Blog: awalkingdelight
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
The Hiding Place
By: Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill
Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
This is the life story of Corrie ten Boom and her experience in WWII. It is an autobiography written with the help of the Sherrills who have written or co-authored over 30 books translated into more than 40 languages. Though Ms. ten Boom and the Sherrills have passed, “The Hiding Place” is a paean to religious belief that has sustained civilization.
The belief eulogized in “The Hiding Place” is Christian, but it could be any faith. Whether Islamism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Caodaism, humanism, naturalism, “…ism” is belief in something greater than oneself.
Corrie ten Boom’s biography illustrates the opposing forces of a human need for belief in something greater than oneself. As noted by other authors, the civilizations that exist today would never have grown without belief in an “…ism” greater than the individual, family, or tribe. Corrie ten Boom is a believer in the Christian Bible and its Word. That belief drew her and her family to protect Jews from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
The rise of Nazism in Germany was a political ideology, secular in its origin, and loosely based on belief in science.
Science is a systematic method of gaining knowledge about nature, its causes and consequence. Like every belief system, science is based on human cognition which can lead or mislead humanity. Neither science nor religion have omniscient or omnipresent insight to the nature of the universe because of the human mind’s limitations and interpretations of facts and events. Religion, like science, can lead and mislead civilization because of human limitation and interpretation.
Thankfully, Corrie ten Boom’s family’s belief in the Bible led them to aid Jews when they were persecuted by the false science of German Naziism.
The relevance of “The Hiding Place” resonates today in the conflict between Palestinians and Jews in Israel and Palestine. One can see a conflict between religion and science in the tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza. Both Hamas and the Jews use their religious beliefs and the science of war to kill each other. As in all war, there is no winner. The death of 6,000,000 Jews in WWII and the slaughter of Jews at the festival in Israel are horrid and unforgivable, but can they or should they be used as justification for the horror of what is happening in Gaza?
She follows her religious belief to do what she could to save her Catholic family and Netherland’s Jews from Nazi’s societal and science ignorance. What forgiveness there is in Corrie ten Boom’s book is only in the acceptance of the Word in her Bible. The power of belief in science or religion both leads and misleads humanity. Humans may not forgive but they often forget.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 