Christianity Today Surviving the “Woke” Church
A strong case can be made that the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is the most significant and prescient Christian apologist to emerge since the Enlightenment. Four decades before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Dostoevsky not only anticipated the communist takeover of Russia, but also saw the inevitable persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and the subsequent driving of Russian Christianity underground. More than any other thinker of his age — or indeed any age since — Dostoevsky recognized that the church and her teachings were not being out-argued by a superior form of socialist dialectic: rather, the Christian narrative was being slyly coopted by a new breed of socialist evangelism that methodically confused and replaced the ideals and aims of Christianity with those of socialism.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, it was not that the verities of Christian thought had been tried and found wanting. They were deemed difficult and therefore left untried in the wake of a new set of quasi-religious doctrines that promised the redemptive salvation and atonement of Christianity without the need to affirm individual free will or acknowledge a world or a Creator that transcended material reality.
The apogee of Dostoevsky’s thinking on these issues comes in his magnum opus, The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1881, less than four months before his death. As in his earlier novels, Dostoevsky engages with questions of faith and doubt, existence and negation, and salvation and damnation, but in ways that dramatically supersede his previous works. Originally titled “Atheism,” The Brothers Kara-mazov marks Dostoevsky’s most direct link between socialism and disbelief: “For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth, but to set up Heaven on Earth.”
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