Divine Discords

"There's gonna be a fight! There's gonna be a fight!", to quote Stan Laurel in the film Chumps At Oxford.
A theological-sociological one, but still a fight. A donneybrook.

I was reading a Lutheran's take on the attacks on poor Benedict XVI  ( which I have sadly gotten into the habit of saying " ex, vee, eye" instead of "16th"...since I cannot remember if it's 16 or 17, and I rebel at reading Roman numerals ever since the "unpleasantness" at the Super Bowl ).
The upshot of it all was that the forces of Modernism were conspiring to destroy good old Christianity...which I have sadly gotten into the habit of referring to as "Pe - ex -ianity " , from the symbol of the Greek Chi  X  superimposed over the Greek Rho  P ... the rho looks like the English "p"...

Anyway, forces of Modernism running amok, and quotations from Niemuller abounding: when they came for the Catholics, I did not protest, because I was not a Catholic, etc.
And all the comments were similar "onward, Christian soldiers" broadsides, and lots of wonderment why the Media should impoverish Christianity, while there was the Drang von Osten  ( Push from the East ) of Muslims filling the ghettoes and sketchy areas of Europe.
( and why do foreigners seem so attracted to our sketchy areas, anyway? A bit of nostalgie de la boue, perhaps? )

I was properly appalled. I applauded their writing. I said that once again we see that a good fight touches us mightily...........

........in ways the love of God cannot.

The love of God needs all our rhetorical skills to whip us up into a frenzy. For the most part, our love is not quick, not acute, not painfully intense. That's why we have sermons to incite us. If any peoples anywhere ever danced themselves into a frenzy around a fire in a religious ritual, then similarly we allow our divines to strain at oratory, and use words to try to inflame our hearts.
But our hearts are green wood.
Were they fat wood, then the love of God would touch our hearts with intimate flame the same as does a good fight!