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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 20, 1983
PAGE 6
London after receiving this year's Templeton Foundation Prize--religion's
equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. Here are excerpts:
"The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of
atheism and self-destruction," the stern speaker warned his
hushed audience. "We can only reach with determination for the
warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently
pushed away.... There is nothing else to cling to in the land
slide."
The man at the lectern in London's Guildhall last week was author
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received this year's $170,000 Temple
ton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion. The award, in
augurated in 1972 by U.S. mutual fund Wizard John M. Templeton,
cited the Nobel-Prize-winning Soviet exile as a "pioneer in the
renaissance of religion in atheist nations" and a "living symbol
of the continuing vitality of the Orthodox tradition of spiri
tuality."
Solzhenitsyn's address was an extension of his last major public
statement, the 1978 commencement speech at Harvard University, in
which he assailed the West for its materialism, spiritual vap
idity and timidity in the face of Communism.
Last week the
author said that Western secularism has been gaining force since
the late Middle Ages and that this "gradual sapping of strength
from within" is perhaps a more dangerous threat to faith than
violent attack from outside, as under Communist rule.
Although he did not mention him by name, Solzhenitsyn sharply
attacked Protestant Evangelist Billy Graham, last year's Temple
ton prizewinner, for "his deplorable statement that he had not
noticed the persecution of religion in the U.s.s.R." during a
visit last year. Solzhenitsyn also accused the World Council of
Churches for seeming "to care more for the success of revolution
ary movements in the Third World" than for denouncing religious
persecution in the u.s.s.R.
The Templeton award ceremony was held earlier at Buckingham Palace, where
Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's husband, presented the Soviet author
with a scroll, a $170,000 check and the Templeton medal. John M. Templeton,
an American Presbyterian philanthropist, established the award 11 years ago
to stimulate spiritual progress and religious knowledge. A panel of five
judges representing the world's major faiths chooses the winners. United
Press International (UPI) added these comments on Solzhenitsyn's address in
a May 11, 1983 dispatch from London:
In the Soviet bloc, hatred of religion is a principal driving
force of communism, Solzhenitsyn said, and the West is in decline
because the meaning of life is reduced to thepursuitof ha�pi
ness•••. Reviewing the history of the Russian revolution,
Solzhenitsyn said, "The world had never before known a godless
ness as organized, miTitarized and tenaciously malevolent as that
preached
.2Y
Marxism.
Hatred of God is the principal driving
force (of Marxist philosophy), more fundamental than all their
political and economic pretensions.•.."