Recovering the Art of Christian Polemics
UNCHARITABLE? DIVISIVE? STRIDENT?
Most well-read Christians know the two most famous stories of the early Church’s approach to dialogue. St. Polycarp tells us that the apostle John once went to the public bath in Ephesus and found inside a Gnostic teacher named Cerinthus. John ran out crying, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.”
Polycarp himself once met the heretic Marcion walking down the street. Marcion hated the creator-God of the Hebrews, and to get rid of Him had tossed out the Old Testament and much of the New and rewrote the bits he kept. Marcion asked Polycarp, “Do you know me?” and Polycarp answered, “I do know you. You are the firstborn of Satan.”
You May Also Enjoy
Snotty, Snide... Gawronski... The End of the Concordat... Silly Zahn... The Archbishop of Canterbury... Unwise Harshness... Homesick for Fundamentalism... Evangelical Decline Revisited... Sex, Nature's Way... Unitarians for Jesus...
In the post-war years, the peasantry and the proletariat have been the winners, while the old bourgeoisie has been the great loser.
To those who would invoke old gods at their convenience and choose human sacrifices for them: Be careful what god you pray to.