In his wonderful book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton points out the tendency non-believers have to throw any available rock at the Christian faith, never mind that the rocks might not all be consistent with each other. He points out that infidels, for example, say that Christianity disparages women and children, but then they turn around to disparage women and children themselves by saying that only women and children believe in Christianity.
This must be a technique that non-believers learn as children in those infidel versions of Vacation Bible School because they use it a lot. For example, they say that Christ Church should be an open and free place, where liberty of conscience has more than enough room for all kinds of opinionated jumping jacks. But then, precisely because it is that kind of church, and totalitarian ecclesiastical controls are as far away from us as the Moscow zoning process is from common sense, this means we are taunted with the existence of some troubled souls in our church who leak information to our adversaries. This person certainly exists (and maybe more than one) — and so what will happen to him when his foolishness catches up with him? Jesus taught us that the Church is like a city on a hill, and the streets are open and wide. This means that scoundrels and cowards can come right in. That is the cost of being the kind of open community that Jesus required the Church to be. And when someone embarrasses himself by skulking when he could walk upright, and it comes out, he sometimes discovers that his secrecy wasn’t all that secret, and more people knew about him than he thought.
On a related point, the other evening at the P & Z meeting, Rose Huskey took a moment to compliment me on the moxie of my daughter-in-law, and she went on to say that one of Christ Church’s best features is our women. This is a sentiment I agree with enthusiastically, and so I told her so. But at the same time, one of the standard canards heaved at us is that we harry our wives, oppressing them like the dickens. But whenever these folks actually meet one of our wives or daughters, they are impressed in spite of themselves, and then do what prejudiced people always do when confronted with a living, breathing contradiction of what they are saying. They make an exception. “Christ Church wives are all browbeaten except for the ones I have met.”
A number of years ago I had the privilege of debating an atheist gentleman, and one of his points was that the Christian faith oppresses women, and he hauled out a verse from the Old Testament to prove it. It is a workhorse argument for them, and so we have to be careful not to begrudge their constant use of it. But we also had the privilege of having this same gentleman over to our house for our sabbath dinner (which we have Saturday night preparing for the Lord’s Day). During the course of our dinner, he remarked to one of the other guests that in the course of his visit to the Christian community here in Moscow, he had never in his life before met so many beautiful wives. He was asked, “What does that tell you?” He said that it meant that they didn’t live where he did, and that was a fact. What it should have meant was that his argument needed to be revisited.