Liberty — therefore Gratitude, Humility & Patience
The 16th Annual Columbus Day Weekend of Evangelicals Concerned
Ocean Grove, New Jersey, October 5-7, 2018
Three Centennials on Christian Liberty, 1918 – 2018
Gardner C. Taylor, Billy Graham & Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn
Dr. Ralph Blair’s Centennials Lecture and his Three Sermons for the Occasion
(PDF version available here.)
An Introductory Lecture
It’s 1918. Since 1914, The Great War has wreaked death, devastation and despair all across Europe and fear and grieving here at home. Sixteen million die. Ten million were soldiers. Says a poet, “For the Fallen”: “They went with songs to the battle, they were young, / Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. / They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted, / They fell with their faces to the foe. / They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.” (Robert Laurence Binyon) Alas, many don’t remember them, won’t remember them – or why they gave their lives.
At “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918, a defeated Germany signs the appointed armistice. But, right through the 59th minute of the 10th hour of that 11th day in that 11th month, 10,000 more soldiers die or are wounded – some 3,000 of whom are Americans – because General Pershing is obsessed with “teach[ing] the Germans a lesson”.
So, a war that the foolish called, the “War to End All Wars”, will resume in 1939, when Hitler invades Poland on the heels of his own evil hoax, a year after Britain’s Prime Minister limply waved a meaningless piece of paper that announced: “Peace in Our Time”. France and Britain – later joined by America – will respond to Hitler’s aggression by declaring war on Germany. And then, history’s deadliest war will rage on until 1945.
In March of 1918, an outbreak of flu at Fort Riley in Kansas sends 500 soldiers to the hospital. They recover and are sent to the Front. The virus mutates. A pandemic spreads around the world, mislabeled as “The Spanish Flu”. Worldwide, it kills many millions. Here at home, it kills over 600,000 – twice as many Americans as are killed and wounded during all of The Great War.
Besides our honorees – Gardner C. Taylor, Billy Graham and Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn – other noted Christians, born in 1918, include Oral Roberts, Bob Thieme, Avery Dulles, Madeleine L’Engle, and Paul Harvey. Other newborns are Leonard Bernstein, Ray Charles, Jerome Robbins, Abigail Van Buren and her twin sister Ann Landers, Pearl Baily, Rita Hayworth, Sam Walton, Mary Kay Ash, William Holden, Alan Jay Lerner, Nipsey Russell, Art Carney, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Birgit Nilsson, Ingmar Bergman, Nelson Mandela, Anwar Sadat, Gamal Nasser, Kurt Waldheim and Helmut Schmidt. Among the four-legged offspring of 1918, there’s Rin Tin Tin.
1918’s bestselling authors are Mary Roberts Rinehart and Zane Grey.
Top songs of the day include, “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”. The lyrics are littered with irrationality. “At the end of the rainbow there’s happiness / And to find it, often I’ve tried / But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase, / And my dreams have all been denied. / Why have I always been a failure? / What can the reason be? / I wonder if the world’s to blame? / I wonder if it could be me? / I’m always chasing rainbows, / Watching clouds drifting by, / My schemes are just like all my dreams, / Ending in the sky. / Some fellows look and find the sunshine, / I always look and find the rain, / Some fellows make a winning sometime, / but I never even make a gain, believe me, / I’m always chasing rainbows, / Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.”
Other pop songs of 1918: “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” – maybe a diagnostic clue for the rainbow griper – and, “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)”. My home state’s song – “Beautiful Ohio” – is written in 1918. It’ll be revised years later.
Hit films are “Tarzan of the Apes”, first of all the Tarzan films, the fifth film adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Charlie Chaplin’s “A Dog’s Life” and “The Bell Boy” with Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton.
Broadway’s 1918 hits are “The Mikado”, “H. M. S. Pinafore”, “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “King Lear”, “Othello”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Her Honor, the Mayor”, “An Ideal Husband”, “The Gentile Wife”, The Ziegfeld’s Follies, “Tiger! Tiger!” and “Toot-Toot!”
Out on Long Island at a military camp, there’s a grateful young immigrant, who, at 5 years old, escaped with his family, from Russian oppression. He’s writing a “soldier show” for Independence Day at camp. His closing number will become a classic. But, he’s not yet satisfied with it and shelves it. Twenty years later, Irving Berlin will ask Kate Smith to introduce that song: “God Bless America!
1918’s comic pages add two new strips: “Gasoline Alley” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not”.
The Eiffel Tower has been the world’s tallest structure for 30 years. In 1930, the Chrysler Building will top it. GM acquires Chevrolet, a chemist invents shaving cream and calls it, Barbasol, and another man, whose wife is prone to kitchen crises, devises bandages for her. They’ll be called, Band-Aids. And ads for Wrigley’s chewing gum urge us to: “Send it to your friend at the Front. It’s the favorite ‘sweet ration’ of the Allied armies.”
Airmail service begins with its first flight to New York City from DC. But the pilot gets lost 25 miles north of DC. Out of gas, he crash-lands. Next day, he gets lost again and crash lands. He’s fired.
And Daylight Savings Time is adopted all across the country, while, all across the country, a total solar eclipse protests.
Christians of note in 1918 are Billy Sunday, Bob Jones, Paul Rader, Homer Rodeheaver, R. A. Torrey, Mordecai Ham, C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer, J. Gresham Machen, and G. Campbell Morgan.
A Few Wise Words on Historical Perspective
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke wisdom that now fails to penetrate the minds of postmodernists, bent on ephemeral, egocentric fantasies of “progress”. Said King: “If we are to go forward, we must first look back”. That’s necessary. As Malcolm Muggeridge observed, “Life is a drama; not a progress.” Even scientific and technological progress always proves to be a mixed blessing. We, who occupy this Earth, are a fallen race. Every so-called “right side of history” is fatally flawed by our self-righteousness and our shortsightedness. True progress through this world is a pilgrim’s pathway, looking back to Calvary and pressing on in faith, to Lands Beyond all fantasies.
EC regularly recalls the lives and the witness of faithful forebears who gathered around the Christ of the cross. We’ve had literary teas, field trips, and their biographical reviews at our retreats and we’ve looked at their hand-written letters and the books that they’ve held in their hands. We’ve heard their recorded voices – not always so crystal clear. And until EC quarterlies went green, a commemorative bookmark was sent out with every mailing and a commemorative calendar was sent out each year.
At the turn of the 21st Century, EC folks spent a weekend in the mountains reviewing 20 centuries of Christianity. In a turn-of-the century sermon at City Church, I summarized that history, condensing each century to a New York minute.
Our EC website offers an overview of over four decades of EC’s history. It’s called, “Looking Back”. Look it up
Gardner Calvin Taylor
As we now look back this weekend, the first of our centennial honorees is Gardner Calvin Taylor. He was born in those dreadful days of the Jim Crow South, on the 18th of June 1918, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A grandson of slaves, he was the only child of Selena Gesell Taylor, a schoolteacher for black children, and the Rev. Washington Monroe Taylor, pastor of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, founded three years before The Civil War by two preachers, one was white, the other was black.
Gardner, himself, would pastor that congregation from 1943 to 1947, just prior to his half-century of service as pastor of the great Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn.
His parents instilled in him an appetite for learning. He said, with such obvious evidence, that they had, “a natural feel for the essential music of the English language wedded to an intimate and emotional affection for the great transactions of the scriptures”.
As a child, he listened to his mother read to him from, Great Stories of the Bible Illustrated for Children. He recalled that these Bible stories were bound in an attractive purple cover. He’d eventually turn this learned love of language and the Bible into a lifetime of well-crafted sermons, communicated with high eloquence.
Time magazine called him the “Dean of the Nation’s Black Preachers”. The New York Times said that he was, “The Greatest Black Churchman in America”. And, when introducing him at Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church, Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker would always say: He’s “the greatest preacher living, dead or unborn”.
He was given 15 honorary degrees and President Clinton gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States’ two highest civilian honors.
But back there in Louisiana, in 1937, at 19, he was driving a car for his black school’s principal when a Model-T Ford suddenly cut across the road and crashed into him. Both of the white men in that Ford were killed. Given the Jim Crow South’s racism back then, Gardner thought that, at best, he’d get a long prison sentence, at worst, a quick lynching.
The only witnesses were two white men – a poor farmer and an oil refinery worker. Both testified truly that this young black man was not at fault. Gardner was shocked. “Surprised by God’s grace” in the true testimonies of these two white men, he was immediately moved to take serious stock of what he was meant to make of this, his now liberated, life.
So, he enrolled at Oberlin College up in Ohio. A century earlier, it was the first white college to admit blacks and women. He earned a divinity degree and entered the ministry.
Taylor often remarked that, “One of the great contributions of the black church was giving to our people a sense of significance and importance at a time when society, by design, did almost everything it could to strip us of our humanity. But come Sunday morning, we could put on our dress clothes and become deacons, deaconesses and ushers, and hear the preacher say, ‘You are a child of God’ — at a time when white society, by statute, custom and conversation, just called us ‘niggers’.”
1948 was the centennial year of Brooklyn’s big Concord Baptist Church of Christ. But this black congregation was in mourning over the passing of their pastor of 26 years.
This was when they called the 29-year-old Gardner C. Taylor to be their new pastor – a decade after God, as Taylor knew, freed him from doom, to live his life in faithful Christian service.
Four years into his ministry at Concord, its great edifice was destroyed by fire. Their first Sunday worship service after the fire was 66 years ago today. They’d moved into their previous building, a few blocks away. And in 1965, their grand new church building was finally ready, with seating for 2,250.
As Taylor stood alone inside that huge new sanctuary, he gazed all around at it all, and he felt tempted by pride. So, to remind himself of who it is that the people come to see, he put a little sign inside his pulpit, that only he could see. It was from John 12:21 – “Sir, we would see Jesus”.
Taylor mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom he’d formed the new Progressive National Baptist Convention for blacks in 1961. The aim in doing this was to get traditional black Baptists into the Civil Rights Movement. Far too many black Christians were lukewarm on civil rights, thinking of that Movement as a political effort rather than as a Christian calling.
Still, Taylor always warned against what he called “a ‘cross-less’ Christianity, a happiness cult. That’s heresy”, he declared. He advised young pastors: “We ought to preach the cross not only in the Passion season. The devil has driven us from our central place. Calvary ought to be in all of our sermons, explicit or implicit. At the tree we find our deliverance. At the place of the riven feet, and at the place of the torn side, and at the place of the thorn-crowned brow, and at the place of the pierced hand we find our oneness, our oneness in Christ, our Sovereign Lord, our Gracious King. … Calvary represents the central event in our Christian gospel, the focus of all divine history as far as the sons of men can see. There, the Lord Christ lured the powers of hell into a fatal misstep and an overreaching of their evil designs and ways. Calvary is the supreme public event in the divine purpose.”
Disgusted with the “prosperity” sermons that so tempted so many black preachers, he often recited the words of Rhea Miller, written when Gardner was just a 4-year old. George Beverly Shea set her words to music and sang them at Billy Graham Crusades: “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold. I’d rather have Jesus than riches untold, … I’d rather have Jesus than men’s applause, I’d rather be faithful to his dear cause, I’d rather have Jesus than worldwide fame, I’d rather be led by his holy name.”
Well, in 1990, at age 72, Taylor retired from the Concord Church on what, by then, had been renamed Gardner C. Taylor Boulevard. And he said, with a very wise smile, that he knew better than to hang around getting in the way of a new pastor’s work.
Thus, on many a Sunday morning, he’d be sitting, unobtrusively, at the rear of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian’s sanctuary, listening with much appreciation, to the preaching of R. Maurice Boyd.
Maurice quit Fifth Avenue in January 1992, and soon joined the City Church venture as our preacher. From time to time, Taylor was our guest preacher. And, never expecting to hear any shouted “Amen” from the folks in City Church, he toned down his style a bit, but he never changed his substance.
One Saturday night, he was stuck in Chicago, but scheduled to preach for us in the morning. He called on me to preach. Honored, even at a last minute, I reminded myself of that little sign in his old pulpit.
In 2004 I asked him to preach at one of our EC retreats. He kindly thanked me, but he was already booked for that very date.
That very same year, he and his wife relocated to Raleigh and seven years later, he moved into a convalescent center.
The last time I heard from him was on Maundy Thursday, 2009. He wrote to say: “I am most deeply grateful for the touching eulogy for our friend, Maurice Boyd. I have blessed memories of Sunday mornings in City Church, when you and Maurice made an enviable team. Every blessing on you.” Then, he added, in Maurice’s familiar phrasing: “I look now confidently to ‘the land of promise and the country of the Great King’.”
In 2015, just after Easter Sunday service, Gardner Taylor found himself in Christ’s nearer presence. Now, he awaits his own resurrection on that new Earth, in God’s land of promise – the country of the Great King.
Billy Graham
Twenty weeks after Taylor’s birth, and 700 miles to the east, Billy Graham was born on his family’s dairy farm in North Carolina. Both men grew up in the segregated South, but in very different worlds.
Billy Frank (as he was known then) was 10 years old when his family moved into their new house on the farm. Given his later fame, it’s been dismantled and rebuilt twice. It stands today beside the Billy Graham Library, near the graves of Billy and Ruth Bell Graham, just off of the Billy Graham Parkway outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.
At 16, he committed his life to Christ at revivals led by evangelist Mordecai Ham. After high school, he sold Fuller brushes door-to-door and then, in the fall, he enrolled at Bob Jones College.
He soon found the school’s rules too restrictive and decided to transfer to a Bible school in Florida. Dr. Bob got himself offended, and so he berated him for, “throw[ing] your life away at a little country Bible school. Chances are you’ll never be heard of, [and you’ll wind up] somewhere out in the sticks.” But, it was at that little Bible school, in anguished prayer on a golf course at midnight in May 1938, that he heard the call of God to preach the Gospel.
Southern Baptists ordained him in 1939. He moved up to Wheaton College to get an accredited degree in anthropology and graduated in 1943. Then he married Ruth Bell, a Wheaton classmate and daughter of medical missionaries to China.
He became the pastor of a small Baptist church in nearby Western Springs, Illinois and preached on a Chicago radio program, Songs in the Night, with soloist, George Beverly Shea. Bev Shea would be Billy’s soloist in their worldwide evangelistic ministry, on through the end of the 20th century.
In the mid-1940s, he joined up with Torrey Johnson, founder of Youth for Christ, and Chuck Templeton. Back then, I heard Templeton preach in Youngstown, but he had serious doubts about the Bible and Christianity. So, with only a high school diploma, he enrolled at Princeton Seminary. He tried to talk Billy into joining him there. Sadly, under his less than orthodox professors, Templeton lost his Christian faith. His son would later say that his father “came out [of seminary] an agnostic”.
Graham, though, kept true to the Gospel. In ‘47 and ‘48 he preached in Grand Rapids, Charlotte, Augusta and Modesto. At Modesto, he and his associates each pledged never to be alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife – wisdom that was far ahead of The Playboy Philosophy’s poppycock that led to #MeToo, but is mocked by postmodern elites.
In 1949, Graham made the big headlines with his Crusade in Los Angeles. For eight solid weeks, thousands came and heard the Gospel in a big Canvas Cathedral at Washington and Hill Street. Two of the converts were Olympian POW hero Louis Zamperini and organized crime’s double agent, Jim Vaus. Well, Dr. Bob’s old prediction that Billy would wind up, “unknown, out in the sticks”, vanished as completely as the smog that lay over Los Angeles in those days, obliterated whatever fell under its spell.
In 1950, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was formed to coordinate citywide Crusades across America and around the world. And, each week, ABC carried his live radio broadcast, The Hour of Decision. The program’s title was Ruth’s idea.
In 1952, Bob Jones’ advice to Billy was this: “Do campaigns in small towns and pull your budget way down. It will do your soul good to get away from the cities where there is not so much glamour.”
However, Graham was already deep in plans for the 1954 Greater London Crusade. Britain’s clerical and media naysayers would later be totally shocked when the packed meetings in London continued on for three solid months.
In 1956, with his father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, theologian Carl F. H. Henry and other evangelical leaders, Graham founded Christianity Today to steer a more responsible journalistic path than Modernists and Fundamentalists. Fundamentalists claimed he’d sold out to Modernists and Modernists hired snoops to dig up dirt on this “Fundamentalist” – whatever they could find, financial, personal, whatever. They found nothing.
Christianity Today’s first editorial in 1956 stated: “We need a new vision of the sovereign God, of a sovereignty which is universal, unlimited and immutable. Neither chance, the follies of man nor the malice of Satan can determine the sequence of events and their issues. God has not abdicated; He is on His throne and He still causes the wrath of man to praise Him.”
In fall, 1956 – as 1957’s New York City Crusade was being planned – a 1st-year student at Bob Jones University ran afoul of the school’s hostility to Billy Graham. Within an hour of his being overheard “griping” about that morning’s anti-Graham speaker in Chapel, he was summoned and seated in front of Dr. Bob and surrounded by several deans. Dr. Bob shouted him down, as he’d done to another freshman, 20 years before. But, now, rather than transfer out in 1956, as the other student did in 1936, I stayed for two years and then I transferred, per my prior plan with my uncle Dave, who’d heard of BJU from me. He liked what he heard and convinced my dad to let me attend BJU for two years. In exchange, he’d pay for my seminary costs. He’d later serve on the BJU board for 30 years as their major financial benefactor.
But in 1956, Dr. Bob knew nothing of D. D. Davis, as he ranted that I knew nothing about evangelism. My uncle never knew about Dr. Bob’s berating me.
But, in another 20 years, in 1976, after Graham’s preaching at IVCF’s Urbana conference, I handed out EC stuff to students as they left that final assembly.
By the way, BJU’s anti-Graham rhetoric backfired and caused a dramatic drop in enrollment. Of course, Dr. Bob and other separatist Fundamentalists saw this consequence as persecution that follows faithfulness.
Well, that 1957 New York City Crusade, set for six weeks, went on for 16 weeks, becoming the longest Crusade of Billy Graham’s long ministry. He now was recognized as the greatest evangelist since George Whitefield, two centuries earlier.
During that New York City Crusade, Graham invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead in prayer. King would say later: “If it had not been for the ministry of Billy Graham, my civil rights work would have been much harder.”
Back in 1952, in a heat wave in Houston, Graham insisted that the shaded portion of the segregated stadium’s seating be reserved for blacks only, not whites. Then, at 1953’s Charlotte Crusade, racists got angry when blacks were counseling white inquirers coming forward at the altar calls. At the Columbia, South Carolina Crusade, a racist governor rescinded use of the state capitol’s grounds, sneering: “Graham’s a well-known integrationist.” So, the Fort Jackson’s commanding general offered the use of the Army base, and 60,000 South Carolinians joined together in that state’s first integrated mass meeting. For the 1953 Chattanooga Crusade, Graham insisted that all the seating be integrated. When racist ushers refused to remove the ropes that separated the races, Graham, himself, began to remove the ropes, saying: “Either these ropes stay down or you can go on and have the revival without me.”
In 1973, Graham preached to South Africa’s very first racially integrated mass meeting. He preached to over a million Koreans in another great outdoor assembly – world history’s largest Gospel gathering. In 1974, he convened the International Conference on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.
This worldwide ministry so often took him far away from home, even for months on end. So, ever resourceful, Ruth did great double-duty rearing their five children. Once she was asked if she’d ever considered divorce. This spunky and quick-witted woman, replied: “Divorce? No. Murder? Yes.”
In 1983, Patricia Cornwell wrote Ruth’s life story. Cornwell would become a bestselling crime novelist and openly lesbian. But she grew up in a troubled family down the road from the Grahams’ mountain home and the Grahams were her strong anchors during those years. Ruth encouraged her to write.
Cornwell told London’s Telegraph that, when she was going to be publicly outed: “I flew to see [Ruth], saying there would be things in the news. She just said, ‘So, honey, what else have you been doing?’.” Interviewed by The Advocate, she said: “Ruth knew about me and didn’t care. Everybody who I had a semiserious relationship with, I took up to the Grahams’ house.” Of her wife, Cornwell says, Ruth “loved Stasi”. She affirms: Billy was “a nice man”.
In Ruth’s last months, son Ned was caring for his parents and called Cornwell for help in the family’s dispute. Ruth wished to be buried up at their mountain home, not at the tourist attraction of the Billy Graham Library. But Franklin opposed her. It’s recalled that, during the intervention: Billy’s “eyes never leave Cornwell’s face as she talks. Ruth Graham sighs. A lot.” But, Franklin wins.
Billy Graham was admired, even by liberal clergy like Leslie Weatherhead of London’s City Temple, major theologians such as Helmut Thielicke, church leaders such as Geoffrey, Lord Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury. Said Weatherhead: “I want to pray for Billy Graham and the converts he is reaching. I want to thank God he is succeeding where so many of us have failed.” Thielicke asked, rhetorically: “What is lacking in me and my theological colleagues in the pulpit and at the university lectern, that makes Billy Graham so necessary?” The Archbishop observed: “Dr. Graham has taught us all to begin again at the beginning in our evangelism, and speak by the power of the Spirit – of sin and righteousness and judgment.”
In over 60 polls, Gallup found that Graham was always one of the world’s 10 most admired people. The American Jewish Committee gave him its National Interreligious Award. He prayed with every President from Truman to Obama. He was awarded 20 honorary doctoral degrees (even one from Bob Jones, six years before that New York Crusade). And he declined at least as many honorary degrees. He was given a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. He and Ruth received the Congressional Medal of Honor for “outstanding and lasting contributions to morality, racial equality, family philanthropy and religion”. And Queen Elizabeth granted him knighthood.
On December 25th, 1991, the Soviet’s hammer and sickle was lowered for the last time and Russia’s new tricolor flew over the Kremlin. Just months later, the former Red Army Chorus and Band – now, renamed the Russian Army Chorus and Band – led in the singing, in English, of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at Billy Graham’s Crusade in Moscow.
In 1993, he spent the last night of the first President Bush’s term in The White House, with the family. The next morning, he offered the inaugural prayer for President Clinton. In 1994 he preached at Richard Nixon’s funeral. In 1995, he preached at the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing victims. And, in 2001 he spoke at the post-9/11 memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington.
But he well knew that his highest honor was to preach the true and simple Gospel. And he preached it to more people, in person, than anyone in history. He saw all of this as a sacred privilege, so remained a man of “holy simplicity”, as London’s liberal Guardian phrased it. He knew that he had nothing going for him except God’s call and his response.
His final Crusade was in 2005, over in Flushing Meadows. “God Hates Fags” picketers protested. EC, too, was there, as we were there at his 1991 Crusade in Central Park.
In frail health for years, but mentally alert, on the 21st of February last, just before breakfast at his log cabin home in the mountains, he passed on to Higher Ground. “The dream had ended, it was morning”.
Millions gave thanks for his life. But a woman who writes for Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, New York magazine and The Nation, trolled: “Have fun in hell, bitch.” Newsweek reported that, “conservatives are really ticked off at her.” So, she pushed back at them, calling Graham, “a piece of shit”. Of course, this fallen world’s contempt for the Gospel knows no bounds. It goes on and on – but not without end.
Billy Graham’s body would lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda – just the fourth civilian to be so honored. But he, himself, was beyond all the honors – and all the disdain – of this world. He was now at peace in the nearer presence of his Lord, and awaiting resurrection.
Aleksandre Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn was born a month after the armistice of 1918. He was born at Kislovodsk, between the Black and Caspian Seas, 6,000 miles east of the Grahams’ farm. Bolsheviks had brutally murdered the czar, his wife and their five children – in “celebration” of the centennial of the birth of Karl Marx.
Aleksandre was still in his mother’s womb when his father was killed. At 10 years old, he devoured Tolstoy’s War and Peace from cover to cover. He dreamed of becoming a writer, himself, one day.
The next year, the Soviet Secret Police hounded his grandfather. Then, his grandfather disappeared without a trace. No one dared ask, “What happened?”
At 13, Aleksandre was in a fight with another boy at school. When he saw his blood, he fainted and his head slammed against a doorpost. That gash, so very familiar in all his portraits, was on his forehead for the rest of his life.
Graduating from high school in 1936, he went on to college to study math and physics. Still, pursuing his writer’s dream, he also enrolled in correspondence courses in literature.
At 22, he married Natalia Reshetovskaya, one of his classmates, and he became a schoolteacher.
Drafted into the Red Army for World War II, he was twice decorated for his bravery. But, in 1945, Soviet Secret Police found an unflattering comment about Stalin in one of his personal letters to a friend. It was determined that his comment was “counter-revolutionary”. So, he was sentenced to 8 years in Moscow’s most notorious prison, Lubyanka. The word, itself, was synonymous with the very harshest of punishments for ideological dissent. He was subjected to many months of torturous interrogation. His ordeals in the Lubyanka and, later, in the Siberian slave-labor camps, would compel him to write his three-volumes of The Gulag Archipelago and the rest of his autobiographical works against totalitarianism and the Soviet Socialist oligarchy.
To spare his young wife from the dictatorship’s vicious harassing on his account, he had to sign a document of divorce.
Eventually, he was transferred to a prison where his skills in math and physics would be more useful to the dictatorship than was the manual labor he’d been forced into. But he found that the aims of the technical work were so reprehensible that he refused. So, he was thrown into an even more brutal Gulag.
In 1953, he was exiled to still another forced labor camp – this one in the farthest reaches of northern Kazakhstan. It was there that he first battled cancer. And, it was there, too, on his first day without a guard, that he learned of the death of Stalin.
On whatever scraps of paper he could scrounge and keep hidden, he’d write down his thoughts, memorize what he’d written, and destroy the scraps of paper before they were discovered. This is how he wrote his poetry and plays and how he planned his first novel, In the First Circle. It was his hard life in that remote Kazakhstan slave labor camp that inspired his work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Through all of his years of imprisonment in Soviet slave-labor camps, only his personal Christian faith brought him patience and protection from utter despair, when even the Russian Orthodox leaders were agents of Marxist ideology and treachery.
Thus, he became a most credible Christian witness against all of the evils of Marxism’s very necessary totalitarianism, of which Western media and elite are so ignorant or in denial. Today, utter naiveté as well as willed ignorance fail to grasp the tight connections between our fallen human nature and the evil temptations of any and all totalitarian power. Having never had to cope under the utter deprivation of personal liberty, many foolishly hold themselves hostage to their own utopian fantasies of Marxism and not to the grim historical realities of Marxism.
But, as Solzhenitsyn assessed: “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not a side effect but the central pivot of Communism.”
And, it’s been right there on display in the huge Soviet Encyclopedia’s one and only sentence about Jesus: “Jesus is the name of the mythological founder of Christianity.” Period! End of discussion!
Solzhenitsyn observed: “The main cause for the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people – and I could not put it more accurately [than the peasants did and do], ‘Men have forgotten God’.”
He noted, that, “Among [allegedly] enlightened people it is considered rather awkward to use, seriously, such words as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Communism instilled in all of us that the concepts are old-fashioned and laughable. But if we are deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another.”
And that is the very definition of any totalitarian state, where all must bend to the will and definitions set by the political dictators of everyone’s thought and speech.
In 1898, Tolstoy foresaw that, if Marxism takes over from imperialism, “the only thing that will happen is that despotism will change hands.”
So, yet again, in 1956, when Khrushchev came to power, he, himself, denounced the dead Stalin and he released Stalin’s prisoners. But he, now in his turn, launched the Cuban Missile Crisis against America.
During the Cold War era, Solzhenitsyn completed his tomes, In the First Circle, The Tanks Know the Truth, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and assorted writings.
But, then, with Khrushchev’s ousting from power in 1964, all of Solzhenitsyn’s works were yet again banned. So, it was, again, in hiding, that he wrote, The Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago.
In the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was under increasing censorship. When he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize, the commissars in Moscow banned him from receiving it. And, the KGB tried even to assassinate him with ricin.
He managed to smuggle his Gulag manuscript to a typist. But the KGB found the typist, tortured him, and seized the manuscript. The remorseful typist then killed himself.
In 1974, The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. So, of course, Solzhenitsyn was, again, arrested for treason. He was stripped of his Russian citizenship and expelled to West Germany. There, he was reunited with his wife and their sons.
In 1976, the family lived in Vermont. From there, he’d travel to speak around the U.S. and abroad. His signed Vermont driver’s registration card is here for you to see.
In 1978, Solzhenitsyn gave that most memorable Harvard Commencement Address titled, “A World Split Apart”. He spoke the hard truth about Communism’s failures – to the obvious displeasure of most in his naïve and self-styled “progressive” audience. He also decried what he detected as the meaningless materialism in so much of American society.
Accurately foreseeing America’s near future, he warned: “I call on America to be more careful with its noble trust. Prevent false use of social justice to lead you down a false road.” Equally prophetic was his warning: “It’s time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”
Voicing conclusions of a lifetime of faith in God during a lifetime of dictatorial atheism, he affirmed: “We can reach with determined confidence only for the warm hand of God, that we have so rashly and so self-confidently pushed away.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to return to Russia, where he spent his last years in further writing and in tutoring other writers.
On Sunday, August 3, 2008, at age 89, he had a fatal heart attack. Thousands came to pay their respect. The funeral was held in Moscow’s 16th-century Donskoi monastery. His widow and sons and friends were there. Even Putin, who had given him Russia’s State Prize, was there. Observers said the funeral had the hallmarks of a state funeral – goose-stepping honor guards, military band, a gun salute.
But Solzhenitsyn, himself, was now beyond all worldly acclaim and totalitarian disdain. Safe at last, he rested in the nearer presence of Jesus, waiting for what “no eye has yet seen, no ear has yet heard, no mind has ever conceived, of what God has prepared for those who love Him.” (I Cor 2:9)