Solzhenitsyn & Our Religious Responsibility
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the influential Soviet dissident and arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century, died recently. It is worth remembering this impressive thinker.
Prior to being exiled from the East, he had looked to the Western World as a place of spiritual vitality. But arriving in America in 1974 he was sorely disappointed by the West’s unbridled individualism, rampant consumerism and inability to sacrifice for anything of ultimate value.
In his Harvard commencement address of 1978 he takes aim at the “state of spiritual exhaustion” crippling our culture by challenging our impoverished notion of “freedom”:
…in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility…. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.
Solzhenitsyn is right. There is no true freedom without requisite responsibility. True liberty doesn’t alleviate us from fulfilling our responsibilities but rather enables us to fulfill them.
Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective”.
For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, “YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.” But if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
~Galatians 5:13-15 NASB
