From today’s YDN

Volf’s upbringing on the cultural margins helped him develop the ability to find points of convergence in conflicting viewpoints, making Volf the unconventional and creative scholar he is widely considered today, research assistant Neil Arner DIV ’07 said. With a professional portfolio that includes over 150 editorials and articles and 11 books, Volf has been called “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day” by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams.

“I was a total outsider,” Volf said of his childhood during the 1960s in Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, where his father was a pastor.

As a religious person in Communist Yugoslavia as well as a practitioner of a marginal religion, Pentecostalism, within Croatia’s small religious community of Roman Catholics, Volf was actually an outsider twice over, Arner said.

Volf, now a member of the Episcopal Church, said he formally affirmed his Christian faith at the age of 16. From then on, Volf recalls being sent to the principal’s office multiple times during high school for wearing a cross or openly discussing his religious beliefs.

“For me, it was matter of personal religious faith,” Volf said, “but it was perceived by the totalitarian state as a subversive act.”

_______________________________________________________

Read the whole thing but come back to the pull quote. Miroslav is a serious Christian and a fine theologian. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him that while wearing the cross was “for [him] a matter of personal religious faith”, the totalitarian state’s perception is accurate that his doing so was “a subversive act.” But witting or not, the article gives the impression that for Miroslav the cross is a matter merely of personal religious faith and not subversive at all. That mistakes him and it mistakes the cross.

The cross has never been a personal objet d’ art. It was a capital punishment Rome reserved not for everyday brigands but for insurrectionists, thus it has always been associated with political subversion. It wasn’t Dali or Rubens who inspired the Roman governor Varius to execute two thousand men at once on separate crosses a few years before the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. The Roman general Titus wasn’t moved by Georgia O’Keefe or David Yurman to crucify 500 Jews daily outside the walls in plain view of the citizens of Jerusalem. The cross was to Rome a public service announcement. Six thousand men crucified every 130 feet on the Appian Way from Rome to ancient Capua advertises WHO’S IN CHARGE on a linear scale that even Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up. It is not for his aesthetics—his taste for clean lines—that the name Pilate has been on the lips of Christians every Sunday for nearly two millenia.

Ever since Rome crucified him people who’ve trusted Jesus with their lives have said JESUS IS LORD. They haven’t shut up about it even when the state persecuted and killed them for it. No one ever responds to the cross tout court.

“To Carthage then I came, and a welter of corrupted loves assaulted me from all sides. I was not yet in love; I was in love with being in love. With secret yearning I despised myself for not yearning enough. I searched for an object of love, loving to love.”

—Augustine, Confessions, iii. 1.

Remember Veni Carthaginem when hearing of deadly nonsense such as “Japanese Launch Campaign to Marry Comic Book Characters” or “Fantasy Funeral Brings Out Thousands of Real Mourners”. The Japanese make easy targets (he said, whose mother’s maiden name is Akiko Tamaoki), but on the high-speed chase to nowhere, they are only faster—and more smitten with animé—than those of us in the West. “The modern conception has made freedom the content of the moral life. It matters not what we desire, but that we desire. Our task is to become free, not through the acquisition of virtue, but by preventing ourselves from being determined, so that we can always keep our ‘options open.’ We have thus become the bureaucrats of our own history” (Stanley Hauerwas, The Peacable Kingdom [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983], 8).

The heart’s restlessness is no accident, any more than its pursuit for an object outside itself, as if desire were a casino and Christianity—or the Blessed Sacrament—the Blackjack table. Moses would find the cult of animé, like the golden calf, banal. Aaron, the priest, looks away.

If we’re incredulous, let’s hope we have the incredulity of Father Brown. “It’s drowning all your old rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition, … calling all the menagerie of polytheism, … Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning; … and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made Man’” (G. K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown [reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1958], 70-71).

We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obligated first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use); it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.’

from Warranted Christian Belief