Christianity and Courage

"I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting." -- G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, although this is not actually true of the teachings of Christianity as given us in Scripture, modern Christians seem to themselves believe it. There is a great effeminacy in the Church: a sense that, in order to be a Christian one must become a woman.  Catholics are almost universally pacifists, and Evangelicals touchy-feely wimps. The God of Israel sent Joshua and David to conquer His enemies; the medieval church sent knights, paladins, and crusaders to resist the violence of paganism and Islam; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church tried to assassinate Hitler. But the modern church fields an army of wan eunuchs whose primary fear is that they'll offend or hurt someone's feelings (and thereby endanger their esteem in the community and worse yet, their funding). I recently had a priest tell me that he could not support an effort to rescue girls from the horrors of sex slavery because the rescuers might have to use force against the traffickers to protect the girls being rescued, and church leaders almost universally denounce even passive, non-violent resistance to the state-sponsored slaughter of infants that goes on every single day in our midst.

But the Lord says:

"If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small. If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, 'Behold, we knew it not'; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?" -- Proverbs 24: 10-12

and

"Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." -- James 4:17

and

"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, murderers, whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” -- Rev 21:8 (note the first item in the list)

and

"Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. -- Joshua 1:9


"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors and mountaineers...This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine." -- G.K. Chesterton