In the Beginning . . .Was the Word
“In the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
These words strike a chill down my spine every single time I read them or hear them read. They are the impetus for the entire experiment of human life being seen as a worthwhile adventure. They simultaneously speak of the beginning and the end; the Alpha and the Omega. They are the telos of our existence as a culture and civilization. Without them, the beginning would begin in void . . . and never would be filled. Everything that we hold dear as a unique civilization is dear because it was foreseen from the beginning of all time as being worthwhile. It was made good, and it still is.
It might seem strange to begin a blog with such a cryptic paragraph, but really it isn’t. This blog is beginning with the prologue to the Gospel of John because John witnessed Jesus Christ, God and man, during His earthly life and understood that he had seen someone and something extremely special. So special in fact that it could only come in the fullness of time. He had seen the fullness of time itself, incarnate in the flesh of mankind, taking onto Himself the fullness of our nature and by doing so, making our existence worthwhile. Because He loves us.
John’s Gospel was written in defense of the Man, for John states in Ch 1. vs.15, “John beareth witness of him, and crieth out, saying: This was he of whom I spoke: He that shall come after me, is preferred before me: because he was before me.”
Christ is before us all. He is the way, the truth, and the life. So much so, in fact, that nothing outside of Jesus Christ is worthwhile in itself. All things must be done with Him, and through Him. Because He “was before me.”
This also happens to be the fundamental realization of Western culture and that which nourished and guided the creation of an entire civilization founded on the fundamental realization that life is worthwhile because He, the Son of the eternal Father of all creation, made it so through His redemptive act on the cross.
Western civilization is centered on the Man, Jesus Christ; for he is the only Man who ever truly lived. The culture of life, joy, and peace is founded in Christ, and he is the man who is worthy of defense. Not because he cannot do it himself. He is, after all, God.
No this blog, rather, is dedicated to those subjects which arise from the unique context in which we find ourselves as Christians living in the 21st century, in a place where perhaps the last best hope of a free existence seems rapidly to be sinking in the flood of secularism, communism, and the ever tightening grip of totalitarianism. Though definitively American in perspective, this blog is oriented towards Western civilization also . . . of course. America is, as it turns out, in so many ways the best of the Western tradition. It is a uniquely American expression that all men are created equal. Our equality, however, is ultimately found in our dignity as children of God. Not the mere fact that because we are human we are equal. That certainly is not true. All people are created differently, with different abilities and capacities. There is no equality in difference. Our equality comes from God and from our creation in His image and likeness. This is also a uniquely American sentiment; that because we are all created with equal dignity, we are all equal before the law because the law also proceeds from the Creator.
As it turns out, this basic realization of our founding fathers, that all men are created equal, is also the one fact that has come under relentless assault from the cultural and political left: the socialists and globalist elites. They must destroy it for their very survival. If they don’t, they cannot continue to prosecute their centuries long war against the West. If we win this culture war, it will be because we placed that fundamental reality at the center of our lives and everything we did both in public and in the silence of our hearts. The culture war is, after all, a battle of which god will be worshiped in the West: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the false god of society en masse. Only one option leads to freedom.
Lastly, and paradoxically I suppose (because it is also primarily), this blog is In Defense of Man. Yes, you guessed it; the God-man. Not that He needs any defense. He certainly does not need my poor attempts to defend Him. I know, as does every believing Christian, that Jesus Christ has already won. I am just attempting to defend Him in the eyes of you (my valued reader) and our culture in general, because I care about life. It is no secret that the real reason why we have a culture of death is because ultimately we worship death as a society. Not that people are literally worshiping the dead in massive numbers (although that is happening more and more these days). Rather, it comes from the basic reality that there is only one life, and again, He is Jesus Christ. If a society worships anything or anyone other than Christ, then there exists a culture of death: because all things will pass away in the end but the Word of God will not.
This blog then, is dedicated to the only one who makes life worthwhile and from whom all truths of politics and culture flow, the source and summit of Christian existence, and indeed of human existence: the Word made flesh.
In Defense of Man 