Chuck Colson draws an interesting comparison between Jeremiah’s warning to the Israelites and Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address here.
Solzhenitsyn delivered each line in his high-pitched voice in Russian.
The translation blunted the impact somewhat?in fact, there were even
sporadic bursts of applause. But soon enough, outraged professors
realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the
West’s surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its
Christian heritage, and with all the moral horrors that followed.As it happened, this summer I was reading a tattered
copy of Solzhenitsyn’s speech at the same time I was studying Jeremiah
in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling parallels between the
dissident’s words and Jeremiah’s warning to the Israelites.For
example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,”
Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete
Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.”
Man has become “the master of this world ? who bears no evil within
himself,” he announced. “So all the defects of life” are attributed to
“wrong social systems.”The condition Solzhenitsyn diagnosed was identical to that of the
ancient Israelites. God spoke through Jeremiah with biting sarcasm,
warning the Israelites of where this kind of “freedom” leads: It would
be freedom “to fall by the sword, plague, and famine.” Jeremiah’s
prophecy all too soon came to pass; the Israelites fell into Babylonian
captivity.
