Mercy and Help for the Powerless

Last updated on: March 22, 2018 at 12:04 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Mercy and Help for the Powerless 2018-03-22T00:04:17-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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You cannot read the Bible well and not wish to help the poor and the powerless. If you see an older person, evil says “whatever,” the Bible says, “honor her.” If you meet a weak man, the bad bully, the Biblical strengthens his weakness. The starving gets food, the enemy love, the poor are not sent empty away.

Christians can disagree on means, but not on ends. My home state of West Virginia has thousands of working poor, our duty is to lift them up. The African American community inherits centuries of robbery, the time has come for restitution. First Nations had treaties ignored and land stolen, payback is an obligation.

How?

That is a much harder question, but I am sure of this: We will not find the answer by turning to Western secularism trapped in the now and cut off from most of the globe. The answer is not in destroying the successes, easy for us to ignore, that have made this the time with the least global poverty, the most education, and the greatest distribution of medical science.

Because this is not the worst of times, but the best of times, Christendom can pay her debts. We have made things better, but some things worse, so we gladly make amends. Making amends isn’t accepting the lunatic idea we have done more harm than good.

The world without Christendom is worse, but we must rectify this or that evil Christians have done.

Globalism is a delusion if it means a moral colonialism that demands people bow to our whims, not to natural law. The laws of Nature and Nature’s God are available to all God’s children, born with reason. The political posturing of our University elites only makes sense to those who bow the knee to a counterintuitive narrative only believable to those in the system. We need to pause and listen to the wisdom of the doers and not just those who reflect on what has been done.

Orthodoxy says come and see… for free, the modern secularist asks who accredited your units.

There is more wisdom in many a Lebanese grandmother than in the philosophy departments full of sophists for hire. The grandmother will fight for her grandchild and love her enemy: Jesus says so. The sophists will footnote papers while babies die. We don’t need more sophists, we need more grandmothers. Better we need to finally listen to the grandmothers who have always loved learning. They are out there.

To build, to create a company, school, or institution that lifts thousands out of poverty is to risk like Constantine: the doer will harm as well as help. The small man who helps no one but boasts of never harming a soul will appear superior when dreams are feared so nightmares are avoided.

The prophetic voice calls for justice, but does not privilege the mob or the present elite. To ignore the excesses of the proletariat or kowtow to the decadence of the bourgeoise is to miss the mark. God save us from statists and oligarchs, communists and fascists.

How should we then live?

Love the poor, but honor the entrepreneurial. Help the weak, but not by denigrating the strong. Take the hard way: Liberty and Law in tension.

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