"It is not the one thing...." (The Perilous Balance)

Christianity is not love. It is not peace, nor justice, nor joy, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor moderation, nor wisdom. It is not about compassion to the oppressed or violence to the oppressor, neither the defense of the weak nor the defiance of the strong. It is not about truth. It is not about experience. It is not any one of these things. Rather, it is every one of these things all working in tandem to create a whole that is not reducible to its parts. To reduce it is to lose it; it is a perilous balance.

Orthodoxy is not any one thing. It is all ideals and virtues and good things working together in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness, for it is the very truth of God, who is the summation of all ideals and virtues and good things in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness. As our God is all good things working together in one person, and as the fruits of His Spirit are all good things working in our person, and as the Body of His Christ are many members with many gifts spread out across nations, tribes, and tongues all working together whether they realize it or not, so too Orthodoxy is an ingenious collaboration of all truth working together into a singular creed.

In our Father's house are many rooms, rooms for many and all shades of His glory, all facets of His beauty. The pacifists are there as well as the militant, the Franciscans as well as the Dominicans. The apologist and the artist and the social worker are there. The high church and the low are there, the traditional and the contemporary. All good things, all things true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and commendable and excellent and praiseworthy, all these things are ours for the taking, the thinking, the doing. All are acceptable to God. Let no mouth open to gainsay any of them. Let no brother gainsay his sister, and let no sister gainsay her brother. Let no pacifist gainsay the militant, and let no militant gainsay the pacifist. All belong in the balance; the absurdity called pacifism will balance the insanity called militancy.

Let all things be done in the image of our God, who is peaceful and wrathful, true and beautiful, compassionate and holy, human and divine. Let no heresy rise to reduce Him; let no ignorance rise to diminish Him. Not because He can be reduced or diminished, but because the reduction and the diminishment does damage to the heretic and ignorant (those terrible simplifiers), causing them to lose the whole that is God, for God is a whole. A single, simple whole who is irreducible and indiminishable. He is an infinitely faceted jewel, a stained-glass window whose design and beauty knows no end or paraphrasing, and is large enough to hold all good and true and beautiful things in His hands.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

On Proper and Cowardly Pacifism (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

"Ye that love the Lord, hate evil..." Ps. 97:10a

Pacifism, though still purported as something unquestionably good, can turn into a very serious kind of evil. Proper pacifism believes in fighting. It believes in fighting because it believes in good and evil. It has a moral vision, and as such believes that the good should be fought for and the evil fought against. As a result, it never believes in fighting for its own sake or for crooked or vain causes. It stays out of and condemns any fighting that was irresponsible and unjust; not because of the fighting, but because of the irresponsibility and injustice. Many famous thinkers of the early 20th century (like G.K. Chesterton) where such pacifists. For them, there was good in the world, and it was worth fighting for against evil. They were warriors who knew when to war as well as how.

Today, however, the case is reversed. Most pacifists stay out of and condemn all fighting because it is fighting. They don't believe in fighting anymore, for anything or any reason. This wimpy and cowardly pacifism (which is rampant today in most antiwar protests) is a direct result of losing a moral vision. An insidious relativism has eroded away any vestige of a moral center. Right and wrong become an issue of individual subjectivism, and now we dare not "impose" "our" morality on another (even while they terrorize and kill others). Ps. 97:10 contains a rebuttal to this mentality: a love of God necessarily entails a hated of evil, because you keep the vision of the good before your eyes. Consequently, everything that is evil, everything in deviation of the vision, becomes more clear and glaring in the light of that vision. A hatred of evil is the only healthy hatred there is, and it is only possible when we walk in the light of the holiness and righteousness of God. Once lose that and you will grow blind to evil and lose all incentive to fight against it for the sake of the good.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2010