07th Dec 2005
Discover Your Inner Russian
For the record, this quote is not intended to promote any type of racial stereotyping. I simply found it fascinating, because of the cultural elements it brings out. It exposes the cultural framework and underlying beliefs that become part of people’s worldviews without them knowing it.
Pfüll was one of those inordinately, unshakably self-assured men – self-assured to the point of martyrdom, as only a German can be, because only a German bases his self-assurance on an abstract idea: science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman’s self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman’s self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully. But a German’s self-assurance is the worst of all, more inflexible and repellent than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which is his own invention, but which for him is absolute truth.
…He was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory’s object – its practical application. His passion for theory made him despise all practical considerations and he would not hear of them. He positively rejoiced in failure, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869),p. 770-771
We in the West have long been the German in the picture painted above. Both “liberals” and “conservatives” have relied on the knowability of Absolute Truth as a core value. More specifically, we have relied on the assumption that we alone (our group, our culture, our denomination) possess said Absolute Truth.
I think that with the death of Scientific Rationalism and the ever-growing worldview of postmodernism, more and more people are coming to see the world through a different set of lenses. While this has long been seen as a threat to the established church, I do not think it should be – a worldview change on such a degree should be viewed as an opportunity. The gospel, if it is true, will speak to any culture.
“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” I Cor 9.22
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