And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

“Death is swallowed up in victory.” – 1 Corinthians 15: 54

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I cannot think of Christmas without thinking of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Nor can I think of Easter without thinking of Handel’s Messiah. It’s more than just an incidental thing to belong to a people who saw the face of Jesus Christ: it is a great blessing beyond compare. And yet we live in a time when a curse has been placed on the antique Europeans. At some point in time a great trial was held and the European people were found guilty of a heinous crime called ‘racism.’ As a result their ancient culture — as well as the people of that culture and their descendants — were sentenced to death. In passing that death sentence upon the European people, the liberals also killed the God who inspired the Europeans to proclaim, “And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then” (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146). But of course that was the liberals’ intent, to kill God by destroying His image in His creatures. What started out as a small sect of liberals became a legion of men and women committed to the destruction of everything connected to Christian Europe.

The great tragedy for Europe and for the world occurred when European Christianity was perceived to be false because no self-respecting intelligent man could believe in the resurrection of the dead. The pride of reason, “Ye shall be as gods,” has always been the besetting sin of mortal man. The reasoning men, the scholars, the philosophers, the scientists, and the men of letters went to the devil first. They were too intelligent to believe in the resurrection from the dead. And the European peasants who did not want to be stupid followed the intellectuals’ lead. It’s not the proofs of God’s existence that are wanting: it’s the heart to believe that is wanting. We are not smarter than our European ancestors who believed in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Show me a modern counterpart to Shakespeare, Burke, Michelangelo, or Hugo Grotius. Those men and so many others like them had great intellects, greater than any intellect of today, so why did they believe while the modern European does not believe? It has to do with the heart. Our European ancestors held to a faith that was passed on from heart to heart at their family hearth fires. The faith that is passed on by an organization committed to a theory of God is not the faith. It is an external faith only, an outward circumcision which “availeth nothing,” while that internal circumcision of the heart, which takes place when two or three are gathered together in His name, is everything. And where, but at our racial hearth fires where the heart is warmed and nurtured, can we learn to love and understand the God who cannot be understood intellectually but only known by a loving heart? A man’s faith in Christ as Redeemer and Savior cannot long endure once he steps outside his racial hearth fire, because in doing so he has embraced the universal mind of man, which leads to Satan, and rejected the heart that truly loves, which leads to Jesus Christ.

We are to God as Katharina the shrew was to Petruchio: before her conversion she saw life as a battle of reasoning wills and felt she must prevail even if it meant defiling her soul to do so. But after her conversion, she sees life through different eyes, through the eyes of the heart, and realizes that conformity to God’s beneficent will is all in all:

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

‘Tis a battle we all must wage, this battle with our pride of reason. Lucifer refused to let go of his pride of reason and became Satan, the evil spirit whom liberals adore and Christians shun and hate. I think part of the reason the liberals have chosen the negro as their primary god is because the negro god does not challenge their pride of reason. The negro needs their intelligence to form the first person of the unholy trinity of reason, the negro, and science. Or so the liberal fantasizes. The negro sees a different reality, which does not include anything but the negro.

Easter really is the day of all days for the European. It is the celebration of their Savior’s resurrection from the dead, a Savior who can only be known by men and women who have not forsaken those mysterious human relationships that bind us to each other and to our Lord. Pride of reason can only be defeated by humble hearts that have learned to love at their racial hearth fires.

Let me close with a remarkable writer who is only known today for his unremarkable books, while his great Christian work has been completely forgotten. The author’s name is James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper was a Christian in ethos like all Europeans of his day, and that ethos was reflected in the manly adventure tales he wrote from age thirty through fifty-five. But in his mid-fifties Cooper saw the Redeemer who was the source of the European ethos. He saw the untamed Aslan, and he wrote about Him, free of the shackles of any one denomination and free of the “he was a good man but not the Son of God” heresy. Cooper’s hero in his masterpiece Sea Lions begins a journey to Antarctica full of the pride of reason, which keeps him from bending his knee to the Son of God. But by the end of the voyage the hero has come to a sympathetic understanding of the love that his intellect never could understand:

Roswell Gardiner has never wavered in his faith, from the time when his feelings were awakened by the just view of his own insignificance, as compared to the power of God! He then learned the first, great lesson in religious belief, that of humility; without which no man can be truly penitent, or truly a Christian. He no longer thought of measuring the Deity with his narrow faculties, or of setting up his blind conclusions, in the face of positive revelations. He saw that all must be accepted, or none; and there was too much evidence, too much inherent truth, a morality too divine, to allow a mind like his to reject the gospel altogether. With Mary at his side, he has continued to worship the Trinity, accepting its mysteries in an humble reliance on the words of inspired men.

Gardiner’s journey was Cooper’s journey: his European heart conquered his pride of reason. Christ will conquer our pride of reason as well if we turn to Him with humble hearts. Why, in the year of our Lord 2013, should we turn our backs on the God of our ascending race? “Christ is risen!” And the response of all true Europeans shall always be, “Indeed He has!” +