[Inspired by the upcoming debate on the topic.]
My answer, of course, is “no.” It’s obvious if you compare trends in wimpiness and trends in religious belief that the decline of Christianity has turned people into wimps. Nietzsche is big among left-wing academics. Wimpiness is big among left-wing academics. It’s wimps who have superman fantasies. People, you should connect the dots!
A wimp is someone who can’t stand his ground because he thinks he’s nothing and has nowhere to stand. You won’t be a wimp if you know what you are and what you have to do. That means that a Christian can’t be a wimp, not without abandoning Christianity.
In contrast, nihilists and relativists can be wimps or psychopaths but not much else. They can assert themselves simply as such, as if they were somehow a law for the universe, or assert nothing at all and give in to whatever is pushing them at the moment. Or maybe they can hunker down and do nothing. Why make those the choices?
But what about “turn the other cheek”? If you want to understand startling injunctions, you look at how the pros handle them. Was Jesus a wimp? Did he turn the apostles into wimps? Or how about Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis, Saint Ignatius, or Saint Joan? Could any saint possibly be a wimp?
If you go a bit lower in the spiritual pecking order, it must mean something that neither Chaucer or Boccaccio or any other writer from the Christian centuries bothered with the Wimp as a human type. Their people had flaws, but wimpiness wasn’t one of them.
At bottom, I think, “turning the other cheek” means abandoning contentiousness, acting rather than reacting, and accepting a standard that you don’t think you’ll grasp or achieve perfectly and doesn’t make you the center of everything. The injunction strikes me as a way of shocking people into stepping back and looking at what they’re doing from a less small-minded point of view. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see what’s wimpy about that.
wimps
No doubt the grinding mill of liberal orthodoxy emasculates men. Organized Christianity is complicit in this neutering. We could do with more Cambria Will Not Yield(s) (http://cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.com), and organizations that celebrate the Christian Warrior ethos of days long gone. Mike
The corruption of a thing is not the thing itself
It seems to me that if you blame contemporary mainstream churches on Christianity you should follow the same principle and blame contemporary art on art and contemporary academia on intelligence and learning. The whole direction seems one to avoid.
Cheek Turning
People only need to recall Jesus’ reaction to the money changers in the Temple to understand he had no categorical objection to violence. Jesus looked at the situation, said to himself, “ah, here’s one of those situations where violence can solve something,” then proceeded to trash the joint.
Much confusion comes because we think “turn the other cheek” is a ban on violence; if we understand the blow to the face is a slap instead of a punch, then we understand that “turning the other cheek” is about how we respond to humiliation, not violence, and all our confusion melts away.
Not wimps
Not much to add. I’ll just point out that Christian martyrs were very brave, not wimps.
And all the institutions have absorbed liberal wimpiness.
Is Christianity for wimps?
On the main issue, the answer is no. Practicing Christianity based on the Catholic Church’s doctrines is not for wimps. A large portion of Protestants are also not for wimps for the same reasons. Even the most physically fearless of men find it impossible to follow the Church’s doctrines all the time. The liberal idea, as implied by a commentator, is based on an extreme interpretation of turn-the-other-cheek that is shared by many liberals and other bizarre groups. The liberal idea is extreme because it follows that everyone must suffer without end while in this world.
Liberals believe that Christians, in order to be true to their faith, must gather in groups to pray for deliverance rather than to fight back. But a failure to fight back ensures everyone (including ultimately the predators) will fall victim to the legions of human predators in the world. An example of a predator is the animal they just arrested for murdering the gorgeous honor student Chelsea King. The liberal idea would require Chelsea to endure horror until the predator was bored and to seek as her only solace, prayer.
(Chelsea could provoke a separate topic on how feminism, a part of liberalism, led directly to this child being told she was equal to a man in every way, including the ability to jog in the park alone.)
Swords
Pacifism is so obviously incoherent that it is sufficient evidence of decadence and a kind of rational insanity. Yet of course it is mainstream.
Clearly pacifism is not Christian; except by eliminating from Christianity almost everything else of what previous (and much more devout) generations of Christains have believed.
To believe that Christianity is pacifist is therefore to adopt the absurd leftist-liberal view that we have suddenly ‘seen though’ many generations of traditional wisdom, and by our especial moral purity recognized profound truths previously invisible or suppressed.
This quote from the Bible (KJV) Luke 22 is not as well known as it might be:
Verse 34 And he said, I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me. 35 And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. 36 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. 37 For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end. 38 And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.
Christianity
Good post you have here; and obviously, Christianity is for everyone who is willing to believe in Christ and His principles, as well as in the existence of God and His magnificence. I really wonder how people could connect “wimpiness” with Christianity. :/
Paul
http://usminc.org