...et multi pseudoprophetae sugent

It is unfortunately more often sobering than inspiring to peer as a learned Christian into the world of common spirituality; and yet we must guard our reactions from despair with the knowledge that the lowly ones of every age have always been more susceptible to the seductions of folly, just as the enticements of knowledge have been more often injurious to the high. From the very beginnings of the church, as the letters of Paul attest, Christian communities have felt the pull of strange gospels, laced by their charismatic preachers with both worldliness and exoticism, and we would be vain to think that in our western world, where the heirs of the apostolic witness, if we may not call them any longer witnesses themselves to that gospel, have grown slothful, and where the one use of the Christianized state, which is the tighter control of all preaching contrary to the gospel, has given way to the triumphant banners of secularism; in this world of ours, we would be vain to think ourselves unsullied, and the uninhibited spread and undeserving influence of false Christianities of various kinds should not alarm us with the shock of surprise, but rather the terrible recognition of disaster. For my part, I do not think I am enough exposed to these things; my eyes are too often turned down upon the page to look about me. Yet even the humble scholar does not remain forever aloof, although he feel the pains of the age more as pinches than an oppressive burden's weight. I felt such a pinch over my spring break, when, as I talked with a younger cousin of mine, she said offhand, though she could not recall the details, that her youth pastor had told them that the world was going to end in a few years, and given them details of the ending; I am remorseful still that I did not write a little note for her to give him, saying only "Matthew 24:36." Of such a teacher is it truly spoken, --or if he is a helpless fool, the teachers teacher-- "It cannot be avoided that there will be cause for stumbling. But woe to him through whom such causes come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck, and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble." (Luke 27:1-3).

Similarly today, following a link from the inestimable Jim West, I was led to this blog post, and the lengthy, but I think worthwhile, article it discusses. I think it will be obvious to those of you who take the time to read it why the ruminations of a secular journalist should have inspired such fierce declamation from this page --until I have some pulpit I shall be restrained to such inspired impotences as these. But I found it more unsettling as I read that the self-assured detachment of cynicism which the author expressed was far more near to me than utterances of his subjects, who all felt they were Christians. Let us credit him some for his rhetoric, however much I might loathe the aesthetic that governs such pieces, and remember that he writes for Rolling Stone; but let it also warn all of us who are of a class with the author and Christians as well, that if it is true that both we ourselves and the people he described are indeed new creatures in Christ, we ought neither to find them so alien to us, nor feel the comfort of kinship more easily in a thing bound by death.