{The Little Red Blog has instructed Pascal the existential Russian blue cat to cease and desist his assaults on Christianity—that is, after this one last parting shot. His next target will be Capitalism, an equally culpable source of Nihilism and an equally inviting target.}
“The history of modernity can be pinned on Paul.” (Jacob Taubes)
Jacob Taubes was a twentieth-century sociologist of religion, a philosopher, and a scholar of Judaism; according to Jerry Z. Muller, Taubes existed “on the border between Judaism and Christianity, between skepticism and belief, between scholarly distance and religious fervor. His self-appointed role was that of a gnostic, apocalypticist, or revolutionist—a man who fed on crisis, constantly on the lookout for signs of the impending destruction and transformation of a world perceived as evil or corrupted.” Described as having been both “charismatic and puzzling,” Taubes may have been the ideal person to assess the apostle Paul (whom he admired) and the Christianity Paul birthed (which he did not admire).
Taubes believed that Paul had been widely misunderstood, both by Christians and by Jews. Given Taubes’ temperament, what attracted him to Paul may well have been the nihilism that was, so to speak, the worm in the apple of Christianity. Commenting on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Taubes notes, “Here we have a nihilistic view of the world. The concept of nihilism is the guiding thread in Corinthians and Romans. The world decays, the form of this world has passed. This is politics as nihilism; behind Paul’s thought there is a profound nihilism at work toward the destruction of the Roman Empire.” Paul counseled obedience to worldly authorities only because their authority was coming to an end and their judgment day was at hand. Why worry about the tax collector when the Grim Reaper was around the corner?
“For Paul,” Taubes wrote, “the days of the Messiah had already begun with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He considered the old eon gone; ‘Time is short,’ Paul wrote, ‘it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none, and they that weep as though they wept not, and they that rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and they that buy as though they possessed not.’” The eschaton would annihilate this world; believers in Christ, however, would be able to watch from on high, untouched by the cataclysm and rejoicing in their own blessedness.
“I would have you be free from care,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Commented Taubes, “You can speak and write this way only if you are convinced that ‘the fashion of this world passes away.’” But when the world from which you were told to detach yourself stubbornly persists, what then? “Is it possible,” asked Taubes, “two thousand years after Paul, to practice Christian indifference to the world and its history with the same good conscience and naivete as did the primitive Christians who lived in daily expectation of the Second Coming?”
Not likely, Taubes declared: “Between Paul and Karl Barth, almost two millennia have passed. If one today were to have a wife ‘as though’ one had none, weep ‘as though’ one wept not, rejoice ‘as though’ one rejoiced not, buy ‘as though’ one possessed not, use this world ‘as though’ it were not—if one were really to act this way, one could fairly be taxed with displaying an outrageously cynical or at least an ambiguous attitude toward the world.” One might even be accused of practicing a kind of Christian nihilism; “This world is not my home, I am a pilgrim and a stranger, my citizenship is in heaven.” Karl Barth did his best to get that message across, to remind believers that the world was neither God’s home nor their own.
In Taubes’ analysis, “Barth’s theology of crisis unwittingly revealed the crisis of Christian theology in a world that does not pass away. Since Paul, Christianity has accepted all authorities of the state as ordained by God; such an attitude, born in the hot chiliastic climate of the early Christian community, can hardly be perpetuated. In the last millennium, the Christian church itself became a part of the powers and principalities that rule the world. Such an ambiguous state becomes intolerable in a time of crisis. Karl Barth was one of the few who saw the writing on the wall. He wanted to force the Christian community ‘out of this world,’ to break the ties with a culture that had spuriously assumed Christian attributes for itself. Therefore, he believed, the capitalist West may present to the Christian community a greater temptation than the non-Christian East.”
What Taubes called “the apolitical premise of all Christian theology” is an inheritance from Paul; call it “Christian nihilism”. The gospels are clear: government does not matter; property does not matter; wealth does not matter; success does not matter; social prestige or respectability does not matter; even family does not matter. Nothing matters except heaven, and the road to heaven is paved entirely with God’s mysterious intentions; everything else is only a speed bump, a detour, or a roadblock.
Nihilism is a difficult gospel to preach. Telling believers that they exist in a meaningless world, that all worldly values are snares and delusions, and that their salvation is entirely out of their hands and in the hands of an unreachable, unapproachable God: that message is not remotely “good news,” which is why Christian apologists over the centuries have learned to discreetly pretend otherwise.
Regarding Barth's neo-orthodox nihilism, Jacob Taubes recalled “the tragi-comical fate of Augustine’s work on the heavenly and earthly city, The City of God, which became a classic in a Christian civilization whose basic premises it vigorously denied. Augustine contested the legitimacy of the Roman Empire, but the authorities of the Middle Ages who quoted Augustine on every page defended precisely the ‘Holy Roman Empire,’ an amalgam of Church and State, of the earthly and the heavenly city, which would have horrified Augustine. Is it too bold,” Taubes wondered, “to imagine that Barth’s theologico-political tracts might have a similar destiny, finding their place on the shelf of ‘Great Books’ of a Western civilization built precisely on foundations that Barth constantly rejected?”
If that should be the fate of Barth’s writings, they would be in good company, shelved not only with Augustine’s books but with the gospels themselves, purveyors of a world-denying nihilism by which almost no one even pretends to live. Christianity has always considered itself to be a religion of hope, but its original hope, as articulated repeatedly in the New Testament, was for the abolition of this world and the advent of a new one. “Thy kingdom come” is a plea for the apocalypse; we should be grateful that the God to whom it is addressed seems not to be listening.
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Jacob Taubes quotes are taken from his 1954 review of Karl Barth’s Against the Stream: Against the Stream, by Karl Barth – Commentary Magazine
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