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IPFS News Link • Religion: Believers

Turn the other Cheek: the Third Way of Christ

• LewRockwell.Com - Yvonne Lorenzo

I respect and frequently enjoy the writing of Fred Reed, whose work I discovered through being a regular visitor to LewRockwell.com. Recently, he wrote about the place of Christianity in history and its current decline in our secular and, although human nature hasn't changed, I would say selfish world; he opined that as Christianity's spiritual and moral influence fades, only its incomparable art, created by distant generations, remains. Nevertheless, I do agree with Mr. Reed's observations here:

Catholicism, in particular, has combined spiritual concerns with a strong intellectual bent. The Christian interest in questions of origin and destiny and man's purpose produced profound thought from the Church Fathers to C. S. Lewis. Today consideration of such matters as death and meaning are held to be in bad taste. Insensible of the wonder and strangeness of existence, we watch Seinfeld reruns and congratulate ourselves on not paying attention to that, you know, like, religious stuff. We live under a sort or Disneyland Marxism and descend ever deeper into complacent ignorance.

And so I see attempts to dismiss Christianity as a mere add-on or style having nothing to do with the achievements of Christendom. This is historical illiteracy. Read any of the thinkers and authors from late Roman times on until recently and you find that they took their faith seriously, that it created their mental worlds. Augustine, Newton, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith more recently, and in the United States the Puritans, Quakers, and so on. Many of these were men of high intellect. Their casual dismissal by professors of sociology is in the nature of monkeys throwing books from a window.

What I find problematic is when he writes and concludes:

In our material and not very thoughtful age the fashion is to point to the crimes committed by the church, to its venality, hypocrisy, and immorality. They existed. Christians behaved, and behave, as horribly as everybody else. But this is usual in human endeavor. As a moral preceptor, Christianity was fraudulent. As a culture and civilization, it was of immense importance. One might note that the atheist dictators–Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot–hold the record for murderousness…

The future? Christianity seems to be dying out. A resurgence is hard to imagine. It simply isn't suited to the modern world.

I don't anticipate convincing Mr. Reed he is in error about Christianity's suitability to the modern world yet I believe he is terribly wrong although the fault is not his; the problem is that frequently Christians did and do not follow the true way of Christ, which requires courage, self-discipline and most of all love, showing lovingkindness and understanding. To the contrary, I would argue in this modern age, in this age of human beings whose god is all too often the state and its controllers, an age where too many worship violence as  both means and end, violence that continually claims ever more victims, the way of Christ—a third way—has never been more appropriate or necessary.

The two obvious ways of response to a hostile or violent situation are first, aggression or second, submission.

Christ's way is neither: it is a third way worthy of consideration and never more relevant in the situation we face today.

In my writing on Desmond Doss, I tried to emphasize that while superficially and transitorily successful, violence inflicts as great a cost on the doer as the victim and the roles can easily be reversed, resulting in a perpetual cycle of violence. I think Benjamin Jowett's introduction to Gorgias is relevant and of course Platonic thought preceded Christ's but parallels it:

The irony of Plato sometimes veils from us the height of idealism to which he soars. When declaring truths which the many will not receive, he puts on an armour which cannot be pierced by them. The weapons of ridicule are taken out of their hands and the laugh is turned against themselves. The disguises which Socrates assumes are like the parables of the New Testament, or the oracles of the Delphian God; they half conceal, half reveal, his meaning. The more he is in earnest, the more ironical he becomes; and he is never more in earnest or more ironical than in the Gorgias. He hardly troubles himself to answer seriously the objections of Gorgias and Polus, and therefore he sometimes appears to be careless of the ordinary requirements of logic. Yet in the highest sense he is always logical and consistent with himself. The form of the argument may be paradoxical; the substance is an appeal to the higher reason. He is uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic, he loses himself in a sort of triumph, while at the same time he retaliates upon his adversaries. From this confusion of jest and earnest, we may now return to the ideal truth, and draw out in a simple form the main theses of the dialogue.

2 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

Right ??? ! Tell that to Bruce Lee, if you can find his grave.

Comment by Molon Labe
Entered on:

Tell that to Bruce Lee!


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