Rick Strickert (Carlvehse)
Senior Member
Username: Carlvehse
Post Number: 4321
Registered: 10-2003 |
| Posted on Saturday, December 28, 2013 - 3:46 pm: |    |
Here is Rev. Joel R. Baseley's translation of an article, "Ist es erlaubt, die Gegner der Wahrheit lächerlich zu machen und ihrer Irrthümer zu spotten?" ("Is it Allowed to Make Fun of Opponents of the Truth and to Ridicule Their Heresies?") published by C.F.W. Walther in Der Lutheraner, Vol. 4, No. 5, November 4, 1847, p. 40. The article is basically excerpts from a 1656 letter to the Jesuits by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a French Roman Catholic mathematician, physicist, inventor of the first mechanical calculator, writer, and Christian philosopher. Here the article is broken up into paragraphs for readability:
Pascal (Cf. the article on him in The Lutheran III, 13) writes: "There is a great distinction between one’s ridiculing religion and ridiculing those who profane it by their weird ideas. It would be ungodly if the truths which the Spirit of God has revealed would not be given the respect due them. But it would also be ungodly if disrespect were not shown to the untruths placed against them by the human spirit. – The verities of our religion have two properties, a divine beauty which makes them beloved and a divine majesty which makes them honored; and heresies have two corresponding characteristics, impiety, which makes them despicable and impertinence, which makes them ridiculous.
Therefore just as saints always experience love and fear for the truth, so they also hate and despise heresy, and they just as zealously labor to powerfully repel the evil of godless, as to also quell their heresy and folly with mockery.
So do not hope, my fathers (the Jesuits), to convince the world that it would be unworthy of a Christian to treat heretics with mockery, since it is easy to show those who do not know it that this method is just, since it is common in the church fathers and from the holy Scripture through the examples of the greatest saints, and approved by God himself.
For don’t you see that God both hates and despises sinners as a whole, that in the hour of death, when their condition is most miserable and tragic, divine wisdom will add mockery and derision to his vengeance and wrath, which will condemn them to eternal damnation: "You refuse all my counsel and do not want my rebuke, so I also will laugh at your disaster and mock you when you arrive at what you fear." Prov. 1.25-26. And saints, moved by the same Spirit, do the same, since they, according to David, when someday they see the evil punished, will both tremble and laugh about it "The righteous will see and fear, and they will laugh at him." Ps. 52,6.
And Job even says this: "The righteous will see it and be glad, and the innocent his mockers." Job 22.19. The prophets, filled with the Holy Ghost also employed such mockery, as we see in the examples of Daniel and Elijah. Love sometimes compels to laughter over the heresies of people in order to move they themselves to laughter and to depart from them."
Tertullian: There are many things that must be mocked and ridiculed so they are not battled as something serious, as if they had significance. Nothing serves vanity better than to make fun of it. And laughter and derision of its foes is actually fair and appropriate for truth that is happy and sure of victory. It’s true that care must be taken that the mockery is not borne of jealousy or truth would be cheapened. But as this is settled, it is a duty to put this into practice if one is equipped to do so.
Augustus: "Who may assert that the truth must remain unarmed against the lie and that it would be allowed enemies of the faith to cower believers with strong words and to frighten them with godless insinuations while the orthodox would only be allowed a dispassionate style that would put their reader to sleep?"
One can read another translation of Pascal's entire August 18, 1656, Letter XI, "Ridicule a fair weapon when employed against absurd opinions-Rules to be observed in the use of this weapon-The profane buffoonery of Fathers LeMoine and Garasse," in The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal: a new translation, with historical introduction and notes (Blaise Pascal, Thomas M'Crie, Edinburgh:J. Johnstone, 1847, pp. 167-184) or in the original French in Les lettres provinciales de Blaise Pascales lettres provinciales de Blaise (Longmans, Green & Company, 1920, pp. 121-134). |
