Enver was always inspired by great ideas, by far-flung schemes. The big idea absorbed him. He cared nothing for details, facts or figures.
Mustafa Kemal was cautious. He was suspicious of brilliancy. Big vague ideas did not rouse him. His objectives were limited, and undertaken only after long and careful consideration and calculation. He wanted exact facts and figures. He had no sympathy with and no ability at handling Arabs or any foreigners.
He was a Turk, and proud of being a Turk; he despised the rest of the world.
“What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom."
Reklam
The conflicting views of the conservatives and progressives were apparent from the start. During the first session, the progressives wanted to change the liturgy of the church to allow for modern languages instead of the traditional Latin and to encourage the participation of laypeople in the mass. The conservatives, predictably, objected.
At the same time a movement called the German Christians arose among Protestants aimed at closer ties with the Nazis. The German Christians wanted to unite the twenty-eight regional Protestant bodies under a single bishop. They elected to this post Ludwig Müller, a fervent Nazi. They also introduced the Führer principle into church government and adopted the Aryan paragraph, which called for the dismissal of all people of Jewish origin from church positions. In 1933 the German Christians claimed three thousand out of a total of seventeen thousand Protestant pastors.
Pietism arose as a reaction to this ossification of the Reformation. Just as Jansenism opposed the cheap grace of the French Jesuits, so the Pietists challenged the nominal faith of German Lutheranism.
The aims of the Pietists were twofold: First, they stressed the importance of personal faith. They left behind all dreams of Catholic Christendom and Puritan commonwealths. They believed that Christianity starts with the individual. So for the first time in Christian history, the idea of conversions of baptized Christians (as well as pagans) came to prominence.
Second, the Pietists wanted to shift the center of the Christian life from the state churches, in which a person was born and brought up, to intimate fellowships of those who had a living faith in God. Revitalized laypeople from these centers were expected to spread the Word of God through all classes of men and women.
When Charles tried to punish the leaders of this opposition, civil war erupted. The Royalist members of Parliament left London to join the forces defending the king. So Parliament was free at last to institute the reform of the church the Puritans had always wanted. It called to Westminster scores of Puritan theologians and assigned to them the creation of a new form of worship and a new form of church government for the Church of England.
Reklam
Reklam