Thank you for writing this! It has provided me a better understanding of my own naive/nascent thoughts on this subject. I am very much in line with your thinking on this but hadn't realized how deep and complex this subject is.
A Christian who inveighs against “unnecessarily disrupt[ing] the traditions, the mores and life-ways, of the broad mass of the population” has forgotten the face of his Father. How can such a “Christianity” be compatible with the words and the example of the Lord Jesus, who charged His followers to let the dead bury their own dead and to call no man on Earth “Father,” and who let no human custom stand in the way of serving those whom human mores had cast aside, even unto death on a Cross at the hands of those angered by His disruptions? People like Vermeule and Ahmari, those Grand Inquisitors in every sense of the term, have no interest in the Gospel that puts everything human to the question, that does not cease to disrupt as long as the last are not yet first and the first are not yet last. For them, the Cross of Christ is nothing more than a pole upon which to hoist the Imperial eagle, a coat of thin and chipping paint over the brutal, unjust “stability” of Ancient Rome. What they are pleased to call their “Christianity” is nothing but blasphemy from top to bottom.
The Gospel truth, in the most literal sense, is that human societies are by their nature suffused with sin, built out of suffering and death the way an igloo is built out of snow. How could it be otherwise, when death is the means by which evolution itself works? The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature. If we instead equate God’s Kingdom with the ocean of evil that is a human culture, as we do when we speak of “Christendom,” then we have exchanged the Glory of the Immortal God for the image of a mere naked ape.
This essay is a beautiful example of why stories are so much more powerful than ideologies.
Thank you for writing this! It has provided me a better understanding of my own naive/nascent thoughts on this subject. I am very much in line with your thinking on this but hadn't realized how deep and complex this subject is.
This is very similar to the approach I support when I talk with my pastor friends.
A Christian who inveighs against “unnecessarily disrupt[ing] the traditions, the mores and life-ways, of the broad mass of the population” has forgotten the face of his Father. How can such a “Christianity” be compatible with the words and the example of the Lord Jesus, who charged His followers to let the dead bury their own dead and to call no man on Earth “Father,” and who let no human custom stand in the way of serving those whom human mores had cast aside, even unto death on a Cross at the hands of those angered by His disruptions? People like Vermeule and Ahmari, those Grand Inquisitors in every sense of the term, have no interest in the Gospel that puts everything human to the question, that does not cease to disrupt as long as the last are not yet first and the first are not yet last. For them, the Cross of Christ is nothing more than a pole upon which to hoist the Imperial eagle, a coat of thin and chipping paint over the brutal, unjust “stability” of Ancient Rome. What they are pleased to call their “Christianity” is nothing but blasphemy from top to bottom.
The Gospel truth, in the most literal sense, is that human societies are by their nature suffused with sin, built out of suffering and death the way an igloo is built out of snow. How could it be otherwise, when death is the means by which evolution itself works? The true Kingdom of God is a utter repudiation of all of this, an invasion of it from outside and above by a loving Power that bears an infinite qualitative distinction from sinful humanity and death-dealing nature. If we instead equate God’s Kingdom with the ocean of evil that is a human culture, as we do when we speak of “Christendom,” then we have exchanged the Glory of the Immortal God for the image of a mere naked ape.