I confess at the outset that I speak of America and the revolutionary option as one who wishes to be informed by, and faithful to, the biblical tradition. I use "confess" here not as an admission of weakness, but as one who would be a "confessor," clearly positioning himself in terms of the myriad beginning points one might choose for serious personal statement. I am increasingly unhappy with an. intensified and highly politicized atmosphere in which one is pressed to distinguish his position by relating it to the prevailing, and usually false, alternatives of political debate. Christians and Jews who take their religious tradition seriously must demonstrate more emphatically the connection between their political posture and the referents in that tradition. For me this means discovering political commitment and style that square with the gospel of the oncoming Kingdom of God, which is what I think the tradition is all about.

That power ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun is not the hypothesis of Chairman Mao alone; it is a conviction common to Richard Nixon, Eldridge Cleaver, Hubert Humphrey, Andre Kosygin, Georges Pompidou, Jerry Rubin, Edward Heath, the editor of the New York Times, Al Capp, and more than several archbishops. To name a few! In fact, across generational and cultural, political and economic frontiers, a belief in the final efficacy of violence seems, ironically, to be one of the few ties that bind us. Century upon century, at least as far back as Cain, violence has been the principal means to public power and vies with sex as a source of stimulation and satisfaction.

Eight years ago an obscure algebra teacher, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, was introduced to the Soviet public by the publication of his gripping story of life in a Stalinist labor camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir (New World), a distinguished liberal literary journal then edited by the poet, Aleksander Tvardovsky. The release of this sensational work was personally approved by both the Party Central Committee and former Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. It followed Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" which denounced the evils of the Stalinist regime and blamed them on "the cult of personality."