johnbyronkuhner.com

Andrew Sullivan has a very short and sharp rebuff of a National Review piece which claims that God supports individual gun ownership, as part of a “Biblical” right to self-defense.  In general, I hate the word “Biblical,” because it implies a simplicity which only ignorance can accept uncritically; the first Christians recognized many holy “books” (Biblia, a plural word), with various degrees of inspiration.  The Gospels abrogate some teachings of the other books specifically, others presumably (i.e. Christians don’t object to planting two types of crop in the same garden bed, despite a prohibition in the Torah never rescinded in any other canonical book), and probably others will be rescinded as we understand the Gospel better.  The current frontier in this is sexuality, just as earlier it was race and before that gender and before that slavery and before that democracy.

I do kind of like it when Christianists talk like this – when they say that Jesus wants us to have guns and kill people who come into our houses – because there is a chance that they will learn something at some point about actual Christianity whenever they “speak their folly and let it be known.”  Jesus preaches an ideal which remains the asymptote toward which history approaches; later Christian thinkers have tried to come up with some nice compromise, which is probably good enough for the majority in its own age, but which always moves in time.  And the great saints are the ones who try not to live the “nice compromise” but aim for the high ideal.  So Jesus proclaims nonviolence, and popes teach just war.  The papal standard is good enough, I suppose, but it’s not Christianity’s final word, and certainly not the standard against which the future will be judged.  With each passing generation, the standards of the earlier generations’ “good enough” become defective.  This is the meaning of time, is it not?  That’s why we still keep going, and that’s why living in history is so interesting.