Thanks to my mother, I now have pictures to go with an event I described in the Preface of Saints and Scoundrels.
In the book's Preface I explain how the book grew out of an experience I had when I was eleven years old and traveled to West Germany with my family. One afternoon my dad drove us to the wall separating
West and East Germany. The electric fence dividing the free world from
the “evil empire” looked ominous and was more than a little freightening for an eleven year old boy.
As we emerged from the car, we were met by a chill, drizzling rain. On the other side of the fence a lone guard stared gloomily at us. The rest of my family had their picture taken in front of the fence but I was too afraid to venture near. Here is a picture of the family (without my Dad, since he was taking the picture).
A few minutes later I plucked up the courage and asked my dad to photograph me next to the terrible barrier, or as close to it as I dared approach. Here I am:
Three years later, in 1989, the wall was torn down. Communism had collapsed and Eastern Europe was free. A year after these momentous changes when I was fifteen, I went back to Germany with my family. This time there was nothing to prevent us driving into the Eastern section. We traveled to Berlin where the remnants of the wall still zigzagged through the city like a serpent. In some areas there were portions of the wall still intact. Here and there I saw people dismantling what remained of the hated emblem of totalitarianism.
Though I was only fifteen at the time, the experience had a marked
effect on me. There was something strangely moving in seeing the broken
concrete all over the ground and thinking, “So this is all that is left
of a regime that tried to crush truth and freedom.” I stooped down and
collected some big chunks of the rubble, determined to show them to my
own children one day.
.
.
Not too long ago my parents came to visit and they brought the box
containing the fragments of the wall. Since then I occasionally take out
the pieces and show them to my children. I tell them how amazed I was
when I learned about the collapse of Soviet communism. Yet I am also
careful to emphasize that from the perspective of all of history the
collapse of the Soviet empire should not come as such a surprise. After
all, hasn’t every other evil empire been reduced to rubble? The Assyrian
empire, for all its boasting, was dismantled by the work of God. The
Babylonian kingdom rose to glory but collapsed in ruin. The proud,
grandiose claims of the Persians, the Romans, and the Nazis were all
likewise brought down to the dust by the Almighty.
.
.
It was this confidence in God’s continued victories over the forces of
darkness that led the Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to predict in
1983 that Christianity would one day triumph over communism. Speaking
of the militant atheists that rekindled “the frenzied Leninist obsession
with destroying religion”, he said:
But there was something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to labor camps for their faith and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells – they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia…. It is here that we see the dawn of hope: For no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.
In toppling His enemies, God does not work alone but uses the
faithfulness of His people throughout the ages to accomplish His
purposes. From my perspective as a young boy it seemed as though the
collapse of communism had come out of the blue. Since then, I have had
the opportunity to study about the men and women of faith who played a
part in the accomplishment of God’s plans. The destruction of Soviet
communism was made possible by people like Solzhenitsyn, Brother Andrew,
Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałęsa, and countless other individuals who
rendered their service to God in the positions in which He placed them.
My boyhood experience helped to ignite my interest in the men and women
of faith who fought against evil in various times, cultures and
situations. Some of these heroes, like Saint Columbanus, Boniface, and
Jim Elliot took the gospel to new and unexplored lands, laboring to
dismantle pagan cultures and replace them with societies that worship
Jesus. Others, like Alfred the Great in the ninth century, or Edmund
Burke in the nineteenth, strove to defend Christian civilization against
barbarian attacks or oppressive ideas. Still others, such as William
Wilberforce, Thomas Chalmers, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer set themselves
against the threat of a corrupting evil springing up from within a
nominally Christian society.
The more I have studied about the heroes and heroines of faith, the more
I have become convinced that the fight against evil empires like
communism is only one half of the job. When Boniface converted the
native German tribes to Christianity, or when Jim Elliot laid the
foundation for the conversion of the Waodani, that was the beginning and
not the end. What is just as important as defeating or converting God’s
enemies is the positive work of building up the culture of Christendom.
For every Berlin wall that crashes to the ground, there are dozens of
churches to be raised up, schools to be created, homes to be
established. For each Roman coliseum that decays into ruins, hundreds of
libraries remain to be built, hymns to be composed, families nurtured
in the faith. Here again, God does not work ex nihilo but calls men and
women to be agents in His kingdom-building work. Men like George
Herbert, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers lived in times of relative peace
and were able pour their energies into strengthening and beautifying
Christian culture. When the Nazi’s reigned their bombs down on London,
Sayers was not able to conspire against Hitler like Dietrich Bonhoeffer
was doing, yet her reading and interpretation of Dante enabled her to
leave behind just as valuable of a legacy.
Throughout the Christian era, there have been numerous heroes who have
embodied both aspects of this call to service. Some were slayers of
dragons, others builders of kingdoms. Some, like Charlemagne and Ronald
Reagan, cried to the enemies of God, “Thus far and no farther!” Others,
like George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton or T.S. Elliot defended
Christendom by showing that the faith is lovely. They knew that the
greatest defense against evil is to enjoy the good, that the strongest
bulwark against paganism is our capacity to love what is beautiful, that
the surest support against the lies of the devil is to be attracted to
what is true. Some Christian heroes have embodied both sides of this
heroic calling. Indeed, men like Constantine, Charlemagne and Alfred the
Great were great builders of Christendom, not merely because they led
souls to Christ or defended civilization from pagan attack, but because
they worked to advance a distinctly Christian vision of culture – a
vision that found expression in art, literature, painting, technology
and hundreds of other areas.
In my book Saints and Scoundrels I have not had time to write
about all the heroes I would have liked to cover, or even all the ones
referred to above. But I have attempted to include a fair selection of
dragon-slayers and kingdom-builders. My hope is that these stories will
inspire you in your own God-given vocations. Like those saints listed in
Hebrews Chapter 11, the brave men and women in the following pages
comprise a vast cloud of witnesses which reach down through the ages to
show us what it means to put the gospel into action. Let them encourage
you to expand your vision beyond what you thought possible, to never
cease striving against the dragons and arch-villains that confront us in
our own day.
In order that the virtues of these noble men and women may stand out in
sharper relief, I have also included some chapters about the dragons.
The witness of a woman like Perpetua is all the more remarkable when she
is contrasted with the murderous aspirations of a despot like Herod.
The stately wisdom of Edmund Burke shines all the clearer when we
compare it to the egotistical foolishness of Rousseau or Joseph Smith.
But there is another reason for the presence of scoundrels in this
volume; they teach us the same lesson I learned on that rain-soaked day
in Berlin when I gazed on the shattered remains of the hated wall. The
lesson is this: though villains may rise and fall, the people of God are
always there to pocket their remains to show the next generation.
Saints and Scoundrels Resource
Purchase Saints and Scoundrels at Canon Press
Purchase Saints and Scoundrels at Amazon.com
Purchase Saints and Scoundrels at Amazon.co.uk
Purchase Saints and Scoundrels through the Colson Center
Interview with Robin Phillips for the Trinity Talk podcast
Matthew Sims' review for 'Grace For Sinners'
Download promotional flier
Quotations from Saints and Scoundrels
Download the Table of Contents, Introduction and the opening of a sample chapter
Preview the opening pages on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment