The Struggle for Truth in a Land of Lies: The Church in Eastern Europe Faces a More Complex Challenge in Its Newfound Freedom than in the Black-and-White Days before the Revolution

As the Soviet Union continues its dramatic transition, many people, including the Soviets themselves, would like to know what is in store. What new issues and problems will emerge with the changing situation? What new role should the church play in the emerging society?

Part of the answer can come from looking at the situation in Eastern Europe, where two years ago many of the same changes took place. The following is an excerpt from a new book by Bud Bultman and Harold Fickett, Revolution by Candlelight (Multnomah), which explores both what happened and what could happen to the people and churches of the newly free countries west of Moscow.

The city of Leipzig, East Germany, blazed with the brightness of tens of thousands of candles. The flickering flames danced with the darkness against the backdrop of the Nikolai Church. The sign outside the historic Lutheran church read, “offen für alle” (open for all). The sanctuary had just been packed with demonstrators praying for peace. Now they were outside, calling for action. And not since Jericho have the shouts of marchers been so effective.

It has been two years since those prayer meetings and marches, two years since those astounding pictures of revelers chipping away at the Berlin Wall. It has been two years since the world watched in astonishment as communist regimes from Poland to Romania came crashing down.

As the bills for past abuses have come due, life has become more difficult. Yet something fundamental has indeed changed. The politics of deceit has given way to the power of truth. Now Eastern Europeans have settled into the hard and sacrificial business of rebuilding their nations.

The usual rancorous debate of the democratic process wasted no time in replacing the unanimous voice of opposition against a common totalitarian enemy. In Poland, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa ran against long-time adviser Tadeusz Mazowiecki for the presidency in a particularly nasty campaign that split the Solidarity camp.

Ethnic tensions long suppressed by totalitarianism have begun to bubble to the surface in many countries. In Yugoslavia, the conflict between Serbian and Croatian nationalists has resulted in hundreds of lives lost. Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s dissident play-wright-turned-president, was jostled in the streets this year by angry Slovaks seeking an independent republic. In March of 1990, a celebration of a Hungarian national holiday in the Romanian town of Tirgu Mures turned into a deadly clash between ethnic mobs.

In some cases, those who stood on the front lines of the revolution have felt betrayed by what it wrought. The word heard again and again on the streets of Timisoara, where a massacre sparked the Romanian revolution, is: “We shed our blood for nothing.” Romania’s new National Salvation Front turned out to be little more than the same party apparatchiks in power, only the names had been changed.

On October 3, 1990, when the world was celebrating Germany’s reunification, Leipzig’s Nikolai Church closed its doors. As the Reverend Christian Führer, one of the church’s pastors, put it, the church’s silence would reverberate as a loud statement of protest. The majority of those participating in the peace prayers that had always preceded the city’s massive demonstrations were disheartened to watch their movement steamrolled by demands for quick reunification. One female theological student commented, “There was the real hope that we would create a new type of democracy. What we are getting now is what the majority wanted before the revolution. They voted for more material wealth, and now we shall get it, but along with it, more social problems and insecurities.”

Eastern Europeans are quickly discovering that democracy and a free market are not sure cures for the problems of their societies. On the contrary, the transformation has often been a bitter pill to swallow. The West has not rushed in with massive recapitalization efforts. Many workers have lost their jobs, and inefficient factories continue to close. After reunification, the unemployment rate in Leipzig soared, and the same demonstrators clamoring for freedom were back on the streets clamoring for jobs.

People Of The Truth

All of the emerging democracies are saddled with rising unemployment, soaring inflation, and a deteriorating environment. But we should not assume that Eastern Europeans have merely traded one pile of problems for another. If this is how we read these events, then we have missed the main point of the story, the part that explains why these events are so historic. Now, with the possible exception of Romania, the pervasiveness of the totalitarian lie, the former climate of untruth, has been replaced with the opportunity of living in the truth. The populations have escaped the moral jail of totalitarianism. They are free. And the difference between freedom and enslavement, even if that difference has not yet translated into improved economic conditions, is still immense.

For those who made the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, truth reigned as the primary issue. Throughout his writings, Václav Havel has stressed the importance of “living in the truth” as the antidote to the environment of lies created by totalitarianism.

The truth has a force of its own that is little understood in the West. During the height of the campaign against Czechoslovakia’s human-rights group Charter 77, Havel told The Register, a British journal:

Many people who live in the open societies of the West don’t understand how important the role of the truth is in totalitarian conditions. It really doesn’t matter so much whether Charter 77, for example, has a thousand or a million signatories. What’s more important is whether or not it has the truth on its side. And the truth exercises an indirect and invisible influence which represents a special kind of power. This is not something which can be easily understood by people from Western countries, where power simply depends on votes and on the respective strengths of different parties and politicians.

It was the church’s faithfulness to the truth that helped transform the face of Eastern Europe in 1989, a fact the media too often neglected. The spiritual backdrop was crucial to those who stood at the forefront of the revolution.

When Václav Havel addressed the U.S. Congress as the new president of Czechoslovakia in February 1990, he explained, “[We] still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.”

The Judeo-Christian concept of human nature has always taught that humankind’s freedom consists in obedience to that higher authority of which Havel speaks, the judge of our actions as interpreted by the still, small voice of conscience.

Once again we have been taught that the first truth is the truth of the human heart; that men and women must first be reconciled to their God before they can find the means of reconciliation among themselves to bring about just and peaceful societies. Only a view of human nature that sees men and women as sovereign creatures whose first loyalty belongs to God leaves enough room in social obligations for true human freedom. During the momentous events of 1989, we witnessed in the work of the church the incarnation of Christ’s words: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

The Catholic church in Poland became the bridge between the Solidarity opposition and the Communist government. Prominent Catholic intellectuals such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki served as mediators linking the crucial connection between workers and the intelligentsia that gave Solidarity its power. He later helped negotiate the accord that paved the way for Solidarity to take the reins of government.

In East Germany, the Protestant church provided the roof for the opposition, a physical and spiritual sanctuary for the tens of thousands of protesters who took to the streets demanding change. The importance of the church’s involvement was not lost on the prodemocracy demonstrators. The populace stretched a huge banner across one of Leipzig’s streets, which read in big, bold letters: “Wir danken Dir, Kirche!” (We thank you, church!).

The church in Czechoslovakia helped breathe the gentle spirit of nonviolence into the country’s Velvet Revolution. Václav Maly, a banned Catholic priest, served as moderator for most of the mass rallies called by the opposition group Civic Forum. At one enormous demonstration, he introduced two high-ranking members of the security police who were part of a bloody crackdown on a student demonstration that had set off the country’s massive demonstrations.

When Maly led them forward, the crowd started jeering.

“They have come to apologize,” Maly shouted over the loudspeaker. The crowd fell silent. He looked out into a sea of stony faces. “Will you accept their apology?”

There was an ominous silence. Then a chant commenced, faint at first, but growing louder: “We forgive you! We forgive you!”

And in Romania, it was a candlelight vigil around a nondescript Reformed congregation of ethnic Hungarians that ignited the revolution there. The demonstration’s initial goal was to prevent Laszlo Tokes, the church’s outspoken pastor, from being evicted by the authorities. The vigil soon grew into a human chain that stretched around the church, only to be crushed by the dreaded Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Hundreds were massacred during the days that followed. The blood they shed was the price of throwing off the chains of Romania’s Communist despot, Nicolae Ceausescu.

New Temptations

In many ways the church in Eastern Europe faces a more complex challenge in its newfound freedom than in the black-and-white days before the revolution. Chief among them is the temptation to identify itself with those in power, with one or another political party, and to enter politics as an equal player. Pastor Führer of the Nikolai Church cautions against yielding to the temptation: “The church must be independent, strictly separate from the state. If the church receives a privileged status, it loses its power and the gospel is neutralized. And if it loses its power, what good is it?”

In Poland especially, a country where more than 90 percent of the population is Catholic, there is a danger of the Catholic majority imposing its will. In September 1990, the Polish government hastily introduced voluntary religious instruction in public schools, stirring fears of Catholic indoctrination among non-Catholics and growing concerns that Poland was exchanging the “red” dictatorship of communism for the “black” dictatorship of the clergy. Public-opinion polls show that the church is losing its long-standing position as Poland’s most trusted institution.

All across Eastern Europe, the emerging free market is overflowing with its own tantalizing temptations. The allure of material things in societies that went without for so long beckons like a garish neon sign, threatening to ensnare consumers in an all-consuming passion. Brigitta Treetz, a young Lutheran laywoman from Leipzig, commented in a letter to friends soon after the fall of the Wall, “I only hope that we are not enduring all of this only for material improvement, but above all for moral reasons.” Protestant leaders in East Germany echoed her fears. In the words of one, there is the danger now of exchanging the dialectical materialism of Marxism for the practical materialism of capitalism.

With the advent of political pluralism, the church is no longer the only avenue for political dissent. As one Polish girl innocently asked her grandfather, “Which is better, the church or Solidarity?” Now there are competing voices from the opposition, and even within the church itself. In East Germany, church attendance is already down, as people trickle out to various other causes.

Now that the church is no longer a second-class institution, church leaders are grappling with its postrevolutionary identity. Yet when asked what role the church should play now, the leadership from various traditions and various countries voiced the same opinion over and over: Though the church is no longer the church of the opposition, it must continue speaking out for the poor, the oppressed, and the lowly.

In the words of East German theologian Walter Bindemann: “We now have to raise the question of what will happen with Bonhoeffer’s heritage. We have said the church in the GDR should be a church without privilege. Now we’re a church living in privilege. Bonhoeffer taught us to be kirche für andere, a church for others. Now there’s the danger that the church will narrow its concentration away from outward service. Bonhoeffer helped us understand that we must bring together religious and social activity. Now there’s the danger of becoming exclusively religious by excluding others. We have to ask, ‘What will happen to this heritage?’ ”

Perhaps the best counsel for the Eastern European church finding its role in the postrevolution period comes from one standing outside the church looking in, Polish historian Adam Michnik, a self-described “pagan.” He writes:

We need … a Church that will teach us moral values, defend national and human dignity, provide an asylum for trampled hopes. But we do not expect the Church to become the nation’s political representative, to formulate political programs and to sign political pacts. Whoever wants such a Church … is—whether he likes it or not—asking for the political reduction of the Christian religion. For we do not need a Church that is locked up, that is hidden behind the walls of a particular political ideology. We need an open Church, a Church that “takes the whole world onto the arms of the Cross.” It is such a Church, I think, that all Poles need today: those who believe in the “madness of the Cross,” those who are blindly searching for the meaning of Christian transcendence, those who define the meaning of their lives in the categories of lay humanism.

From Communism’S Ashes

In fulfilling its role, the church and its members will often find themselves doing what the world may deem foolish. But only this kind of foolishness can help heal these cultures so damaged by 40 years of totalitarianism, the kind of “madness of the cross” so evident in the story of an East German pastor named Uwe Holmer.

Pastor Holmer wasn’t sure how to respond when leaders from his church district approached him in January 1990 with an unusual request. They wanted him to take in Erich Honecker, the deposed leader of East Germany. Honecker, 77, had just been whisked from a state-run hospital, where he was recuperating from cancer surgery, to Rummelsburg prison to stand trial on treason charges. But he had hardly been there 24 hours when a court ruled he was too sick to stay in prison. After his release, the state refused to provide him with a place to stay. The former leader was so despised that no one could be located to take care of him.

Pastor Holmer was the director of a church-run convalescent center in the secluded village of Lobetal. He knew it would be the ideal setting for the Honeckers—a neutral, out-of-the-way spot where they could easily be protected. But to grant Honecker asylum! Holmer had bitter memories of Honecker and his regime. Honecker had personally presided over the building of the Wall, a wall that separated Holmer’s family when it was erected, and kept him from attending his own father’s funeral. He had even more reason to resent Honecker’s wife, who ran the ministry of education. Holmer’s ten children had been denied admission to any university because of their faith.

But Holmer thought about his own responsibility as a Christian. It was the very purpose of the ministry at Lobetal to take in the poor, the sick, and the homeless. Honecker was now the poor, the sick, and the homeless.

Yet Holmer didn’t think it would be fair to put Honecker and his wife up in the church’s retirement home, since there was a long waiting list to get in. He decided he had no choice but to shelter the couple under his own roof.

When Honecker arrived at the pastor’s residence, the deposed dictator looked dazed and confused. Holmer and his wife ushered them into the drawing room of his large, rambling home. “Welcome to my home,” he said in a quiet, soothing voice. “I know you have come here to convalesce and to rest, and I hope you will find the peace and quiet you need here.”

Holmer’s sentiment wasn’t shared by the rest of the country. Hate mail began pouring in. Some parishioners threatened to leave his congregation. Loyal supporters of the ministry at Lobetal gave notice they were considering cutting off their funds. The Holmer household began receiving bomb threats.

Holmer defended his actions in a letter that was published in the East German newspaper Neue Zeitung. “In Lobetal,” he wrote, “there is a sculpture of Jesus inviting people to himself and crying out: ‘Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ We have been commanded by our Lord Jesus to follow him and to receive all those who are weary and heavy laden, in spirit and in body, but especially the homeless.… What Jesus asked his disciples to do is equally binding on us.”

The church, when it acts in accord with the absolute demands of her Lord, provides a light that clarifies the relative merits of actions in the temporal world—in the world of politics, economics, and human rights. Throughout Eastern Europe, the church served as the guardian of the truth and a shelter for those, believers and unbelievers alike, who dedicated themselves to the politics of truth.

The church played a vital role in causing communism to crumble in Eastern Europe. It has an equally vital role in shaping the kind of societies that will arise, phoenixlike, from communism’s ashes. Adam Michnik eloquently characterized the church’s importance during the days of communism. And his words still hold true. The church is important, he writes, “because it teaches all of us that we may bow only before God.”

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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