As a huge fan of rhetoric as an art form, I value beautiful, articulate speech. Words really do it for me, and there is nothing better than a finely-crafted rant. On my bookshelf is a compilation called "The Malcontents." It contains roughly five hundred pages of bitter satire and grassroots stump speeches defending freedom and liberty dating back centuries.
My favorite is John Milton's Areopagitica, in which he demands the right to a free and unlicensed press in 17th-century England. Milton's speech contains a section called "On the Importance of Even Wrong Ideas."
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil...
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.
Indeed, the wheat shall rise with the chaff to be separated at the harvest. But until the harvest, it is important -- indeed, essential, that thought be free in order that we might pursue God in all avenues. I know Christ because I have once not known Him, and now find rest in His peace and salvation. Our pest control shall be natural and organic -- we endeavor to guard truth from falsity without poisoning both. This is difficult.
Yet the Lord shall correct us as we walk and talk, a light unto our paths. As Milton argues in "Truth will win out:"
"What great purchase is Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, may do either to the Lord.
How many other things might be tolerated in peace and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another! I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks..."
My words are not dogmatic imperatives to which we demand adherence. I've neither the authority nor the desire to command it in such a manner. We're here to offer a prophetic perspective -- indeed, a perspective we regard as necessary and true. With this in mind, we shall write in bold strokes with hands seized by fear and trembling.
May the Holy Spirit guide us in this endeavor.
