The church thus begins with a benevolent concern for human welfare and ends up as the Grand Inquisitor, all the while still professing to be Christian and to be truly concerned about human welfare. The “hard” laws and sayings of Scripture, and its heavy requirement of responsibility, impose too great a burden on men. Its tender concern for man leads to a more “humane” application of Scripture. The church begins by becoming more the friend of man than the servant of the Lord. His account is both sympathetic and devastating. Dostoyevsky portrayed powerfully the dereliction of the church when it sees itself as man’s hope rather than Christ Himself. The Russian nineteenth-century novelist, Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, had an important section often printed separately as The Grand Inquisitor.
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