Harassed by the Gestapo and repudiated by most Protestant leaders, the Confessing Church led a perilous existence. In 1935 no fewer than seven hundred Confessing Church pastors were arrested. The movement’s presence was an embarrassment to the Nazis, and its witness to Christ’s lordship over the world implicitly challenged Hitler’s totalitarianism.
When it was obvious that Hitler’s friend Ludwig Müller had failed to unite the Protestant churches, the Führer turned more and more to his anti-Christian Nazis, who claimed that Nazism represented the true fulfillment of Christianity. In 1935 the Nazis created their own Ministry of Church Affairs under a Nazi lawyer, Hanns Kerrl. When Kerrl met resistance from churchmen, he declared, “National Socialism is the doing of God’s will. God’s will reveals itself in German blood. True Christianity is represented by the party.”
I think love will bring music out of any life?Is that not true?Alıntı
Sweet, women make it true. I think women are the best artists of the world, for they can take the common lives of men solid with the money-getting of our age, and make them beautiful.
Reklam
Liberals initially welcomed Pope Pius IX (1846–78). He was a warm, kindly, well-meaning man, and the liberals took him for a true reformer. Some dreamed of an Italian federation under the pope. But Pius suddenly changed his mind about the Papal States when revolutionaries assassinated the first papal prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Revolution broke out in Rome, and Pius was forced to flee. With French military help, he regained Rome and the Papal States, but this time Pius insisted on a return to the old absolutist rule.
The American Revolution in the 1770s inspired these radicals in Europe. It offered a great lesson to ponder and perhaps to imitate. To European observers, the American founding fathers were true men of the Enlightenment—rational yet passionately concerned about equality, peaceful yet ready to go to war for their freedom. By wresting independence from a formidable imperial power, they had proved that the Enlightenment ideas worked.
For Plato, the mind was a chariot. For Descartes, it was a mechanical clock. For Freud, it was a steam engine. Today, the most common analogue for the mind is the computer. Although it’s true that our brains are not literally digital computers, built on silicon circuits and binary logic, the modern metaphor of the mind as a computer is by far the most powerful and comprehensive one we’ve ever had.
Most of the basic beliefs of these evangelicals could be found in Puritanism: the sinfulness of man, the atoning death of Christ, the unmerited grace of God, the salvation of the true believer. But Puritanism was more concerned with politics and trying to create the holy commonwealth, the true Bible society, in England and America.
The evangelicals were not detached from politics as the Pietists were, but their controlling passion was to convert the lost. They were less concerned about the reform of churches and more intent on the preaching of the gospel to all—nominal Christians, scoffers, and heathen.
Reklam
Reklam