Peter Kreeft loves Socratic dialog forms, and has written whole books in question-and-answer format. So it's no surprise to find him using the same crutch in a thoughtful essay with a misleading title (The piece is called "How to Win the Culture War," but Kreeft doesn't care a whit about whether the culture war is won, because he's talking about spiritual combat, and looking to Mary and other saints as role models in the fight)
"Q: Is not God a lover rather than a warrior?
A: 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, betrayal, selfishness, and all love's enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely "compassion" (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.
In fact, every page of the Bible bristles with spears, 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 never present in the religious education of any of my 'Catholic' students at Boston College. Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have. They have gone past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology-disguised-as-religion, into a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the Kitten."
Related and simpatico from Archbishop Timothy Dolan via The Anchoress:
“Maybe the greatest threat to the church is not heresy, not dissent, not secularism, not even moral relativism, but this sanitized, feel-good, boutique, therapeutic spirituality that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion, entails no battle against sin, but only soothes and affirms.”
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2 comments:
Oh, I love this.
"father-love and mother-love are war"
Those who haven't experienced the sharp passion involved in their kid being crossed, corrupted, neglected, misled or otherwise hurt (at ANY age) will have a very hard time understanding this. And since fewer and fewer people are having kids, that means society as a whole is losing this knowledge.
As a relatively new Christian, I still remember being mightily confused, for years, over the idea that total pacificism (aka 'peace' in the liberal lexicon) meant, in effect, giving up on many other important principles, ignoring the plight of the down-trodden, sucking up to the bullies and merely hoping they'd go away and not bother you. A very selfish kind of love indeed. Great catch.
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