nunia
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
"Communism and the Theologians: Study of an Encounter"
Book by Charles C. West; Westminster Press, 1958
FOREWORD--1963
The purpose of these few words of introduction to the paperback edition of this book is to share with future readers some of the experience which past readers have had with it, and some of the wisdom which helpful critics have imparted to a grateful author. Communism and the Theologians is indeed a book which fits many categories, but none of them comfortably. It makes some modest claim to be a work of scholarship; some readers have been kind enough to commend it as an introduction to the theologies of Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr and Josef Hromadka especially. It bristles with footnotes for those who delight in such diversions. An occasional untranslated German word or even sentence floats by like flotsam on the tide of an argument, having escaped the editor's eagle eye. But the reader will soon discover that the author is much too involved in the world he is exploring to preserve the proper scholarly detachment. Judgment is not always as reserved as it should be. Enthusiasm overrides analysis from time to time or informs it so subtly that the unwary reader may not always realize just when he is airborne. Let the critical scholar enjoy himself, but be on guard.
It is a book about Communism. The reality of the Communist world, both in theory and practice, underlies all its analyses and convictions. The author would be prepared to back anything he has here written in criticism or approval of other theologians' encounters with Communism with his knowledge of Marx, Lenin, and the facts of Communist society. But there is very little direct exposition of Communism in the book. The Introduction which, it is hoped, every reader will peruse before going further, sets forth briefly the challenges of Communism which every theologian and church must meet, as the author sees it. If the reader agrees with these ten pages, the rest of the book will be for him an intellectual joy ride. We will be airborne together. If he does not, then let us wrestle with one another and with the five men whose thought is also at grips with the Communist reality, until we find a truth which is stronger than us all. This book is intended to be a dialogue of which the reader is a part, about this truth as it grasps Communist reality.
This book is about theologians and theology. It proved in almost every case impossible to discuss a theologian's encounter with Communism without finding the roots of that encounter in the central moving impulse of his theology itself. To have done otherwise would not have been to take him seriously as a theologian. This is why the chapters that follow are in fact an introduction to the theology of these men, slanted toward its application to a particular human situation. But for this very reason this book escapes the realm of theology as the professionals understand it. It is not organized according to doctrines; it does not set forth the content of Christian truth as such. Rather it is concerned with the interaction of social with theological convictions in each man studied, in the light of the two realities which stand over against us all: that of the Communist world, and that of God's action in Jesus Christ.
This book is therefore at heart not a study of ideas at all, but of human beings in their life together. It is concerned with one sort of human beings called Communists, and with another sort called Christians, and with the responsibility of the latter for the former which the writer, being a Christian, shares. It is concerned with the realities these human beings face in their common life, realities which are always breaking down systems of doctrine whether Christian or Communist. It is primarily concerned with the one reality we all face together and which calls us to account whether we answer or not--the judgment and grace of God. The reader is urged therefore to begin at the very beginning, with the Preface and to hold in his mind throughout such human situations as are therein described. Other such descriptions come up every so often, in nearly every chapter, but especially in those on Barth and in the concluding chapter where the author charts his own unhampered course across the sea of the problem. The reader may find relief and reorientation in turning to these illustrations even out of the regular order of his reading. He may have a good conscience in doing so, for they, and the myriad human situations like them where Christians meet Communists in daily encounter, are the touchstone and the test of all that is written here, and in many other books besides.
CHARLES C. WEST
Christmas 1962
PREFACE
From the course of the author's many wanderings in the service of the Church, two incidents stand out which seem especially suited to form an introduction for the reader to this book.
The first was in a Chinese temple not far from a large city in the year 1949. The temple was Buddhist, but for a number of months it had been rented in part by a Christian university whose students and faculty had fled from the north as the Communists captured their city. Here, in this new environment, they had hoped to build again a community of learning and of the Spirit which would bring health to China for a few years more. It seemed indeed as if they were succeeding. Buddhist temple ceremonies and Christian life had gone on side by side in the temple throughout the winter and spring, but there was no doubt where hope and vitality lay. The microscopes of the biology department stood on the altar of the goddess of mercy, but the goddess was largely ignored. Uneducated monks chanted sutras they did not understand for pilgrims whose piety was at best nonchalant, and whose faith doubtful; while the university church in the former cowshed outside the walls met daily for prayer and preaching, and the student Christian fellowship regularly for Bible study and instruction. It was Christian students who were found in the neighbouring villages teaching the illiterate and helping with the harvest. One saw everywhere the beginnings of hope.
But at the time of which I speak all this had passed. The Communists were coming. Fear and revolt had gripped our whole community. The monks and the pilgrims had fled. A 'revolutionary committee' of the students had challenged the authority of the President, Dean and all his staff, including the missionaries. The leaders of the student Christian fellowship gathered in a deserted courtyard to share with each other their perplexity. One young woman stood out at that meeting. She poured out with tears her bitter complaint for all her Christian teachers and pastors had failed to give to prepare her for that hour. She expressed all the lostness which was in everyone's heart, leaving us with nothing but prayer to a hidden God as we parted at midday.
As we gathered again for the afternoon the girl with regained composure was studying the classical paintings on the wall of the courtyard. 'I learned to paint like that as a child,' she explained to me. 'Every stroke is a symbol, and has its place in the structure of the whole. Each style has its history and expresses the culture and tradition of our land.' Then she turned, 'But all that has no power to help us now. It has no meaning any more. It's all dead.'
The other incident took place in Berlin a few years later, at the height of the McCarthy hearings and the security fever in the United States, when East Germany for its part was facing a wave of arbitrary arrests, and expulsions from school or university on ideological grounds. A leading American newspaper arrived in Berlin with an article analysing the effect of security investigations on freedom of thought and speech in American universities. There was, said the article, a marked tendency toward conformity in themes, theses, and even in common room discussion. There was a wariness of organizations which touched on controversial questions. Students were tending to avoid commitments and opinions which might possibly, some day years hence, be held against them and cost them a job.
Some days later a group of East German students were wrestling with the problem of their Christian responsibility in the face of Communist pressure on them to conform ideologically. Should they argue and think for themselves in the required courses in Marx-Leninism? Should they write the truth and not the line required in their examinations? What attitude should they take to the 'Free German Youth' of which they were all perforce members? False steps at any of these points might lead to expulsion from the university and possibly to arrest. But the concern of the students was not to avoid these two fates, if such were the price of Christian action. It was rather that their action be a witness to the lordship of Christ and thus a ministry to the Communist, not merely an act of enmity and resistance. Then one of them turned to me: 'You are a citizen of a country with long practice in freedom of thought and speech such as we have not had,' he said. 'Do you have any advice for us here?'
It is for reasons like these that the author was driven to write this book.
Communism is a changing phenomenon. The question might well be asked: is there any purpose in a study in depth, which does not pretend to be a tract for one time only, when the issues at stake may change tomorrow? As these words are written another disarmament conference has just been broken off, and the balance of military power seems to be shifting in favour of the Soviets even while there is internal evidence from the East that Communist ideology is failing more and more to hold its adherents. Yet in China the ideological front is strengthening and in Indonesia a recent election strengthened the Communist Party. By the time these words are read other events will have taken the place of these, and popular reaction will be in yet another mood.
But it is this very changing face of events which makes a long range view of the encounter with Communism so important. It is the same face which changes. Communist power may wax or wane. It may shift from the military to the diplomatic sphere and back again. But it will not disappear, nor will the non-Communist world's responsibility for containing it, negotiating with it, seeking some viable structure of order this side of total war. The question of the Christian's use of power is a long range problem. Communist ideology may change its forms, or develop its heresies. But the fact of a generation of men brought up to think in its terms will not vanish. The leadership of convinced Marxists in many countries of the world will not be abolished. Least of all will people who have lived long under Communism, even after they may have thrown it off, begin to think again like us who have never been through it. The Christian responsibility of the East German students mentioned above, to find a witness which transcends both the Communist ideology and all the ideological defences of the western world, will not cease; nor will the respon- sibility of Americans, Britishers, and others who read these words, to help them at cost to our own 'security'.
Furthermore the fact of revolutionary change itself, the predicament of our Chinese girl with the cry for help it brings with it, will continue. Communism claims to organize this revolution and give it direction and meaning. But the revolution is bigger than Communism. It seethes in Russia, as it does in India and covertly as well in Britain and America. It has its post-Communist as well as its pre-Communist mood. The need for Christians who know the meaning of repentance, and who are free for endless experiments in new creation or service, will not soon be exhausted.
Theology too has changed. These pages will partly record this change, reflected in the theology of different cultures and experiences, as it meets the fact of Communism. The change could be expressed in a sentence by saying that theology has become more conscious of itself over the period of the last generation. The reader will find only brief mention of a form of Christian thinking about Communism which was highly popular twenty-five years ago: that which placed Marxism and Christianity more or less on the same level as life and death antagonists or as possible elements in a synthesis to the advantage of both. The time when both Marxism and Christianity could be considered as basically humanist philosophies at war, or in conversation about the best ideal for human society, is past. It is past because Communism has exploded in practice this false picture of what it is and intends. But it is past more surely because Christian theology has learned meanwhile that its object is not human experience, not even religious experience and practice, but God and his acts toward men. At least one of the forces which have driven it to this discovery, has been the persistent Marxist undermining of any good conscience which the Christian might have about his culture and class position, of every confidence that his doctrine is truth and not ideology, of every attempt to withdraw from submitting his faith to the test of practice in social and historical action. The greatest discovery Christians have made is their complete solidarity with a world which has lost its self-confidence in a revolutionary age, and their complete freedom to be open for what God is doing that they may bear witness to it. This book is the story of this Christian discovery, in the face of the challenge of Communism, and of the ministry to the world, including the Communists, which flows from it.
The story is far from finished. Of the five major theologians with whom these pages deal, every one is still at work and may live to refute much of what is here said about him. This writer offers his apologies to each for presuming to relate their thoughts to this issue before they themselves have fully had their say. But, in my defence, the subject is too urgent to wait, and my gratitude to all of them for the guidance of their thought is too full to remain unexpressed. They have all been, personally or through their writings, my teachers.
Finally, a few words of acknowledgement are due, which may explain more than any others, the spiritual ingredients of which this book is made:
To my wife and three sons who lived with their husband and father in his often intolerable state during the months when it was being written.
To the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., who supported the author on an extended furlough in order to give him time to complete this work, and who through the vision of their mission policies have given him many of the insights which he has incorporated here.
To Professor Roland H. Bainton of Yale Divinity School, without whose encouragement and prodding many uncertain words might never have been committed to paper, and to Dean Liston Pope, whose undeserved interest encourages the writer to publish what he has written. The substance of the book was originally presented to Yale University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
To Professor John C. Bennett of Union Seminary, whose companionship has accompanied the author at every stage of this work and before, and whose kind and careful insight into persons and social issues has corrected many misjudgements and contributed many new perspectives.
To Professor H. Richard Niebuhr, adviser in the earlier stages of this volume's preparation, to whom the author owes the intangible and unlimited debt of a student to that teacher who has opened his mind to new worlds of thought, and has imparted to his spirit that desire on the one hand to love and appreciate them, and on the other hand never to rest in them, which is the mental discipline of every Christian.
To Professor Reinhold Niebuhr. The reader of the chapter of this book devoted to Niebuhr's thought will recognize in it the author's struggle with himself and his own heritage. Niebuhr's dialectical manner of finding the critical point of Christian obedience, his uncompromising solidarity with those who bear the burdens and responsibilities of our common life, and even his suspicion of theology which does not prove itself in responsible action, belong indelibly to this writer's sense of what the Christian faith is and means. Every criticism of Niebuhr's theology which this book contains, every attempt to show him as the Barthian he truly is, is an expression of undying gratitude for the spiritual impulse his teaching, his action in society, and his books have given, and is meant in loyalty to his true intention.
To Professor Karl Barth. More space has been devoted to him in this volume than to any other theologian, partly because he is less well known in the Anglo-Saxon world, but mostly because in the broad vistas of his Dogmatics a new perspective emerges and 4 new horizon becomes visible whose potentialities the Christian world is only beginning to explore. It may be beyond the capacity of any Christian to bring every thought so captive to the mind of Christ and to live so utterly from the centre of God's redemption in Him as Barth would have us do. The great theologian himself would be the first to admit the possibility of an area where he himself does not succeed, though he might not agree with this I writer's contention that politics is that area! But it is Barth more than any other thinker of modern times who opens the Christian imagination to the boundless resources for practical living in the fact that his life is in the hands of a redeeming God. His theology forms a seedbed in which the Christian insights of other men can reach a fuller flower, and the Christian encounter with Communism find firmer roots in reality. Finally, to the many friends who cannot be named here, whose lives are one continuous encounter with and ministry to the Communist world in the name of Christ. It is these men whom this study exists to serve first of all, by exploring the resources of Christendom which might help them with their task, and by making known to the rest of Christendom by what standards and in what spirit they live and work. The judgements and ideas this book contains, so far as they are my own, have been forged in constant and grateful companionship with them in their action, thought, and prayer. Where the judgements err and mislead the fault is mine. Where the ideas contribute to the knowledge and practice of others concerned with this encounter, I shall have succeeded in conveying to the reader something of the work of the Holy Spirit which I have seen and heard among these companions who carry on their ministry on behalf of us all.
CHARLES C. WEST
Bossey, 1967
CONTENTS
Foreword 7
Preface 10
Introduction: Communism versus the Theologian 17
1 Communism as the Enemy 27
1 Perspective across the Battle Line 27
2 Theology for the Conflict 31
3 Strategy of the Conflict 40
4 Critique 44
2 Communism as Judgement and Hope 51
1 The Crisis of Civilization 52
2 Hromadka's Picture of Communism 57
3 Hromadka's Underlying Theology 64
4 The Strategy of Christian Witness 71
5 Critique: the Problem of Communication 73
3 Religious Socialism: Paul Tillich 78
1 Theological Categories 78
2 Bourgeois Principle and Proletarian Situation 87
3 Marxist Socialism 91
4 The Kairos of Religious Socialism 99
5 Critique 104
Appendix: Nicholas Berdyaev 111
4 An American Encounter: Reinhold Niebuhr 117
1 Some Basic Principles of Niebuhr's Early Social Analysis 117
2 Changing Approach to Marxism 122
3 Niebuhr's Marxist Analysis of Society 125
4 Socialist Christian Action in the Nineteen-thirties 129
5 Christian Religion and Communist Religion 132
6 Ideology and Christian Truth 139
7 Marxist and Christian Views of History 148
8 Man in Society 156
9 Christian Realism in Power Politics 165
10 Alternative to the Communist Hope 165
11 Ministry to the Communist 174
5 Revelation and Ideology: Karl Barth 177
1 Barth and Socialism 177
2 Barth's Central Concern 190
3 The Question of Ideology 212
6 History and Politics: Barth and his Critics 257
1 Christian Eschatology: Theory and Practice 257
2 The Structure of Christian Social Responsibility:
Politics and Communism 290
7 Christian Encounter with Communism: a Conclusion 326
1 The Form of Revolution and Resistance 326
2 Theology in a Mature World 337
A. Ideology and the Needs of the Neighbour 345
B. Philosophy of History and the Lord of History 351
C. Humanist Ideals and Christian Co-humanity 355
3 The Gateway to Action 359
A. Power 359
B. Alternatives 364
C. Renewal 374
D. Ministry 381
Index of Subjects 391
Index of Names 397
Crux probat omnia.
Luther
Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Matthew 10.1
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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