The Warrior Priest Podcast

In this episode, I ruminate on what it's like to get old, and what that means for training and life. 

...without Jesus Christ, you would be right to revile God for evil. In that case, you should try to run out of this world and find some better god. But your mistake was to run to what you imagined was a god while the true God was coming into the world to end evil.

When Christians confess together their belief in the forgiveness of sin, it's like pinching themselves to make sure that what they heard isn't a dream. Absolution seems somehow illicit, frightening, and joyful all at once. Can this be true? May God just forgive me? Can a word of promise accomplish what's promised? Is it right? Is it binding? Will it last? Is it legal? Is it even possible for the God who knows all things and counts the hairs on our heads to forget something, especially something as obvious as our selfishness?

In his fictional world of Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien has adapted old world ideologies by removing the parts he deemed to be un-Christian and in doing so created a warrior’s code for the new world.

Deliver us from evil, we pray. That's what Jesus taught us to pray. But, in Greek, the petition in the Lord's Prayer is this: Deliver is from the evil one. Evil is not an abstract concept. It's not an outdated, old-fashioned idea like swinging a dead cat over your head to ward off evil. Evil is personified and personalized as the work of the evil one. The devil, Satan, the father of lies, the Prince of Darkness masquerading as an angel of light.

For the Anglo-Saxons, a man’s value to society was dependent on his ability to take his place in the social order: to pledge unshakeable loyalty to his lord and in return for the lord to prove his value as a leader by rewarding loyal warriors with gifts and status. This transaction is what imbued a man with his “worth”, or weorð in Old English, and this was what constituted honor. The warrior class separated themselves from “ordinary” folk based on a sense of honor, defining themselves as the geweorðode or those “made worthy”.

What you need redeeming from, deliverance from, is your slavery. You are in bondage. You are in a pickle. And I tell you, soberly, you are in a big pickle. In the end, there's no escape. But there is deliverance. There is redemption. There is a way for you to get into the wedding feast.

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” – Epictetus, Discourses

You have to remember, that in Jesus' day, there was a great fight going on. Who's the hero of the Bible? Who's the big kahuna in the Bible? Who's number one in the Bible? The two front runners were Abraham or Moses. The big fight is finally about whether the Bible, the Old Testament as we call it, was finally about Moses or finally about Abraham. But, there was even a fight about why Abraham was so great. What makes him the father of us all, which is what this parable is all about, so that it is into his bosom you will be taken in heaven? Not Moses' bosom, but into Abraham's bosom. And that's where heaven actually is.

Nihilism consists in an inability to find value and meaning in the higher aspects of this life and world. It empties the world and purpose of human existence. Nietzsche defines nihilism as: “the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, Book I: European Nihilism