Being the Body by Charles W. Colson

Author:Charles W. Colson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

18

THE CHURCH IN CAPTIVITY

Literalistic Christians will learn that a God or a faith system that has to be defended daily is finally no God or faith system at all. They will learn that any god who can be killed ought to be killed. Ultimately they will discover that all their claims to represent the historical, traditional, or biblical truth of Christianity cannot stop the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal religious system questionable at best, null and void at worst.

—JOHN SHELBY SPONG,

retired Episcopal bishop

A DECADE AGO, as the world watched in astonishment, long-entrenched Communist regimes collapsed. Oppressors fled. The persecuted church emerged triumphant. A miraculous deliverance.

But oppression of the church did not end, of course. It continues today in China, North Korea, Vietnam, parts of India, and in a number of Islamic nations. One place in particular cries out for our attention. Here is how our brothers and sisters in Sudan describe their plight:

If we say Jesus is God, we do not eat. We starve within sight of the U. N. planes filled with food you sent us, denied to us by our government. . . .

It is mutilations, our ears, lips, hands, feet gone. It is another generation without education. It is mass rapes—our daughters, many men. It is slavery, the real thing.

It is running barefoot . . . before the utterly incessant tracking of the spraying, hissing, whining bullets spitting at our heels from helicopter gunships.

It is our pregnant women in jails so hot that the babies in their wombs are essentially poached and born, of course, dead. They have held us down and pierced our lips so hot and through the bloody perforations forced the locking arm of padlocks, which when shut prevent the tortured ones from speaking or eating.

One day, government forces came to my brother’s home. . . . They tied his hands behind his back and tied the other end of the rope to their vehicle. They dragged him three miles. His skin was worn off his bones. They poured gas on my brother and set his body on fire.1

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