The Little Red Blog

The Joy of Heresy (Part 3): The Lake of Fire

{Are we done with Marcionism? No, we are not done with Marcionism, nor is Marcionism done with us. I am going to gnaw at this bone until—well, until I stop.}

In a prescient 2019 article at Crisis, Fr. Tim McCauley warned about neo-Marcionites in our midst, heretics who reject the Old Testament God for being judgmental, cruel, arbitrary, irrational, etc. Neo-Marcionites, like their titular predecessor, prefer a kinder, gentler God, a God of unconditional love and infinite forgiveness; Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion, refers to this conception disparagingly as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a label which has been given the Orthodox Christian seal of approval by serial Christian convert Rod Dreher.

Alas, it is already too late for Fr. McCauley’s alarum, Christian Smith’s analysis, or Rod Dreher’s endorsement to help us. The neo-Marcionite invasion is well underway, as we see from the following publisher’s blurb for Doug Frank’s book A Gentler God:

What is God like? Is he the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop heartbreaking human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is he the callous Judge, offering the faithful a place in his heaven while summarily casting the faithless into everlasting hell? Is he the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him--unceasingly--for his "awesome power"? If this is the God we have been taught, it is no wonder that many people have come to realize that they do not like, let alone trust him. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today's atheists also leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God --an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being. This book points the way. It dismantles the "angry, punitive God" of traditional Protestantism and beckons us toward a kinder, more welcoming God. This God does not ask us to grit our teeth and try our best to believe. Instead, this God meets us in our humanity, inviting our hearts to respond in genuine trust and love.

Get thee behind us, Satan disguised as Doug Frank! What Frank's book dismisses as “the simple certainties of childhood” is the very Word of God, preserved in the inspired pages of an infallible Bible. Do today’s pseudo-Christians “want a personal connection with God”? They should be careful what they wish for; as the author of Hebrews proclaimed, and as the pages of scripture abundantly show, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Thankfully, not all Christians are sheep easily led astray. Contra the neo-Marcionites, the folks at “Answers in Genesis” (AiG) proudly subscribe to good old-fashioned Old Testament monotheism. AiG owns (among other things) a popular tourist attraction in Kentucky called “The Ark Encounter,” which, according to one observer, is “devoted to emphasizing – with great specificity – the wrathful nature of God and the eternal damnation that awaits unrepentant sinners.” The Biblical tale of Noah’s ark is a perfect object lesson in YHWH’s severe justice, illustrating as it does that “all humans are sinners and are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”

The Ark Encounter exhibits are labeled to help visitors draw the correct theological conclusions: 

Genesis 7:16 states that, as the flood waters rose, God slammed shut the door into the Ark. Once shut, all the humans and animals on the other side of the door were doomed to drown. According to a placard displayed at Ark Encounter, there may have been upwards of 20 billion people on Earth at the time of the Genesis flood, a number that would have included children and infants, not to mention the unborn.

Another placard asks, “Was it just for God to judge the whole world?” The answer: “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Secondly, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”

Generations after the deluge, a supposedly righteous man named Job learned the folly of questioning God. What part of “I am God, and you are not” do modern Christians not understand?  From Eden onward, testing the LORD’s patience has been a losing strategy; “FAFO" ("Fool Around and Find Out”) is spelled out in fiery letters throughout the Bible. “Answers in Genesis” does not blink at the dire message found in the scriptural text:

According to AiG, this ancient divine slaughter prefigures a future divine slaughter. As the Ark Encounter website puts it, “God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire.  God always keeps His promises – judgment will come.” According to AiG, we can escape this fate by believing in Christ, but for the billions (past and present) who have not or do not, the result is “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire.” ¹

Doug Frank, neo-Marcionites and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists would be well advised to purchase their asbestos diving suits while they can. They may not have started the fire, but they are destined to spend eternity in its flames. 

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At a popular evangelical tourist site, the Ark Encounter, the image of a 'wrathful God' appeals to millions (theconversation.com)

¹ The “lake of fire” should not be confused with Johnny Cash’s “ring of fire,” although both are known to “burn, burn, burn”.

The Joy of Heresy (Part 2)

{It has been suggested to me that very few people share my interest in early Christian heresies or in the ditheistic system of Marcion of Sinope. I find this difficult to believe. Is this not still a Christian nation? And ought Christians not to be on guard against the revival of ancient heresies such as Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism? The roads to Hell are many and varied, filled with seductive roadside attractions and a plethora of unknown unknowns; the more we learn about the landscape of heresy, the better we can avoid it.} ¹

“In holding the idea that the revelation of God in Christ was transitory rather than intrinsic to the godhead itself, Marcion anticipated the modalist-Monarchians such as Praxeas and Sibellius. His Christology inevitably led him in the direction of patripassianism.” (R. Joseph Hoffmann, from Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity)

Whatever happened to the Modalist Monarchians? They were one of the best of the New Wave/punk pseudo-apostolic bands; Praxeas and Sibellius were the Lennon and McCartney of their era. Perhaps they got lost on their way to Patripassianism; it is, I have heard, a long and winding road, and the signage, in koine Greek and Aramaic, is confusing.  

As we were saying, heresies—by which we mean, divergent views about Jesus and about the implications of his life, death, and resurrection—abounded in the early centuries of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before authorities stepped in to quell the riot of religious and metaphysical speculation. Unfortunately, by the time order was restored, an entire clowder of Gnostic cats had been let out of the bag. We turn again to Rufus Jones (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) for explanation:

It is no exaggeration to say that by the middle of the second century the Church found itself engaged in a life and death struggle with the multitudinous forms of Gnostic religion. With all their variations, they can quite well be grouped under the label, 'the Gnostic complex.'  ‘Complex’ seems a very appropriate word for these movements. The word properly means organized tendencies or sentiments which are in some degree confused, morbid and abnormal. They are usually found in individuals, but here in these movements we are confronted with social waves, or tides, or drifts, of morbid and unbalanced sentiments which were more or less 'contagious.' We have revealed to us in these movements a society which seems neurasthenic and psychopathic—suffering from nervous prostration— in which almost any ‘suggestion’ may powerfully operate and effectively work.

A great many of the Gnostic societies are, of course, not rightly called heretical. They were often wholly outside the sphere and area of the Church. Some of them plainly antedate the birth of the Church, but they tended all the time to influence and color its life and thought, and the movement was the fertile mother of heresies. Christianity has throughout all its history borne the marks of its conflict with this mélange of rival faiths, for while it was ostensibly victorious over them, it was at the same time in some degree 'led captive' by those whom it conquered.

Gnostic writings were given to speculation about the origin of the world and the source of evil, but they were much more akin to magic than to philosophy, and they drew upon mythology and imagination for their constructive material rather than upon rational and verifiable grounds of truth. They are decadent forms of religion, full of confusion, superstition, gullibility, credulity and wild imagination. ²

With all due respect to Rufus Jones: just hold your horses there a minute, buddy. “Mainstream” Christianity was chock-full of so-called "divine revelations," miraculous events, and what might plausibly be called wild imaginings. Paul deliberately eschewed and explicitly denigrated “rational and verifiable grounds of truth” in favor of mystical visions he modestly claimed to have been granted (“whether in the body or out of the body,” he did not know); those visions revealed to him, in his words, "things hidden since the foundation of the world."

As for Gnostics’ belief in magic: I am at a loss as to how anyone can view the transformative effects of pneuma, as described by Paul, as anything other than magic; pneuma was said eventually to transform believers into quasi-divine creatures with authority to judge angels. ³ The Church’s official doctrine of eucharistic “transubstantiation”—bread and wine transmuted into “the body and blood of Christ”—is as magical as the day is long, especially as it is facilitated, according to the Church, by formulaic words being spoken as part of a structured ritual by an authorized priest. You simply cannot get more magical than that.  

Continuing his polemic, Rufus Jones damned Gnostics with the faintest of praise, suggesting they were, at best, industrious scavengers:

Gnostics were very skillful in their use of “the debris of ancient faiths,” out of which they fashioned new and fantastic structures. They “plundered” the older faiths somewhat as the builders of new temples plundered the ancient shrines for their building material. The religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Old Testament and Greece, especially the imaginary world system set forth in Plato’s Timaeus, furnished suggestions, and sometimes even body and filling, for the weird Gnostic “gospel” during the prolific period of the first and second centuries.

Again, with respect: Gnostics were no more guilty of “plundering” than were orthodox Christians, who expropriated in toto the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, reinterpreting them at will and using them as a cudgel with which to browbeat the Jewish people. Moreover, while the Gnostic gospels were undeniably “weird,” I would hesitate to make that point if I were, like Rufus Jones, an adherent of a religion which worships an incarnate God who was born of a miraculously impregnated virgin and who, after performing all sorts of miracles, allowed himself to be cruelly murdered before rising from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes and then disappearing from the planet for good.

In other words: let whoever is without weird religious ideas of their own cast the first stone at the glass houses of others.

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¹ See Fr. Tim McCauley’s prescient warning: Beware the Neo-Marcionites (crisismagazine.com)

² Pagans like Celsus and Porphyry described Christianity itself in almost identical terms.

³ Pneuma was also said to help build strong bodies 12 ways--I think. 

 

The Little Red Blog's research assistant

The Joy of Heresy

{My research into Paul the apostle has led me to reading about Marcion of Sinope, a 2^nd-century Christian bishop who fell out of favor with orthodoxy over his claim that the God of Jesus was an entirely different God than YHWH, the creator God of the Old Testament. He based this on his reading of Paul’s letters, and he then interpreted (and “corrected”) the gospels accordingly. In a sense, Marcion was the original booster of Pauline Christianity, albeit in a form quickly condemned by other Christian writers. Since Paul’s writings also appealed to some Gnostic groups, he became known by critics as the “apostle to the heretics”. Marcion, with his doctrine of two Gods, had a substantial following, but, as Christian orthodoxy solidified, he was effectively banished from Christian history, only to begin making a comeback starting in the 19^th century. The point I’m trying to make is, Christian history is fascinating, and so are Christian heresies.}

So many heretics, so little time! Such was the lament of Professor Rufus Jones back in 1924, when he published his The Church’s Debt to Heretics. “My greatest difficulty in preparing this volume,” he explained, “has been the problem of selection. The material vastly overflowed my limits of space. I was compelled to choose a few specimens from the prairie harvest which the centuries laid at my hand.” A prairie harvest of heresy! There is a title waiting for its book to be written. “Some readers,” Jones acknowledged, “will look in vain for their pet heretic, while others will find someone praised and glorified whom they would prefer to see burned or at least left to oblivion.”

Christianity did not exactly invent the idea of heresy, but it certainly did its best to perfect and to promote it. Forbidden ideas and forbidden books drew the censure of church authorities ever since there was such a thing as “church authorities”. Paul himself warned against “false apostles” and counterfeit gospels; while his gospel was authorized directly by God and therefore could not be questioned, subsequent Christians had to rely on the Church to refine (and define) orthodoxy for them by sifting heresy from the voluminous deposit of faith—and by the occasional “inquisition” and burning at the stake to make sure everyone took orthodoxy and heresy seriously.

Despite the best efforts of the doctrinal gatekeepers, heresies refused to go away. The Protestant Reformation, by allowing heterodoxy to flourish, let a veritable clowder of heretical cats out of the bag; the Enlightenment came along and made things worse. Twenty years or so ago, Philip J. Lee, a Protestant pastor, felt compelled to write a book (Against the Protestant Gnostics) in which he denounced much of modern Christianity as infected by Gnostic and Pelagian heresies. More recently, the nationally syndicated columnist Ross Douthat, a convert to Roman Catholicism, surveyed the American religious landscape and pronounced it filled with heretics; his book was titled, straightforwardly enough, Bad Religion.

I raise the issue of heresy because I have been reading about post-apostolic Christianity, which was a veritable smorgasbord of religious oddities. My readings of, and about, Paul have made it clear to me that the original “Jesus movement” was much less unified than standard Church history would have us believe; Paul himself encountered resistance to “his” gospel, and his letters largely focused on combating what he saw as misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and demon-inspired opposition to that gospel. Neither Paul nor the other leading apostles—i.e., Peter, James, and John—were able entirely to control the religious and spiritual energies that their movement tapped into and unleashed. In the decades following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (70 CE), and as Jesus’ original disciples and earliest followers died off, extravagant and increasingly inventive versions of the gospel were in circulation—most of which the Church managed, one way or another, to suppress.

One man’s heresy is, of course, another man’s orthodoxy; “right belief” is in the eye, and the heart, of the believer. Second- and third-century Christianity was something of a religious carnival in which various sideshow attractions congregated, from Marcionites to Valentinians and from Docetics to Montanists, with variations of each and with numerous hybrids in different combinations (e.g., Marcionite Gnostics, for instance). The label of “heresy” was applied to these sects both contemporaneously and after the fact by the version of Christianity that ultimately prevailed. Ironically, the Ebionites, a sect of Jewish Christians who hewed closely to Jesus’ teachings and lifestyle, were among the groups judged as heretical, raising the question of whether Jesus would have been accepted—assuming, of course, that he would have wanted to be—by the religion which he supposedly founded. ¹

The point of Rufus Jones’ book (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) was that orthodoxy was clarified, revised, and made explicit in response to “heresy”. He went so far as to claim that heretics provided (or provoked) “discoveries of fresh insight,” and that some of them, at least, were “recipients of new illumination, gifted leaders of unwon causes, prophets of neglected or forgotten truth, and profound interpreters of the deeper significance of life.” Then again, he acknowledged, some heretics were merely “capricious innovators, freakish disturbers, hysterical champions of novelties, and unhappy rebels against whatever exists.” Furthermore, as Jones pointed out, heretics are not necessarily more tolerant or open-minded than their orthodox opponents; in fact, “Heresy asserts a fiery infallibility” of its own. It “challenges the ideas of orthodoxy, insisting that its own ideas are more true and closer to the eternal nature of things.” It would be an exaggeration to say that within every heretic is a potential inquisitor, but it would not be altogether wrong. History is full of sectarians who break with orthodoxy and then attempt to impose their new orthodoxy on members of their sect.

Rufus Jones also noted this distinction:

Orthodoxy in all ages has been concerned with the preservation of an objective system that has come to be considered essential to salvation, since the mission of the Church, in the mind of the faithful, orthodox believer, is to be an instrument of salvation. Orthodoxy has thus, in the main, formed around the essentials for salvation and around theories of eschatology. Heresies, on the other hand, have been more concerned with life, with experience, with maintaining a continuous revelation of the Spirit here and now. They have inclined to shift the emphasis from heaven to earth.

Heretics speak both for the primacy of individual conscience and for the ongoing work of the Spirit. How can the Church, or anyone else, close the books on revelations? Heretics can be disruptive, of course—but is that not the nature of the Spirit? Churches, say the skeptics, are built not just as shelter for believers; they are built to keep the Spirit out.

How can we tell the difference, then, between constructive and destructive dissent? Well, we could ask the Authorities what They think and accept Their verdict. Or we could take our cue from the first-century Rabbi Gamaliel, as quoted in the Book of Acts: “I advise you, Leave these people alone! Let them go! If their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is from God, you will not be able to stop them.” When it comes to heretics, by their fruits, as it were, we shall know them.

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¹ I am being provocative, but only mildly so. Rufus Jones wrote, “What we may properly call ‘Galilean Christianity’ had a short life.” Christianity as it developed became more about believing in Christ than about living like Jesus.

The Heresy III floor-standing speaker from Klipsch

Sunday Sermon: Our Daily Affront

{Full disclosure: I was never the same after reading, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, Mark Twain’s fierce, irreverent polemics against religion and Christianity. His “Letters from the Earth,” “The Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Great Dark” were my introductions to atheism and to metaphysical nihilism, undoing, alas, the valiant efforts of Sister Mary Josephine, Sister Mary Conrad, and various other devoutly dedicated Catholic teachers. If the authors of the Baltimore Catechism had been even half as funny as Mark Twain, I might have stuck with the Church; as it was, it was (and is) far too solemn for me. In what follows, Satan, having been suspended for a time from the heavenly court, pays a visit to Earth and reports back to his fellow angels. His letters make it clear that he finds mankind simultaneously amusing and appalling; the best that can be said about man is that he may be God’s favorite mistake.} 

Mark Twain (from "Letters from the Earth"):

This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing like it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself “the noblest work of God”. This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked about it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it. 

Moreover—if I may put another strain upon you—he thinks he is the Creator’s pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. Man prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance.  

I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven! He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go to it if he doesn’t keep the Commandments. The Commandments, too, are a curiosity. I will tell you about them by and by. 

“I have told you nothing about man that is not true.” You must pardon me if I repeat that remark now and then; I want you to take seriously the things I am telling you, and I feel that if I were in your place and you in mine, I should need that reminder from time to time, to keep my credulity from flagging. 

For there is nothing about man that is not strange to an immortal. He looks at nothing as we look at it, his sense of proportion is quite different from ours, and his sense of values is so widely divergent from ours, that with all our large intellectual powers it is not likely that even the most gifted among us would ever be quite able to understand it. 

In times past the human being has had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge that number and still be within the facts. One of his principal religions is called the Christian. A sketch of it will interest you. It is set forth in detail in a book containing two million words, called the Old and New Testaments. Also it has another name—the Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. 

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So, it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; all its best precepts and rules of conduct came also from those other Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and a singular heaven I must tell you about. 

What shall we do? If we believe, with these people, that their God invented these things, we slander Him; if we believe these people invented them themselves, we slander them. It is an unpleasant dilemma in either case, for neither of these parties has done us any harm.   

   

Satan's Limitless Imperialism

{Though some may dispute the relevance of Satan, he has been in the news lately thanks to Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stated that the Catholic Church is “controlled by Satan,” and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who is explicitly running against the “Satanic Elites,” the “Satanic Regime,” and the “Luciferian Cabal”. My own interest in Satan is less political, but I applaud Greene and Taylor for their audacity in standing up to the Prince of Darkness. Yesterday, I offered an excerpt from Mark Twain in which he discussed his own lifelong curiosity about Satan; since that excerpt exhibited a streak of irreverence, today I provide a more orthodox perspective.}

It is good to know one’s enemies. For Christians, the primary enemy is Satan, and Christian scholars through the ages have expended much effort (and much ink) to explain Satan, his diabolical nature, and his malevolent intent. ¹

According to Denis de Rougemont (The Devil’s Share), “The Bible informs us that Lucifer is an angel fallen from heaven.” In fact, the Bible says little if anything about Lucifer, but de Rougemont takes Jesus’ statement “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” as definitive.

I have no idea how de Rougemont knows so much about Lucifer/Satan, but I can assure you that none of what follows can be sourced to the Bible:

Angels are spiritual creatures living and functioning on the frontiers of the Eternal and the Creation, of eternity and time. They are divine intentions, messengers, servants flying on lightning wings, whose speed is that of thought, and this is why they are invisible to us; intelligences without fraud, participating in the omniscience of the Creator, and this is why we have difficulty in understanding them. At the summit of the angelic hierarchy are the Archangels. One single Archangel betrayed his mission, his message, and his very being, and this is Lucifer, the bearer of Light. Satan rebelled, he refused to serve, he refused to transmit his divine message, he wished to become original, the author of his own destiny, the bearer of his own light. And immediately, by the very laws of Being, he fell from heaven, which is the region where God’s intention reigns absolute. Lucifer became his own messenger, and as he is but a pure spirit, once the source of the Spirit was cut off, he became the messenger of Nothingness and its mysteries.

Though fallen, he has kept the nature of a pure spirit. Like an artist who has lost his genius and who no longer believes in painting, but who has kept his ‘knack’ and his eagerness to belong to the vanguard, Satan still knows Spirit and spirits, but no longer the end and the glory to which they are destined.

The dazzling and consuming act of pride which transformed the Angel of Light into an Angel and Prince of Darkness condemned him to a limitless and therefore desperate imperialism. The entire world could not fill the void which the consciousness of having left his rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature. Having fallen from the eternal, Satan wants the infinite. Having fallen from Being, he wants Having. But his problem is forever insoluble. Everything that he annexes to himself he destroys. To be sure, he can have everything, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture—but he will never have anything but this world. He will never reconquer Heaven, which is properly the soul of the world; of the universe, he will have only the material carcass. It is from the debris of this disaffected Mansion that he will make the firewood to kindle his Hell.

He knows it full well. This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy focus on individual souls. He prowls around us like a roaring lion in quest of his prey. He prowls around us like a gangster obsessed by kidnapping. His victories will always be sterile, for one does not become a father by kidnapping a child; one can steal the child, but not paternity. One can steal power, but not authority. Satan can steal this world, not its divinity.

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¹ Ink is known to possess anti-demonic properties. Martin Luther once routed the Devil by hurling an inkwell at him.

Denis de Rougemont was a Swiss author and “cultural theorist” best known for his classic study Love in the Western World. He won a defamation suit in 1982 against a journalist who accused de Rougemont, in print, of advocating “French Fascism” and who compared him to the Vichy collaborators in World War II.

Denis de Rougemont - Wikipedia

Rougemont 2.0: Denis de Rougemont's complete online — Rougemont 2.0 (unige.ch)

English translations of de Rougemont’s works are available online, for free, at www.archive.org

Books Report

{Somewhere in the brief course of my limited education, I learned that you haven't really read a book until you've handed in your book report--and, even then, you should be prepared to be told that you did not read the book properly or understand it correctly. It sure makes you wonder why Johnny can't read, doesn't it?}

Bernard McGinn is a Roman Catholic scholar and theologian whose specialty has been the history of Christian mysticism. His 1994 book Antichrist, however, was something of a departure, investigating Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. McGinn wrote with the close of the millennium looming, which allowed him to bring together Christian eschatological speculations (apocalyptic and otherwise) with the idea of the Antichrist, “the final human opponent of all goodness.” “Views of the end of time,” McGinn wrote, “have much to tell us both about society’s perceptions of the meaning of history and about its understanding of evil. They may also reveal something about a society’s self-understanding.”

McGinn was not interested in lampooning belief in the Antichrist or in relegating such beliefs to the dustbin of History. He took his subject seriously: “The Antichrist legend can be seen as a projection, or perhaps better as a mirror, for conceptions and fears about ultimate human evil. Belief in the Antichrist provides a special focus for understanding Western conceptions of evil.” Moreover, while “Antichrist’s history is entwined with that of God’s superhuman spiritual adversary, he differs from the devil in being conceived of primarily as a human agent. The issue raised by belief in Antichrist is that of the relation between human agency and evil, especially the possibility of a completely evil human being.”

Bernard McGinn (theologian) - Wikipedia

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Black Wind, White Snow is a 2014 book by British journalist Charles Clover about The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. ¹ It was published right around the time of Vladimir Putin’s first humanitarian intervention into Ukraine, when he responded to pleas for help from the oppressed Russia-loving people of Crimea. Since Putin is currently attempting to liberate the rest of Ukraine from the genocidal Nazi regime of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Clover’s book remains timely, if not prescient, tracing the roots of “Eurasianism” and of Russia’s post-Soviet right-wing ideologies (which echo the 19^th-century Slavophiles); political philosophers such as Lev Gumilev, Yury Mamleev, and Aleksandr Dugin figure prominently in the narrative, along with their eccentric theories of history and geopolitics and their unaccountable nostalgia for the Soviet Union.

As Charles Clover argues, “Putin’s ambitions for ‘Eurasia’—and, to be fair, the West’s ambitions to thwart him—directly provoked the war in Ukraine.” Again, Clover was writing of the 2014 war, but his analysis applies today as well. “Russia has drawn a red line around its former imperial subjects—a sphere of influence that delineates those countries that will not be allowed into the Western orbit and those that Russia will grudgingly part with.” It is clear, and has been for decades, that Ukraine falls into the former category. “Looking at Russia’s recent behavior through the lens of Eurasianism—the goal of protecting Russia’s civilizational identity—makes a lot of that behavior snap into focus and gives a consistent explanation as to which battles the Kremlin has chosen to fight, which it has chosen not to, and how it has fought them. Never mind that the whole idea of a ‘civilizational identity’ is tendentious at best and totally contrived at worst. The most important aspect of Eurasianism is not its merits, but the consensus that it appears to enjoy across the Russian elite.”    

Charles Clover author biography (bookbrowse.com)

¹ According to the biographical blurb above, Black Wind, White Snow has (or had) an alternative subtitle: Vladimir Putin and the Great Culture of the Steppe. I like that better than The Rise of Russian’s New Nationalism.

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Heather Cox Richardson is a highly regarded historian whose liberal bias is a feature and not a bug of her historiographical work. She has focused on the Reconstruction Era of the American South and on the history of the Republican Party. Her 2020 book How the South Won the Civil War combines those two topics, as Ms. Richardson claims that the unreconstructed South (Dixiecrats) and the inter-mountain West (rugged and well-armed cowboy individualism) combined forces in the latter half of the twentieth century to form the base of the modern GOP.   

But why should I bother composing a review of this book when Wikipedia has done the work for me? Here goes:

In How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020), Richardson argued that America was founded with contradicting ideals, with the ideas of liberty, equality, and opportunity on one hand, and slavery and hierarchy on the other. Union victory in the Civil War should have settled that tension forever, but at the same time that the war was fought, Americans also started moving into the West. In the West, Americans found, and expanded upon, deep racial hierarchies, meaning that hierarchical values survived in American politics and culture despite the crushing defeat of the pro-slavery Confederacy. Those traditions—a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color—have found a home in modern conservative politics, leaving the promise of America unfulfilled.

Professor Dana Elizabeth Weiner states: “With this beautifully written book, prominent US historian Heather Cox Richardson offers valuable insights to historians and general readers about the tenacity of oligarchy in American politics since the seventeenth century.”

Deborah M. Liles, a professor at the University of North Texas states: “Heather Cox Richardson's skill with connecting events into a cohesive narrative is on full display in this brilliant study. She dismantles the concept of equality guaranteed in the Constitution, connects western ideology with that of the Old South, and demonstrates how oligarchs and those who supported them established restrictions within society to retain their power.”

Might Ms. Richardson’s narrative be somewhat facile? Given the intermountain West’s history of radical unionism and socialist politics, it seems the story might be more complicated—at least, that is how it looks from here in the People’s Republic of Missoula, Montana.

Heather Cox Richardson - Wikipedia

 

Saturday Lecture: Jesus Goes to Hell

(Christian tradition has it that Jesus spent the brief time (36 hours?) between his death and his resurrection rescuing previously unredeemed souls from Hell. This post-mortem adventure is known as “the harrowing of Hell,” and it did not make its way into the canonical Christian gospels. It did, however, make its way into various apocryphal (unauthorized) documents of the early Church (e.g., the Gospel of Nicodemus) and into liturgical ceremonies as well. In the following text, notice the theme of human deification emerging, as Jesus says to Adam, ‘You in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person,’ and then ‘I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.’}

A reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday: The Lord’s Descent into Hell "What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled. Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son. The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: 'My Lord be with you all.' And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light. ‘I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise. ‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person. ‘For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden. ‘Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image. 'See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one. ‘I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you. ‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God. The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages.’ From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday: The Lord's descent into hell (vatican.va)

He descended into Hell

Good Friday in Dogville

“Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” (Words reportedly spoken by Jesus shortly before he died)

“The people who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances.” (“Grace,” in the movie Dogville)

Jesus died, it seems, with the same grace and compassion with which we are told he lived.

It is possible, though, to imagine a different ending, one in which Jesus used his considerable power and his heavenly connections to turn the tables on his adversaries. Consider the final scene of the movie Dogville. To set the stage: Grace, the runaway daughter of a crime boss, had taken refuge in the town of Dogville from her father’s detectives. At first accepted by the residents of the town, Grace is soon enslaved and subjected to repeated brutal sexual assaults. She is at last located by her father’s agents; her father, on learning what was done to his daughter, wants the townspeople punished. Grace, on the other hand, though she admits she was horribly abused in Dogville, wants to forgive and to move on. Grace and her father sit in the back of his limousine and discuss the matter, while his thugs stand by, prepared to savage the town.

Grace: I’m not the one passing judgment, Daddy. You are.

Father: No, you do not pass judgment, because you sympathize with them. A deprived childhood, and a homicide isn’t necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can blame is circumstances. Rapists and murderers may be the victims according to you, but I call them dogs, and if they’re lapping up their own vomit, the only way to stop them is with the lash.

Grace: But dogs only obey their own nature, so why shouldn’t we forgive them?

Father: Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey their own nature.

Grace: I’m arrogant because I forgive people?

Father: My god, can’t you see how condescending you are when you say that? You have this preconceived notion that nobody, nobody can attain the high ethical standards as you, so you exonerate them—I cannot think of anything more arrogant than that. You, my child, my dear child—you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself.

Grace: Why shouldn’t I be merciful? Why?

Father: No, no, no, you should, you should be merciful when there is time to be merciful, but you must maintain your own standard. You owe them that. You owe them that. The penalty that you deserve for your transgressions, they deserve for their transgressions.

Grace: They are human beings. Does every human need to be accountable for their actions?

Father: Of course they do. But you don’t even give them that chance, and that is extremely arrogant. I love you, I love you, I love you to death, but you are the most arrogant person I have ever met.

Grace: The people who live here are doing their best under very hard circumstances.

Father: If you say so, Grace. But is their best really good enough? Do they love you?

Narrator: Grace looked around at the frightened faces behind the windowpanes. How could she ever hate them for what was at bottom merely their weakness? If she’d lived in one of these houses, she would probably have done things like those that had befallen her. Would she not, in all honesty, have done the same? Grace paused, and while she did, the clouds scattered and let the moonlight through, and Dogville underwent another of those little changes of light—it was as if the light, previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer. And all of a sudden Grace knew the answer to her question all too well. If she had acted like these people, she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. No; what the people of Dogville had done was not good enough, and if one had the power to put it to rights, it was one’s duty to do so, for the sake of other towns, for the sake of humanity, and, not least of all, for the sake of the human being who was Grace herself.

Grace: If there is any town this world would be better without, this is it.

Father: Yes?

Grace: Shoot them and burn down the town.

Father: (Nods) We’d better get you out of here. I’m afraid you’ve learned too much already.

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The ending of Dogville is devastating. I do not defend Grace’s decision, but it is humanly understandable. An analogy might be: what if prisoners at Auschwitz had been given the choice, at their moment of liberation, of having vengeance wreaked on their captors? To return to the example of Jesus: we have been told he died for our sins, but did he also, in forgiving his executioners, forgive all the executioners throughout history—including, among others, the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the executioners at Auschwitz?   

Dogville Script - transcript from the screenplay and/or Lars von Trier & Nicole Kidman movie (script-o-rama.com)

(FYI, in the film, Grace is played by Nicole Kidman; her father is played by James Caan.)

Life After Apocalypse

{Theological reflections by an atheist are suspect by definition, which is why I so often turn to the words of others more qualified on the topic and (perhaps) better situated spiritually than I am. For the uninitiated, the fundamental meaning of "apocalypse" is "a revealing"; as a religious term, it refers to a revealing of metaphysical realities heretofore concealed, a disclosure of "things hidden since the foundations of the world" (Matthew 13:35). The implication (and the expectation) was that such a revealing would inaugurate a transformation, a bringing into existence a new heaven and a new earth.} 

 

"For all things every day become worse and worse, for the end is drawing near." (Inscription on a late seventh-century crypt near Poitiers, France)

 

Christopher Rowland, from "Apocalyptic and the New Testament":

 

Early Christianity emerged in a world where contact with the divine by dreams, visions, divination, and other related forms of extraordinary insight was common. Its emphasis on access to divine power, which it was believed would be typical of the Last Days, was an important element of its appeal. Paul, for example, made much of the dramatic, charismatic, and experiential basis of his arguments. Access to privileged knowledge of the divine purposes was in certain cases linked to decisive action; Paul took upon himself the role of divine agent to bring about the inclusion of the 'nations' in the people of God in the Last Days. The mission to the Gentiles was intimately linked with the framework of an eschatological history in which Paul believed himself to be a crucial actor. It is the conviction that he is the divine agent to whom God had revealed the Messiah which is at the heart of Paul's approach to the Scriptures. They are now read in the light of the conviction that the Age of the Spirit has come. 

 

Paul uses language which indicates that those in the messianic fellowship are not merely believers in the Messiah but are in some sense clothed with the Messiah's person: they put on Christ like a garment. Paul speaks of the Messiah dwelling 'in' him. The divine is incarnated in the lives of Jesus' followers. Such ideas have become so much part of Christian doctrine that their startling quality can easily be missed. It would be no surprise if, when they heard all this, some of Paul's converts thought that they were already living in the glory of the messianic age, uncluttered by the shackles of human misery and thoroughly overwhelmed with the divine nature. Part of Paul's task may have been to disabuse them of such fantasies. 

 

The divine presence of the eschaton is vividly present in the lives of the early Christian communities. The Parousia is regarded by Paul as being fulfilled in some sense in the presence of himself, the agent of the Messiah, visiting and admonishing those communities. Paul is the embodiment of Christ whose person is to be imitated. His coming, like that of his Lord, will be with power; his arrival in a community will bring divine blessing. Paul, the apostle of Christ, comes as a threat and a promise: a threat to those who exclude the Messiah and his apostle, a promise of blessing to those who welcome them.

 

The sense of privilege and destiny with which Paul's career was surrounded was shared by others in Paul's circle. The church's role as the bearer of the divine mysteries was stressed. The Church is portrayed not as some ordinary human group; rather, it is believed to have a supernatural mission to proclaim the gospel to the powers in heaven and on earth. Life is shot through with apocalyptic insight and struggle. Ordinary events take on an extraordinary meaning; the struggle with the demonic is not just an eschatological affair but is met in routine human events. Paul speaks of wrestling with principalities and powers. Those whose spiritual insight was so attuned might discern the conflict between the angels of light and darkness in the midst of humankind, thereby becoming witting or unwitting participants in the struggle.

 

There is a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of Christianity, which arises from its indebtedness to apocalyptic. In the New Testament we have documents which are saturated with hope and the conviction that an insight of ultimate significance has been vouchsafed which relativizes all other claims. Yet life on the brink of the millennium is psychologically and politically impossible to sustain. The fiery enthusiasm of Paul sits uneasily with the staid and sober ethic so evident in his epistles. Christianity found ways of enabling those who aspired to perfection to go on living in the midst of imperfection. In the New Testament, we find the conviction that the veil into heaven has been breached and the powers of this world (and the next) defeated. Yet, alongside this there is evidence that those powers have been ordered by God and all still seems to be left as before. From the earliest stage of Christianity's genesis, Christians have had to wrestle with this conundrum.

 

To read apocalypses is to be overwhelmed--and perhaps alienated--by what seems unsavory and, at times, profoundly unhealthy. Yet apocalyptic has expressed a critical response to the injustices of the world, frequently on behalf of the powerless, and has opened eyes closed to realities which have become accepted as the norm. Its role in Christianity has proved remarkably pervasive. There is a significant strand of Christian tradition in which the intensity of the visionary hovers on the brink of fanaticism. Deep within the beliefs of such visionaries lies a millennial dream of the rediscovery of an evangelical piety which will transform humanity. Yet the point of it all is not fantasy but a form of life based on service and simplicity. The millennial dream is a fragment of religion which has never entirely perished in the welter of the fantastic and barbarous, for despite its awesome manifestations, it has continued to kindle a flame of humanity and hope. 

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Christopher Rowland's "Apocalyptic and the New Testament" can be found in the 1995 collection, Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, edited by Malcolm Bull.

 

The Sea Monster and the Beast with the Lamb's Horn, by Albrecht Durer

Existential Wednesday: Is It True?

{What does it say about my life that, when I check my web browser, I find that I have a tab open that is labeled ‘Papias of Hierapolis’? Setting that issue aside: as Easter approaches, it seems reasonable to wonder, if Jesus died for our sins, why did he then return from the dead? Had he overlooked a sin or three that still needed to be forgiven?  Was he just showing off? Did he expect to be greeted with candy and flowers when he strode triumphantly from the tomb? Was Easter his ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment? Inquiring minds want to know, and so does Pascal the existential Russian blue cat.}

“Christ's Resurrection should not be celebrated as a historical or social event, but as existential.” (Metropolitan Hierotheos)

“I can only imagine it is true / that Jesus comes with his eggful of miracles…” (Anne Sexton, “Is It True?”)

Writing in 1972, the Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten (Christ and Counter-Christ) thought that the existential mood of the moment might provide an opportunity to make sense of Jesus’ resurrection. Braaten began his meditation with what I think is one of the most profound theological questions I have ever encountered: “What if,” Braaten asked, “the resurrection is an answer to a question no one is asking?”

Assuming that his readers would be able to get past that jarring query, Braaten continued:

Is the resurrection a liberating word in history? Is it good news to modern man? Does it answer to the modern question of fragmentariness, of absurdity? If a person cannot hope for fulfillment beyond death, is there something else that can grant the sense of fulfillment? Is there anything to which a man can give his life, some cause for which he can spend it, that is not itself among the ambiguities of life?

With the references to “absurdity” and to “ambiguities,” we are of course knee-deep in existentialism, as Braaten admitted:

The main reason for existential interpretation is to make sense out of the Easter story to ourselves as modern men and women. People are asking today for a transcendent meaning of life, something more than the questionable values of culture and morality in their concrete historical forms. A person looks to a fulfilling future which brings her life to a meaningful outcome, to have a sense that she has not lived for naught. To offer someone the possibility of fulfilling their life by offering it up to society, or to the nation, or to the future development of the race, or for the glory of the tribe—all that seems hollow; none of it is equal to a human life. On the one hand, we live in a time when people are affirming the secular world, but if we rightly hear the prophets of the counter-culture, there is less and less in the glorious secular vision of technological humanity to allay the pangs of finitude. ¹

Ah yes, “the prophets of the counterculture,” possibly the same individuals about whom Alan Ginsberg wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” Or not; but in any case, Carl Braaten was hopeful that countercultural angst could yield to the Christian proclamation:

The message of the appearance of true life and new being in the resurrection of Jesus and in his victory over death, innocent suffering, and broken existence may offer a ground of hope beyond the questionable and fragmentary structures of secular society. Man is afflicted by a hunger for love, healing, freedom, and righteousness that cannot be satisfied by any of the structures with which he is presently allied. Man has a passion to be wholly human that cannot be satisfied by the roles he plays, by the houses and cars he owns, or by the success he gains in his upward strivings. When he races into the future or turns the clock ahead, he is only shortening the distance between now and the hour of his death.

Contrary to popular notions, the Christian gospel was only incidentally about redemption from sin; it was in fact centered on the triumph over death, a triumph accomplished (somehow) and exemplified (allegedly) by Jesus. In Eden, the human prospect of immortality had been lost; for Christians, it had been restored on Easter. Man could now assume his originally intended role, lording it over the cosmos and judging angels. The heart of Pauline Christianity is the breathtaking notion that men and women, those living “in Christ,” would henceforth be as gods. If that seems an exaggeration, allow me to cite an Orthodox Christian cleric, Metropolitan Hierotheos:

Participation in the mystery of the Resurrection is an experience of deification. He who has been initiated into the ineffable power of the Resurrection has realized from experience what Christ's purpose was in creating the world.  In reality, man was created in order to attain deification, and the world to share in the sanctification through man. Then he who is initiated into this ineffable power of the mystery of the Resurrection attains deification and fulfills the purpose of his existence. ²

Unless, of course, the Christian narrative was all just “wishful thinking,” a possibility which Braaten concedes:     

The question, then, to which the resurrection may provide an answer is the question of an adequate definition of man. ³ Can man be adequately defined in his humanness if a boundary line (death) is fixed beyond which he cannot seek his identity in fulfillment and pure freedom? Is not man a creature in quest of a total unburdening, a full freedom, in which all the negativities are themselves negated? Can man have his future closed for him, closed absolutely and with utter finality by death? Will he not rather create a myth to enshrine a vision beyond the closure? And is that myth to be classified merely as wishful thinking? Or, if it is wishful thinking, can we not learn something about man from the fact that he dreams and wishes and fantasizes beyond the limits of finitude?

Far be it from me to suggest that Braaten has answered his own questions, or that, in doing so, he has shed all the light we need on the resurrection.  

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¹ “Prophets of the counter-culture” would include, for instance, Bob Dylan (“I got nothing, Ma, to live up to”), Richard Thompson (“There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow / There’s nothing to grow up for anymore”), and Joni Mitchell (“You could have been more / than a name on the door / on the 33rd floor in the air”).     

² The Inner Existential Celebration of Christ's Resurrection | St. Mary Orthodox Church of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts (stmaryorthodoxchurch.org)

³ Some of us have been known to ask, what are people for? The Christian argument is simple: before Christ, people were for death (“fruit for death,” as Paul phrased it), but after Christ’s resurrection, people are for (or can choose to be for) eternal life.  

Last night I had the strangest dream...