Culture War Part 3

Peter Kreeft's Culture War Part 3:

"...But, you may object, is not the God of the Bible compassionate? He is. But He is not compassionate to Moloch and Baal and Ashtaroth and to the Canaanites who do their work, who cause their children to pass through the fire. Perhaps your god is compassionate to the work of human sacrifice—the god of your demands, the god of your religious preference—but not the God of the Bible. Read the book. Look at the data.

But is not the God of the Bible revealed most fully and finally in the New Testament rather than in the Old? In sweet and gentle Jesus rather than wrathful and warlike Jehovah? The opposition is heretical. It is the old Gnostic–Manichean–Marcionite heresy, as immortal as the demons who inspired it. Our data refuted; our live data, which is divine data and talking data. Thus His name is the “Word” of God. This data refuted the heretical hypothesis in question when He said, “I and the Father are one.”

The opposition between nice Jesus and nasty Jehovah denies the very essence of Christianity—Christ’s identity as the Son of God. For let’s remember our biology as well as our theology. Like father, like son. That Christ is no more the Son of that God than Barney is the son of Hitler.

Will the real Jesus please stand up? He does so gladly. The gospels are pop-up books; open their pages and he leaps out. Let’s dare to look at our data. Let’s see what sweet and gentle Jesus actually said about the sins of the Canaanites, about the culture of death.

Many centuries ago, those Canaanites used to perform their liturgies of human sacrifice, their infanticidal devotions to the devil, in the Valley of Gehenna, or Ge Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem. It was a vast abortuary, like our culture. When the people of God entered the Promised Land, the Prince of Peace commanded them to kill the supernatural cancer of the Canaanites. Even after that was done, the Jews dared not live in that valley or even set foot there. They used it to burn their garbage. So the devil’s promised land became God’s garbage dump. And the fires never went out, day or night. (No matches, remember.)

Now, sweet and gentle Jesus chose this place, Gehenna, as his His image for hell. And he told many of the leaders of His chosen people that they were headed there and that they were leading many others there with them. He said to them, “Truly, truly I say to you: The IRS agents and White House interns go into the Kingdom of God before you.” That’s the modern dynamic equivalence translation. He said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones [that] believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” That is our data. That is the real Jesus. And that is the Jesus who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I do not think he has started manufacturing Styrofoam millstones.

But, is not God a lover rather than a warrior? No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is, what the Love that God is is. Love is at war with hate and betrayal and selfishness and all Love’s enemies. Love fights; ask any parent.
Yuppie love, like puppy love, may be merely compassion [in] the fashionable world today, but father-love and mother-love is war. God is love indeed, but what kind of love? Back to our data. Does Scripture call Him “God the puppy” or “God the yuppie” or is it “God the Father”? In fact, every page of this Book bristles with spear-points, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20. The road from paradise lost to paradise regained is soaked in blood. At the very center of the story is a cross, a symbol of conflict if there ever was one. The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in Scripture and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is almost never present in the religious education of my students at BC. “BC,” by the way, stands for “Barely Catholic.”

Whenever I speak of this, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have. They have gone through the wardrobe to meet the lion and the witch. Past the warm fuzzies—the fur coats of psychology disguised as religion—into the cold snows of Narnia, where the white witch is the lord of this world and Aslan is not a tame lion but a warrior. A world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the kitten. Welcome back from the moon, kids.

Who doesn’t know we’re at war? Who doesn’t know that the barbarians are at the gates? No, inside the gates, writing the scripts of the TV shows and movies and public school textbooks and juridical decisions. Only the ones in the lunar bubble of academia or the lunar bubble of establishment religious education programs, with their unprofitable prophets who cry, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace; the ones who compose those dreary, drippy little liberal lullabies we endure as contemporary hymns.

The drug dealers know we’re at war. The prostitutes know we’re at war. The beggars in Calcutta know we’re at war. The Polish grandmothers know we’re at war. The Cubans know we’re at war. The Native Americans knew we were at war—until we gave them firewater and then gambling casinos to dull their dangerously awake minds.

Where is this culture of death coming from? Here. America is the center of the culture of death. America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower. If I haven’t shocked you yet, I will now. Do you know what pious Muslims call us? The Great Satan. (Impious Muslims call us that, too, but that makes no difference. We are what we are.) And do you know what I call them? I call them right..."