Timothy Stoner

A Generation of Martyrs: Suicide Bombers in Reverse

Posted on 17. Jun, 2009 by Tim Stoner in Christian Life, Christianity, Essays

It was Jesus, clear-eyed non-sentimentalist if ever there was one, who was the first to underscore the seething antipathy that exists between the world and His followers. It was He who prophesied that, like a pot on boil, it would inevitably erupt in blistering gales of fury, fueled by a blinding and cruel intolerance. As there are permanent, utterly irreconcilable differences between the seed of Ishmael and Isaac, so between those who claim Christ as Lord and those who do not. Though the intensity of the repulsion is not currently, or even, frequently, obvious in the western world, particularly in “Christian” America, according to our Lord and Master who knows better than we do, this still remains the latent reality.

What Jesus was so undiplomatically exposing was the true cosmology which hides behind the peaceful facade of normality. He was telling His disciples then and now, “don’t be fooled by appearances, whatever it may look like on the surface, there is a pitched battle raging continuously underneath”. This conflict was indelibly woven into the very fabric of existence following Adam’s fall. At that point, entrenched hostility was spliced into the genetic strands of human history. This was prophesied immediately following mankind’s rebellion. A cosmic war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent was declared, which reached its zenith at the Cross where Jesus, “the Seed of woman” crushed the head of the Serpent.

The rapprochement, for the most part, between the church and western cultures is not due to an expansiveness of tolerance among her enemies, but is in no small part the result of the church’s fearful reticence, its timidity, its confusion. What “peace” prevails has come at the cost of clarity and faithfulness; the fruit of a subtle blunting of the message which so incensed the curious and appreciative crowds that they eventually joined in the demands that Jesus be tortured to death. It is not proof of a change in the historic currents of opposition; of the world having “grown up”, or a church grown wiser.

Jesus guaranteed that if we followed Him in proclaiming His Gospel we would face persecution. (Jn. 15:20; Mk. 10:30) When Jesus makes such a promise and it does not come to pass, one ought not jump to the conclusion that it is because the world has stopped hating the message of Jesus. It is more likely the result of a series of choices to be less offensive than Jesus. The Beatitudes assumes suffering for the sake of Jesus. It portrays persecution as an unexceptional, commonplace experience for believers. Thus, its rarity in the west is more probably the result of seduction and compromise, and is actually an indictment on us for having fallen in love with the world and for desiring its friendship more than God’s.

About this fragile, tolerant, civility C.S. Lewis notes, “At first [Christianity] is welcome to all who have no special reason for opposing it; at this stage he who is not against it is for it. What men notice is its difference from those aspects of the World which they already dislike. But later on, as the real meaning of the Christian claim becomes apparent, its demand for total surrender, the sheer chasm between Nature and Supernature, men are increasingly ‘offended’. Dislike, terror, and finally hatred succeed: none who will not give it what it asks (and it asks all) can endure it: all who are not with it are against it. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, “The Decline of Religion,” (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970) 222-223. For, as he reminds us with characteristic lucidity, “Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world. . . but it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world  that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977) 45.

The Beast can remain unmasked as long as the diamond-sharp, absolute and regal requirements of King Jesus remain obscured or unspoken. So long as the Divine prerogative to impose His rule, His reign, His order on the creature’s life is not insisted on, civil discourse prevails, good-will can be toasted all around, and a safe, respectful tolerance enjoyed.

But, as mathematician, Ian Malcolm, glibly asserts in Jurassic Park, “life will find a way”, so does a spiritually hard-wired hatred. This is evident in numerous countries, cultures and people-groups throughout history. Peaceful co-existence among co-belligerents of this depth cannot continue indefinitely, and this is precisely what Jesus alerted His disciples to. The Serpent is very clever and very subtle but he is also utterly evil so his patience, as his cunning, is not infinite. There comes a point where the gloves  come off, the mask is thrown aside, for the loathing becomes too much to suppress and what has festered bursts all restraints and burst into the open. Even will this be true in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Anyone with the barest modicum of discernment is aware that winds are shifting, that currents have changed, and a momentum building that has only one possible outcome: open and hostile confrontation.

The battle ground has been carefully selected and reconnoitered. The weapons have been tested and approved. What remains is the selection of a lead voice to launch the frontal assault. For those who have been listening, the linguistic weapons are self-evident: “fanatic”, “religious fundamentalist”, “intolerant hate-mongers”, “judgmental, homo-phobic, zealots.” The demonization of the culture’s enemy has proceed apace for several decades now. It has been so successful that within the church itself the discomfort has now become hostility toward what is viewed as an aberrant theology which promotes a grossly offensive, culturally insensitive, intolerance. The special forces have cleared out the intellectual, legal and legislative ground and set up a secure base of operation. Very little work remains before the declaration of war is made public.

Such is the effectiveness of the demonization, so profound its compelling influence, that within evangelical Christianity new theologies are being rapidly assembled in an attempt at all costs to deflect the coming assault. The desire to minimize the offensive stigmata of the bloody Cross, and avoid the shame of the world’s rejection is so intense that Orthodox Christianity is undergoing a desperate face-lift. Deconstructive surgery is being performed to eliminate all vestiges of (”smug”) certainty, and every trace of (”mean-spirited”) dogmatism, offensiveness, divisiveness and intolerance. Where even the slightest rhetorical hint of exclusivity remains, it must be totally excised.

Among His friends, Jesus is receiving the ministrations of well-meaning spin-doctors who are recasting Him as a genteel and omni-tolerant Messiah who accepted everyone except the religious elite. This culturally inoffensive Jesus embraced all alike, save for the smug, the religious, the fanatical absolutists, the mean-spirited judgementalists. All but the greedy, cruel and hypocritical fundamentalists of His day received the benefit of His unvarnished and unquestioning acceptance.

His thundering insistence that He was the Way, the Truth and the Life, that every other story-teller was in absolute error and all who rejected Him were destined for an eternal and severe judgment, is reinterpreted. That Jesus claimed not to be bringing peace but a sharp sword which would split and tear open families, is deleted. A thick muffler of embarrassment has been wrapped around our mouths. An ever-so-subtle shame has crept its way into the church bringing about a timid silence which is decreasingly guilty, but increasingly conflicted and confused. It tacitly condemns itself while overtly condemning those theologically and culturally outmoded vestiges of a bygone era. All painfully directive words, clear unambiguous assertions and uncompromising ethical imperatives are now dismissed with glib irony.

So confused has the church become that it cannot distinguish between condemnation and conviction. It can barely even fathom the beauty and delights of a compassionate, loving yet inflexibly absolute authority. All this drift to avoid the inevitable: an offensiveness which provokes opposition, produces rejection, which leads to shame and culminates in persecution and suffering. One would not be far off the mark to say it is a mad dash away  from the Cross. It is an attempt to avoid that scandalous, stigmatizing stone of offense over which the religious and the intellectual tripped, fell, and–exactly as Jesus prophesied, “were crushed.” (Mt, 21:44)

This all, however, is no argument for making of oneself an abrasive and repugnant ass. We are not to court rejection as though it were evidence of special favor or assured us extra credit. There have been those who sought martyrdom so assiduously that their deaths were more suicide than sacrifice. They were mistaken. There are still some today who believe that they are on the fringe because of Jesus, instead of their abrasive, hateful tongues and their nasty, critical dispositions. They are also wrong. This teaching was never intended by Jesus to support that. Nor was it meant to justify self-inmolation, or a pursuit of suffering for its own sake. After all, we are exhorted to pray for the authorities in order that peace might reign and the church fulfill its evangelistic mandate undisturbed and undeterred.

But what it does tell us is that suffering for Jesus is what we signed up for when we made the proclamation: “Jesus is Lord.” By doing so we joined a long train of faithful disciples who accepted the shame of the cross and drank the bitter cup, like their Master, to the dregs. It also points us to another reality, this battle we are in will cost us our lives one way or the other. And we are called to die, daily, and that at least, this means we must lay our lives down, like Jesus did, for life of the world. We go into the world, which is in rebellion against our Lord and hates even the hint that He has specific demands on their lives (most especially, sexual). We live in hostile (latent, usually, unless we make an intolerant assertion of exclusivity) territory. We do not respond with evil, even if we are treated unkindly or cruelly. We go out, not like Islamic radicals, to blow ourselves up and take as many pagans with us, but to lay our lives down that in giving ourselves away they may live. While the suicide bombers intend to win by killing, we follow a Master who showed us that we and others with us can win by our dying. And nowhere is this counter-intuitive spiritual principle more obvious than when the Christian is killed out of love rather than hate. And nowhere is it more powerful.

Avoiding the offense of the Gospel in the name of reaching the world, is thus like cutting off your tongue so you can sing better. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. So it was and so shall it ever be. What was good enough for our Lord and Master is good enough for us who claim to be His disciples.

Tags: martyrs, persecution