The Church of England will die unless we read the Bible…..

Sep 16, 2017 by

by Gavin Ashenden:

I’ve just come back from Russia. The last time I was there – 35 years ago – was when I became a Bible smuggler, and got caught by the KGB.

Two KGB majors ran the interrogation. They threatened to have me tried as a bullion smuggler (I’d failed to declare that a gold ring I was wearing was imported bullion). When I was found guilty, the sentence would be 20 years in the labour camp in Siberia, they said. In exchange for not prosecuting, they wanted the names of the contacts I was taking the Bibles to.

I survived the questioning, they didn’t get the names and I lived to tell the tale.

But why did I (and others) smuggle Bibles?

Because the Bible is the bedrock of the Church. It’s very hard indeed to survive as a Christian without meeting Jesus in the Gospels, where his words take on a life of their own and through which the Holy Spirit changes you.

The Russians are scornful of the way some Western Christians are capitulating to secular culture, particularly over the redefinition of marriage. At meetings I attended last week they said “we have lived under the dead weight of atheist secularism, and we know how empty and dangerous it is to human flourishing.” Only the Bible challenges the claims of secularism.

When Marxism took brutal control of Russia in 1917, the activists who imposed the dictatorship had a number of targets. At the front of the line were Christians and the Church. Many people see the culture war that is sweeping over the West, the struggles over sex and sexuality and identity politics, as the next wave of Marxism, re-configuring culture this time, rather than economics. This is not just evolution, it’s part of a revolution.

This ideology is attacking Judaeo-Christian culture and attempting to silence those who speak up for it. Justine Greening, the Government minister for Equalities threatens the Church and says we must “keep up” with modern attitudes. Dame Louise Casey rants that it’s “not OK” for Catholic schools to be against gay marriage.

The cultural and political screws are slowly tightening against those who do read the Bible.

Read here

 

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