Peace in the Face of War

WAR AND ESCHATOLOGY 1
NIKOLAI BERDYAEV
“You shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that you are not troubled:
for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation
shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be
famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes.”
So it is written in the ‘little Apocalypse’ of St Matthew (Matthew 24:6-7)
From Tribal to Universal God The bible is full of narratives about wars. The
books of the Prophets, the summit of ancient Jewish religious teaching, have
as one of their chief subjects, the reconciliation of the terrible horrors and
injustices of wars with Jehovah’s 2 omnipotence, his Divine Providence. For
with the Jewish people especially, there was an acute sense of the almightiness
of God. Great misfortunes in the destiny of the Jewish people were understood
as the inscrutable ways of the Providence of God, Who ultimately led His
people through trials and tribulations, suffering and rebukes for apostasy, to
victory. A similar problem confronts contemporary consciousness. Jehovah
was originally a tribal God, a war-God. Only later did an awareness of a
universal God, a God of the cosmos, emerge. A certain tension arose between
the universal God and the pagan-like, national God. Modern consciousness, in
essence, having returned to ancient paganism, is not far removed from this
ancient pagan consciousness of God that the Jewish people maintained for a
time. Contemporary Germany 3 stands firmly on this ancient pagan mind-set.
From Eschatological to Historical/Apocalyptic World-View The eschatological
problem within Christianity can assume two different perspectives.
All Christian confessions have their eschatological elements; all theological
treatises have their eschatological chapters, although these eschatologies
may have been downplayed at times. But the problem can be stated
differently. A thorough eschatological understanding of Christianity is
possible. Many academic historians of Christianity, free of confessional bias,
insist that Christianity without eschatology is simply not credible. In any
case, early Christianity was eschatological.
1
This article originally appeared in the journal Put’ {The Way}, No 61 Paris 1939, edited by
Berdyaev 1925-1940.
2
This was the generally accepted transliteration for the Name of God (the Hebrew tetragrammatton:
YHVH) in academic circles during the epoch in which the author wrote.
3
In 1939, at the time of writing
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