The Jaguar-Skeptics

Let us face the obvious fact that most Christians don't like to be noticed for what they really are. In private and among friends we love to expound upon those things that we (very sincerely) believe to be true, but when it comes to those people you work with, or that friend you don't want to offend, or such-and-such group, which may very well be composed of Christians like you, that is generally engaging in talking behind someone's back, or laughing at a joke that is not quite right, our resolve often thins a little. I have laughed along too from time to time.

But this view is downright madness. Its source is common human cowardice, nothing less: the old fear of man. This may be made plainer when we understand what a Christian witness is really like.

Suppose a big group of people was trying to convince itself that jaguars (or lions or tigers or bears or what have you) do not exist. They went to the length or writing books and making vociferous speeches on the subject. Not only this, but they took it upon themselves to fume and take great offense at those stone-age nicompoops who had the cheek to embrace the delirious fancy that wild beasts actually exist. Men may strike lecterns and swear by the existence of Phoenixes, unicorns, gryphons, dragons, and every other invention of the human imagination, but wild-beast-ites are nothing but fundamentalist prudes (since they also embrace those insufferable notions of making preparations against attack and not letting their children run around in the jungle at night), who are actually dragging down society, because they are trying to convince people not to do such liberating things as pull down their walls and use their arrows for firewood.

Now, if you stumbled upon an outlandish group like this, your first reaction would probably be laughter. Your second, after realizing that they were truly serious, would be (since you are but a man) probably disdain. Then one would hope you would feel pity and a sense of urgency for these poor, illusionary souls, cheating themselves with chimerae while danger loomed in the form of those very beasts the belief in which they scoffed at. Certainly you would never feel in the least ashamed at affirming the reality of jaguars in their presence. You would, in fact, cite that fact repeatedly, perhaps thumbing through a biological textbook or the photographs of a naturalist for extra proof. Better yet, you would show them the practical evidence of jaguars: spoor, tracks, recent kills, legends among other peoples, scratch marks on trees, dens, and the like.

I challenge anyone to tell me how our manner in spreading the Christian faith should be significantly different. The main differentiation is that Christianity is so much more important that the threat of death or pain, which might shut us up about jaguars--at least until they started to attack--ought never to stop us from affirming the divinity of Christ or the reality of substitutionary atonement. Certainly public ridicule should not stop us. The souls of men are at stake, not our self-image. The jaguar-believers might have mud slung at them in the street, even be exiled like gypsies, but they would certainly maintain a staunch attitude about their belief and never have the least thought of conformity. If they did, the jaguar-skeptics would crow over their victory, for no one looks more ridiculous than a man who proposes something so stupendously dramatic and life-changing as Christianity by his hearth, and then actually doesn't let it show by the hearth of someone else. Our families already know. It's the other people who had better be able to tell the difference.

~The Musing Protestant