What offends the Christian?

Christians should be the most realistic people in the world. No one should be able to say, “We operate beyond the comfort zone of Christians. They are unwilling to confront this truth.” To be realistic in our spirit is not only healthy for us, but imperative for our service to the Kingdom of God. This means engaging with the world around us, and yes, to be desensitized to an extent. We cannot recoil and bury our heads in the sand, at least.

If we want to operate most effectively, even the obscene should not scandalize us. Why? Because the Kingdom of God begins from this vantage point: that the world is a tragic mess, and that sin is the rule, not the exception. The mission of the believer is to wade into a sinful world and discover what God wants to do with it. Evil is the basis for our favorite discussion.

Now we can take this further yet, and I will make the case for it.

Christians have license to explore the culture around us fully, to see what others see, to hear what others are hearing, and to expose ourselves to the reality of society, even if we refrain from subjecting ourselves to the worst scum simply for the sake of it. We should be able to appreciate the role of ungodly art for its redeeming qualities, if there are any. For example, among my favorite TV shows today is The Sopranos, which displays frequent nudity, violence, and profanity; the main character is a boozing mob boss who works out of a strip club and has people killed to protect his exploitative racket. My favorite manga series, Berserk, revolves around a mentally scarred, revenge-driven mercenary trying to survive a hellish fantasy world by any means necessary. It displays in gory detail every kind of abomination and grotesquery, including the horrifying cruelty of literal demonic beings having their way with innocent people.

Yes, both of these stories need to be restricted to adults only, and even then it would have traumatized me when I was a new Christian. However, now that I’m older, more desensitized, and able to process inappropriate imagery and shocking events without being personally offended, I can say that these are both masterpieces of artwork, with deep commentaries that are worth exploring. Neither of these R-rated stories endorse their own protagonists, but surrounds them with characters who criticize them and expose their hypocrisy and wickedness. Both of them end up dealing with redemption and the cost of sin, in their own way. In other words, I can see how the material (ie. evil things done by bad people, explored in all its brutality) is used as a basis for having the same exact discussion that Christians should wants to have. And I do have interesting discussions about them with other Christians. They are more worthy of analysis than anything I’ve seen in “Christian media”.

But I don’t want to suggest that we even need to justify our enjoyment of ungodly art. Some of my favorite music artists include Tool, which is openly New Age and anti-Christian, with songs that are quite blasphemous. When I first converted to Christianity, I used to sit at the dinner table and listen to full Tool albums in my headphones while I was studying my Bible for the first time, reading the words of Christ and the apostles. While the singer raged and mocked God, I smiled at his attempt to undermine with his silly little song what I had just discovered to be the most powerful truth ever. It seemed to me at that age, as it still does now, that even the active opponents of Christianity are really harmless. They can literally do nothing to etch away at my faith, much less hinder God’s plans. They are here for our amusement, and to fulfill a role within the greater system of redemption. Why should I allow a song, a show, or a story to offend me?

I am more offended by the false arguments of misled Christian than I am with the writings of Aleister Crowley. I am more opposed to the Catholic Church than I am to paganism. I am more angered by the prayers of false prophets than I am by the ravings of witches. Compared to the wickedness of the deceivers on “our side” (if we accepted their claim to be on our side) the spooky opposition on the other side looks quaint to me. Infinitely more damage was done to Christianity by Emperor Constantine than by Emperor Nero. To falsely accuse Christians and burn alive is a clear opportunity to spread the Gospel and testify against the pagan powers, but to camouflage yourself as a Christian and seek to capture its doctrine for the empowerment of Rome is seditious, planting the tares among the wheat.

Did Aleister Crowley commit a litany of obscene sins and inspire more to do the same? Of course. But there is a reason he kept his atrocities in the shadows: society is horrified by such evil. He was a pathetic man, diseased and miserable, disgraced and hated to this day. Our answer to that kind of sin is also straightforward: to share the Gospel, to bring others to repentance, to help them be redeemed and converted, so that their testimony will be used for God’s Kingdom. However, when Thomas Aquinas justifies the Inquisition and deceives millions of ignorant believers into accepting the bloodshed of innocent Christians as being the holy duty of the Church, we have a truly satanic inversion of Reality. When priests rape little boys and cover it up, or when they soothe the outrage of offended Christians as if they were an authority over them, or in all the other ways that wolves dress up in sheep’s clothing among us, this is the much greater threat. And this is why the Roman imperial councils on Christian doctrine were established to begin with: to put the wolves officially in charge of protecting the sheep from those faithful sheepdogs who would come to attack. I despise these impostors more than any outside enemy.

Love Reality and hate lies

The Bible contains many stories of offensive things. It describes evil actions done by evil people. It tells the stories of sinners, and even its “heroes” are almost all flawed. If we avoided learning about bad things, we would never open our Bibles! But how does it present this evil? What is the conclusion? We see it unfold over time. We understand the context. We do not envy the Prodigal Son, but wait for his fate to be shown to us. We see mockery of God, and we are not persuaded by it. We hear the arguments of the Devil himself, and we are put on guard to watch for it. You cannot learn from what you cannot expose.

The New Testament is a fascinating collection of letters, obviously, but one pattern I see is the withholding of its authors in describing the full extent of the problem. They are writing to freshly converted Gentiles for the most part, and otherwise to Jews who are struggling to adapt to a new system. They are writing, in other words, to the weakest and most vulnerable kind of Christian, who need to be delicately shielded and fed the milk of the Gospel. They are compared to fragile plants who are barely sprouting, rather than mighty oaks and ceders that cannot be moved. But we should strive to be the mighty tree, not the sapling. We should become immovable. We should look down on the evil of this world as an inferior, not an equal. We should have hard bark, so-to-speak, and deep roots. We should withstand the coming and going of the world’s nonsense, and draw sustenance from the ground even in dry seasons. To drop the metaphor, we should be the kind of people that others can come to with their real problems in a crisis of conscience, no matter how messed up or guilty they are, trusting that we are not some pearl-clutching, gee-golly, out-of-touch sentimentalist. They should see us as an example of somebody who can handle any controversy.

In our modern lifestyles, we are rarely exposed to horror and atrocity in real life. There are medical emergencies, crimes, and accidents, but rarely a true display of evil that we have to deal with. The clearest example of that today is what Israel is doing to Palestine, and the footage from there is heartbreaking. In my observation, those who have experienced war and devastation don’t get much edification from fictional drama anymore, because they have enough personal experience to draw from. But for those who are comfortable in their daily lives, it can be profitable to remind yourself what is possible, or at least of what others might be going through. Just as the Bible contains many despicable characters and ungodly actions, but is framed by the truth of God’s response to these things, we should be able to face the facts of our wretched world and frame it with the Good News. We should love Reality—not the bad circumstances, but the full story—because it leads to Jesus Christ. We should hate lies, which lead away from him while pretending to be Christian.

Let me know if you agree or disagree. What is your story?