The Church In Wartime

 ... needs to have a little hair on its chest. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.

Mark 2:23-28:

As he was passing through a field of grain on the sabbath, his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain. At this the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?” 

He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry? How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat, and shared it with his companions?”

Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

I just finished reading The Boniface Option by Andrew Isker and it really spoke to me. It's an edgy, in-your-face rallying cry for Christians to fight what Andrew calls Trashworld. I like the name. Trashworld is indeed what we're facing.

In Trashworld, beautiful young women, designed by God for husbands, families and children, are mutilated and poisoned by people with smiling faces. At our local, Catholic university, USD, this is celebrated.

The Boniface Option put into book form what I've been feeling and trying to express here. It opposes Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option, which calls for a strategic retreat into cultural bunkers in the form of neighborhoods of like-minded, Christian survivalists. I blogged extensively on The Benedict Option and my objection to it was that it wasn't offensive-minded.

At the Battle of Omdurman, a British force armed with Maxim guns defeated a larger force of Islamic rebels armed with some rifles and lots of pointy things. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about it with this snippet.

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

That is absolutely the way things are with Christians today.

How can you have total superiority of argument and crawl into a bunker? You only run and hide when you're outgunned. We aren't outgunned as the photo above shows. You want to surrender to that?

Isker makes another salient point, something that I've felt, but never put into words. You cannot run from Trashworld. It is coming to get you, to kill what you believe. It will follow you no matter where you hide. I'm willing to bet some serious money that the State of California will make an effort to force all schools, including Catholic grade schools, to teach gender theory. The Benedict Option fails because it assumes there's a safe haven. There is none.

Andrew is a young man. Well, he's younger than me, that is, and he's got a young man's sensibilities. His recommendations are broad and sweeping, which is fine. When he's older, they will be more refined. It's all good. He sees the problem for what it is and his recommendations are aggressive, which is what we need. You can't take Guadalcanal if you don't have a whole bunch of Marines and Isker is the Christian version of a Marine.

That brings me to the Gospel passage that started this post.

After reading The Boniface Option, I read some of Max Lucado's When God Whispers Your Name. If you ever wondered what Christian erectile dysfunction sounds like in prose form, Max Lucado is your answer. A friend of mine tried it and couldn't finish it. It is a collection of simpering, wimpy platitudes. It reminded me of the excellent book, A Touch Of Wonder by Arthur Gordon, but Lucado doesn't have Gordon's authentic, Southern charm. Gordon's book is the real deal, Lucado's book is the version you get when you find old copies of Reader's Digest at the dentist's office.

Then I went and read the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has an edge. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. Read the passage with the proper voice inflection, "Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?" It is full of scorn. He's sneering at them. It is never read that way from the pulpit on Sunday. Instead, we get the standard pablum about how God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

Jesus didn't suffer fools. If we are to be Christ-like, then Isker is right and we should treat the sadistic Mengeles mutilating our children like ... well, like sadistic Mengeles.

Here's some more Mengelean hideousness for you.

Click on that to make it legible and read the whole thing. It is the testimony from a young man who has gone through bottom surgery. That's where a doctor from the local Nazi death camp slashes a wound into your abdomen and puts a piece of colon there which requires regular treatment with antibiotics and a daily wound stretching regimen so the wound doesn't heal. If the wound heals, you won't have a "vaginal" abdomen wound any more.

Meanwhile, God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

We're a wartime Church, getting firebombed by the Nazis and we get God is love, love is love and love is good and we must love and love is soft and we must be soft and love love love.

Andrew Isker says screw that.

And so do I.