I am almost finished reading this nearly 800 page autobiography. There is a great need for this story to be accurately turned into a screenplay and movie. I am struck by the pervasive influence of Communism in higher education, government and media that is strongly documented in this book. There were many Communist sympathizers in the US who were not party members going back to the early 1900s. The driving force of Communism in all its forms was atheism - a strong desire for an economic and governmental system that rejected God and Christian influence in every aspect of life. It was Chambers' realization of the gracious presence and power of God that turned him from Communist espionage and caused him to be a "witness" in order to protect the nation.
The book was written in 1952, but is still relevant today. Sen. Ted Cruz, the newest United States Senator from Texas, has stated that there were 12 Communist professors at Harvard Law School when he attended there in the early 1990s. Witness documents the pervasive influence of Communism at Harvard and in other arenas of higher education. My son has told me that many of his professors at UC Irvine were avowed Communists or Marxists. The same continues to be true at many of our most respected universities.
Harvard attorneys and professors, as well as the chairman of the school of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, all rallied around the accused communist defendants in Witness, using every aspect of their influence to protect Communist spies at the highest levels of the United States government. Communist sympathizers in the media did the same thing. By God's grace, there were those gifted, determined and often isolated individuals whom God empowered to pierce the lies and confusion caused by their communist apologists, which resulted in the conviction of Alger Hiss as a Communist spy, an assistant Secretary of State for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Communists in the US government influenced the policy toward China, allowing Communist China to come into existence. Hiss was influential at the Yalta conference, leading the US to allow the Soviet Union to take so much of eastern Europe. Harry Dexter White, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and head of the World Bank, is portrayed as an active Communist spy and espionage leader for the Soviet Union.
Despite the attacks on McCarthyism and "witch hunts," atheistic, communistic ideas now prevail in much of our government, higher education and media. Witness explains how this happened, and also the solution - a turning back to our Creator and Redeemer as our only real hope. The totalitarian necessity of atheistic and communistic ideas is laid bare in the book. Under Communism, people become no more than functional animals, with no soul and no ultimate hope. They are merely pawns to be manipulated.
Some enlightening quotes from Witness:
p. 444: "No man lightly reverses the faith of an adult lifetime.... He reverses it only with a violence greater than the force of the faith he is repudiating."
p. 489: "I could never be a complete man without God. I suspected that the same fatal deficiency that I had known was at the root of all the troubles of modern man and must result inevitably, as I was to write later on in Time, 'in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action.' Evidence of that mortal incompleteness I found in most of the minds around me." Note: Chamber was a senior editor for Time after he came out of Communism.
p. 491: "No one is so competent a witness to the substance of Christianity as the sinner; no one, except, perhaps, the saint."
p. 505: "... man's occasional lapses from God-seeking end inevitably in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action. Modern man knowns almost nothing about the nature of God, almost never thinks about it, and is complacently unaware that there may be any reason to ...."
p. 506: "The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption has been subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good, and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. . . . The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th century faces. . . . Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanquished from the world."
p. 616: Henry Luce, publisher of Time, and supporter of Chambers, his senior editor: "By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave, the upper class should be fore you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?"
Response by Luce's European friend: "You don't understand the class structure of American society, or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists."
p. 617: In order to encourage Chambers with a word from Scripture, Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, shared John 9:3 with Chambers, concerning why the young man in the passage was born blind: "that the works of God should be made manifest (displayed) in him." Chambers understood that Henry Luce was telling him that he was born spiritually blind, but that He had been given spiritual sight in order that the work of God would be evident to the world through Chambers' life!
p. 700: "At the heart of the crisis of our times lies the cold belief of millions, avowed or unavowed, that the death of religious faith is seen in ... that it has lost its power to move anyone to die for it. I sensed that the deepest meaning of the Case, and the meaning of my life for myself and for all other men, was the degree to which I could be so moved to act (to die for my faith)."
p. 715: "I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist."
p. 720: "In Communism the individual is nothing." This is true of any atheistic perspective. This is in stark contrast to Christianity, where every individual is made in the image of God, and for whom the God-man Jesus Christ, died that the individual may live.
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