To Avoid Distraction (With Gladiators!)

Last updated on: October 3, 2020 at 5:33 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

To Avoid Distraction (With Gladiators!) 2020-10-03T17:33:48-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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There are people, topics, and positions that if you even mention them became the topic or keep an audience from focussing on the deeper issues. I once gave a lecture on beauty to a group of parents in the early twenty-first century. During the extensive questions at the end, one parent asked my view of the Harry Potter series.

“I will not comment,” I commented, “because it is such a hot topic that no matter what I say the important topic of beauty in our culture will be overshadowed.”

The next year I got a call and was told that the group was eager for me to return and repeat my lecture on Harry Potter. Not talking about the Boy Who Lived was more powerful (at the moment) than talking about almost anything. The moment the question was asked my lecture was doomed!

If I ask you to think too hard about contemporary topics that do the same, you will not be able to keep reading. (“He is being coy about his views of vexillology!” said at least one reader forever distracted by wondering about my opinion on the flag of Belize. “Your very failure to comment is a comment.”)

On ethical issues, I have seen this often as a college professor. A speaker will come to campus and talk about an important issue. He might persuade the students (mostly people of good will), but he argues for a particular approach to the topic instead of instilling a more general approach that will lead to lifetime action. If a person begins to think in a a certain manner many problems can be solved, but if that person bogs down on some “hot topic,” endlessly googling support for her position, then no change will happen.

To return to Harry Potter in the early twenty-first century: Better to give a good approach to literature, than to try to settle this particular hot topic.

The early church faced a vile culture and so found herself full of vile people: just like our day. Transformation is slow and there is no wall that can be built that keeps out the rot of any given time. We are as we were before coming to church, at least a bit, until the full glorification, the final deification, that will come at the End of Time.

The communicator must, then, go for the deep truth, the transformative lesson, that will strike to the heart of all evil. These lessons are hard won. Monotheism would seem a simple enough truth: “hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one.” This truth took millennia to take root, yet when it did great cultural progress in a multitude of areas was possible. The Jewish law was not radically different from surrounding culture, if it had been nobody could have obeyed, bogged down in some “hot issue” in the Bronze Age. Instead, the Law was radically different in demanding monotheism without compromise for centuries. Other thinkers would propose monotheism in Egypt or Babylonia, but the Jewish revelation persisted.

Much good flowed from this demanding, seemingly irrelevant issue. “Sure,” said the prophet of Marduk, “but what of our policy towards Pharaoh Neco? Can’t you say something about that?” And sometimes the prophets did, but mostly, since they were speaking to deep time, root causes, the kept demanding justice for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the alien. They kept demanding purity, holiness, and decency.

They were not distracted.

I am sometimes asked why the New Testament does not condemn (directly) more evils of the Roman age than it does. There is no word against Caesar’s liquidation of whole populations. There is no word against gladiatorial games.

Why not?

The New Testament is striking at the root. If you love even your enemy, then the bloody mess that is the pagan Roman Empire cannot endure. If Christianity prevailed, as it did, then the Empire would be transformed. Blood sports would die. Christian Emperors would err, behaving like their pagan forebears, but love your enemies would endure, eating away at the memory of the bad deeds they did. Some truths cannot be heard at the time.

True love demand consent from the beloved and if God demanded perfect holiness now of a people bogged down in the love of Gladiatorial games, then no change would be made. Instead, God underlined love, grace, forgiveness. A man can wiggle his way to justifying this particular deviation from those general principles (say that of welcoming the stranger and the alien), but Christian history will grind slowly toward paradise.

His consent to the general principle (love of even enemies and justice for all) will produce change even where he could not consent to change if asked just then.

So it goes. So it has always gone. We are heading toward the City of God: chaste, just, beautiful.

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