Christianity, Culture, Vocation
The Japanese soldier who held out in a Philippine jungle for 29 years after the end of World War II died. Hiroo Onoda was 91. Read his story–including why he finally turned himself in– after the jump.
Would you say Lt. Onoda was an example of outrageous stubborness (a vice) or inspirational integrity (a virtue)? How does this relate to vocation? [Read more...]
Chad Bird tells the story of Henry Gerecke, a pastor of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and a military chaplain assigned to minister to the war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, including walking with ten of them to the gallows. Many of the Nazis clung to their Nietzschean paganism. But some of them Pastor Gerecke led to Christ.
That might bother some of us. Surely, if anyone deserves Hell, these mass-murdering monsters did. We might think that it’s wrong to extend the Gospel to sinners of this magnitude. As if Christ, when He bore the sins of the world on the Cross did not carry what these men had done. That would make the Cross too hideously ugly. But it is. And this is what Christianity is all about, or it is nothing.
After the jump, read about Pastor Gerecke. And follow the link to read him tell his own story, including the names of the Nazis who did and who did not come to Christ. [Read more...]
Today is the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War.
See Attack on Pearl Harbor – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Do you think we will ever again have a world war; that is, war on a global scale?
The New York Review of Books has published a rather remarkable article by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, a detailed account of the ways Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his family opposed the Nazi regime. You might be familiar with Bonhoeffer’s activities–though I learned a lot I didn’t realize–but the actions of his wife Christine and, especially, his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who was a major mastermind of the German opposition to Hitler, are not known nearly as well as they deserve to be. It is a moving story of courage and of faith.
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took the lives of 2,300 Americans, destroyed 12 ships and 160 aircraft, and brought the nation into World War II.
See Pearl Harbor attacked: A witness remembers, 70 years later – The Washington Post.
Reflections, thoughts, and lessons learned?
So what is orthodox about this teaching from an Orthodox patriarch?
Church debate in Russia continues to simmer over the role of dictator Josef Stalin, but Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church has said in a Moscow sermon that the Second World War was redemptive for his country, while making no mention of the former Soviet ruler's name in his address.
“The church does not look at the war as historians or politicians do,” said Kirill on 9 May at the Church of Christ the Saviour. “The church has a particular stance, a particular spiritual point of view.” The Patriarch said he believed the war had redeemed Russia from its sins.
“We know what took place among our people after the bloody events of the beginning of the 20th century,” said Kirill. “How many lies, how much evil and human suffering there was. But God washed away these lies and this evil with our blood, with the blood of our fathers, as has happened more than once in human history.”
“And that is why we must come to a special understanding of the redemptive meaning of the Great Patriotic War,” Kirill added.
The patriarch did not mention by name Stalin, who led the Soviet Union during the Second World War, but the church leader did take issue with historians who equate Nazi Germany with Stalin-era Russia.
“When some homegrown historians tell us that the evil here was no less than there, they are not seeing beyond their own noses, and fail to see the divine horizon beyond their extremely primitive and sinful analysis,” said Kirill. “The Great Patriotic War [as Russians call the Second World War] revealed to us God's truth about ourselves. It punished us for our sins but revealed to us the great glory and strength of our people.”
via Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: Russian Patriarch avoids ‘Stalin’ as dictator debate simmers.
You get that in Dostoevsky too, the notion that OUR sufferings are what redeem us.
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