What Does Being A Christian Warrior Mean?

Last updated on: September 27, 2014 at 10:46 am by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

What Does Being A Christian Warrior Mean? 2014-09-27T10:46:49+01:00 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

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In French Catholicism, every year, there is a thing called the Pilgrimage of the Family Fathers. It’s exclusively for, well, fathers. Each participating parish puts a group together and they converge on a church in Paris, and then we all do a procession towards the Sacré Coeur.

This year was the year after the massive French protests against same-sex marriage. The next bête noire of this movement was a plan by France’s Socialist government to teach “gender studies” in school. Before we set out for the pilgrimage, the participating men in our parish sat down and shot the shit together in the church’s basement. There was much handwringing (not going to say bitching…) about the loss of manliness in contemporary culture. I mostly listened. At some point, I ventured: “According to our faith, the most manly act in history was a man dying on a Cross.” The conversation was over.

There’s been an interesting discussion going on at First Things on Christian manliness, and the metaphor of the Christian as warrior, prompted by this ridiculous thing. A followup asserts that this over-testicular Christian masculinity is an overreaction to the Church’s failure to marshal (ha) the language of spiritual warfare that is so present in the Bible and Christian tradition. Frequent readers will know that the military metaphor for the Church is one I quite readily employ.

But I do want to complicate things a little bit.

First, because, as Eve Tushnet so astutely notes on a different (or is it?) topic, “different people need different metaphors, even when expressing a universal human need.” While it’s right to critique and want to shift the relative importance of the various metaphors that the Tradition gives us to understand our vocations, I do think it can be misguided to insist too strongly on the necessary centrality of one particular metaphor. I think the reason why we have so many metaphors is precisely because God, in his Wisdom, knows that, on the one hand, no single one can capture everything we need to hear and, on the other hand, not all of us were made for all the metaphors.

Second, in response to this:

I share your desire to bear witness against the degraded, culturally captive self-parody that “muscular Christianity” has always been. But it seems to me that warfare as a purpose of human life is, unfortunately, much more central than you allow.

When Adam was first made, he was told to fill the earth and “subdue” it. Gerry Breshears of Western Seminary has pointed out that the Hebrew word used here for “subdue” is a martial term. It is used to describe what victorious armies do to conquered cities. Warfare is part of the purpose of human life from the beginning.

One interpretation of what happened in the Garden of Eden was that Satan did not appear as a seemingly harmless and seductive snake as he is so frequently portrayed in Christian art, but rather as a much more threatening, more dragon-like monster. Eve ate the fruit not because she was misled, but did so under duress. And Adam’s sin, in turn, was to not interpose himself. But, and this is the key, according to this interpretation, the way for Adam to interpose himself–and the reason he didn’t–would be to have died. Christ is the New Adam, because Adam was called to be a Christ. Adam shows us we are called to be warriors, but it is Christ who shows us how to be warriors.

Again, I’m all for spiritual warfare imagery, and I use it profusely. But we must always remember that the greatest warrior in history, Christ, fought–and won–his war by dying. This is our mode of spiritual warfare. How manly is this? Very, since by definition, Christ (not Chuck Norris) is the most manly man who ever lived. But it’s a very different definition of manliness, and of spiritual warfare.

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