian propaganda became more intense “the Church’s ears were re-opened to the Word of God. … But at the same time God’s Word challenged us, questioned the reality of our own religion, and forced us to recognize God simply and solely in His Word. Under the attack of neo-paganism, but especially through the power of God’s Word, its promises, and its demands, our usual attempts to see God’s revelation in other historical events and forms, ideas and words, save in the historic event of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, completely broke down. … Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, was recognized and acclaimed afresh as the sole Word of God” (p. 100).

One consequence of this sifting was the emergence of a strong Bible movement in the German Church carrying through into the post-war years. There also emerged a new feeling for the sacraments of the Church. Before the war, Communion services were infrequent and the number of communicants small. “People gathered afresh around the sacraments. The number of communion services and communicants increased. In the midst of all the tribulation and distress there awakened a new longing for the concrete, personal experience of receiving the body and the blood of the Incarnate Son of God Who has given Himself for us. … These communion services echoed the joy of the early Christians, to whom the body and blood of Christ were objects of the greatest joy and praise” (p. 101).

There were other signs of renewal. Schlink reports that under the persecution there emerged a great sense that the Church was the fellowship of those who confess and bear witness to the lordship of Christ. The term brother came very naturally into common use again as Christians discovered their solidarity across denominational lines. The liturgy was reshaped so that common prayers for those exiled and imprisoned were a more prominent feature. There was greater attentiveness to saying the creeds and ancient prayers which expressed the identification of the people with the Church of the ages. “Through these prayers we realized that across all distances and even across the war-fronts, we were one people with the worshippers in all nations” (p. 102).

The clergy experienced renewal. There was a new focus on the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments as the chief work of the clergy, “which takes precedence over all other tasks. But it became especially clear that the Church cannot be led by anything but the voice of the Good Shepherd, as preached in the Word of God” (p. 102). There was a renewal in lay ministry. “Many elders then began to understand their task in a new way as that of watchmen. Many who had only listened to the Word before, now came forward to read to the congregation, or to give their own exposition of a passage of scripture. Many, who had never thought of doing so before, accompanied bereaved persons to the cemetery, so that the body should not be laid in the earth without a reading from scripture and a prayer. In addition to the old office of deacon, new duties were assumed; readers, catechists, both men and women, undertook the care of the poor and pastoral work, while young people taught the children” (p. 103). There was a new recognition that ordinary people in the daily work in factory, school and the military were presented with both the challenge and peril of Christian ministry and witness. “Hesitatingly, but with growing confidence, the Church in the Third Reich began to proclaim that in every sphere of life we owe obedience to God in Christ, proclaiming its message in the face of the world and helping the persecuted” (p. 104).

And then comes the stunning conclusion to Professor Schlink’s report. “All of this proved that the Church can only help, in the middle of the disorder of the world, by really being the Church. Its most important duty to the world consists in allowing itself to be re-made by the Word of God. When the Church derives its life solely from the Word of God made flesh, the witness of that word within the Church is bound to have effect in saving and bringing order into the world around. But if the Church bears witness to something other than this Lord, however well intentioned its advice, warning, help and sacrifice may be, it will only increase the disorder of the world” (p. 104).

In a time when the disorder of humankind asserts itself both in the Church and the world and the Church is again being sifted and sorted, albeit not as fiercely as under the Nazis, what can we say upon hearing this testimony of the German Church to us except amen and please God grant us their repentance and renewal.

The Rev. Leander S. Harding is dean of church relations and seminary advancement and associate professor of pastoral theology at Trinity School for Ministry.

Church vs Reich

C.S. Lewis on Dictators and Totalitarians

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Source: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment by C.S. Lewis

Highlights:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured.

Excerpt:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. A great many popular blue prints for a Christian society are merely what the Elizabethans called ‘eggs in moonshine’ because they assume that the whole society is Christian or that the Christians are in control. This is not so in most contemporary States. Even if it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore neither ver wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers. And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the government, they will not often be even the best unbelievers.

The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish. And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice

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Can There Be Morality Without God?

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Introductory remarks given at the debate held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

By: Fr. Hans Jacobse

I want to thank the Orthodox Christian Fellowship and the Secular Student Alliance of UMBC for their invitation to debate this evening. I am looking forward to a healthy and vigorous debate that is not only academically interesting, but I think is one of the central questions of our age.

We live in what some people call a post-Christian or post-modern society – an assessment I generally agree with, but like most sweeping claims it can mean different things to different people. It’s prudent then that we define our terms.

The question we are discussion this evening is: Can there be morality without God? I argue no it is not possible. But before giving you my reasons, let me rephrase the question more in line with atheist presuppositions.

Atheism, properly understood, allows for no objective existence for anything non-material, not made of matter. Materialism is the philosophical ground of atheism, a point that anyone familiar with more than the surface character of the atheist argument will recognize as true.
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Saint John Chrysostom and 21st Century Christians

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Taken from a lecture by Fr. Josiah Trenham and republished on Mystagogy.

From Mystagogy:

[The following portion of a lecture (all of which I recommend to be read) delivered by the Very Reverend Josiah Trenham in 2007 I found to be a very edifying piece on how Christians can implement at least some of the counsels of St. John Chrysostom into our own lives today. Of course, this is by no means exhaustive, but it gives us enough to think about and to hopefully inspire us to dig deeper into the rich treasures of one of the great Fathers of the Orthodox Church. – J.S.]

Fr. Josiah Trenham:

In this last portion of my lecture I would like to focus upon what I perceive to be several areas in which Saint John Chrysostom’s life and teachings may render the 21st century Christian particular assistance. The Church finds Herself in this new millennium faced by unique particularities, which demand an articulate word from the Holy Fathers to guide us through the unique challenges of post-modern life.

The Sanctification of City Life in an Age of Global Urbanization

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