{"id":5587,"date":"2019-09-30T04:10:57","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/courage-in-the-orthodox-church\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:10:57","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:10:57","slug":"courage-in-the-orthodox-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/courage-in-the-orthodox-church\/","title":{"rendered":"Courage In the Orthodox Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The leaders of the Orthodox Church showed more courage in dealing with the vigorous assault on religion than did the leaders of AUCECB [Evangelical churches in Russia].  What showed particular courage was Aleksy&#8217;s public pronouncement in February 1960 at a Conference of the Soviet Public for Disarmament.  After listing all the wonderful things the Church had given to Russia, the patriarch stated:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yet, despite all this, Christ&#8217;s Church, whose very aim is human well-being, is suffering insults and attacks from humans&#8230;. Jesus Christ himself predicted indestructibility of the Church when he said:  The gates of hell will not overcome the Church.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The great irony is that it was Metropolitan Nikolai, the sycophant to the Kremlin on foreign policy, who had written the patriarch&#8217;s speech.  Also a factor in his falling out with the Soviet overlords was a collection of his unpublished sermons which responded strongly to atheist attacks on religion. Such is the mystery of life that within the same breast can beat both the heart of a coward and a man of courage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The leaders of the Orthodox Church showed more courage in dealing with the vigorous assault on religion than did the leaders of AUCECB [Evangelical churches in Russia]. What showed particular courage was Aleksy&#8217;s public pronouncement in February 1960 at a Conference of the Soviet Public for Disarmament. After listing all the wonderful things the Church [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2959,5,2958,35,49,1462],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}