For in many things we offend all. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.
The Bible is crystal clear on this matter: right speech is right practice. If we can accomplish the difficult task of speaking rightly, behavior follows as a matter of course. This disquiets modern man. We are so attuned to a legal system which tells us that our speech is free and only our action restricted, that we rankle at the idea of bridling our mouths.
Each time we speak, we announce our ultimate allegiance one way or another. Whether obvious or not, this is what it is that our mouths do. I have failed miserably at this.
In our Hebrew class, we have for the first time a Hebrew teacher who wants us to give answers to very personal questions. As a means of fixing a new word into our heads, she is quite fond of picking a question using the new verb and then asking it to every one of us. Because this post is not a Hebrew lesson, I will proceed from here as though all the conversations below occurred in English.
Three days ago, teaching the word “to wait,” our teacher moved rapidly across the room, asking each student one simple question: “Are you waiting for Messiah?” A few students answered yes. Most answered that they were not.
I was second to last among the students she selected. “Are you waiting for Messiah?”
Unthinkingly, without hesitation, I said that I was not. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized what I monumental betrayal I had just committed. I tried to rationalize that, because she assumed we were Jewish, I certainly was not waiting for Messiah in the sense that she intended, and so my answer was perfectly acceptable. I tried, in one brief second, to justify myself.
But my conscience knew better. It knew that, for what dark reasons I do not know, I had just denied the faith. I lied about my allegiance. My face must have betrayed my inner turmoil, because rather than moving on the next student, our teacher said,
“I cannot tell someone else to wait for Messiah. This sort of thing is a personal feeling each person must decide for himself.”
This knocked the air out of me. Whether she realized it or not, she, who did not share my faith, had rebuked me for my failure to stand up for mine in a powerfully understated way I have never seen from a Christian. She moved on the next kid. I do not remember what he said. I don’t remember anything else from that class period, really. Once you’ve publicly denied your faith, properly conjugating pu’al in the present tense suddenly becomes less interesting.
Two days ago, I was working at a local ministry to children and I happened to strike up a conversation with one of the other volunteers. We discussed schooling, how mine was part homeschooling and part public school, and I tried to sell him on the pros of homeschooling. He hopes one day to have children, and is considering how he wants to educate them. I hope he’ll homeschool them, so I pitched both the academic and moral advantages of homeschooling pretty strongly. And then, in a display of false humility, I lied to his face. I said something along these lines:
“Of course, it’ll ultimately be up to you and your wife to try to figure out what’s best for the kids. That’ll depend on how well equipped you feel to homeschool them, what sort of public school district you’re in, etc. Ultimately it’s up to you.”
Putting wimpy disclaimers of the “I-could-be-wrong” variety, when I know I am most definitely not wrong, is one bit of false humility I probably picked up during my years in the public school system, a bastion of relativistic thinking where the fixed bedrock principle is the denial of fixed bedrock principles. Like a guy who says, “Nice to see you again” to a dreadful and unpleasant human being, I let my warped sense of modesty wrinkle up my convictions and throw them into a trash can. Here’s what I should have said if I were truthful:
“Whether you give your children a solid Christian education or hand them over to a godless and incompetent school system comes ultimately down to one question. Will you give you children to God as his rightful inheritance, or will you wrench them away and give them to Ceasar, sacrificing them on the altar of temporary convenience. If you would hand your children over to destruction, I can only pray that you change your mind or else that God withholds children from you.”
That would be impolite. But it is what I believe. But, in a cowardly attempt not to appear too strait and narrow, I denied the biblical mandate of Deuteronomy 6:7, which makes it clear that it is the responsibility of parents to give their children a thoroughly Christian upbringing.
As long as Christians continue to believe that sending their children off for anti-Christian indoctrination in the public schools is one viable option, as long as Christians let their desire to get along with everyone outweigh their desire to train up their children in the way they should go, Christianity in the United States will suffer defeat after defeat, and generation after generation of spineless, immature Christians.
The fact of the matter, though the dogma of modern pluralism refuses to admit it, is that Christianity is at war with all other systems. If Christians pretend that there are arenas of life where this war is not being fought, such as public schools, they hand victory by default to the enemy. There is no neutrality. Any group of people who believe that there is are in the process of committing group suicide, no matter how much they may protest to the contrary.
Reflecting on that conversation, I realized that only victory or defeat is possible. I am determined to seek only victory. If that means that I become unacceptable in the sight of my enemies and in the sight of those from my camp who preach appeasement, so be it. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. I will place my cultural loyalties with Christianity, and not with those who are furiously working to tear apart everything I believe in. This, in some minds, will make me a narrow-minded fundamentalist. So be it.
In Hebrew class today, our teacher was teaching us how to talk about our identity in Hebrew. She pointed out that she herself was an Israeli immigrant to the United States, and therefore had to decide whether she considered herself Israeli or American first.
She turned to a girl who was an Israeli citizen. “Israeli or American?”
“Israeli first, American second.”
She turned to another girl, “American or Jew?”
“Jew first, American second.”
She turned to a young Jewish man, a member of the American armed forces, “Jew or American?”
“Jew first, American second.”
This young soldier, though he fought in the army of an entity called “United States,” placed his Jewish identity above the country he was willing to die for. Our teacher continued to ask the question around the room, and with only one or two exceptions, every student chose Judaism over Americanism. Whether they believed in the future coming of Messiah or not, their cultural loyalties trumped their citizenship.
“Jew or American?”
A young law school student standing next to me, responded, “First I am a Jew, and secondly I am unusually tall, thanks be to God. I am only American third.” We all chuckled at his half-joking manner, but we understood what he was saying: he believed that being an American paled in significance to being a Jew. His ancestry and even his physical structure were built into the very nature of who he was. His American citizenship was a social construct built on where he happened to be at birth, a formality taken down by some bureaucrat.
I was certain she would ask me whether I was more Jewish or American, at which point I would have to reveal that I was not Jewish. Instead, she paused and asked, rhetorically,
“Does it surprise you how they answer?”
Then the teacher turned to me. Somehow, she knew that the standard question she had been asking would not fit. Even know I don’t know how she so quickly knew I was of a different background from the rest of the class, but she said,
“What about the Christians? Are you a Christian first, or American?”
She caught me off guard. But I knew my answer: “Christian first. Only after that American.”
Her eyebrows shot up in momentary surprise, and then the faintest of smiles crossed her lips. “Okay. Interesting.”
If even our military members consider their ethnic identity to be more important than their allegiance to “America,” whatever that means, then I can tell you one thing for certain: The temporary cease-fire that we dress up as a permanent solution and call democratic pluralism is taking its dying gasps.
Whether we like it or not, we are running headlong into a time when we will have to decide what to replace it with. The electoral is divided and is dividing into sides incapable of any real compromise. The only solution is for large segments of the population to be disenfranchised. The question is not whether we should disenfranchise huge chunks of the populace. That we will do so is inevitable. The question is, Who should we disenfranchise.
I will propose stripping some fairly large segments of the population of their right to vote in the next post. The time is not yet upon us to do so, but sooner or later it will be, and the more thought we have put into the controlled demolition of Western-style democracy, the better the odds we can keep it from descending into tyranny and anarchy.
4 Comments
Great post Mitchell, but I think you’re beating yourself up too much about the Messiah question. I don’t think it’s mere semantics to say that, for Christians, ‘Messiah’ has already come and now we wait for the return of Jesus Christ (who is the Messiah, of course). But the reason we don’t use the language of ‘waiting for Messiah’ is so that we don’t blaspheme and confuse what epoch of history we’re living in.
Thanks, Nate.
When I said I was not waiting, the words themselves were not the problem. The problem was that when I said no, it was with a strong intent to conceal my position, which is why I answered so fast and unthinkingly.
I am confused as to how answered “Yes” would constitute blasphemy, but if it would somehow, I suppose I’m glad I didn’t. I’m not a big fan of blasphemy.
But I’m not losing sleep over it. What I’ve realized recently, though, is that I’ve got a strong urge to be agreeable to whoever I’m speaking to, to the extent that I misrepresent what I’m actually thinking. While I do like to be diplomatic sometimes, I’m not willing to do it at the cost of concealing what I’m thinking.
Since ‘yes’ to the question is technically true to Christian doctrine, that wouldn’t have been blasphemy. What I meant is that using the language of ‘waiting for Messiah’ rather than ‘waiting for the return of Christ’ can signify waiting for Messiah the first time, or waiting for a Messiah other than Jesus, which is blasphemous. Though I understand how it wasn’t about that for you.
Gotcha. Fair enough.