Peace and War

“Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”

The perennial burden of the believer in a faithless, self-interested, predatory and relentlessly aggressive world is that he simply does not fit in, no matter how hard he or she may try. If our hearts are truly in the process of being remade in the likeness of the Lord Jesus, we are bound to find ourselves emotionally at odds with our co-workers, neighbors and especially the power structures of the societies in which we live.

How can we not? We are of a completely different disposition, and it goes right down to our spiritual genetics.

Antisemitic and Deplorable

I couldn’t help being reminded of Psalm 120 on Tuesday as I read Doug Wilson’s weekly letter column. That man has enemies. CNN recently interviewed Doug and other members of his church, then ran the results on prime time TV. This predictably resulted in an inundation of mail from secular liberal viewers kneejerk-reacting to the horror of Christians expressing perfectly orthodox views right out of the Bible.

Accordingly, the first twelve letters Doug received were nothing short of scathing. Bonnie wrote:

“I am a Jew and I find your view and purpose to be antisemitic and deplorable. Oh I am also a gay woman and my mission is to get rid of any man who thinks like you. You are disgusting!!!!!”

Zizzie added:

“My wish for you is a long and excruciatingly painful end … I wanna watch you suffer.”

And those are just the comments I don’t have to edit to run them here.

I Like to Watch

How does Bonnie plan to “get rid” of Doug? She says she’s making it her mission in life. Some not-completely-unreasonable people would take that as a threat. Zizzie is a little mellower. She doesn’t need to be personally involved in “ending” Doug, but she’d sure like to watch.

Bonnie and Zizzie are “for war”, and there are millions more like them out there, mostly women and substantially whiter and more left-leaning than average. You can’t placate them, you can’t explain yourself to them, and the only reason you don’t run into them is that they don’t know you exist. They live in the little bubble-culture that firmly believed Kamala Harris was electable in today’s US, and found out last November to their horror that most of their neighbors are not like them. A few hundred amiable Presbyterians determined to make an impact on their local community might not look like the Visigoths sacking Rome to you and me, but to Bonnie and Zizzie, they’re way worse, assuming we take them at their word.

Should we? Maybe not. But can you be 100% confident all that vitriol is empty rhetoric? I can’t.

The Crux of the Matter

The accusations of antisemitism are particularly funny, since young Christian Nationalists regularly charge Doug with being a craven Jew lover, a Mossad plant, and maybe even a secret Hebrew himself. His position on Israel, notwithstanding his Replacement Theology, is much the same as mine: right down the middle of the road where both sides of any purely binary argument can see you and hate you for your failure to fall into line.

Like me, Doug is big on the biblical roles of men and women. Why? Because members of both sexes are far more content, not to mention far more efficient and productive, doing the things for which God designed them. We are for peace in the home, peace in the extended family, peace in the workplace and peace in society, and we believe the Bible teaches us how to get there by submitting our wills to Christ and following the teaching of the word of God. Those who have gone the opposite direction with their choices in life understandably find this “disgusting” and “deplorable” because any success we achieve through the fruit of obedience to the Divine Wisdom exposes the emptiness of the alternatives.

What’s left? To get rid of anyone who thinks like that. To the men of Sodom, the simple expression of a moral viewpoint was deeply offensive. Their instinctive reaction to Lot’s polite and tentative amendment of their conduct was, “Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” In context, they meant they had in mind for him something worse than homosexual gang rape. That’s not anything I want to think about.

Okay then. I guess it’s on.

Living Peaceably with Some

“Live peaceably with all,” wrote the apostle Paul. Note that he prefaced it with the words, “If possible, so far as it depends on you …” Sometimes accommodation with evil isn’t possible, and sometimes putting out a brushfire doesn’t depend on you. “They hated me without a cause,” wrote the psalmist. That prophecy was fulfilled in the person of Christ, says John.

There will be Christians — who am I kidding, there are a bunch of them — convinced Doug and his fellow congregants brought the outrage of militant lefties on themselves by agreeing to be interviewed and saying in plain words what they believe the Bible teaches. To these folks, living “peaceably” means “lie down and take it” when the issues that are important to their fellow believers are not equally critical to them. Why push the roles of the sexes? Why talk about Israel? Why do you have to be proselytizing all the time? Well, because they asked, and faithfulness to Christ demands an honest response.

Okay, fine. Where do you draw the line exactly? I expect you draw it well north of where the outrage-mongers do, even if you’re well south of Doug and his ilk. That’s if you’re genuinely Christian at all.

If you’re not, the time to get off the bus before the mob turns it upside-down is rapidly approaching.