Colson on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Speech

Earlier this week I reflected on the Class Day speech that Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in 1978. Over at Christianity Today , Chuck Colson offers some reflections of his own, namely comparing Solzhenitsyn to the prophet Jeremiah. Here’s a sample:

As it happened, this summer I was reading a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s speech at the same time I was studying Jeremiah in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling parallels between the dissident’s words and Jeremiah’s warning to the Israelites.

For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.” Man has become “the master of this world . . . who bears no evil within himself,” he announced. “So all the defects of life” are attributed to “wrong social systems.”