Arm yourself with your creed

Get your own dirt

The devil is a one-trick pony.

In the Consolatio Philosophiae from Boethius, Lady Philosophy’s dress is described as having had pieces torn from it by violent men. This is my preferred analogy for ideologues who have one good idea and try to make it everything. How can you tell ideologues? They don’t have coherent principles or systems of giving and receiving honor: instead, they operate in loyalties and disloyalties displayed in certain ways of talking. You must demonstrate your loyalty to the cause, or be cast out. But no idea passes the totalitarian test—no non-idea either.

Totalitarianism can, in part, be blamed on the presence of the gospel—ideology is an empty, envious lie wishing it were the real story. The devil, in a Promethean fit, brought his own scrap, ripped from the truth that humans are to become like God, and sought to foist it on the human race. Humans have been doing the same to each other ever since. Our own age is not exempt.

What Tom Holland says here about Darwinism re-enshrining an ethos where “the strong will prevail over the weak” in Christendom [society largely governed by Christian principles] is telling. Why are we so susceptible to this ethos? This cult of the fittest presents a significant threat to too many Christians: they would prefer that living the faith means the end of struggle and fight. Other Christians have stared into the abyss for long enough and, hair of the dog, have been possessed by a spirit of rugged, tough-talking individualism, leaving us with a Jesus-John Wayne Frankenstein’s monster.

But the real trick is in how this lie proved so pervasive. There are too many Christians, especially in America’s history, who have conceded the [Nietzschean?] accusation that Christianity consists of the pallid, the limp, the broken and frail. I have not finished Dominion yet, but this concession contributes largely to the ‘victim olympics’ we see in America and the Western world more broadly. The true believers, they say, are those who can see and tout their many frailties.

But Christianity consists NOT of the pallid, the limp, the broken and frail merely. The pale-Galilean sentiment is demonic doctrine. Christianity consists of the weak, yes, led in parade as captives of the mighty Jesus Christ! Our weakness is overwhelmed and outweighed by His strength—that’s the gospel. Us, and Him! We should not remake Jesus in the image of His poor followers, or yoke Him with some strongman—in Jesus’ parable, the strongman is bound and plundered. Do you still want to a strongman?

Jesus’ sufficiency lies in His supremacy.