Without God. . .

In contrast to those who enjoy blaming Christianity for nearly every war, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his 1983 Templeton Prize Lecture, “Men Have Forgotten God,” argued that the 1914-18 war was the result of a collapse of the moral imagination rooted of man  due to a practical atheism.  Solzhenitsyn blames that loss of God for the war to end all wars, a war that has bequeathed not a legacy of peace but a seemingly endless history of conflict.

It is not a simplistic blame but an admission that at the time of the WWI the world had long ago given up on the quaint notion of a God worthy of man's attention.  In essence, the root of man's problem has always been the idea that it was possible to organize the world without God at all.  For surely this has been the pursuit of modern man with his skepticism of all things Christian but his absolute trust in that which appears to be science but may only be posturing arrogance.  Why should we be surprised?  Was this not the same arrogance that dismissed Moses to go up the mountain all the while working to create a tamer god from clay and gold?

Western high culture was not so high as it presumed to be when it determined to make modernity the deity and to betray every fact of history and every truth of reality in favor of this ultimate lie.  Without a God to measure humanity against, the only thing left was to pit man against man, culture against culture, until there is only conflict, suspicion, and mistrust.  Man was never so frail as when He decided that he did not need God but could become or control whatever deity was useful for his purpose.  Since then we have only argued and less about truths of substance than about claims which can never be proven.

What did we learn from the great war?  To mistrust and belittle all tradition and authority until it does not compete with the glory of self in the moment. . . To eliminate objective moral truth and to replace it with a spinning compass that points only to want, desire, and self-interest. . . To cede the international not to religion that binds but to negotiations from national interest?  If these are the lessons, we learned them too well.  Instead of destroying fascism and socialism in their infancy, we fed them until they have grown fat on the food of human suffering, conveniently blamed on religion but it is a religion no one really believes anymore.

Christianity had been the glue that bound people to a conscience informed by the eternal God, the One who transcended boundaries but not for a kingdom of this world.  Without God, without the Church, and without the authority of the Scriptures, the world became a devil's playground of temptation, technology for war, and the toil of suffering in which self-denial could not be justified anymore.   In other words, we buried God but opened a Pandora's box that without God we cannot close, nor do we want to.