The Real Tragedy of the Left

Cohen's (and Trueman's) critique of the left misses the one real tragedy of the left, political and theological: absolutely no sense of humor.  Still, that's a plus for the rest of us, as it has provided endless material for the conservatives throughout church history to have a go and have a laugh and a hoot.   From Irenaeus, with his devastating pastiches of Gnostic theology, through Augustine's sarcastic swipes at the Pelagians and the Donatists, to Aquinas' hilarious vignettes on the Germans (who can forget his comment that they are `the only people so immoral they have no trace of the natural law'?), to almost anything Luther ever wrote about anyone with whom he disagreed, to Cochlaeus's scurrilous satires, to Bale's scurrilous plays, to the woodcut in John Foxe of Bishop Bonner spanking naked Prots in his garden, to Calvin's hilarious treatise on relics (remind me again: how many hands did that saint have???), to John Owen's Monty Python-esque `Socinian Catechism', to Pascal's laugh-out-loud send-up of the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters, to Kierkegaard's witty attacks on `substantial mediocrities' (humorless nerds who lived parasitically by rubbishing others who had the jobs, the status and the influence they, the mediocrities, craved), to Spurgeon's one-liners, to John Henry Newman's witty and devastating riposte to Charles Kingsley, to Chesterton on anything and anybody, and even down to the present day with the Wittenberg Door  etc etc etc. The theologically conservative and orthodox always have more fun, as anybody with a smattering of church history and a modest acquaintance with primary texts would know.  But then the conservative, Protestant and Catholic, have discovered the secret; and if you don't know what that is, I sure ain't gonna tell ya.