Radical Centrist Style . By: Billy Rojas . . There are different ways to write about Radical Centrism. Which style to use depends on your purpose. The best rule to observe when deciding how to develop a theme is found in the Bible. Here is the passage, edited, from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: . For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to harvest what is planted... a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;... a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. . What time is this? That is the question that a writer needs to ask. The answer cannot be: It is always a time for peace. We may always desire peace but sometimes you need to go through war to get there, or if not war, agony or disgust or anger or tribulation or ruthless candor. . We live in the real world, never in an ideal world. Love and kindness is sometimes completely inappropriate; after all, even in the most caring and compassionate text in the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus threatened sinners with damnation in Hell. . As I see it, all the wisdom in the Bible needs to be at the center of faith. Not just the 'nice' parts, not just the reassuring parts. . When Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple he did not first tell the men with their sacks of gold how much God loved them and then seek to persuade them with gentle words. He did not say that they were forgiven, nor ask plaintively, "why can't we just get along?" The Gospel accounts never say any such thing. What they do tell us is that Jesus threw them out, no gentle sermonette, no plea for them to respect the sanctity of the temple, and no mild words of tolerance. Instead he made them desist though his actions. That is what the Bible says and nothing more -and surely there was good reason that the Gospel writers framed the event that way. Sometimes you need to make it absolutely clear that you have zero tolerance for evil. . Not after first pleading with your enemies for understanding, not after first showing how much compassion you have for them, nor after first expressing any other open-hearted sentiments. Precisely because that may not at all be the right time for any such thing. . To make this as clear as possible, there certainly are times for conciliation. Sometimes conciliation is exactly the right policy. There cannot be such a thing as Radical Centrism without conciliation. It is essential to RC and we may even say it is what is most important to us, taking into account any kind of long range view. . But it may be necessary to get into one helluva bad fight first, and fight to win, before there can be any thought of conciliation or anything of the kind. . As the Apostle Paul said, "the secret power of wickedness is at work" and the source of evil needs to be rooted out and destroyed, or so I take II Thessalonians as saying when describing how Christ deals with Satan and the works of Satan. The words used to describe the actions Jesus takes against a manifestation of the Devil are terms like "brought to judgement," "destroyed," and "annihilate." . Needless to say such language should be understood as metaphor; after all this is about writing, not about taking to the streets looking for a brawl. But it is good to draw inspiration from the New Testament in cases like the aftermath of the Orlando mass murder. . Some supposedly "Christian" responses to the massacre make me want to vomit, like Michael Brown of the Christian Post who, on June 14, assured hypothetical homosexual readers of his column for that day, that the only thinkable response that Jesus could possibly make to homosexuals necessarily would be loving kindness and the only conceivable reaction of Paul would necessarily be one of gushing compassion to gently persuade sinners to mend their ways but that, regardless, no true Christian would deign to be judgmental. This gross distortion of the New Testament message about sodomy is sickening and flies in the face of Matthew 11 which tells sodomites they are going to Hell, and half of the entire first chapter of Romans -which ends with the strongest possible uncompromising condemnation . Brown went on to apologize for any unkind words he or other Christians may have spoken about homosexuals, assuring them that Jesus would never hurt their feelings, nor judge them harshly. Actually, none of the men who wrote any of the books of the Bible were compassionate toward sodomites / homosexuals. In every case their view was that sodomy is a heinous sin of the worst order and hurting the feelings of homosexuals was anything but a concern of theirs. This is because unless homosexuals cease being homosexual, unless they repent and strive to repair the damages their sick and ugly conduct has caused to others, they deserve the fate that God has decreed for them: Eternal punishment in Hell. . I'm not sure what the name of the heresy that Mr. Brown believes in may be, but whatever it is, it is utterly false to the message of the New Testament. The Bible does not teach "all love, all the time." On the contrary, there is "a time to love, and a time to hate." . And there is a time to fight evil -with everything you've got. The way to do this is also easy enough for you to understand; these are also the words of the Apostle Paul: "Throw off falsehood; speak the truth..." and "Let no one deceive you with shallow arguments." . A writer cannot get any better advice than that. . . Yes, in the context of Radical Centrism, Bible verses may sometimes need to be understood metaphorically, but, dammit, these can be powerful metaphors if you take them seriously: "Put on all the armour which God provides, so that you may be able to stand firm against the devices of the devil. For our fight is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens. Therefore, take up God's armor; then you will be able to stand your ground when things are at their worst, to complete every task and still to stand. So, stand firm, I say. Buckle on the belt of truth; for coat of mail put on integrity; let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace, to give you firm footing; and, with all these, take up the great shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take salvation for helmet; for sword, take that which the Spirit gives you—the words that come from God." . These are fighting words. And, as I see it, now is a really good time for a good fight. For those who are uneasy with so much religious language, here is a little story I like to use to explain evolution: It seems as if the ancestor or us all is the notochord, a tiny creature that sort of looks like a minnow. It was the first known "fish" that had something that would, millions of years later, become the first backbone in any species. . The first known notochords simply look like minnows. There is a gap in the fossil record after that but when these creatures reappear, hundreds of thousands of years later, they still are minnow-like but now they have little jaws with sharp teeth, like miniature piranhas. Obviously they got tired of being pushed around and developed what they needed to become good fighters. . The way I look at it, we need to develop a backbone and sharp teeth that we can use to bite holes in our enemies until they get the idea -or so many holes that they cannot continue and are destroyed. . Hopefully this is also interpreted as a figure of speech. No-one is urging Radical Centrists to go out and bite people. But it is high time to bite holes in the arguments of our enemies that demolish everything they say because that is what they are: Enemies. . And this is war. 25 Then throw off falsehood; speak the truth to each other
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