The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part Three)

{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 - Wikipedia

Jacob Taubes quotes are taken from his 1954 review of Karl Barth’s Against the Stream: Against the Stream, by Karl Barth – Commentary Magazine

Saturday Lecture: Superiority Lost

{Friedrich Gogarten, a German theologian and contemporary of Karl Barth, pointed out that Gnosticism and early Christianity both considered man fundamentally alien to the world. For Gnosticism, the alienation derived from the bungling and malevolence of the demiurge, the false creator god; for Pauline Christianity, man’s sin had caused his own, and the world’s, alienation.}   

“It is the orderly world, anchored in the law, from which Christian faith frees us.”

Friedrich Gogarten (from Despair and Hope for Our Time):

The apostle Paul, proclaiming freedom from the law as freedom from the legalistic powers of the world, could not be more explicit. These powers possess divine and all-permeating force. However, since they belong to the created world, they are not gods at all but creatures—which should not overshadow the fact that they are of prime significance in the world. Because they are powers of the law, they preserve the world as world; that is, these powers keep the world in its worldly order without which it would not be the world, would not be an ordered entity. ¹ They accomplish this by attempting to enclose the world, so that the world seeks its basis and its meaning in itself. On the one hand, the powers fulfill their task as creatures; on the other hand, they become, in effect if not intent, hostile to God. Inasmuch as the world becomes self-enclosed, it shuts itself up against its creator and against its own creatureliness.

These powers pervade the world and close it off from God, but they are not, as Paul understands them, in essence hostile to God. Their seeming hostility must be understood as man’s doing. According to Paul, man is not caught in some cosmic fate but in his own guilt. Man’s sin has enabled the powers to engulf the world; sin, for Paul, means that man has decided in favor of the world against God.

When Paul attacks “the ungodliness and wickedness of men,” he attacks a false piety in which man worships the powers as a divine reality. For such a piety, Paul’s argument is bound to appear as a horrible blasphemy; it elevates man above the divine power of the world, which, in the view of pagan thought, entails an intolerable profaning of the world and of the powers which pervade it. When this happens, pagans argue, nothing can be divine anymore for man; his life falls prey to an inevitable arbitrariness and becomes totally meaningless. ²

For Paul, the evil which befell man and the world is the result of man’s guilt and not of a cosmic mishap. Man’s sin, in which he serves and worships the creature instead of the creator, causes the unfortunate transformation of the cosmos. God’s creation—in which everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected—has been corrupted, through man’s, sin into this fallen world which is in the power of the evil one. Sin affects God and the world, it perverts the fundamental order of all existence, the relation between the creation and the creator; therefore, it becomes a fate which man cannot reverse.

The Christian faith and Gnosticism are similar in maintaining man’s superiority over the world. In this, both are in sharp opposition to previous ancient thought; in both, therefore, the world is overturned. In opposition to all previous thought, both Gnosticism and the Christian faith understand man as a being who is not from the world, who owes his existence not to the fact that it is enclosed by the world and embedded in its order but to its not-being-from-the-world.

Gnosticism represents the breakthrough of the insight into the basic foreignness of everything worldly to everything human, causing a “tremendous insecurity, a world anxiety, fear of the world and of oneself.” This insight and this anxiety are the driving forces of Gnosticism: they define its attitude toward the world and hence to everything else. Therefore, it can content itself with negative statements concerning man who stands in opposition to the world, and concerning the god in whom man finds his salvation. Gnosticism expresses the ontological foreignness of human existence over against the world and hence man’s superiority, although this only means that human existence is not worldly, not “of’ the world. In this way, Gnosticism is the pioneer in discovering man’s selfhood, a true consciousness over against everything worldly, one which is no longer enclosed by the world.

Gnosticism’s view of man, however, has only the negative meaning of “non-worldly and anti-worldly.” The superiority of man over the world as it is revealed by the Christian faith is of a very different sort. Admittedly it, too, has a negative meaning:  Christians are admonished to return to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who had caught them and made them obey his will, to rise from sleep and to be awake because they belong to the day and not to the night. As in Gnosticism, which uses the same expressions, this means that they are being called out of the world. Here, too, the world is called evil and hostile to God; it is the realm of the lord of this eon, and its wisdom is folly in God’s sight. What Gnosticism says of the law which belongs to the world is true here as well: It does not bring life, as man is wont to believe in his worldly captivity; on the contrary, it brings death.

But all these statements have a fundamentally different meaning for the Christian faith. For while Paul says that the law brings death to man, he also says that this law has been given to bring life. For “the law is holy . . . and just and good.” The reason for the fact that it causes death for man who deals with it and seeks life in it, is not the law itself but man’s sin. It is not the law which has become death for him, but sin which through the law caused death; hence, it is man who has caused this evil. Through him this world has become—and this is emphatically stated in the New Testament—“this world,” the world of sin and hostility toward God.

Man’s superiority as discovered by the Christian faith is of a fundamentally different kind from that of Gnosticism. Christianity understands man’s superiority over the world as having been forfeited, along with his salvation, by sin. Man must now be addressed as a sinner who has lost his superiority over the world.

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Friedrich Gogarten - Wikipedia

¹ Gogarten here pictures the world’s “powers” as a katechonic force for law and order. Carl Schmitt would later promote the same idea.

² This “pagan” argument is more or less the argument made by David Bentley Hart in his essay, “Christ and Nothing”.

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part One)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat may have bitten off more than he can chew with his excursion into Christian nihilism. To be honest, he is less than convinced of his own thesis, thus the question mark in the title. In any case, he will post Part One today and Part Two next week, once he’s had time to finish digesting the sources.}

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?” (Jesus)

David Bentley Hart believed that modern nihilism resulted from Christianity’s failure to hold the cultural ground it had seized, fifteen hundred years ago, from pagan antiquity, leaving in its stead a spiritual vacuum. Other observers, though, have asserted a much more fundamental connection between Christianity and nihilism; some have gone so far as to claim that nihilism is at the very heart of Christianity. How in the world, most of us would ask, could anyone make such an absurd claim?

Well, there’s this: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.” And there’s also this: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” And, you know, this: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

The New Testament yields numerous such quotes that seem, at least rhetorically, to set Christians against the world and any of its purported meanings. Christian nihilism, if such it could be called, was not complete nihilism; Christians didn’t believe that nothing mattered. They only believed, or were encouraged to believe, that nothing in this life mattered; mortal existence was merely a passage to eternity (if you were lucky) and Christians were therefore taught to avoid worldly attachments. Paul used himself as an example: “For the Lord’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, but I count them as rubbish if I gain Christ and am found in him.” He advised his followers not to have children—hostages to fortune, as they say, and distractions from the heavenly prize upon which Christians were to keep their eyes. Jesus had given similar counsel; leave family behind and let the dead bury their dead. Time was short, said Paul, and the world was on borrowed time; you could not invest your hopes in it. Moreover, this world was the realm of Satan, its acknowledged prince; for a Christian, the best counsel, as Paul (or Bob Dylan?) said, was, “Keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes.” Neither Jesus, Paul, nor their followers needed a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

Again, and in fairness, Christians were not “world-haters,” the epithet famously (and accurately) applied to ancient Gnostics. Christians believed that creation was the work of a loving God, but it had been corrupted by man’s sins; still, they believed that mortal life had value simply because it had been given to us by God. Moreover, most Christians held that the way we live determines our immortal fate; life was an ordeal that tested our faith and our spiritual strength. That notion, however, was put to theological rest in the 4^th century by St. Augustine in his polemics against the Pelagian heresy. Man could not “earn” salvation, said Augustine; salvation could only be a gift of God graciously bestowed on undeserving sinners. Augustine cut the ground out from those who thought that “right” living (moral purity, loving one’s neighbor, keeping the commandments, etc.) and faith in Christ would enable believers to pass through the narrow gate to heaven; as he explained (and as Luther and Calvin reiterated), nothing a man does in this life has any effect at all on God’s judgment—no one deserves to be saved from hellfire, and God’s decisions are both mysterious and irrevocable.

Christianity’s ambiguous stance towards the world could be seen by contrasting the fanatical ascetism of the “Desert Fathers” (e.g., St. Anthony the Great), which morphed into Christian monasticism, with the worldliness of the post-Constantine Church. On the one hand, “The model of Anthony and other hermits attracted many followers, who lived alone in the desert or in small groups. They chose a life of extreme asceticism, renouncing all the pleasures of the senses, rich food, baths, rest, and anything that made them comfortable. They instead focused their energies on praying, singing psalms, fasting, giving alms to the needy, and preserving love and harmony with one another while keeping their thoughts and desires for God alone.” They may not have hated the world, but neither did they embrace it; it offered nothing but snares and delusions.

On the other hand, following Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Christian leaders gained unprecedented status and authority. Christianity became the beneficiary of the emperors’ largesse; it became, in the words of Robert Markus, “increasingly wealthy, prestigious, and privileged.” ¹ Less than a century after Constantine, Christianity was made the official religion of Rome; pagan practices were outlawed. To its credit, Christianity played a crucial role in preserving the legacy of Rome, but it did so in part by taking on some of Rome’s imperial characteristics; the Church could not very well renounce a world in which it played such a prominent role.

Even with the Church triumphant, the strain of nihilism remained, preserved in New Testament texts; for centuries, it would lead periodically to sectarian outbreaks, Gnostic heresies, millennial cults, etc. Jesus’ admonition against trying to serve “two masters” (e.g., God and Mammon) made ordinary Christians wary of earthly ambition, a wariness reinforced by the fact that wealth and power were for the most part out of reach anyway. If Christianity did not deter worldly progress, neither did it encourage it, much less inspire it. In all, Christendom viewed the material world, for all practical purposes, as a crime scene—the crime of Adam, of course, reenacted in perpetuity by all his progeny. Ecclesiastical authorities shepherded their flocks through life, incessantly cautioning them, “Move along, folks; there’s nothing to see here.” For Christians, it wasn’t life's journey that mattered; it was the destination.

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Re St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers:  Desert Fathers - Wikipedia

¹ Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity. Markus, for what it’s worth, would likely disagree with my thesis of ‘Christian nihilism’ and my claims about the ‘world-denying’ aspect of early Christianity; “From the later second century,” he wrote, “Christians had been moving fast towards an assimilation of secular culture.” The spread of Christianity could not have happened if the faith had required of believers an explicit rejection of, or distancing from, ‘ordinary’ life, customs, and habits. “Since that time,” Markus continued, “Christians had begun to penetrate every level of Roman society and had moved even further towards accepting the values and the culture of their pagan contemporaries.”   

Nihilism: when you've got nihil, you've got nihil to lose.

Wednesday with Pascal: The Katechon (Part Two)

{Is it possible that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat thinks that the Katechon is, well, a literal cat? There seems no other explanation for his fascination with this obscure Biblical figure whose identity and significance have never been made clear.}

As we have previously discussed, the apostle Paul (and, arguably, Jesus himself) expected the world to end in his lifetime. “The time is short,” he famously counseled. He also declared, “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed,” which suggests a similar expectation, as does “The night is nearly over, and the day has drawn near.” Despite Paul’s missionary zeal and eschatological urgency, however, he did not live to see the eschaton, which, two thousand years later, still has not arrived.

What went wrong with the early Christians’ eschatological timetable? Did they simply misread the signs of the times? Paul, hedging his bets, offered a cryptic explanation for the delay; the eschaton could not take place until the Antichrist (“the man of lawlessness”) was revealed, at which time Jesus would return to smite him and to put the entire cosmos in order. And why was the Antichrist still unrevealed? Because, said Paul, he was being held back by the mysterious and to this day unidentified Katechon.

While one might assume that forestalling the apocalyptic end of the world would be a good thing, the issue is more complicated, at least for Christians. The eschaton, for all its world-historic turbulence, would also see the second coming of Jesus, on the clouds, for his salvific encore (“Parousia”), after which a last judgment would sort out sheep from goats, the blessed from the damned, and the world would be restored to its original pristine glory. Thus, the Katechon, by restraining the Antichrist, also prevents Jesus from returning and the dead from being resurrected. The question then becomes, is the Katechon serving humanity by keeping the world going, or is it serving God in some way, or is it, paradoxically, serving the Antichrist by preventing his final (and, inevitably, fatal) showdown with Jesus? The corollary question is, do we or do we not want the world to end? ¹ Our answer to that determines our feelings about the Katechon.

Paul’s invocation of the Katechon was ambiguous at best. He did not say by whom the Katechon had been deployed, or who would (eventually) remove it. At least in his letters, he did not instruct the Thessalonians to pray for its continuation or to pray for its destruction; he signaled neither gratitude nor resentment towards it.

Reflecting on this, Roberto Esposito writes that “In delaying the explosion of evil, the Katechon at the same time delays the final victory of the principle of good. The triumph of evil is held in check, true, but the divine Parousia is also delayed by the Katechon’s existence. Its function is positive, but negatively so.” Or, in the words of Tim Howles, “There seems to be an ambiguity about the deferral that the katechon enacts. The threat of violence that is associated with the eschaton is certainly held in abeyance. But as a corollary, the future is denuded of its power to infuse the present, inspiring a sense and a direction in time. The contemporary moment becomes one in which nothing can really happen because the sense of historical becoming, that has its truth only in the eschaton, is indefinitely deferred.”

Perhaps if we could identify the Katechon, we might better discern which side It, or He, is on. Unfortunately, as Yohanis Wakuma explains, “The identity of ‘what restrains’ and ‘he who restrains’ remains controversial. Some identify these with God and divine providence; others see the restrainer as a force hostile to God, yet one which remains under God’s control.” Throughout the centuries, the most common suspects for Katechon-hood have been the Roman emperor (or the empire itself); the Catholic Church (or individual popes); the Holy Spirit; the logos; Russia; the United States military; and, less often, Donald Trump. ²

For centuries after Paul invented the Katechon, it remained an obscure and enigmatic notion, a forgotten bit of scriptural minutiae in which not even scholars took an interest. It was rehabilitated after World War II by an unlikely figure: Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist (and influential jurist in Hitler's Third Reich) who believed that the Katechon was both the key to history and mankind’s only hope for survival.

I bet you did Nazi that coming.

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¹ Most Christians are not aware that the “Lord’s Prayer” (the “Our Father”) expresses the desire for the eschaton to arrive; that, after all, is the meaning of “Thy kingdom come…”

² Seriously—Rod Dreher (The American Conservative), now living the good life in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, remarked in 2020 that “In an entirely non-theological sense, I see Trump as a Katechon. I do not believe that the political forces he holds back can be restrained for much longer, simply because they are growing in popularity. It is self-deceiving to think that any politician, even a charming Philosopher-King (which Trump is not), could turn back a vast cultural tide. The best small-o orthodox Christians and other cultural traditionalists can hope for is that our political leaders (in whose number I include federal judges) can hold back enough of it, for long enough, to give us an opportunity to build institutions and other structures that will allow us to ride out the deluge ahead. If Christians like me vote for Trump, it is only because of his role as Katechon in restraining what is far worse.” I think it far more likely that Trump is the "Man of Lawlessness" than that he is the Katechon.  

There must be a Katechon in here somewhere...

Wednesday with Pascal: The Katechon (Part One)

(Leave it to Pascal the existential Russian blue cat to drag in, for his own amusement, a half-digested biblical concept of questionable relevance. Regardless, Pascal plans on batting his latest cat toy around for a while.}   

“The notoriety of the Katechon now surpasses that of the Antichrist.” (Richard Gilpin)

"We have met the Katechon and it is us." (Pascal the existential Russian blue cat)

All the new thinking is about the Katechon. In this, it differs from the old thinking, which was about the eschaton; in other words, rather than focusing on the (possibly) imminent end of the world, we now focus on whatever (or whoever) it is that holds back that event.

We are indebted to the apostle Paul for the idea of the Katechon, which was, he said, the reason Jesus had not yet returned. Having told his followers that the time was short and that the present world would soon be transformed, even in their lifetimes (“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed”), Paul hastened to qualify that promise, lest people abandon themselves to eschatological excess—giving away their possessions, quitting their jobs, neglecting their familial and/or civic duties, not paying taxes, etc.

It was not an easy balance to strike. In a letter to believers at Thessalonica, for instance, Paul rapturously described what was in store for them, including Christians who had already died: “God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. We who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

After which, Paul prudently added (or some later scribe interpolated): “Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Let us then be alert and self-controlled.”

Informed that some Thessalonians were nonetheless jumping the eschatological gun, Paul sent them a second, briefer missive in which he explicitly discouraged end-times speculation and expectations:

“We ask you not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report, or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come. Do not let anyone deceive you, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

This was the first scriptural mention of a figure who became known as the Antichrist. Once again, Paul withheld specifics, cautioning his audience that only God knew what would unfold and when the unfolding would take place:

“Do you not remember that, when I was with you, I used to tell you these things? And know you what is holding back the man of lawlessness, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so until he is taken out of the way.”

Whatever it was that Paul had told the Thessalonians about “these things” is lost to the ages; scholars and exegetes can only guess. Nor can we know if the recipients of Paul’s letter understood what he was saying when assuring them that “when the one who holds it back is taken out of the way, then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing because they refused to love the truth and so to be saved. For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and will all be condemned, those who have delighted in wickedness.”

In other words, according to Paul, the highly anticipated and devoutly to be wished for eschaton would be preceded by the revelation (and destruction) of the Antichrist, who would first have turned many away from the truth and lured them to their eternal condemnation. What, then, was keeping the Antichrist from being revealed at that present moment? Someone, or something, that Paul identified only as “katechon,” meaning “that which restrains” (or “that who restrains”). A barrier of some kind (perhaps metaphysical?) existed behind which the Antichrist was impatiently waiting his turn, a roadblock, as it were, which kept Antichrist stuck in traffic, checking his watch, and muttering to himself, “Damn it, it’s half-past the eschaton already!”

Nowhere else in Paul’s letters does he allude to a katechon; nowhere else in scripture is such a concept or personage mentioned. If, however, the katechon was holding Antichrist at bay and thus delaying the eschaton, then we ought to be grateful that it did, and that it continues to do, its job—right? The world is still here, as are we, and the final judgment has yet to take place—so, good news, right? No Antichrist in sight, right? The katechon is our friend, right?

If only it were that simple.

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Katechon - Wikipedia

There must be a Katechon in here somewhere...

Books Report

{Really—more books? As my friend Pascal asked me the other day, “Do you even read these books, or do you just check out the cover blurbs and pretend you’ve read them?” I did not dignify the question with a reply. My approach to reading books is the same as my approach to eating a meal: I take what I need, and I leave the rest.}

Stephen Holmes’ The Anatomy of Antiliberalism appeared in 1993, a year or two before the Gingrich “revolution” was launched and just as Bill Clinton began steering the Democratic Party away from the liberal course it had taken for most of the 20^th century. Having abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberal economics and having ditched healthcare reform before it could get off the ground, the Clintons proceeded to enact punitive “welfare reform” and “prison reform”; they barely put up a fight against Gingrich’s right-wing agenda, but they scored a TKO over Sister Souljah. Under the circumstances, the timing of Holmes’ book was serendipitous—or would have been, had anyone in power been paying attention. Holmes tracked anti-liberalism’s philosophical origins to the Counter-Enlightenment and the reaction against the French Revolution; his narrative began with Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic philosopher who praised the purgative powers of war and who asserted that the single most important man in any polity was the executioner. Holmes then examined the works of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair Macintyre, modern anti-liberals all, before bringing Christopher Lasch, a heterodox liberal (and one of my favorites), into the conversation.

The point Holmes wanted to establish was that “the disparagement of liberalism” had a long history; it was not “a passing fashion of the late twentieth century.” Twenty-five years later, with liberals still being routinely reviled as Marxists, fascists, and anarchists, Holmes’ point continues to be relevant. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism sought to discover what it is about liberalism that has been so vexing to so many and that has produced such fierce opposition, even from some who could by no means be counted in the “Conservative” camp. Liberalism—which, to be sure, can be smug, condescending, and self-righteous—just seems to get under people’s skin.

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When you’re done with that, you might consider Ted McAllister’s 1997 Revolt Against Modernity, which goes into detail about Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order. McAllister offers a right-side view of the same ideological struggles chronicled by Stephen Holmes. I will not go into detail about the book here, because I plan to devote several posts to it shortly; but I will say it is readable, rewarding, and a reminder that conservatism has an intellectual pedigree, even though no one on today’s Right (except possibly Patrick Deneen, but I’m no longer sure about that) seems the least bit interested in it.

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In my abundant free time, I have been brushing up once again on St. Paul (the apostle, not the city), with books like Satanward, by James Kallas; Paul and His Recent Interpreters, by N.T. Wright; and The Epistle to the Galatians, by Ronald Fung. Paul fascinates me; more accurately, Paulinism fascinates me. How is it that this possibly head-injured and seizure-prone man has been (and still is) taken seriously by so many despite having been demonstrably wrong about his main predictions and despite his belief in a multi-tiered cosmos populated by demonic “powers and principalities” who sometimes (he said) disguised themselves as angels of light? Christianity has had almost two thousand years to scrape this ancient barnacle from its theological hull, but there it remains.   

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I am always reading something about Russia; I am presently (and slowly) working my way through Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Lenin, in which Payne endorses the thesis that Stalin had Lenin poisoned to hasten his demise. I have also been taking a second look at Walter Schubart’s Russia and the West, about which I blogged extensively a couple of years ago; if I find anything in it that explains Putin’s determination to annex Ukraine, I will let you know.  

Still Grappling, After All These Years

I didn't post this yesterday as a "Sunday Sermon," but I hate to let it go to waste. 

George Bernard Shaw's  “The Monstrous Imposition upon Jesus” was part of the preface to his 1912 play, "Androcles and the Lion". Shaw did not have the benefit of either the new scholarship on Paul or of the resulting so-called "new perspective on Paul"; that is, he was at the distinct disadvantage of not knowing what we know. Of course, Saint Paul himself suffered from the same disadvantage, having no opportunity to learn from modern exegetes who could have straightened him out, no doubt, on some important points.

In any case, Shaw was no fan of Paul, as the following excerpt attests:

[Paul labored] under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the terror of death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the terror of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with sinners, and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know, about whether his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has forced us to accept him as the man without sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of his delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibition of superiority to the fear of death. This must have both fascinated and horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts for his fierce persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts for the strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of Jesus Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road to Damascus, the idea that he could not only make a religion of his two terrors, but that the movement started by Jesus offered him the nucleus for his new Church. It was a monstrous idea; and the shocks of it, as he afterwards declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus calling to him from the clouds, "Why persecute me?" His natural hatred of the teacher for whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false light…

There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus. When Saul watched the clothes of the men who stoned Stephen, he was not acting upon beliefs which Paul renounced. There is no record of Christ's having ever said to any man: "Go and sin as much as you like: you can put it all on me." He said "Sin no more," and insisted that he was putting up the standard of conduct, not debasing it, and that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed that of the Scribe and Pharisee. The notion that he was shedding his blood in order that every petty cheat and adulterator and libertine might wallow in it and come out whiter than snow, cannot be imputed to him on his own authority. "I come as an infallible patent medicine for bad consciences" is not one of the sayings in the gospels…

The business of a Christ was to make self-satisfied sinners feel the burden of their sins and stop committing them instead of assuring them that they could not help it, as it was all Adam's fault, but that it did not matter as long as they were credulous and friendly about himself. Even when [Jesus] believed himself to be a god, he did not regard himself as a scapegoat. He was to take away the sins of the world by good government, by justice and mercy, by setting the welfare of little children above the pride of princes, by casting all the quackeries and idolatries which now usurp and malversate the power of God into what our local authorities quaintly call the dust destructor, and by riding on the clouds of heaven in glory instead of in a thousand-guinea motor car. That was delirious, if you like; but it was the delirium of a free soul, not of a shamebound one like Paul's. There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations of Paul's soul upon the soul of Jesus.

Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere imposition and reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to whom many prefer him) that he appears common and conceited. Though in The Acts [of the Apostles] he is only a vulgar revivalist, he comes out in his own epistles as a genuine poet—though by flashes only. He is no more a Christian than Jesus was a Baptist; he is a disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of John. He does nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that Jesus would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity, that he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling confessions and self-revelations that would not surprise us if they were slipped into the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an intellectual conscience that demanded an argued case even at the cost of sophistry, with all sorts of fine qualities and occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus.

To be clear, I am far from endorsing Shaw's criticisms of Paul--I just find them entertaining, spiced as they are with the Shavian wit and containing some fine turns of phrase. Shaw exemplified the 19th- and early 20th-century liberal antipathy towards Paul, as well as the post-Renan secular reverence towards the "historical" and non-divine figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul was too much the fanatic, too much the mystic, and too much the first-century Jew to pass muster in British drawing rooms circa 1900; but here we are, a century later, still grappling with his legacy and still "hopelessly in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic,"  which fate Jesus may have escaped but which seems inescapable for the rest of us.

 

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part Three)

What [Paul] wanted to talk about was the generation of an altogether new pneumatic world of eternal life in which everything that was tied to the lower elements of the present world of corruption and death would be transformed into a wholly different kind of heavenly existence, indeed, into an altogether different world. (Troels Enberg-Pederson, COSMOLOGY AND SELF IN THE APOSTLE PAUL)

 

As we saw, Paul experienced a revelation, an uncovering, of the “Christ” within him, and he was tasked directly by God to explain to the Gentiles that they, too, could be gifted with “Christ in them”. As Troels Engberg-Pederson makes clear, Paul meant all this very literally: “Christ” for him was a pneumatic being, and Paul had “a wholly concrete and bodily understanding of the pneuma…Paul conceived of the pneuma as a physical entity.”  

In his letters, Paul at times uses the metaphor of pregnancy, referring to the entire created order groaning in anticipation “as in the pains of childbirth”. Consider, too, that Paul often speaks of  “seed”: of planting the seed of the gospel, of promises made on behalf of Abraham’s seed, and of (crucially) the physical body as the seed which, upon death, is sown in the ground so that it will rise, eventually, as a new, spiritual creation. He writes to the Corinthians that “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body…flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” ¹

Putting all this together, it appears that, for Paul, having “Christ in us” amounted to what we might call a spiritual pregnancy, one which would come to term only upon Jesus’ return. It would be misleading, however, to apply to Paul our modern understanding of “spiritual”. We think of “spiritual” as meaning “insubstantial,” as opposed to material things which we term "substantial". Paul’s understanding, like that of his contemporaries, was that pneuma, or “spirit,” was a substance; in fact, it was a substance far superior to flesh and blood. In Paul's thought-world, spiritual creatures existed--not just Christ but angels and a host of malevolent entities; they possessed bodies, but bodies of an entirely different substance from ours. As Paul envisioned it, the bodies of the elect “in Christ” would someday be composed of just such spiritual substance, no longer subject to the indignities and limitations of the flesh.

To be pregnant with pneuma, then, meant that the seed of the spiritual body planted within a believer at baptism would grow if nurtured properly by holy living, prayer, and by being replenished in the Eucharist. Eventually (again, only at the Parousia, the return of Christ to claim God’s kingdom) the individual believer would be pneuma through and through, a new and immortal creation, capable, as Paul said, of judging angels. 

Here is Troels Engberg-Pederson on the Pauline concept:

[Paul’s] idea was the stark one that Christ-believers’ bodies of flesh and blood literally die—or atrophy—while they are living here on earth in order to become fit for the final transformation that will occur in the future. That dying is what is referred to by the talk of ‘sharing’ in Christ’s sufferings and becoming ‘conformed’ to his death.

The real starkness of Paul’s idea lies in the fact that he took the two processes of ‘becoming conformed to’ Christ’s death (in the sarx) and getting to know...the power of his (Christ’s) resurrection’ (in the pneuma) as taking place simultaneously in Paul’s body…his idea is that with the arrival of the pneuma, the body of flesh and blood is at one and the same time undergoing two opposed processes: dying (as flesh and blood) and coming to life (as a pneumatic body).

[Paul believed in] a striking co-presence in believers of a dying away of the physical body of flesh and blood in conformity with Christ’s suffering and dying—and a corresponding takeover of the same body by the pneuma, which will eventually lead to its final transformation into a body of glory. When that happens believers will literally come to shine like stars in heaven.

 

In the midst of life, we are in death. Expressions like “dying to self” or “dying to the world” were not, for Paul, mere figures of speech. They described a real process that was allegedly taking place within each believer, aimed at creating an unprecedented divine-human hybrid. When Paul insisted that "in Christ" there is "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female," he wasn't issuing a manifesto for social justice; he was describing an emerging ontological reality in which such divisions would literally no longer exist. 

 

That, I believe, is the staggering idea Paul preached, based on his own transformative experience; he himself was among the “first fruits” of God’s new family, brothers and sisters "in Christ" who would inherit and, with Christ, rule over God’s new creation.

 

Paul’s idea of “Christ in us” is echoed in the work of the late author Philip K. Dick, who also experienced (and wrote about) a “divine invasion”: a series of them, in fact, from which he, like Paul, developed his own esoteric exegesis. Here is one brief item from that exegesis:

“The Immortal One is a plásmate…a form of energy; it is living information.  A plásmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a homoplásmate. This annexes the mortal human permanently to the plásmate. We know this as the “birth from above” or “birth from the Spirit.” It was initiated by Christ…”

The kingdom of God is within you, and not just metaphorically.

If we’re going to take Paul seriously—and, for two thousand years, we have—we ought also to take Philip Dick and his cross-bonded "homoplasmate" seriously. I will have more to say about that another time. For now, I simply want to emphasize that Paul, whose writings have been the foundation of Christian theology for two millennia, preached a gospel the details of which most Christians would find bizarre; in fact, if Paul’s name were not attached to these dizzying speculations, Christians today would almost certainly reject them.

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¹ It would be wrong to think that Paul’s dismissal of “flesh and blood” means that he believed in a Platonic “immortal soul” as the mode of our eternal existence. For him, the opposite of “flesh and blood” was pneuma, a very different concept than that of the soul. Engberg-Pederson notes that Paul used Platonic rhetoric without endorsing Platonic ideas, one more sign of Paul’s instinctive eclectic genius—or, if you prefer, his confusion.

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part Two)

Before proceeding further with the implications of Paul’s “in Christ,” I should make it clear that the conclusions and speculations here are entirely mine and not Bruce Chilton’s, whose book RABBI PAUL I have been reading and to which I have referred. Chilton, in fact, doggedly attempts to reconcile Luke’s accounts (in Acts) with Paul’s own, whereas I dismiss Luke almost entirely.  

Consider, for example, the issue of Paul’s baptism. Bruce Chilton accepts Luke’s claim (as do most scholars, I concede) that Paul, after his “conversion” experience, was promptly baptized into the Jesus-movement. Luke says that Paul, having been struck blind by his encounter with the risen Jesus, was led into Damascus where a man named Ananias, after miraculously curing Paul’s blindness, baptized him. ¹ While Chilton acknowledges that “Paul never named the man who baptized him,” he nonetheless insists that said baptism must have taken place: “Obeying the apocalyptic voice [of Jesus] meant that Paul had to be baptized.” Baptism, says Chilton, was a “supernatural event [in which] the risen Jesus now drenched believers in the Holy Spirit”. It was also a requirement for anyone entering the Jesus-movement; therefore, Paul must have undergone it.

I don’t accept that claim.  Rather, I suggest that Paul, already “drenched” by his revelation/realization of the Christ within him, would not have sought out baptism; why should he, when he had been given a command by God himself to take the gospel to the Gentiles? ² Paul does not say he was told, “Go and be baptized, then preach to all nations in my name”; he had his revelation and his commission from God--what more did he need?

If Paul had been baptized, it seems logical that he would have mentioned it when listing, as he frequently did, his apostolic credentials; being able to name Ananias, the man who baptized him, would have solidified his standing in the communities he addressed. Instead, Paul very clearly says that, after his revelation, he did not “confer with flesh and blood” but went away into Arabia. Chilton claims that Paul here means “he did not have any human encounter that was important to him,” but that strikes me as undercutting the notion that Paul, before departing Damascus, had been baptized—wouldn’t that have been important to him? Wouldn’t regaining his sight have been important?

Paul’s failure to mention his baptism could simply reflect his focus on his prior revelatory experience, which was for him the source of his missionary zeal; it could also stem from his wanting to credit Christ and Christ alone with his spiritual transformation. Still, it would have been easy enough for Paul to have written “I did not consult with any man, but after being baptized I went immediately into Arabia…”  The fact that he did not so state cannot be ignored. 

I’m aware it is counterintuitive, perhaps even heretical, to assert that the greatest apostle of all was never baptized, but I can only repeat: I believe Paul felt himself to have been baptized directly by Christ, and thus not to have needed any additional ritual immersion. Bruce Chilton, in my view, works much too hard, here and elsewhere, at salvaging Luke’s account; the simplest explanation of why Paul didn’t mention his baptism at human hands is because it never happened.

Another case in point where Chilton and I differ: Chilton accepts Luke’s narrative that the newly baptized Paul, having regained his sight, immediately began preaching in the synagogues of Damascus, which led to his hurried flight from the city. Luke writes, “At once [Paul] began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God…Paul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving the Jesus is the Christ.”

Again, Paul says no such thing in his letters. Baptism aside, it is implausible that Paul, in the wake of a spiritually and existentially shattering revelation, should have proceeded in the way Luke describes. Paul would have needed time to make sense of what had happened to him; having been seized, as it were, by Christ, his life turned upside down, he would have needed time to regain his balance and to divine (as it were) his new course.

Here again we should take Paul at his word. After his revelation, Paul, as he says, “immediately” went off to Arabia to work out the implications of that event. How, he would have wondered, could he have been so wrong about Jesus and the Jesus-movement? How could he have failed to recognize Messiah? How could the Christ who now lived within him be reconciled with the Torah Paul had long revered? How could Paul’s new life be reconciled with his old one? What exactly did God want him to do?

Such questions would not have been resolved overnight. In wrestling with them, Paul eventually came up with answers whose radicalism has too often been concealed beneath Christian pieties for two thousand years; but it's still there for anyone willing to take Paul's words seriously, as my next post will explain.

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¹ Let’s be honest: Luke could not have been more heavy-handed in using the “Paul was blind but then he could see” trope. Luke’s having the scales fall from Paul’s eyes has given us an enduring metaphor, but it’s difficult to take the event literally. Bruce Chilton, however, ingeniously links Luke’s description to Paul’s famous “thorn in the flesh,” which has kept exegetes guessing for centuries.

Paul says (also in Galatians) that the members of the congregation had taken pity on him when he was ill; “If possible,” Paul reminds them, “you would have dug out your eyes to give me.” Based on this, Chilton concludes:

“A chronic visual disease seems most likely…the description comports well with an ailment produced by a virus that is activated by anxiety. [It] often lies dormant, later in life infecting the nervous system and provoking ‘shingles’ as well as the ballooning, scarring condition of the eye known as herpes zoster. When he was baptized,” Chilton asserts, “Paul was a stress machine…it is no surprise he had one of his attacks.”

Given the range of my own speculations, far be it from me to chide Chilton for being overly imaginative. Still, I don’t believe Luke’s account for a second.

² I am skeptical of Paul’s claim that he was commissioned to preach specifically to non-Jews. I think it far more likely that his mission to the Gentiles came about only after his gospel fell on deaf ears among his Jewish brethren; he then retroactively decided (and no doubt convinced himself) that God had intended him to go to “the nations” all along. 

Paul's Divine Invasion (Part One)

Please turn to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Chapter 1, verses 11—16):  

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.  I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.  But…God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles…” [emphasis added]

The concluding sentence in the above passage is frequently translated as “God…was pleased to reveal his Son to me…” [emphasis added]

As it turns out, much hinges on the difference between “revealed in me” and “revealed to me”.

I have been reading Bruce Chilton’s RABBI PAUL, and Chilton emphasizes the importance of getting, and understanding, the preposition properly:

God determined to “uncover his Son in” Paul. Conventional translations have stood in the way of what he clearly said [in Galatians]…these translations make readers think in terms of external stimuli coming to the seer like ordinary sense perceptions…the basic meaning of [Paul’s] language, however, is that a heavenly mystery has its cover taken off: the veil of circumstance is momentarily stripped from spiritual reality. Here the cover is removed from God’s Son, who is “in” Paul, within his consciousness in an experience uniquely his.

Paul’s experience was not of an objective event that other people witnessed with him…his brief reference in Galatians relates to a personal moment of disclosure, an unveiling of the divine.

In Paul’s words, the “Son” of God was disclosed [raging] inside him. ¹

It was no longer Paul who lived but Christ who lived in him.

Before analyzing the passage, we should first note that Chilton’s understanding of Paul’s language does away with Luke’s fanciful inventions in Acts: on the road to Damascus, traveling with companions, Paul (and the others?) saw a sudden blinding light, he was thrown to the ground, he (and the others?) heard a voice from heaven, etc. Paul himself never refers to any such incident; while an argument from omission is hardly airtight, it seems plausible enough in this instance—i.e. Paul never refers to such a dramatic (and public) incident because it never happened.

What did happen, though, was dramatic enough: enough to turn Paul’s life around and enough to alter the course, eventually, of Western culture.

Because the idea of Christ living “in” believers became central to Paul’s emerging theology and to the emerging Christian religion, it is essential to understand what he meant by it. "Christ in us"  was not a figure of speech: it was not just a poetic way of referring to a person being influenced by the example of Jesus, or to someone being inspired by the hope elicited by Jesus’ resurrection, or to going through one's life conscious of one's faith in Christ. For Paul, as we learn from his various writings on the subject, Christ was a new creation—an actual being, an entity, an organism—something unprecedented in the history of the cosmos.  It was not the idea of Christ that lived inside of Paul after his revelation; it was literally Christ himself.

Just as Christians came to believe (as many still do) that the bread and wine of the Eucharist became the literal body and blood of Christ—that is, the Eucharist is not merely a symbolic ritual but an actual transformation (transubstantiation) of physical elements—so too did Paul clearly teach that the “Christ in us” was not symbolic or notional but a real abiding spiritual presence.

Now, this claim could be understood in a Gnostic sense: each of us, Gnostics would say, has within us from birth the “Christ,” a spark of divinity that is ours by nature and which only requires that we become aware of its existence—that we wake from sleep, as Gnostics put it—for it to begin reshaping us into the divinities we are (or are meant to be). The Gnostic "Christ" lies dormant until we become spiritually aware.

Paul was not in that sense a Gnostic; rather, he believed himself to have been, in the event of revelation, entered  (“penetrated” or “invaded”) by the living Christ, after which God revealed to Paul his new identity. As Chilton says, God “uncovered” in Paul the Christ that now lived in him. Paul had been taken by force--not the external force Luke portrays, but a spiritual force within him--so that he could transmit (preach) the Christ to others.  It was no longer Paul who lived but Christ who lived in him; and it would be the privilege of others, upon hearing Paul’s gospel and upon believing in Christ, to experience that same “divine invasion”.

One believer at a time, a whole new race was being created, a race which was to humanity as the "new Adam" was to the "old Adam," and a race that would inherit the new earth that God was about to recreate and transform.

As my next two posts will explain, there were still more implications of "Christ in us".

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¹ Chilton’s choice of the word “raging” seems apt, given what we know of Paul’s single-minded and unflagging zeal for the gospel. “Christ” within him was a relentless engine, and Paul had no way (and no desire) to resist its compulsion.