Templeton Address

By Richard Ibbett

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 at Kislovodsk, which lies in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in southwestern Russia. He grew up in the town of Rostov, on the Don River. Desiring to be a writer from childhood, he attended the grammar school there, leaving in 1936. During WWII he served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Soviet Army. He was decorated three times for heroism. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin, he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. At the end of his sentence he was exiled for life to Kok-Terek in Kazakhstan. This exile was cut short by the death of Stalin. In the early 1960's he was allowed to publish some of his works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. After the publication of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ he was again arrested in 1974, stripped of his citizenship, and flown out of the country to Frankfort, West Germany.

In speeches given throughout the free world, he warned against the dangers caused by the internal moral decay of the nations of the West. The West today is mostly comprised of the modern nations of Israel. The Templeton Prize for progress in religion was established in 1972. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded this prize in 1983. Following are some excerpts from his address, given 40 years ago, on May 10, 1983 at the Guildhall in London.

“...if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some sixty millions of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”  Included in this horrendous loss of life is the genocide of the ‘Holodomor’. Something few people in the West have heard about.

Solzhenitsyn: (In the 18th century), “…Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism.”

Solzhenitsyn: “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 .... The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free, But the West's own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness.” Solzhenitsyn then spoke of our ‘giving in’ to the forces of evil all around us: “Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. ... Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society.”

Today, this spirit of ‘self-loathing’ is manifested in the tearing down, or desecration of monuments and statues to the great of the past. Last year in Melbourne, Australia, a statue of Captain James Cook was sprayed with red paint. Captain Cook, who discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770, was most likely the greatest navigator this world has ever seen.

Continuing with Solzhenitsyn: “The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to realize that they are beset by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily.”

Falsehoods and lies are foisted upon us from childhood. At school, children learn that their lives are the end product of chemicals mixing in some primeval pool, or around underwater thermal vents, or spores from space. Take your pick.  Another falsehood foisted onto us by our own leaders in the Israel nations today, is that:  “Diversity is our strength.” How can this be? God knows where our strength lies, and the scriptures tell us that: “Israel then shall dwell in safety alone.”  Deuteronomy 33:28, and, “Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” Numbers 23:9.

But Israel does not dwell alone at the present time. For decades she has been witnessing to a flood of strange (non-Israelite) nations pouring into the lands of the birthright. Genesis 35:11; 49:22-26. 1 chronicles 5:2. This may explain why, when our Lord returns, that: “... before Him shall be gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as 'the' (definite article) shepherd divideth his sheep (Israel) from the goats:” Matthew 25:32.

This world is submerged in a sea of lies, and one day our people will know this to have been so. “O Lord my strength and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the nations (of Israel) shall come unto Thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, ‘Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.’” Jeremiah 16:19.

Solzhenitsyn:  “All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: ...There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide; the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.”

In other words, as Solzhenitsyn perceived; There is no hope to be found in governments, politicians, or any of the ways or works of man. So, our cry must be: “Let Israel hope in the Lord, from henceforth and forever.” Psalm 131:3 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man of great insight, died at the age of 89 years, on August 3, 2008.