“8 And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among the people. 9 Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen. 10 But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking. 11 Then they secretly instigated men who said, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” 12 And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, 13 and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, 14 for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.” 15 And gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” (Acts 6:8-15 ESV)

Threat levels and dwelling in the hypothetical: the question of what we say about ourselves, reveals how Aware we are of the Scriptural prophecies of end times, of Armageddon, of Judgment Day. Because these things will arrive like a thief in the night, they will catch us while we are merrily going about our days. And the Readiness, awareness of the Threat Levels, shall—to the saved, to the Chosen, to the Readied—shall simply meld and progress into the Tomorrow as if some percentage of humankind Failed the test. We shall proceed, perhaps, in iterations of culling, iterations of call for those on the Margins of their Faith, the more Real the margin-dweller for their straddling of worlds.

The hypothetical means always to have a bit of a What If unresponsive, that cannot be Addressed, that we chalk up to faith that the Enemy isn’t all-out overwhelmingly pure evil. Sure, in the event the enemy invades, carpet bombs willy-nilly without regard for human flourishing and life, we will do our best to respond: the Christian sees memes, ad campaigns as unfortunate backward carpet bombs, as ideas unmonitored go viral. But also, good people fight to keep the airwaves—the ad waves, the memes—desperately, of necessity, clean. But to the possibility again, of a blitz of evil, we pray for enemies and do hope the spirit of One Humankind will allow that to go back to a New Eden, a bombed-out Denied forward step into the technological, resulting in a New Garden, that the nationality or ethnicity of the First Couple will not be the point of dispute: all humankind share two Ancestors named Eve, named Adam. So we are half-crazed at the heights of our Readiness, and half-crazed to preach a Return to “what we say about ourselves”, not “I am fortified up the ying yang” but “I trust in the mercy and forbearance, the plan and the bellicose Salvation Decision of Christ”.

That is, war colleges of the spirit, jihadist training camps (of choose-your-religion to insert here), some get closer to that hour of prayer and some less so, but the point is not lost: make your Raison d’Etre to be Christ and His plaintive, yes defensive, yes militarized in His choice of aggressive wording, appeal to be heard and All-Sufficient for the un-weaponized Soldier.

That is, un-weaponized in the sense of not armed to the gills with needless efforts to foresee: humankind is One Being, One Body, One Ethnicity called Adamic (not to choose favorites around Eve, as first mother, either). At some level the stockpiling has to give way not to a Catch-22 paradox, but to incorporation of Friendliness, of Mutuality, of Alliance, of finding the energized and Forward economic battle lines of Friendly Projects.

What we say about ourselves is not just that we are sinners in need of grace, but that we would rather die Head Held High and Firm Countenance, than respond in kind to some of the rampant evil onslaughts headed our way. We have faith Humanity, and in particular our own Brand of Faith and Existence, will tickle the fancy of war’s winners, whether literally winning (as we do hope our Faith always shall do) or winning the war of ideas, winning the subsequent Peace and its histories told, winning the Transference of Christ to His disciples, of father and mother to their daughter and son. Maybe some written work, or some historical Anomaly most fascinating, will perk the ears of a later generation: would that we had not Crucified Jesus! Would that we had not Insisted on a military victory that was couched in bombs dropped and such “obvious” economics rather than in Faith’s Dictum: be saved, be Holy, be Giving and Dutiful, love the Brotherhood, the Sisterhood.

To love, then, is to know when to call it a day: more, the Religion of Christ is in fact the Perfect and All-Sufficient answer to the war college’s cry for a way to end each working day. To end, not frustrated we cannot fortify yet more, but content we are Trusting All Things, the lives of our men and women, into a Gracious Spirit called Holy. Because the enemy minus Christ’s religion, gets bogged down in bureaucracies and weird wonderful malaises that blind, that obviate, that obfuscate, that weary, that traumatize, all efforts to See the Big Picture. Only we hope that the Big Picture called Peace is not lost to these our newly minted friends. Friends we can play a little friendly game with, never aping or hurting the pride of a bellicose jealous youthful (uneducated, inexperienced, unpacified) leader of a foreign type of church.

Therefore the Christian hears rumors of war and distant rumblings, a steady purring deep rumble overhead, and this is the New Fashion of War, war for Christ’s religion yes, only insofar as we collate all religions as to their response to Human Frailty and Sin, criminal gangs the agreed-upon target rather than our colleagues across the sea or across the continent. As a church we target the foibles of the weaker moments of our men, of our women, but never losing sight that all are sinners, that nothing is shocking or scandalous, because to the Sin-bearer Christ, each of us, it is par for the course that Mankind is Fallen. Fallen into ideologies of War, into ideologies of Domineering, into ideologies of Exclusion or false rumors of scandal that kills.