War is a bad word

This war (like all major wars) is fundamentally spiritual. I sometimes feel as if my puny brain is the battleground for all these battles. I can't remain aloof because there's no happiness for me in so doing, because there's no happiness without truth?and this war is essentially a war about truth. Every false throne must first crack and splinter, that's the distressing thing, before the genuine can appear in unadulterated form. I mean that personally and spiritually, not politically.-Hans Scholl

Hans Scholl was beheaded in Munich on February 22, 1943, for his involvement in anti-Nazi activities. He was 24. After a recent election I read of one man who had to be taken to a mental hospital as a result of his desperate efforts to make up his mind in the utter confusion of his political ideas. That was more than a grotesque and isolated incident. He had made the daring attempt to go along with the convention policies of all parties and all factions. It may well be that he was more sensible and reasonable than the blind mass of voters. How much weaker are the consciences of those who cast their vote without ever having recognized the real nature of party candidates and party platforms.

How many there are who make no attempt to go into the policy or motives of the party that is overthrown by their vote! People throw their votes into the scales of world history without being able to weigh up one party against another. Conscience has been thrown to the winds. People have incurred responsibility for incalculable guilt. Without looking for guidance from their consciences, they have presumed to make weighty decisions of worldwide importance.

Our conscience warns us: do nothing without sufficient reason; never act without a firm basis of fact; go into action only when you know what you are doing! The only way to safeguard our lives from the curse of irresponsible action is to accept the unfalsified weights - truth. God's justice, alive in the heart, is the only criterion that carries authority in every decision. Otherwise there is no ground under our feet. When God's nature - his unchangeable righteousness - is firmly imprinted on our conscience, then, and only then, can our conscience pass judgment and give witness.

Conflicting human opinions of relative right and relative wrong do not help the conscience to make well-founded decisions. It can take a clear stand through the weight of God's truth only. It is only on the rock of the genuine Christ that the conscience finds any stability. Christ alone is the example, guide, and liberator. He alone gives the conscience the foundation, the basis, and the reason for responsible action. There is no other righteousness - only that of his coming kingdom.

Everything else fluctuates, uncertain. It changes its nature, for it is inadequate. It has no stability, no adequate foundation. Even in the most educated families and the finest schools, human ideas totter and fall. Everything that is human fluctuates between limp docility and rigid opposition. Nothing is certain. Everything is relative. The result is clear: in this relativism, which gives equal recognition to quite irreconcilable opposites, humankind loses all sense of values.

In the face of all this confusion, Jesus Christ remains today and forever exactly the same as he was in the time of Augustus and Herod and Pilate, no matter how many thousand times his clear picture is changed and falsified by this relativism. What his will brings about today is exactly the same as he will establish in his final kingdom at the end of time. Only he who is immutable is decision - everything else is delay and displacement. The relativism and fickleness of our own opinions can have only one result: the will to live sickens and breaks down. Life gains health only through the absoluteness of Christ's will, which is always and forever the same. Health is strength to act and power to create, born out of a sure instinct for life and well-considered decisions. It calls for something firm and constant to fill the whole of life.

Eberhard Arnold

used by permission, www.bruderhof.com