Discipline and Witness

Whittaker Chambers penned a long book (800 pages) to his children and the world, published in 1952. I still have my copy from Christmas, 1952, and will pass it on to my great-grandson who will inherit what remains of my materials from a long life of teaching and ministry.  Paragraphs from it were so gripping that even with the growing forgetfulness of old age I remember the following one almost as I remember Scripture passages.  I quickly recovered the page I wanted (Page 6) in that I remembered the name of the man in the piece, sixty years after reading Chambers – a name quite unfamiliar currently to an American ear.  Therein is an important concept in regard to the standards of God and self-discipline with meaning for human life when one thinks above the materialism and yearns for meaning above that which is common in a world much taken and often controlled by wealth.  The paragraph appears early as Chambers prepared his children to understand the idealism that caused him to do the things he did in betraying his American heritage for Communism, and then returning to freedom and home in his person and faith.  He wrote:

When I was a Communist, I had three heroes.  One was a Russian.  One was a Pole.  One was a German Jew.  The Pole was Felix Djerjinsky.  He was ascetic, highly sensitive, intelligent.  He was a Communist.  After the Russian Revolution, he became head of the Teheka and organizer of the Red Terror.  As a young man, Djerjinsky had been a political prisoner in the Paviak Prison in Warsaw.   There he insisted on being given the task of cleaning the latrines of the other prisoners.  For he held that the most developed member of any community must take on himself the lowliest tasks as an   example to those who are less developed.  That is one thing that it meant to be a Communist. (Bold Accent mine)

So it was that Chambers was setting up the approach to witness, what it meant and how it was done.  On the same page as the quote above he wrote:

   . . . . a man may also be an involuntary witness.  I do not know any way to explain why God’s grace touches a man who seems so unworthy of it.  But neither do I know any other way to explain how a man like myself – tarnished by life, unprepossessing, not brave – could prevail so far against the powers of the    world arrayed almost solidly against him to destroy him and defeat his truth.  In this sense I am an involuntary witness to God’s grace and to the fortifying power of faith. (Bold Accent mine)

Before me is the full page review from Life Magazine. (06/09/1952, Pg. 36, Editorial)  The Editor entitled the piece, CHAMBERS AND HIS CRITICS, with the subtitle a quote from Chambers: Communism is never stronger than the failure of other faiths.  The editorial refers to the large range of opinions about this Book-of-the-Month for June, 1952.  That range, from eminent personages who were mostly at odds with Chambers’ concluding opinion that life on earth was to be determined on whether mankind chose mankind only, or chose God primarily.  His implication is that it will always be that matter of choice.

One might take Chambers’ opus, change a few lines here and there, substitute another enemy title for Communism and present a highly similar document favoring the trust of faith in God’s directives over the uncertainties, ignorance, machinations, and social concoctions of mankind that are supposed to address the needs of people and nations.  In founding documents of so many movements appealing to citizens there is implied spirituality.  They are similar to the call of God to the righteousness of nations.  The problem, of course, is that the effective application is impossible without God’s assistance.  So it is that the witness of God continues, and the prophets warn us in their way.  The Life Editor concluded that: They were of old time: . . .Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Ezekiel and the rest, summoning careless Israel back to the God of their Fathers.  It was part of the prophet’s role to sound unreasonable, part of his faith not to be believed.  We close this vignette from decades ago with Jesus’ affirmations from the closing verses of Matthew’s Gospel: that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be offered to the world until the end of time.  If that hope is denied or met with silence, what alternatives do the best minds of earth have to offer?  Even the best ones offer only temporary respite – perhaps for a generation.  God’s message holds in truth that is unchangeable in God.