After deviating away from the text yesterday, I want to stick to this, for it is the gospel, and it is a principle. You will be hated by this world if you take Christ as seriously as he deserves to be taken. For that means you will obey his commands. It means that you will struggle with your desires, your lusts.
It’s interesting. I watched the Phantom last night. And the first half looks like the temptation of the ideologues, this world: leave the light, let you dark side reign, and you will live in music…. but have no life. The choice of Christine to not stay with the phantom but to marry Raoul, who was rich, handsome and young, is following her natural and health instincts, and the weeping of the Phantom sad but… inevitable.
THis was written in the 1980s. Today you could not do it: for it offends overmuch.
In times when lies are compulsory, the churches main job is to be offensive, and speak truth.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
We are commanded to bear the truth and speak the truth. We will be accounted rude. At least.
And we will be shunned: we will not gain that promotion: we will ose our jobs. We may be driven out of our professions. Now, this will hurt: I don’t love my employer or medical college, but I do love my profession, and the company of colleagues. I enjoy working for a university. And I like my work.
But if we have to tell lies to keep on doing that, the profession itself will be corrupted. It has happened in the last century — from the eugenics of US psychiatry to the simple schizophrenia of the Soviets.
Silberman reminds us what was happening in the University of Vienna when Asperger submitted his thesis in 1943: ‘The beautiful city of Vienna had become an abattoir of surreal brutality.’ He isolates some key changes in the Viennese medical scene. The first was eugenics and compulsory sterilisation — ideas the Nazis imported from the US, sponsored by none less than the US National Academy of Sciences, who hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics in October 1921 in Manhattan, and promoted in journals like Science. In Germany in 1934, 62,400 people with schizophrenia, epilepsy, inherited blindness and other conditions viewed as human imperfections were brought to the newly formed Genetic Health Court and were given forced sterilisations.
Asperger’s former thesis supervisor, Professor Franz Hamburger, and his trusted colleague Dr Erwin Jekelius became ardent Nazi party members. Three weeks after the Anschluss the prestigious University of Vienna Medical School was transformed to conduct research into ‘racial improvement’. A new Dean of Medicine was appointed, who Aryanised the medical school: all faculty members had to produce birth certificates to confirm their Aryan descent and sign a loyalty oath to Hitler. Eighty per cent of the medical faculty was dismissed, since of the 5,000 physicians practising medicine in Vienna at that time, 3,200 were Jews. Many were dragged out into the streets by gangs, brutally humiliated and deported to concentration camps.
It was in this context that Professor Asperger gave the first ever public lecture on autism. On 3 October 1938, in a lecture hall in the University Hospital, he declared: ‘Not everything that steps out of the line, and is “abnormal”, must necessarily be “inferior”.’ To understand quite how brave that statement was, we need to know the political climate. That night was Kol Nidre, the night before Yom Kippur. For the next 24 hours stormtroopers brutalised Jewish neighbourhoods in Vienna. A month later, Kristallnacht occurred: 95 synagogues in Vienna went up in flames and Jewish homes, hospitals, schools and shops were demolished with sledgehammers.
As Vienna cast ou all its Jewish doctors (to the great benefit of England and the USA, but at a great cost to the Jews) so could we be cast out. We should not forget that Jesus was preaching to Jews, and they were commended to be a light on the hill, and to rejoice when they are hated.
What happens to them will happen to us. At present they are being hounded out of Europe.
Night ,ay be falling in the West, but while we can speak, we must. It is our duty. We must not let the Barbarians destroy our scholarship, delay our studies, and regulate our search for truth. We probably won’t get grants — for we won’t be applying to reinforce the politically correct lies. We won’t get promoted. But our dole is to witness, warn…
And let the Spirit of God work in the hearts and minds of man, and bring those of Christ to him.