History’s Most Offensive Thinker
April 7, 2015
FROM “The Words and Deeds of Christ” by Joseph Sobran:
What greater proof of his divinity could there be than the fact that [Christ] is still resisted, even hated, after 2,000 years? Nobody hates Julius Caesar anymore; it’s pretty hard even to hate Attila the Hun, who left a lot of hard feelings in his day. But the world still hates Christ and his Church.
The usual form of this hatred is interesting in itself. For every outright persecutor, there are countless people who pretend not to hate Christ, but subtly demote him to the rank of a “great moral teacher,” or say they have nothing against Christianity as long as the “separation of church and state” is observed, or, under the guise of scholarship, affect to winnow out his “authentic” utterances from those falsely ascribed to him – as if the Apostles would have dared to put words in his mouth! And as if such fabricated words would have proved as durable as “authentic” ones! (Try writing a single sentence that anyone could mistake for a saying of Christ for even a century.)
Most secular-minded people would find it distasteful to nail a Christian to a cross, though there have been exceptions. They prefer to create a certain distance between themselves (or “society”) and Christ, to insulate worldly life from the unbearable Good News, so that they feel no obligation to respond to God’s self-revelation. An especially horrifying concrete application of this insulation of society from Christianity is the reduction of the act of killing unborn children to an abstract political “issue,” a matter about which we can civilly “disagree.”
Pretending to leave the ultimate questions moot, they actually live in denial of and opposition to the truth we have been given at so much cost. What was formerly Christendom – a civilization built around that central revelation of God to man – has now fallen into a condition of amnesia and indifference.
[…..]
Christ always has been, still is, and always will be too much for the human race at large to accept or assimilate. Exactly as he said he would be. The world keeps proving the truth of his words.
