Fundamental skepticism about human reason

Fundamental skepticism about human reason arose during World War II. The limitations of human reason in the fields of physics and mathematics were already beginning to emerge in the 20th century, but the madness of the Nazis and Japanese imperialism was enough to arouse despair about reason in the fields of philosophy and sociology as well. As many of you may know about this, I won't say more, but there was another area where the experience of World War II shocked me.

It's theology.

Throughout World War I and II, mainstream Christianity served strictly as a war criminal. It was during World War I that liberal theology, in which people think "the pastor is bad" without knowing what it is, collapsed. Carl Barthes wrote the famous "Strong in Rome" because of the shocking misconduct of liberal theologians who were leading the theology at the time.

Christianity was more affected by World War II. Hitler and the Nazis actively embraced Christianity as a tool and used it as a genius of sedition, and mainstream Christianity in Germany obeyed Hitler.

Hitler, in particular, was hailed as the new incarnation of Jesus by the Protestant Church in Germany, and he served thoroughly as a Nazi propaganda tool. To this end, theology was revised.
Catholicism was not much different. Pope Pius XII is still suspected of serving in the Nazis at the time. Of course, he was not actively serving at the level of German Protestantism at the time, so there is still a "controversy," but at least he was not actively resisting.

Theologians who confronted the Nazis in Europe at the time were Karl Barth, who changed the direction of theology - not his theology but the historical flow of the whole theology - from the experience of World War I, and pastors of the German Confession Church who fought on the basis of the Barmen Declaration that Karl Barth wrote to confront the mainstream Nazi church. Abominably, Pastor Dietrich Bonhöper, sold by Jeon Kwang-hoon, is the leader of the Confession Church. Bonhöper, a promising young genius theologian at the time, left England, where he had fled in advance to lead a church against the Nazis, returned to Germany, and was eventually arrested and executed just before the Nazi collapse.

After World War II, theologians were shocked. The mainstream church was unable to resist Wilhelm II of World War I and Hitler of World War II. No, many theologians were reduced to trumpeters of the regime, and even the entire church served the Nazis during World War II.

If God is alive, if the gospel is true, why did this happen?

Perhaps many non-Christians here would like to laugh at it, saying, "It's because Christianity is that kind of religion," but please review the beginning of this article again. It was not only Christianity that failed in World Wars I and II, but also human reason itself. It is the same as the mainstream Protestantism in Korea that now serves Yoon Suk Yeol and others.

The real problem for Christianity is this:
It's not difficult to point a finger in hindsight. Anyone can say that the Nazis were bad after their defeat. What is really needed is to "theologically" discern that the Nazis were wrong when they were in their prime, and to risk your life and cry out for justice. "Here and now [sitz im leven] * Spiritual discernment and visionary - I'm a little reluctant to use it in a heretical sense in our country right now, but I'll just use it because it's a proper usage in this case - to see what makes it possible to declare. That way, the church can act as the light and salt of the world.

"Spirit" is actually a word that should be used here in Protestantism, where it has been used from time to time and has run out of value. If the Christian God is the God of righteousness and justice, the ability to discern what is righteousness and love here and now, and the power to proclaim it, must come from that spirituality. In that sense, the corruption of the church, especially the political corruption, must be directly linked to the spiritual problem of the church. Just as Bartga saw the great masters of theology collapse helplessly in front of Wilhelm II, he went back to Rome in the Bible, and with the answer from the Bible, he confronted Hitler's Theology of Eyong, spirituality is bound to discern injustice and fight it. Because otherwise, as Jeremiah has appealed, I feel like I am burning inside and cannot endure it (Jeremiah 20:8-9).

So these aspects of the Korean church that I have now brought are directly related to the spiritual depravity of the Korean church. No, now the word depravity may be too much.
One of the misunderstandings is that the majority of the Old Testament "idolites" weren't actually worshiping other religions. They believed they believed in the Yahweh faith. Even Ahab, the corrupt king of the Old Testament, was a protector of the Torah to the extent that he couldn't take away a vineyard from Nabot. He himself was a man of Yahweh's faith.

Their problem is that the object of the "religion" they believe in has become detached from the "given God." Although Christianity is a religion based on revelation, because it is a religion, it always risks being changed by power, capital, etc., just like any other religion in the world. As a result, Christianity as a religion is bound to be strained at all times with revelation. In fact, historically, churches have always tended to distort revelations for their own sake, not for God's sake. As they do now.

I told you about Ahab, but he was a man who couldn't steal Nabot's vineyard. Is this "pastor" God I'm bringing closer to revelation than Yahweh? Is a minister who says this about a commando's invasion of the Constitution with 10,000 rounds of live ammunition and a massacre of people better than those who served in the Nazis? They could have died if they didn't, but aren't these pastors in our country right now threatened with their lives?

The church becomes the light and salt of the world