How to Recognize Cowardly Courage
Nothing can make a hobbit lose his respectability quite so fast, as a “nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable” adventure. Nothing can cause a hobbit, much less Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag-end, to partake in such an endeavor, at the risk of being late for dinner. Fortunately for us, Bilbo Baggin’s parents were paired together like magnets attracted by opposing fields. In our adultishly trite and boring day and age, we simply say “opposites attract”, but in reality, that’s actually called a good story.
Tolkien was brilliant in the good story department. His beloved character, Mr. Baggins, had more than Baggins-blood in his veins, and as much as he tried to suppress the hereditary impulses of his Took-bred Mother, often times, they would build to eruption. The ultimate fuse was lit in the opening chapter of The Hobbit, at an explosion of magical fireworks, tall tales, and a dwarfish song of lost gold and dragons.
Tolkien described this song as awakening “something Tookish….inside him (Bilbo), and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.
Lo and behold, the bold Tookish blood is resurrected by the idea of adventure…or at least is slowly struggling to life by clinging to a near relation of adventure. Mr. Baggins is enthralled by the idea of seeing great mountains, not actually forging a path through them. He dreams of hearing pine-trees, but not as they roar with the flames of the dwarvish song. He dreams of waterfalls without torrents, caves without trolls, and he imagines wearing a sword instead of using it. To Bilbo, at this point, an adventure is nothing more than a glorified walk in which he views himself courageous, yet remaining safe.
With such a misguided view of adventure, The Hobbit would never have trekked nearly so far as Mr. Baggins. And while we may chuckle at the naivete of our dear little Hobbit, how often do we fall prey to the same, comfortable decontextualisation of reality?
Courageous but Safe
This is something intrinsically human, which we see all the time within the sphere of our cultural arena. We have businesses which announce to the populace that they support the moral revolution along with all its personal choices, proud slogans, and rainbow colored burger-wrappings. The loudest voices of the culture appear a benefactor to humankind – a selfless, supportive, matriarchal leader of a revolution.
Waving the banner of moral relativity, and promising normalization of sin which objective truth denounces as evil, it is these voices that seem both prominent and promising, helpful and hopeful, commanding and courageous in a field of awakening sympathy. Yet these voices, rising above the chaos of their battle, are not benefactors but beneficiaries. Their tactic is only to scream louder than all the other voices. In making themselves heard they appear courageous, when in actuality, they are only safe.
They are safe because they are only broadcasting the tendencies of fallen flesh, they are trying to normalize a fallen worldview that is already largely accepted, and they are speaking from the rooftops that which the entire culture mainly believes. A business that remains true to its moral beliefs in the wave of this moral revolution, is seen as less courageous – though it is under more pressure – than a business which proclaims the right slogans and supports the right endeavors, even though it merely drifts with the tide of political and moral descent.
Our fallen nature is naturally bent toward that which is fallen. We ride atop the stream and imagine ourselves bold pioneers of an undocumented future, propelling toward that which we were already being carried, all along. The real battle is against the current – not with it.
The Cowardly Christian
Of course this cowardly portrayal of courage is not just prevalent in the cultural arena, but in the Christian sphere as well. It is very easy for us to imagine ourselves seeing mountain-tops of spiritual experience, finding pleasure in the forests of knowledge, and drinking from the waterfalls of religious sentiment. We imagine ourselves very brave to speak brave words against the darkness of secular caves, and to wear swords of moral truth rather than rainbow-colored walking sticks. But how often does that spiritual experience, that knowledge, that sentiment, those words, that truth, actually propel us into the battle, rather than the pleasant idea of religious equanimity?
How easy it is to applaud high moral virtues, rather than fight for them. How quick we are to sing the praises of Scripture in public, which we disregard in solitude. How often do we strive to live outward lives of religious morality and aptitude, while living in private indifference to the God who is not glorified by a glittering sword never pulled from its sheath.
Christian Courage
This worldview is detrimental to a fallen world with a core of fallen beliefs, and to a Christian church with a core of Christian beliefs, not only because it redefines courage, promotes a life of hypocrisy, undermines our cause (God’s glory) and the manner in which we pursue it, but also because it is destructive to the very foundation of the Gospel.
Christ came to this earth, lived, suffered, died, and rose again not to make us comfortable, conformable, happily indifferent mimics of a sinful world, nor to make us stoic pursuers of a philosophers’ religion, nor to make us sentimental seekers of a wishful religion. Christ died to resurrect dead men and bring them to Himself. Not to make us comfortable, but to be our comfort (Psalm 23:4). Not to make us conformable to the sins of this world, but ever conforming to the perfect image of Himself (Romans 8:29). Not to make us stoic, but to free us with the truth (John 8:32). Not to make us sentimental dreamers, but to ground us in His eternal and solid hope and joy (1 Peter 1:3-6).
It is this Gospel that gives the Christian courage, and this Gospel only.
But when we refuse to live courageous lives reverberating forth from the truth of this Gospel, we fall short of our our God-given purpose of life..
As John Piper writes in his book, Don’t Waste Your Life:
“God created me – and you – to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion – namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life.”
Safe but Dead
Up to this point, we have seen the world’s tendency of believing they are courageous when they are actually safe. I want to clarify here, because I think to call the world safe can be misleading. What I mean by this is that the world is simply drifting with the tide of fallen cultural digression. It is not proclaiming a new progression of social and political and moral achievements, but simply recognizing those abhorrent milestones as they erect on already-laid foundations. It has nothing to fear from the world, because it is the world. So it is safe. From the world. But that does not mean it is safe.
As G.K. Chesterton said in his book, The Everlasting Man, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
The problem with the world is that it is not only safe, it is dead. Like a corpse buried deep in the ground, it is safe in its deadness – safe from everything, that is, but it’s own internal corruption.
The Gospel is useless apart from its power to resurrect the dead. Without Christ, the world is without hope, without joy, without life. It is impossible for such a world to have courage. It is forced to remain a decaying leech of hypocrisy, sinking its gums into the ghost of a virtue never to be its own.
The Christian – we who have been resurrected and rescued, by the grace of God, from our own deadness in sin – have not only the means of courage but the cause of our courage.
Puritan theologian, John Flavel, expressed this cause over 350 years ago:
“‘He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all; how shall He not with Him freely give us all things?’ (Romans 8:32)….Surely if He would not spare His own Son one stroke, one tear, one groan, one sigh, one circumstance of misery, it can never be imagined that ever He should, after this, deny or withhold from His people, for whose sakes all this was suffered, any mercies, any comforts, any privilege, spiritual or temporal, which is good for them.”
Oh, the blessed logic of Romans chapter 8! This logic declares the world courageous in nothing but it’s own deluded hypocrisy of courage, and safe from nothing in it’s own internal corruption. This logic declares Christians courageous because we are grounded in the very root and foundation of all true courage, and safe because in that root and foundation is Christ.
To be courageous and safe is only contradictory when the world professes both and contains neither.
But the Gospel declares our hope in Christ, who has made us more than conquerors (Romans 8:31-39). And if God is for us, then who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)
Christian courage is found in the same place as our refuge – it is found in Christ (Proverbs 14:26; Psalm 18:2).
Soli Deo Gloria,
