Facs
Transcript
Let me give another example which is especially near to this country. I could refer (but I want to do it only in passing) to the legislation which is usually called “Prohibition,” where the churches identified God with special political laws – not with special principles, which is right, but with special laws and legal procedures; and the result was the same judgment, namely that these legal procedures proved to be the greatest boon for gangsterism that ever existed, perhaps, and did not do what it was supposed to do – on the contrary.
Now if you identify, in such a case, your ultimate concern with a concrete method of carrying-through principles, then you are under the judgment of history, and this judgment should be applied, but it shouldn't be applied to that for which religion ultimately stands, because then religion itself is drawn into the catastrophe of a special system of ideas of a special moment.
But the main example perhaps in this country, and at the same time a step beyond problems of religious socialism, is religious pacifism, which was one of the most energetic movements, 22 years ago, when I came to this country, and I always tell the story that whenever I spoke about Aristotelian logic or about the doctrine of sin or about the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit in the Holy Trinity, the question was not “How is it with these problems?”, but the question was, after two seconds, “What do you think about pacifism?” There was nothing in the whole world which was not focused at that time at the problem of war or peace, and the relationship of Christianity to it. Now I don’t mind this at all – I didn’t understand it; I simply was surprised and didn’t know what to answer – but perhaps now I am able to understand it and even to valuate it.