The quality of public discourse in this country is growing more pathetic by the day, especially among Christians.  We nitpick everyone we dislike and disavow people based on one little thing,  despite a life-long faith of incredible accomplishments, like many of these Civil War Generals(oh good now you snowflakes can stop reading), who were each a better representation of Christ than any Christian leaders today.  And since we see all the falls from glory based on the smallest of failings, we just lay low and keep lowering the standard.  Maybe if we make ‘not judging’ our religion no one will notice us.   Then we can all be happy in our sin. No one will put us on the outs with the big clique.

Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513 , Albrecht Dürer. “The ‘Christian knight’, a tireless warrior who cannot be deterred from his path by Death with an hourglass on an old nag, nor the Devil.”

We have allowed the World to relegate our ‘faith’ to a small corner of our secret, private individual lives during a few hours on Sunday.  If it ever makes it’s way to the public square, then it becomes ‘religious zealotry’, and then we are basically Muhammedan terrorists.  And the World doesn’t even have to enforce this with peer pressure.  Fake Christians do it for them.  And having become friends with the world they are not able to comprehend Christ’s words ““If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”  People acting out their Christianity in the public square will be hated and persecute, especially in a culture as evil as ours.  And when they are hated, do you think Google searches of them are going to reveal truth?  You trust Google and it’s women abusing, fetal-murdering, truth abusing, friend-of-China-for-monetary-gain culture?  You think you are going to get something besides whatver minor flaw they choose to ‘discredit’ the person.  They do the same thing on the whole with scripture.  They take some evil our culture loves like homosexualists, and then find a verse that sounds bad, and voila the whole Bible is junk.  Then many Christians talk about “the God of the Old Testament”, maybe that will get us off the hook.  “I’m a New Testament hip, modern, postmodern, woke Christian, so no gay bashing here.”  “See I can be friends with the world.”  “Please like me.”

You really think Christianity is about getting along with this evil culture spreading infanticide and sexual perversion?  Spreading all these -isms like environmentalism?  Then when someone dares to debate, argument becomes the enemy.  As if this Christian faith isn’t a War as Paul often said.  Jesus said he came to bring the sword.  And he needs to bring it to the church again, separating those in love with their sin, from the Orthodox.  It’s all right there in Matthew 18.  We should care about those who are in sin.  We should sort it out and pursue them. Maybe we were wrong or maybe they really were in sin.   What we bind on earth is bound in heaven.  What we do here has eternal consequences. We are supposed to decide who is in the Church, who can come to the table and who can not. Hold a trial like Peter in Acts 5.  You don’t just walk away with limp-wristed talk about how you are praying for me and “I hope you find enlightenment”. And all the other passive-aggressive things which are just cowardly.  And ammount to nothing more than judging in every bad sense of the word.  Do something, fight it out like a man, like Paul or Jesus.

It’s going to be a long road.  But start educating yourself.  Read the classics they don’t want you to read because of such excuses as “they are just dead white males” “because, slavery” and all the other nonsense which is really just hatred of Jesus the Christ.

Read Witness by Whittaker Chambers.  Understand the war Marx waged on Christianity.  Go to Summit Ministries and take the worldview test and see how much has crept in that you don’t even realize.  Question the motives of everyone of your public(government) school teachers.  Where they attempting to glorify Christ in History, Literature, Math etc as they taught?  These things do matter.  Jesus is Lord over all, not just our private feeling.  He isn’t just a ticket to heaven.  He is a way of Life.  Read Vaclav Klaus or any number of other people talking about the Global Warming farce like Mark Steyn.  Get a book on logic, read Richard Weaver’s books on Rhetoric.  Then have real debates.  Do some real thinking.  Take every thought captive.  Be a real Christian.

Once upon a time there was a poet, I know not when, I know not where, I remember not who.  He was before an audience reading one of his poems. When he had finished someone asked him what it meant.—and he read it again.  I just love that story I feel the same way about so many things.  The poem was the best way he could express what the poem meant.  The meaning was the poem.  Reading it again was the shortest, most accurate, most beautiful way of expressing what it meant.  Anything else would not due.  It would be to leave something behind.  To dissect it would be to vivisect your beloved family pet in an attempt to understand why he was beloved.  You would destroy him.  Part of the understanding is a thing inexplicable. 

A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog. Oil painting by Emile-Edouard Mouchy, 1832.

A woman told me she wanted to copy the colors of my house and I was instantly off contemplating the millions of factors that went into making it beautiful.  A list of colors just seemed vulgar, for that is not where the enchantment resided.  I couldn’t give her what she wanted.  At some level she would be disappointed.  So I suppose I chose to disappoint here now rather than later.  I gave her the first step in the journey, but who knows where she will end up.

I think this may be how Jesus responded to people.  He says that parables concealed meaning.  They can’t be broken down.  You have to have the right heart to inculcate the truth they are brimming with.  If you don’t have that, there is no help for you, there are no smaller bites, no introductory course.  The magic isn’t there. When we turn them into platitudes that apply to every situation, to our situation, they die.  This is especially true of our reading, it is modern mechanistic.  We want formulas and diagrams that work.  Which is why C. S. Lewis compared machines to magic.  Both get things done, they exude power over the world.  But the Logos, truth in word, should work the other way round.  We don’t manipulate it, we should allow it to remake us.  And this is a complex thing, we are body, soul and mind and sinful nature.  We don’t like changing much, we like our sin.  We could learn things by just being told, by using our minds.  But often it requires a sort of living parable or metaphor for us to learn.  God puts us in situations which go to all aspects of our being, and force us to learn or make a choice to learn.  Often we fail the test and go off to worse evil and he leaves us to ourselves.  But he made the world to do this, situations can teach us, minister to our soul, feed our bodies.  Good art can help us do this better, by taking us into another world we can reflect on our own world and become better men.  Nathan does this fofr David when he exercises David’s kingly wisdom, without revealing the bias David has for himself.  Jesus also did this as he put people in situations that forced them to rethink their world the rich young ruler, the woman he called a dog.  These were not theological debates, these were tests of all that they had built themselves to be, their whole person.  And they also make great stories to tell other. To put us in those situations too.

It’s an odd place we find ourselves in philosophically today, because this modern view of the world is going away, but only partly.  We want to each possess a unique, self in many senses of the word.   We want to remake our bodies with tattoos and piercings and crazy clothes and gender reassignment surgery and the bastardization of language.  But in many ways our thinking is more homogenous than ever.  We want to put people in two categories us and them, good and bad.  We love our systems.  We don’t follow professors or wise thinkers, we go and get degrees in programs.  We get jobs in companies, with titles.  They plug any old person into the system.  The particulars of the person matter little.  In fact when they do come out it is often a problem, “it’s not professional”.  What a hideous word, dehumanizing.  It is a modern word, and it’s strange that we keep it around in this sea of hyper individuality.  And we even apply it to churches, pastors are professionals?  How sick.  Absolutely sick. Churches are now seen as business and not living organisms.  We want to make every field of study and every profession into a science instead of an art.

And yet even the sciences are not that modern in the way they really work themselves out.  The average person has never read a scientific study, they just read the story told by the person in the lab or the journalist discussing the person and his lab.  There is an art to solving complex mathematical problems, or using math to solve engineering problems.  There is an art to programming, to say nothing of all the jokes,  because nothing is perfect, especially when dealing with humans.  People ask me how I fixed their computer or how I built a software solution.  And again I am back to staring off into space.  It doesn’t work that way.  We need to get back to the art in things.  As Chesterton said, when things go wrong you don’t need a practical man, you need an impractical man.  The practical man can not imagine things going wrong, only the way things ought to go.  It takes the impractical man, the poet to venture outside the system and dare to see the unseen, the ghost in the machine.  To reenchant what has been taken from us by the modern machine.  It just can’t seem to participate.  And so I will continue to offend people with vague answers.  I will continue to drive people nuts asking too many questions to get to all aspects of a thing to really understand and appreciate it.  That is to love and not vivisect.