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In the Ravensbruck Extermination Camp, Germany, 1944, a woman who had harbored Jews as a member of the Dutch Resistance grieved the enormity of the evil she faced. Thousands around her—her sister Betsie among them—were being brutalized and killed. Only fragments of the Bible, shared with her fellow captives, kept her sane and alive. At last, she found in Revelation 3:8 meaning in the midst of horror: "Because you have limited strength, have kept My word, and have not denied My name, look, I have placed before you an open door that no one is able to close."

Miraculously freed after ten months of captivity, Corrie ten Boom went on to buy a former concentration camp and turn it into a place of ministry to those ravaged by war. By age 86, she had spoken to millions around the world her message that "there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still." The door God opened through Corrie's personal catastrophe has still not shut.

Tolkien once wrote in a letter: "No man can estimate what is really happening at the present. … All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in."

In 1949, most Christian missionaries were ejected from China. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and Christians became the target of massive persecution. Churches were closed, believers jailed—many died as a result. How could the infant Chinese church possibly survive? Indeed, after Mao's death in 1976, it seemed the church had not survived.

Yet by 1992 China contained some 7,000 churches, and over 10 million believers, with many more converting every day. As he had the baby Moses in the basket, God plucked that church out of its vulnerable situation and nurtured it to adulthood in the very camp of the enemy. The brash notes of the Communist Party were taken up in the great eucatastrophic song-story.

Such providences do not make evil any less evil. But as Tolkien put it in the Silmarillion, "Evil may yet be good to have been … and yet remain evil."

It is hard to speak of the positive results of catastrophic events when people we have loved are dead and landmarks we have known are destroyed. We can never see 9/11 as anything but evil. And yet, as our minds are reawakening to the horror of war, the same horror that helped impart deep realism and strength to the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, we may rediscover the bedrock source of that strength—the knowledge of the God who, through and only through an awful death at the hands of sinful men, rose and redeemed humankind.

In literature, history, and our own experience, the echoes of that great True Story are all around us.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More Christian History, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church's past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

In January's Christianity Today article, "Wisdom in a Time of War," J.I. Packer wrote about what Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism.

A Christian History Corner last October also looked to Lewis as an answer to September 11: "Forget 'Normal' | C.S. Lewis's warning against panic during World War II resonates in our new crisis."

Christian History Corner appears every Friday at ChristianityToday.com. Previous editions include:

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46