SubversiveOrthodoxy: Apostles Create Quiet;Don'tChangeTheWorld

SubversiveOrthodoxy:Apostles Create Quiet;Don'tChangeTheWorld
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From the amazing "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise", in which Richard Inchausti (great interview with him at this link)draws from Blake, Kierrkegaard, Berdayev, Chesterton, Dostyoesky, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul, Girard et al:

"Seduction resides in the safeguarding of alien-ness..." -Jean Baudrillard

The point that many moderns fail to grasp about Christian thinkers is that they have very little interest in changing the world. They seek merely to see things clearly in the light of God's hidden logic. And if by so doing they expose the narcissism of their contemporaries, the false agendas of their leaders, the didactic pornography of their artists and entertainers-well, that is a ll to the good. But unlike their more utilitarian peers, they desire to live in the truth even more than they desire to be effective in the world.

...Evil manifests itself in absence of perception, and in the negation of Being more than it does in the presence of stupidity, violence or even hatred. It is more often than not a species of folly-a commitment to "virtues" that are not really virtues...It wears a suit or a uniform, waves a flag and has credentials. That is why the primary moral task from a Christian perspective is first to perceive vevil. And this requires that one see what isn't there and through things that are. This is possible only for someone who is suspious of virture and believes in a greater reality than his own.

What the Christian mysteries require from us is not that we construct a better world, but that we love and serve the one we are given. As one Parisian graffiti artist wrote in 1968, : "the intellectuals have hitherto only changed the world, the point is to understand it." This is a decidedly contemplative observation, one that confirms Blake's suspisions of the new aesceticism and Kierkegaards' view that even if somene were to speak the Word of God directly today, no one in the modern world would hear it, simply because there is too mucdh noise and distraction. The function of the modern apostle, therefore, is to create the silent contemplative places where individuals can e xperience truth for themselves..
pp187-189



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