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In this book we are trying to confess that the goals of the contemporary Church - that is to say, the church of St. John's by the Gas Station, the Christian college, the denominational and interdenominational seminary - the 'goals' of these Christian communities are blasphemous. The reconciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish today by these subterfuges has already been wrought. The brotherhood - the one blood of Acts 17, 26 - that the Church makes its goal today is already a 'fact'. And because this is so, that very fact judges our goals and our efforts to achieve brotherhood by social action as blasphemous, as trying to 'be' God. Instead of witnessing to Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the totalitarianism of wars and political systems of the 20th century. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields of battle. The Church then tries to do what the State, without the Church's support, had already decided to do to solve all human problems by politics. And this is specifically the political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism and of Revelation 13. Politics by definition can only adjust and rearrange. It cannot - as politics - solve anything. But the Church's social action encourages the very movements in the contemporary political processes which are moving us straightaway into 20th-century totalitarianism.
from the Foreword
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Will D. Campbell was a Baptist preacher in Taylor, Louisiana, for two years before taking the position of Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi from 1954 to 1956. Forced to leave the university because of his ardent Civil Rights participation, Campbell served on the National Council of Churches as a race relations consultant. Campbell worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Andrew Young toward bettering race relations. Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly earned him the Lillian Smith Prize, the Christopher Award, and a National Book Award nomination. The Glad River won a first-prize award from the Friends of American Writers in 1982. His works have also won a Lyndhurst Prize and an Alex Haley Award.
Richard Goode is Professor of History at Lipscomb University. He edited Will Campbell's Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance (Cascade, 2010) and authored with Will Campbell Crashing the Idols (Cascade, 2010).
