MIRCEA GELU BUTA, The Refugee Crisis and the Christian Hope
The secular western world leaves at present the impression of vulnerability that has occurred in a
prosperous citadel due to its dependence on that wellfare in front of the waves of desperate people
looking for shelter, trying to escape death and destruction as a result of a complicated but not inevitable
geopolitical situation and constituting anything but a menace, as history has demonstrated
on repeated occasions.
The spiritual thesaurus our Christian ethics is based on, contains the in depth description of such
events that go with humanity since its very beginnings, of which one can fi nd plentiful testimony in
The Old and New Testament.
The will to fi nd the necessary courage to follow the guidance of these teachings leads easily to the
discovery that living by the commands of the scripture is far less dangerous than ignoring them, a
fact proven by the ambiguity and confusion of the sociological conclusions as well as by the political
unrest. The majority of approaches that have tried, one way or the other, to ignore Christian ethics
have turned, faster than their authors have expected, into wastelands that lead nowhere.
The attitude of the practising Christian supposes, above all, the effort of assertion, the spiritual law
becoming a priority overruling any other interests. This is obviously a decision that has to be taken
individually before it is made public. As in many other circumstances of our history we are met by
an outstreched hand, and this hand cannot help us unless we accept it.
KEYWORDS: postmodernism, migration, Christian spirituality

MIRCEA GELU BUTA