The Third Rome Brings Down the Hammer

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/02/06/Russian-court-sentences-Jehovahs-Witness-to-6-years-in-prison/7661549488690/?sl=2

The Kremlin, seemingly at the behest of or in collaboration with the Moscow Patriarch continues to wage its war against all 'sects' as well as groups with perceived ties to the West.

The Watchtower Society also known as the Jehovah's Witnesses have been banned and forced underground and now some of their leaders are being sent to prison.

This story saddens me on several levels. One, I am saddened about the Jehovah's Witnesses because in many cases I believe their membership rolls are filled by those who have an earnest desire to follow God's Word and are put off by the corruption and casuistry which so dominates the denominations of mainstream Christendom. In a place like Italy they are reacting to both Roman Catholicism but also the many corrupt forms of Protestantism that have entered their land. In Russia, they are reacting to Orthodoxy and once again in many cases the degenerate and less-than-Scriptural forms of Evangelicalism which claim Scriptural obedience but all too often are found wanting.

That said, the Jehovah's Witnesses for all that they have grasped are like those who strained at the gnat and swallowed the camel. Ethics matter but apart from Christology, you have no Gospel and you have no Kingdom and the Watchtower has missed Christ and thus all their trials are in the end, for naught.

I am saddened because many in the Evangelical world don't seem to care about what happens to them. They're heretics anyway is the mindset. For others if they possessed the political power they strive for they too would lower the hammer on the Watchtower and on all those like them.

There are some Evangelicals especially in Europe that seem concerned about their plight. Again, this is not due to any kind of common cause or shared ethics but simply in terms of 'human rights' and a concern for democratic values.

While we as Christians would place very little stock in 'human rights' and even less in democracy we should be concerned when states sacralise and try to force conformity. There's a practical concern whether or not one agrees with the Witnesses.

But even more we understand that many of the points which have so earned the ire of Moscow are the very points that we as Biblical Christians would and should also stand for and thus (if faithful) would also lead us to fall afoul of the same authorities.

In other words the actual points of persecution are common to Biblical Christianity. The Witnesses aren't being pursued by Moscow because they're Arians. Rather they're being pursued because the sacral Russian state views them as un-Russian, subversive and 'harmful' to families.

Because the Witnesses refuse to vote, join the military, salute the flag, and cut off their members from the cultural mainstream, they are both hated and feared. Moscow knows they are not agents of Western imperialism and yet at the same time the fact that they break with the social order and no longer fit in, their presence sows schism in society. Families are angry when their children and grandchildren refuse to participate in the cultural holidays and the many Orthodox-flavoured customs which dominate daily life.

To be a Jehovah's Witness is to be a non-Russian, or to place Russian-ness into a secondary category. It takes Russians and turns them into strangers and foreigners... the very thing the Biblical Gospel calls us to.

What a shame that the Jehovah's Witnesses with all their error have a better sense of this than Western Evangelicals.

It should be no different for Christians living in Italy, France, Germany, Britain or America. What a disgrace that the Arians are displaying a more Biblical testimony than the overwhelming majority of Evangelicals.

As far as Russian Orthodoxy goes, we are finally beginning to see its true colours. The organisation struggles to separate any aspect of its being from the state apparatus and thus in the aftermath of the USSR its bestial and whorish proclivities are once more on display.