sword of the mind, a sword which heals.

I had an interesting conversation at work today, it started off being about the comodification of learning, how the free market has all but destroyed education for it's own sake. Then, meandering through Karl Marx and past the "lost tomb of jesus" we wound up with a rather passionate and confounding discussion about the church in the first three centuries.

It's interesting how when I try and talk about early Christianity with people, most folks can't seem to concieve of a world where Christianity and Oligarchy aren't synonymous. Mention the church in the first centuries and people seem to envision some midevil world where the church is already well ensconced as an oppressive force. If you try and explain to these people that there was a time when you could be killed by the state just for telling someone you believed in Jesus it doesn't quite register, and that's to say nothing of Russia.

There is always this readiness for people to believe that throughout history Christianity was always a tool of the state, employed primarily in the validation of feudal patriarchy and empire, a weapon of the ruling class. Try and tell someone of a radical bent that two thousand years earlier they would have been tighter with the Christians than the Pagans and they shut it out. I wonder as I proof-read this how people might react when confronted with the simple reality that in all totalitarian regimes the rule of empire comes through the suppression of true Christianity, wether it's through the fascisms of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Bush or Cesear.

I shouldn't be surprised, after all nearly fifteen hundred years of church and state has sapped the cultural imagination in the West. I imagine it would be easier for someone of Eastern European or Palestinian descent to identify with the Catacomb Church. But the word of the day in our modern, bourgeois society remains "religion, the opiate of the masses". It remains this because it's comfortable; and this watchword is intellectual robbery.

Sloganeering robbs people of the truth because it denies further thought and replaces it with easy to memorise and convienient sound bites "better dead than red", "The Bible says it, God wrote it, that settles it", "Religion is the opiate of the masses". Religion isn't the opiate of the masses, rather power and it's aquisition by any means nescessary is the opiate and religiosity and fake piety are too often the blasphemous smoke screens by which the unscrupulous trick the un-wary and seek to silence or discredit those genuine saints and heros who give their lives in the service of a higher truth.

For every person who cites Hobbes or Maciavelli to me as an example of Christianity's triumph over all things good and free, I wonder what they'd say after reading The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, the life of St. Mary of Egypt, or the Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer? And as I mention the saints who put Hobbes in his shameful place I wonder to myself why the church is so willing to ban books like Harry Potter while doing nothing with Maciavelli's The Prince. And then I wonder why any church should presume to keep an index of banned books at all, and why I should encourage it--if even hypothetically?

I tried--but failed--to explain to my incredulous customer today that there was once a time when the only weapons a Christian was allowed to use were the weapons of the spirit: the works of mercy practiced in genine sacrificial love, the charisims of intelligent and thoughtful witness and the Holy Spirit of God at work within us. At the time of Origen and Justin Martyr and even at the time of Augustine these were the weapons of the faithful; not to be used as so many try today, to bludgeon people over the head, either with one's own opinons or worse still with the Bible, rather the use of refutation in a loving and intelligent way. A way which was un afraid to call things by their proper names but which never intended to cause pain, indeed which was even capable of grieving with those hurt.

It's with these intellectual and emotional tools that the early Christian appologists and theologians went to work, taking apart the arguments and philosophies of their opponents with patience and with care. It was with their minds and with their words and with reason through the Spirit that the early Christian heresies were shown to be fallacious and it was through reason, through thoughtful dialogue, and by the faith of the martyrs that converts were won.

Only after the marriage of church and state and the advent of the "Christian" empire did conversion by force, and refutation with the sword become the fasion--as it still is today. And it's been through violence that the worst perversions of faith and morals have found their genesis. This can be seen even today as politicians and other people in leadership roles try and associate faith with national pride, or by making a show of their own sanctity. To the credit of most athiests, when they rail against Christianity what they are attacking is most often the stench of false religion, the hypocricy of faith used as a political tool, or as validation for the very things Christ spoke out against for his entire life.

The defense of power which motivated the rulers of Cesear's empire and the chief priests and hierarchs of many nations to execute the faithful within them. The defense of worldly power which sent Jesus to the cross and continues to send martyrs to their graves. The retaliation of empires against the treson of proclaiming that the only true king is Christ and that his kingdom is coming; a kingdom where every tear is wiped dry and where this present world will no longer be brought to mind.