"God has so arranged that men should be corrected by men".880 But is it not a defeat for one who tries to correct people's lives according to the Gospel that his example and his words will remain fruitless? Is it not a defeat for the Church that the people to whom she is sent for Christ's witness "will not receive sound teaching, but... will turn to fables" (2 Tim. 4:3-4)?

Deacon Alexander is indignant: the Church is the Body of Christ, and therefore there can be no question that it can be "broken." Why, the Lord likened ancient Israel to the apple of His eye. The Lord is not only the Head of the New Testament Church. He was also the Head of the Church of the Old Testament. He was the invisible Ruler of Israel. But were there not catastrophes in the history of that Israel? Did not the prophets consider the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the captivity of their people by pagan empires, to be defeats and failures? Did not the prophets call falls falls, and defeats defeats, and defeats defeats? Well, remember at least "Lamentations of Jeremiah"! "Lord... Look at our reproach. Our heritage has passed to strangers, our houses to foreigners... Mount Zion is desolate, and foxes walk upon it" (Lamentations 5:1-2:18).

What do you call what happened to a group of people who for centuries had power and respect in society, controlled school education and the main currents of culture, put troops and human enthusiasm at the service of their ideas, achieved complete unanimity in society and put signs of their ideology at all crossroads... And then we see that these same people have turned out to be an insignificant minority, that the majority hates and despises them with sincere enthusiasm, that the army, the police, the schools that once served them have now turned against them, that there is no place in culture for their ideas, and in cities and even houses for their symbols? Is the word "defeat" inappropriate to describe what happened?

Do we consider it a victory if a priest manages to enter a secular school and tell children about Christ there? And if a priest is expelled from school, is this not a defeat for the Church? In the same way, our entire Church will one day be expelled from "polite society"! And the fact that it will be considered "decent" not to associate oneself "with these Orthodox" will also be our defeat.

The "little flock", of course, will remain. And it will fulfill the words that the "gates of hell" (let me remind you, by the way, that the "gates" in biblical language are the meeting place of the council of elders, i.e. a kind of "think tank" of the city, and not the periphery, as it is today) will not prevail against the Church. But He Who desires the salvation of all, would like to see His children among the "more than the sand of the sea"... But people will not give the Lord this joy. And this is also our defeat.

This is an undoubted theological perspective. But how the current times relate to it is a completely different question. Perhaps even now, by our behavior, our silence or, on the contrary, by the obsessive intonation of our sermons, multiplied by helplessness in the selection of arguments, we are laying in the public consciousness that reserve of distrust and hostility towards us, which will soon explode the possibility of the normal life of the Church.881 Or perhaps God's Providence will postpone our final defeat for several generations or even millennia. After all, in the first place, not every disease is a disease that leads to death. And, secondly, it often happens that the patient feels better in the last hours before death.

But the position of Deacon Alexander is astonishing: since Orthodoxy is now being revived in Russia, it means that we are not afraid of the Antichrist (and the apocrypha is given that "the Russian Tsar will be feared by the Antichrist himself"). Well, yes – the "end of the world" will not happen in one, separate country...

Deacon Alexander Lisikov teaches: "I will allow myself to remark to Deacon Kuraev: if before a battle with an enemy who wants to enslave your homeland and kill you... Someone would agitate you not to take up arms—what would you say to him, and what would you call this man? – ..! That is it."882

In fact, I have an answer that I am ready to put in place of an ellipsis with an exclamation mark. If the "someone" suggested by Fr. Alexander had told me not to take up the flamethrower, for it is not the business of a clergyman to burn people alive, but to advise me to defend my relatives with prayer and preaching, I would thank him for his advice. If this man, seeing my determination to go to the front, would have advised me not to sit in the cockpit of the MIG-29 in such a case, I would have thanked him for this advice. Well, in fact, if I, who only once entered the cockpit of the pilots of a civilian aircraft, are entrusted with an expensive MIG and immediately sent into battle, then I will ruin myself and rob the Motherland.

So I say: since we, today's people of the Church, do not have experience of political struggle and intrigue, then it is better not to hope that we will outmaneuver everyone in politics. So you should not accuse me of betrayal and exclaim: "So what does the Orthodox (?) Deacon Andrei Kuraev – to non-resistance to evil?" But resistance with the means that the Church really has. In fact, I remember that Someone called for non-resistance to evil by force, before me. Could it be that the deacon of Alma-Ata had forgotten – Who exactly? And in general, it is unwise to resist with a force that does not exist.

Let us imagine that it depends on us to determine the military plans of the Russian army for the spring-summer campaign of 1942. The year 1941 was catastrophic for us. If the Germans are able to strike the same blow in the new year, we will not be able to resist. However, we know that the enemy's forces have also been exhausted. In any case, he will no longer be able to attack simultaneously on all fronts. And how important is it in this situation to know where exactly he decided to deliver the main blow - on Moscow, on Leningrad or in the south? If we had had such information in the spring of 1942, maybe our armies would not have rolled back all the way to Stalingrad during the summer...

But what is there to guess about the past! Today we know that the main citadel that we must defend and which is the target of anti-Christian forces is our faith. Money, state power, ideology and politics are already almost completely controlled by forces, to put it mildly, non-ecclesiastical. But there is also Orthodoxy. And if we can keep it, then the defeats on other fronts will not be final. So what can be our response to the "machinations of the Freemasons"? Let's learn the catechism! This is an area in which everything depends on our diligence and our love for the truth. No one will interfere with us here. And this will make us independent of the world of newspapers and sects. Here's what I'm proposing. Is this also the advice of a traitor to the Church?

If you want to help Serbia, learn to respond to American sectarians! Do you want to wash away the shame of the Chechen war? Keep in mind so many words of the Gospel and Biblical that, like St. Cyril, Equal-to-the-Apostles, you will be able to explain to Muslims the superiority of our faith in words. Or does Deacon Alexander know another way for Orthodox communities to survive in Islamic Kazakhstan?

My opponent was particularly indignant at my reminder of the words of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov): "Do not attempt with your feeble hand to stop the general retreat."