The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part Two)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is aware that Christians, on the rare occasion they give thought to such matters, do not think of themselves as nihilists. He apologizes for disturbing them and promises to move on from this topic as soon as possible.} 

 “Our life is illusion; the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God.” (Karl Barth)

“The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.” (Karl Barth)

Despite Christianity’s openly declared contempt for the world, Christians found themselves stuck with living in it. Having been catapulted to power and respectability by Constantine, Church authorities made the best bargains they could with what Paul had described as the world’s “powers and principalities,” becoming, in relatively short order, one of those very powers. The Church’s worldly triumph required reinterpretation of certain scriptural passages, but Christian apologists were up to the task. The nihilism at the heart of Jesus’ and Paul’s gospel was discretely ignored, though it never went away.    

To make a long story short, Christendom lasted until it didn’t. Whatever claims to the contrary had been made by Christian authorities—or, for that matter, by Jesus himself—Christianity could not forever resist the currents of History. In the nineteenth century, challenged by the Enlightenment, Protestant theologians began rethinking their Weltanschauung, while Catholics dug in their heels against the modern tide. The former eventually arrived at “liberal” theology, which mixed the social gospel with a humanized Jesus while hoping to immanentize the eschaton; the latter (Catholics) thumbed their nose at Enlightenment and conceded the pope infallibility. Then came the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and what might be called the Disillusionment of the West.    

Toward the end of the war, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, following the lead of Soren Kierkegaard, scandalized and provoked his Christian brethren by reminding them of the nihilism concealed beneath the cover of their respectable bourgeois religion. According to J. Gresham Machen, Barth insisted that “God is not another name for the totality of this world; and he is not to be found in any experience of man. He is, with respect to this world, the "completely Other," the One who is incommensurate with anything that can possibly enter into the life of man. Such is the stupendous dualism between the world and God that is at the root of the thinking of Karl Barth.” Nothing in this world connects us to Barth’s God; God may deign to reach out to us or to reveal his will—or he may not, and if he chooses not to do so, there is nothing we can do about it.

In Barth’s view, not even Christianity could bridge the gap between human and divine. Walter Lowrie, following Barth, put it this way: in our religious rituals and language, “We are thinking not of God but of man; as Barth says, while we thought we were speaking about God, we were merely ‘saying Man with a loud voice.’” Ludwig Feuerbach had made the same point in the nineteenth century, but on behalf of atheism; Barth, on the other hand, wanted to force Christians to confront the emptiness of their earthly existence, including their faith. As Karen Leslie Carr puts it, “For Barth, ‘Faith is no possession, rather it is a void; God is nowhere present in history, rather the truth points us only to his total absence; Jesus’ message lay not in his superior knowledge of God but in his cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In short, for Barth, ‘Religion possesses no solution to the problem of life; what it does is to disclose the truth that the problem cannot be solved.’” People long for security, foundation, and assurance, but none of that is to be had in this life. People crave God but God is not in the world: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.”

Carr continues: “For Barth the issue was, how do we even make sense of the inchoate mess that is our existence? How can we claim to know anything about God at all, when ‘the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God?’ God is so far removed from our experience that one is driven to question his very existence. Barth wrote, ‘Our world is formless and tumultuous chaos, a chaos of the forces of nature and of the human soul. Our life is illusion: this is the situation in which we find ourselves.’”

Was Barth a nihilist? Only in the sense that he pinned all earthly hopes on a God who cannot be known unless he chooses to reveal himself; mortal existence, in Barth's theology, has no value in and of itself. That is a hard gospel to preach, and a harder gospel to accept.

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Karen Leslie Carr quotes from The Banalization of Nihilism.

God is forever out of reach, and yet we keep reaching...

Saturday Lecture: The Pursuit of Shadows

{In the 1920s and 1930s, for a variety of reasons, Protestant theologians—most prominently, Karl Barth—abandoned the ‘social gospel’ and its aspirations to construct God’s kingdom on earth. Instead, they put their trust in a God whom they declared “wholly Other” and out of human reach. In effect, Barthian ‘neo-orthodoxy’ insisted we throw ourselves on the mercy of a mysterious, absentee Judge whose verdict would have little or nothing to do with the merits of our case. The following was written in 1933 by an admirer of Barth’s. You may note its resemblance to more recent polemics against Modernity; almost by definition, traditionalists have no new arguments to offer.}   

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

A judgement is being pronounced today on our whole Western civilization.

To Modernism we can attribute much of the present disintegration of the old divine ordinances of society, of the family, home, marriage, which constituted the firm foundation on which life was lived in a former day. What man was, he was through those ordinances, but what he is now, he is through himself. The world in which we live now is one of convinced individualism, which accounts for the prevailing uncertainty and confusion of thought, and for the moral Bolshevism so rampant.

Humanity is not without its admirable features. Though subject to transitoriness and death, it has shown itself capable of great self-denial, and self-sacrifice, and through its efforts it has brought into being a whole group of cultural, aesthetic, and scientific values. But humanity conceals within itself the titanic impulse to storm the heights, to ‘build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and to make us a name.’ By ignoring the distance between man and God, it has been guilty of Promethean pride and self-glorification, and has succumbed to the sinful ambition ‘to be as gods.’

In the faith of the nineteenth century in the unfailing progress of man, of human culture and morals, with Herbert Spencer as its high priest, this pride found arrogant expression. ‘Progress,’ said Spencer, ‘is not an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become perfect.’ The final product of this pride in humanity is Humanism, especially as it has come to full flower in America. John Dewey, the leading American Humanist, with perfect logic rules out God altogether; for if humanity be thus irresistible, if man can confront the world as lord, what need is there for a God anymore? Man is God to himself. Religion remains as a human product, valuable because of its usefulness, but the only possible religion in the end is the worship of humanity.

This proud self-conscious humanity, with all its gifts and powers, has come into the crisis of its existence and has been overtaken by judgement. All its fine idealisms have been seen to have been delusions, and all its self-deifications to have been dreams born of intoxication. Its judgment is revealed in its deficiency of power. It has become weak and almost despairing, for the crisis has revealed what it is not, as much as what it is. The proud Towers of Babel which it sought to build are toppling down. Its sin of trying to do without God is being discovered.

Our modern individualistic Protestantism has its roots much more in the enthusiasts and humanists of the Middles Ages than in the Reformers. A Church which has sunk in many places into being a social center, a home of Humanism, with nothing better to offer than some special brand of ‘Christian culture’ (higher than, perhaps, but no different in kind than that of the world) has lost its substance in the pursuit of shadows. The religion of temperament and sentiment has replaced the religion of will and obedience, but it has proved inadequate for our time. Synergism has been enjoying its great day, pervaded by a Pelagian conception of sin, salvation, and grace. We have come to understand ‘the Kingdom of God’ as a project of social and moral idealism, a perfect human society here on earth.

Our age can be compared with the age of the close of the Roman Empire. Now, as then, there is a widespread sense that the foundations are being shaken on all sides. Once more a quite elementary longing has arisen for something that is beyond time’s shakings, for an ‘Archimedean point’ outside, a longing for contact with a Reality above the relativity of history and experience.

This crisis is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of our age. For when humanity ceases to rely on itself and to make of itself a god, hope may be at hand. The world has experienced a veritable apocalypse of evil, which has shaken the faith of all but the very young in the nobility of human nature. The preaching of our time has sought to lift men by an appeal to their strength rather than by a reminder of their weakness. It has made much of the seeming good in human nature and has inclined to ignore the overmastering evil. The crisis into which such preaching has brought us must be regarded as a judgment.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Shadows

 

Sunday Sermon: Sympathy for the Scapegoat

“You shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it as a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.” (Leviticus 16: 9-10)

Wolfgang Palaver (from Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory):

Jesus is the innocent victim par excellence because he is not bound to violence and owes nothing to it. It was thus necessary for Jesus to be completely independent of the world for him to uncover the mechanism of violence at work in human culture and for him to become a victim of this violence. In other words, Jesus’ insight into the order of violence had to come from a source outside the human realm. Girard refers to this as "the transcendence of love, a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence, is never responsible for any violence, and remains radically opposed to violence." Jesus is not dependent on the world of violence in which human beings are trapped. Jesus originates entirely from a God of love and nonviolence.

Only with the help of the grace of God can humanity free itself from the dungeon of scapegoat logic. Jesus’ resurrection is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion.

How, throughout the history of Christianity, did events so often take place that followed the pre-Christian pattern of collective persecution? How could biblical revelation lead to a cultural tradition that radically persecuted minority groups such as Jews and witches? For Girard, historical Christianity is characterized by a sacrificial interpretation of the Gospel Passion and the salvation brought by Jesus, whose death is thus misread as a sacrifice equivalent to those found in archaic religions. Christian theology often interprets the crucifixion of Jesus as a sacrifice ordered from on high to appease the wrath of God. As Girard puts it, “Thanks to the sacrificial reading it has been possible for what we call Christendom to exist for ten or twenty centuries; that is, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures, on the mythological forms engendered by the founding mechanism of scapegoating. Mankind relies upon a misunderstanding of the Gospel to re-establish cultural forms which remain sacrificial.”

The persecution of other groups is one of the characteristics of sacrificial Christianity; the systematic persecution of Jews, heretics, and witches, as well as all inquisitions, crusades, and religious wars are the direct result of this decisive misunderstanding of scripture. According to Girard, this form of Christianity is a regression to Old Testament conceptions of sacrifice; it is an intermediate form between myth and the gospels.

The equality of all humans before God no longer allows any containment of mimetic rivalry by means of hierarchical differences. With the dawn of modernity, these hierarchical orders collapsed, and the crisis of violence present at the foundation of civilization re-emerged, e.g., Thomas Hobbes’ conception of human equality as a state in which anyone can kill anyone else.

The modern world is at once both better and worse than its predecessors. The biblical unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism does not lead automatically to paradise on earth, but rather to dangers even greater than those that previously existed. The biblical demystification of the world has given rise to modern science and technology, which have provided mankind with the capability to annihilate itself.

Girard references the increasingly virulent struggle in the modern world to be viewed as the victim, a kind of "radicalized victimology". According to Girard, Nietzsche was correct in saying that persecution, in the future, would only take place in the name of victims. The radicalization of the biblical concern for victims is ultimately opposed to the Christian spirit. Girard: “This new totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. Its adherents denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.” The proponents of this ideology seek the abolition of the Ten Commandments and all other prohibitions in the effort to enable the boundless fulfillment of desire. Mass consumerism constitutes a complete unbridling of desire and threatens a sacrifice of nature in its entirety.

Girard does not preach impending doom, nor does he secretly hope for any act of divine vengeance; instead, he argues that "a radically Christian appropriation of history can only be apocalyptical," as the world is more and more liberated from ancient forms of servitude but also deprived of sacrificial protection.

Girard: “If men turn down the peace Jesus offers them—a peace that is not derived from violence and that, by virtue of this fact, surpasses human understanding—the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a cultural crisis whose radical effect will be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences.” 

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René Girard - Wikipedia

High on the hill stood a lonely scapegoat...

Sunday Sermon: The Road to Deification

M. David Litwa (from We Are Being Transformed):

Pauline religion is in many respects a “utopian” form of religion. Utopian religionists find themselves somehow out of place and thus restlessly try to break boundaries and escape structures perceived as limiting or even oppressive. In accordance with this utopian line of thought, Paul’s gospel presents a mode of transcending this world often called “salvation”.

Religions of salvation, understood in a broad sense, perceive some “lack” in human existence, and present a remedy for that lack. In theistic models, the lack is often some form of alienation from the divine, and the remedy consists in somehow overcoming the separation between the divine and the human. In ancient Judaism, this attempt to overcome alienation aimed at proximity to the God Yahweh. In this case, it was a covenantal proximity, which can be viewed as a kind of moral and relational approximation to God (i.e., conformation to Yahweh’s righteous character and holiness).

The Platonic model of salvation, pervasive in Greek (and later Roman) thought, posits an overlap between the human and divine natures. Whether innately or as something bestowed, humans foster a divine principle in their true self (the immortal soul, the divine image, the divine spirit, etc.). To become fully divine, they need to strip away or transform what makes them “un-divine” (i.e., the mortal, earthly body with its passions and evil deeds) and ascend to the upper reaches of the universe. 

In this model, salvation involves some sort of transcendence of human nature as it is normally conceived. At the present time, the human is perceived as a weak, fleshly body controlled by passions and subject to external powers (human or daimonic). In the transcendent state, the human becomes an immortal, free entity unburdened by internal passions and external powers.

For Paul, the way to become transcendent was through participation in the divine Christ and specifically the immortality, power, and virtue that constituted Christ’s divinity. [Paul claimed that] Christ exhibited, in his resurrection, a universal power and immortal corporeality that proleptically united heaven and earth, the human and the divine. Paul envisions a “glorification” of those who, due to the sin of the first Adam, fell short of the glory of God. He preaches that the divine spirit or pneuma of Christ has been unleashed into the flesh of those “in Christ,” a down payment of their own new corporeality.  As those assimilated to the power and immortality of the divine Christ, such human beings gain the power to be called “children of God” and owners of all things.

One way to understand this complex of ideas is through the category of deification—a native category pervasive in Paul’s culture. Deification, which etymologically means something like “God-making,” must always sound alien and unnatural to modern thinkers as well as to Christians and post-Christians working with modern schemas of theology and anthropology. Modern religious sensibilities add an additional layer of complication. Especially for Protestant theologians, deification has the air of hubristic, “pagan” religion. In the modern climate, deification at best can be counted as an over-audacious metaphor. ¹

Nonetheless, Paul expects that he and his followers will attain a state of deathlessness and incorruption. This state is achieved by receiving a sort of bodily immortality. Since mortality is one of the basic (if not the basic) conditions of human existence, Paul evidently promises a kind of life beyond normal human conditions. The body he anticipates is not only immortal but freed from the laws of generation and decay. This new, pneumatic body will not grow old or waste away. Paul tells his converts—as if it were common knowledge—that they will someday judge higher, superhuman beings (“angels”). In promising this, he seems to assume that he and his community will one day have an existence—or at least a status—above those angelic beings. Such a cosmic role seems to be part and parcel of transformed Christians judging the whole “cosmos”. They are those who will be given “all things” by God, and who will come into possession of grandiose cosmic realities—including life, death, things present, things to come, and even the world itself. 

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Litwa, M. David: We Are Being Transformed (De Gruyter. Kindle Edition.)

About « M. David Litwa, Ph.D. (wordpress.com)

¹ Those who recognize the “otherness” of deification might be tempted to view it as a mythological way of thinking. What this amounts to is the realization that deification does not fit the categories of Western empirical worldviews. It is difficult enough conceiving what ‘God’ is in a scientific age, let alone what it means to become one.

Killing God Softly with "Time" Magazine

{A quick reassurance to readers: God is not really dead. That is a canard and a vexatious rumor spread by Satan's minions, who are legion and who at one time infested even the Christian seminaries of America.}

I recently read an essay titled “When My Dad Killed God” which appeared in the July 2022 issue of Christian Century. It was written by Don Hamilton, whose father was a briefly famous/infamous theologian associated with the “God is dead” theology of the 1960s. The essay begins:

I grew up on Gregory Hill Road, an unexceptional two blocks of postwar homes in Rochester, New York. In the spring and summer we rode bikes and played baseball. In the fall and winter we raked leaves and shoveled snow. From our street you could look up to the nearby hill to see the Gothic red spires of the tower at the Colgate Rochester Divinity School (now Colgate Rochester Crozer). At Christmas they put a star on the tower, at Easter a cross, and you could hear the bells everywhere in the neighborhood. Many divinity school faculty members and their families lived on Gregory Hill Road, including my mom, five kids, and my dad, theologian William Hamilton.

The divinity school was an important presence in our lives. I remember the echo running down the school halls to Dad’s office, the tuna noodle casserole at the all-school luncheons, the granular soap in the bathrooms, and the spring graduation processional when the faculty walked by in their colorful academic robes. They had a wonderful chapel where Dad performed weddings, and we got great use out of the grassy picnic area at the bottom of the hill.

Everything changed after God died and we got run out of town. Dad, it turns out, killed God.

“Dad”—that is, William Hamilton—was co-author, with Thomas Altizer, of the book Radical Theology and the Death of God. His contributions to the book included grappling with the meanings and implications of its central claim:

What does it mean to say that God is dead? Is this any more than a rather romantic way of pointing to the traditional difficulty of speaking about the holy God in human terms? Is it any more than a warning against all idols, all divinities fashioned out of human need, human ideologies? Does it perhaps not just mean that "existence is not an appropriate word to ascribe to God, that therefore he cannot be said to exist, and he is in that sense dead"? It surely means all this, and more.

It used to be possible to say: we cannot know God but he has made himself known to us, and at that point analogies from the world of personal relations would enter the scene and help us. But somehow, the situation has deteriorated; as before, we cannot know him, but now it seems that he does not make himself known, even as enemy. This is more than the usual assurance that before the holy God all our language gets broken and diffracted into paradox. It is really that we do not know, do not adore, do not possess, do not believe in God. It is not just that a capacity has dried up within us; we do not take all this as merely a statement about our frail psyches, we take it as a statement about the nature of the world and we try to convince others. God is dead. We are not talking about the absence of the experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God.

Such claims were understandably a hard sell to the authorities, and to Hamilton’s colleagues, at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. They would be, eventually, cause for disciplinary action. Don Hamilton’s essay summarizes the immediate response to his father’s controversial views: “Letters to the divinity school called for Dad’s resignation or firing. Some announced they’d no longer contribute to a school that employed him. Someone in Indianapolis returned a school fundraising letter with the words, ‘If God is dead, why do you need money?’ scrawled across the front in huge red letters.”

Most of us, theists and non-theists alike, are not theologians; nor were the editors of Time magazine, which fueled the controversy with a dramatic cover asking readers, IS GOD DEAD? The “death of God” theology was almost entirely misunderstood, and its motivating context—the horrors of the 20^th century, the Holocaust in particular—was ignored. According to Don Hamilton, there is now a respected (if marginal) genre of theology called ‘Theothanatology’—the death of God. Its practitioners can only hope to escape William Hamilton’s fate:

Amid the death threats, hate mail, and newspaper editorials calling for Dad’s dismissal, our family stopped going to church. The faculty at the divinity school, some of them our neighbors on Gregory Hill Road, turned against him. We could see signs of the strain. He started smoking cigarettes, which he had never done before. He’d sit out in the backyard by himself at night and tell us he dreamed he was carrying our blue station wagon on his back. In the spring of 1967, he took a job at New College in Sarasota, Florida, and we left Gregory Hill Road…in later years he suffered from depression and drank a lot.

William Hamilton died in 2012. So far as I know, he never retreated from his theological conviction that God had pre-deceased him:

The death of God must be affirmed; the confidence with which we thought we could speak of God is gone, and our faith, belief, experience of him are very poor things indeed. Along with this goes a sharp attack on religion which we have defined as any system using God to meet a need or to solve a problem, even the problem of not having a God. Our godlessness is partly a search for a language and a style by which we might be enabled to stand before him once again, delighting in his presence.

I am not a Christian, but it is my understanding that Christianity teaches that Christ overcame death, so that death’s dominion was no more. Why, then, was there such a fierce reaction against the theological claim that “God is dead”? Did Hamilton’s fellow Christians not believe that the God who was dead would rise again? O ye of little faith! What sort of God would let a little thing like death keep him down?

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When my dad killed God | The Christian Century

Radical Theology and the Death of God – Religion Online (religion-online.org)

Sunday Sermon: "Eating of the Devil's garbage"

{John Chrysostom was a fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, a noted Christian apologist, and a ferocious opponent of Jews and Judaism. Nicknamed “Golden Tongue” for his oratorical prowess, he is recognized as a saint by both Eastern and Western denominations, notwithstanding his having written what James Parkes has called ‘the most horrible and violent denunciations of Judaism to be found in the writings of a Christian theologian,’ no small accomplishment itself. In the following excerpt, Bishop Golden Tongue explains why, even though Jesus had already conquered Sin, Death, and Satan, those things continued to exist and to plague the Christian faithful almost as much as did the Jews. This is patristic theodicy at its finest.}   

St. John Chrysostom:

Yesterday we began our sermon concerning the Devil. But others, while these matters were being discussed here, took their places in the theatre, and were looking on at the Devil's show. They were taking part in lascivious songs; you were having a share in spiritual music. They were eating of the Devil's garbage: you were feeding on spiritual unguents. Who pray decoyed them? Who pray separated them from the sacred flock? Did the Devil deceive them? How did he not deceive you? You and they are men alike; you and they have the same soul and the same desires, so far as nature is concerned. How is it then that you and they were not in the same place?

Because you and they have not the same purpose. On this account they indeed are under deception, but you beyond deception. I do not say these things as discharging the Devil from accusation, but as desiring earnestly to free you from sins. The Devil is wicked; I grant this, but he is wicked for himself, not towards us—if we are wary. For wickedness is destructive to those alone who hold to it. Virtue is the contrary. Virtue is not only able to profit those who hold to it, but those nearest at hand too. Evil is evil in itself, but good is also good to others.

Those in the theatre were deceived, but you were not deceived. This is the proof that, in every case, the purpose is master. Use this method of proof; if you see a man living in wickedness, and exhibiting all kinds of evil, while blaming the providence of God, and saying that by the necessity of fortune and fate and through tyranny of Demons our nature is beset, and on all sides shifting the blame from himself to the creator who provides for all: silence his speech not by word, but by deed, showing him another fellow servant living in virtue and forbearance. There is no need of long speeches, no need of a complex plan, nor even of syllogisms. By means of deeds the proof is brought about. Say to him: you are a servant, and he is a servant; you are a man, and he is a man. You live in the same world: you are nourished with the same nourishment under the same heaven: How is it that you are living in wickedness, he in virtue?

On this account God allowed the wicked to be mingled with the good. He did not give one law to the wicked while appointing another world as a colony for the good, but mixed these and those, conferring great benefit. For the good appear more thoroughly approved when they are in the midst of those who try to hinder them from living rightly, and who entice them to evil, and yet keep hold of virtue. For there must be also heresies among you that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

Therefore also on this account God has left the wicked to be in the world, in order that the good may shine the brighter. Do you see how great is the gain? But the gain is not owing to the wicked but owing to the courage of the good. On this account also we admire Noah, not because he was righteous nor yet because he was perfect alone, but because in that perverse and wicked generation he preserved his virtue, when he had no pattern of virtue to follow, when all men invited him to wickedness; and he went his whole way contrary to them, like some traveler pursuing his way while the great multitude is being borne along vehemently. On this account he did not simply say Noah was “just” and “perfect,” but added “in his generation”—in that perverse, desperate generation, when there was no acquisition of virtue. ¹

Trees tossed about by contrary winds become stronger. There is gain to the wicked from their mixing with the good. They feel confusion, they are ashamed, they blush in their presence; and even if they do not abstain from evil, yet nevertheless they dare what they dare with secrecy. And this is no small thing, not to have transgression publicly committed. For the life of the others becomes the accuser of the wicked. For the righteous man is grievous to the wicked, even when beheld, and it is no small beginning of amendment to be tormented at his presence. If the sight of the righteous man did not torment the wicked, if they were not stung and pinched in conscience at his presence, there would be but little hindrance to indulging in wickedness with pleasure. Do you see how great is the gain both to the good from the wicked, and to the wicked from the good? On this account God has not set them apart but has allowed them to be mingled together. ²

Our argument about the Devil is the same. God has left him here in order that he might render you the stronger, in order that he may make the athlete more illustrious, in order that the contests may be greater. ³ When therefore anyone says, “Why has God left the Devil here?”, say to him: “Because the Devil not only does no harm to the wary and the heedful, but even profits them, not owing to his own purpose (for that is wicked), but owing to their courage who have used that wickedness aright.” The Devil even fixed upon Job, not that he might make him more illustrious, but in order that he might upset him. On this account he is wicked both because of such an opinion and such a purpose. But, notwithstanding, he did no harm to the righteous man Job; the Demon showed his wickedness and the righteous man his courage.

“But the Devil does upset many,” says one. But that is owing to their weakness, not owing to his own strength. Direct your own intention aright and you shall never receive harm from any, but shall get the greatest gain, not only from the good but even from the wicked. For on this account, God has suffered men to be with one another, and especially the wicked with the good, in order that they may bring them over to their own virtue. ⁴

The power of the righteous has its force not in the magnitude of their number, but in the grace of the Spirit. There were twelve Apostles. The whole world was in unbelief. But those twelve turned the whole world to themselves. For this reason, God left the wicked in the midst of the good, that since they are of the same nature as the righteous, they may also become of the same purpose.

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Three Homilies on the Devil - Part 2 - Sermon Index

¹ God, in other words, graded Noah on a curve, which, to be honest, is as good a fate as any of us can expect.

² A strategy (mixing the wicked with the righteous) akin to filling a barrel with a mixture of good apples and rotten apples. What could possibly go wrong?

³ Human existence, then, is conceived as a sporting match in which the stakes are eternal blessedness or eternal damnation. Feel free to place your bets at the counter with M. Pascal.

⁴ Chrysostom’s argument can also be directed against what John Milton called “cloistered virtue,” that is, to be proven, virtue must be tested and tried.

The War in Heaven

{I may have made a mistake giving Professor Arguendo the password to my blog. He appears to be bound and determined to impress upon one and all the connection between early Christianity and the myth-laden cosmos of the ancient Near East. Why he believes that issue to be important remains unclear; it’s almost as if something has possessed him.}

Arguendo: "Both Christ and Satan are necessary for salvation. 'No Devil, no God,' was John Wesley's way of putting it." (Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic)

After his uncredited cameo in Genesis, Satan received scant attention in the Hebrew scriptures until the Book of Job, when he unexpectedly was awarded a co-starring role. After a brief prologue praising Job’s piety, the author commences the plot:

“One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’  Satan answered the LORD, ‘From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.’ Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’ ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ Satan replied. ‘Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has. You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’”

Unable to resist the challenge, God first allows Satan to inflict calamities upon Job’s properties, his animals, and his family, culminating with the tragic death of Job’s children, to which loss Job responded with, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” “In all this,” the author insists, “Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” We then witness round two: Satan returns for another chat with God, who smugly brags of Job, “He still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him without any reason.” Satan has a ready answer: “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. ‘A man will give all he has for his own life. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.’” God, who seems surprisingly accepting of torture, agrees: “Very well, then,” he tells Satan; “He is in your hands, but you must spare his life.” The rest of the story is too well known to need repeating, though it is worth noting that God never admits that Job’s troubles stemmed from a wager with Satan; likewise, Job never suspects that anyone other than God could be responsible for his miseries.

The point is, YHWH (the God of Israel) and Satan had a long and complicated history. As Israel’s fortunes declined, its anguished prophets developed a new understanding of the balance of powers in the cosmos. As Norman Cohn explains:

From the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE, the Jews produced a new, complex, and comprehensive demonology. There grew up a body of literature commonly known as ‘apocalyptic,’ full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world. Evil spirits ‘rise up against the children of men and against the women’; they are demons who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods. Within limits prescribed by God, evil spirits or demons wreak destruction on the earth; they are also seducers, tempting human beings to every kind of sin. The chief of the fallen angels, Belial (or Satan), emerges as the antagonist or rival of God. His subordinates tempt men to fornication, jealousy, envy, anger, murder, and idolatry. Ultimately, the Devil and his servants, human and demonic, form a single host and are all alike doomed and destined to be overthrown and annihilated.

Such apocalyptic dualism—Good pitted against Evil—was late in coming to Judaism, but its antecedents were ancient and can be found in mythologies from numerous cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Persia, India, etc.). Neil Forsyth (The Old Enemy) links the Jewish and Christian narratives to ancient dualistic myths in which the world, along with its human inhabitants, was the scene of divine combat. “The Christian version of the plot,” he writes, “is something like this: A rebel god challenges the power of Yahweh, takes over the whole earth as an extension of his empire, and rules it through the power of sin and death. He is the typical death-dealing villain who causes consternation among his subjects, and his depredations and cruelty make them long for a liberator. This dark tyrant, ‘the god of this world,’ as Paul called him, is eventually thwarted by the Son of God (or man) in the most mysterious episode of the Christian story, the crucifixion, which oddly combines both defeat and victory. The struggle with Satan continues, however, and we wait still for the end of his story in the end of history. The function of Christ is to be the potential liberator of mankind from this tyranny, while the function of Satan is to be the Adversary in this Christian variant of the ancient combat narrative.”

“This bald and inadequate summary of the story,” Forsyth admits, “is nowhere contained in the scriptures. Versions of it are implicit in the New Testament, but its obscurity and fragmentation there, its presence as an assumed truth rather than a revealed truth, has made it possible for centuries of rationalizers, from the earliest allegorists to the latest liberal or humanist Christians, to ignore or avoid the devil’s role in the Christian system. The Bible says very little about the devil, and that mostly obscure and allusive; furthermore, texts which did apparently mention the devil seemed to give contradictory information about him.” 

Forsyth insists that “A shift of focus from God to Satan helps to clarify the mythological foundations of the whole Christian system. ‘No Devil, no God,’ as John Wesley put it, but this idea is not a peculiarity of the devil-soaked Protestant imagination; it is basic to the Christian story. It is mainly Satan, in fact, who gives to Christianity its mythological dimension. The depredations and tyranny of Satan are what motivate the incarnation story and that against which the activities of Christ are directed. The myth is most evident in those parts of the Christian testament which are explicitly apocalyptic, but it is present wherever the Satan figure or his demonic allies appear. In Luke, Christ sees Satan fall like lightning from heaven; the implication is that the struggle of the disciples with demon opponents is an episode or manifestation of the larger myth. Similarly, when we are told that Satan enters into Judas, the human tale of treachery is transformed into another stage of the cosmic battle being waged between Christ and his adversary; such battles are the stuff of myths.”

Christianity insisted that its salvific events had taken place in history rather than in the realm of myth, but the inclusion of Satan in the narrative created problems: 

The mythological mode ascribed evil to the activities of an independent cosmic principle loose in creation—Satan or the devil. If human life is seriously viewed as conditioned by a struggle between divine forces, it becomes difficult to insist on human responsibility; yet human responsibility was essential to both Judaism and Christianity. The notorious difficulties of Paul’s theology may be seen as his efforts to construct a version of the narrative that would allow for a separate principle of evil but would confine its power. A cosmic evil, beyond human control, raised the difficult problem of the relationship between evil and sin. 

The cosmic struggle could not absolve the humans caught up in it; a vestige, at least, of human responsibility had to be preserved. According to Paul, humans were tainted by Adam’s original sin; they were enslaved by Satan, by Sin, and by Death; their will was conflicted, and their flesh was weak; they could do nothing at all to save themselves; yet, as the Book of Job had emphasized, humans had no more right to lament their condition than clay had to complain to the potter. Humans had been given “free will” and sufficient knowledge of God; they had no excuse for their idolatry or their other sins, for which they would be judged accordingly. They could not be neutral regarding the spiritual war; they had to choose a side.

^{_________________________________}

 

Sunday Sermon: The Calvinists

“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.” (John Calvin)

The Calvinists:

(9) The Calvinists - "Total Depravity" (Lyric Video) - YouTube

(14) The Calvinists - "Limited Atonement" (Lyric Video) - YouTube

(14) The Calvinists - "Unconditional Election" - YouTube

decapolis records » The Calvinists

Lyrics are embedded in the videos, saving me the trouble. To anyone who objects that these are all basically the same song: your point is?

  Enjoyest thou thy journey, for the Lord hath already determined thy destination.

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Power of Prolepsis

{Last week, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with Ukrainian sympathies hissed and clawed at C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, ending with a rhetorical question borrowed from Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot. Today, we pick up the story from there, sans Mr. Lewis, as Pascal discusses the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ sleight of hand that is ‘proleptic eschatology’.}

“With the resurrection of Jesus, the future reign of God has already begun in human history. While the culmination still awaits, a piece of the future exists now.” (J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement)

“Jesus’ resurrection underscores the ontological priority of the future.” (R. David Rightmire)

“Does it look like we are redeemed?” demanded Walker Percy’s “Lancelot” of the Catholic priest with whom he was verbally sparring. The obvious answer was, and is, no, it does not look like we are redeemed, Christianity’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Unless appearances are radically deceiving—and such a deception would certainly demand an explanation--our present world is neither the garden of Eden nor the kingdom of God.

Faced with that reality, nimble Christian apologists reach into their bag of apologetic tricks, pull out an item labeled “prolepsis,” and wave said item in the faces of skeptics. “Ha!” they cry. “Our redemption is proleptic! Already and not yet! The kingdom of God is now upon us, and it waits for us in the future!” It is hard to argue with that logic (if “logic” is what it is) but let us follow its thread and see where it leads.

“Prolepsis” sounds like—what? A toothpaste or a mouthwash? An anatomical feature (“I think I broke my prolepsis”)? An architectural term ("That church features a stunning prolepsis")? Something you scrape off your shoe (“Damn it, I stepped in a pile of prolepsis”)? In fact, “prolepsis” is a literary device, a kind of foreshadowing; the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered.” The expression “dead man walking” is proleptic: the condemned prisoner’s future is already known in the present.

Christian theologians have found prolepsis useful; it enables them to claim that Jesus “proleptically” triumphed over sin, death, and evil—even though the world continues to look as unredeemed as ever. Jesus’ resurrection was a proleptic event, a glimpse of the end of history and a taste the kingdom of God—which will get here (in its fullness) when it gets here, but which has proleptically arrived and shown its face in the risen Christ.

A proleptic victory is decisive; though the war continues, the battle has been won and both sides know it, even as the losing side continues to fight bitterly and to win the occasional skirmish. Gregory Boyd explains how this works for the Christian gospel:

A common analogy is the distinction between D-day and V-day in World War II. Historians generally agree that, for all intends and purposes, World War II was decided in the Battle of Normandy (referred to as “D-day”) that began on June 6^th, 1944. At this time the Allied forces dealt a fatal blow to Germany that rendered its defeat inevitable. But it took another year for Germany to surrender (referred to as V-Day). Between D-Day and V-Day, the victory the allied forces had already in principle won was not yet manifested as an actual fact.

This captures the dynamic of the New Testament well. D-Day for the Kingdom took place when Jesus culminated his work by dying on the cross and rising from the dead. At this time the Powers were dealt a fatal blow and were in principle defeated. Yet, Christ’s victory over the Powers will not be fully manifested until V-Day, when Christ returns and fully establishes God’s Kingdom.

The past two millennia (and counting) of human history has been little more than a mop-up operation, slowly picking off the stragglers of Satan’s army and liberating the captives (as Jesus had promised to do). Some skirmishes have resulted in temporarily disheartening defeats for the good guys—Auschwitz comes to mind—but, back at divine headquarters, the champagne has already been popped.

R. David Rightmire enhances our understanding of how winning sometimes looks like losing. ¹ He explains:

"Prolepsis" is a technical term in theology that refers to the anticipatory nature of reality. Ultimate truth is only knowable at the end of the historical process. Along the way, knowledge of the truth is only provisional, to be verified at the end of history. Christian truth presupposes a proleptic view of reality.

Fundamental to understanding the historical significance of Jesus' resurrection is the concept of proleptic eschatology. "With the resurrection of Jesus, what for all other men is still to come has been realized.” Viewing the resurrection as proleptic event underscores the ontological priority of the future. The coming Kingdom is that future reality that interprets the past and present proleptically. The proclamation of the Kingdom and its confirmation in Jesus' resurrection are events of the past that proleptically point to the future. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the paradigmatic proleptic event of the past that serves as a promise of the future.”

Do not be deceived, say the apologists, by the past or present, both of which are sordid, sinful, and misleading. Keep your eyes on the prize of the future, and on the coming Kingdom foreshadowed by Jesus’ resurrection. That one event, which took place two thousand years ago, tells us everything we need to know about what is in store: 

Jesus' resurrection is ultimately decisive, for in this event, the anticipated revelation of God is made manifest within the historical process. The resurrection of Jesus is the interpretive key to the meaning of history. All of reality must be viewed in relation to this one unique occurrence in history. The historical resurrection of Jesus Christ provides the anticipation of the end, in that the end of history has come into the midst of history.

It is, to say the least, a bold claim. The future has been revealed in the past and shines its light on the present. History continues even though it has come to an end. Evil persists even though it has been defeated and rendered powerless. Christians live “in the meantime,” between the “already” and the “not yet”; the tension would seem unmanageable, but, somehow, they manage (mostly by not thinking about it). J. Christiaan Beker puts it this way: “Our life in the world involves an inescapable tension—a tension gravitating between joy and agony. We rejoice in the ‘already’ that is, but we also agonize because of the terrifying ‘not yet’.”

As Rightmire says:

Futurity is fundamental for Jesus' message." The "now" of the Kingdom is informed by the "not yet." Jesus summoned his hearers to turn, heart and soul, toward God's near future, toward his near reign. He made the final salvation of each man depend upon accepting or refusing his eschatological message of God's near reign. The message of Jesus announces the "proleptic reality" of God's future Kingdom, partially realized in the present.   

The earliest Christians believed that the last days were just around the corner, achingly close; “The time is short.” Apologists soon realized—no doubt after the eschaton and Parousia failed to arrive--that "time" had a mind of its own and that "short" was a relative term. Consequently, Christians concluded that redemption had a proleptic dimension; Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection did not immediately usher in the eschaton but merely offered a sneak preview. Having seen the ending—resurrection and immortal life in heaven—believers could conduct their own lives accordingly, assured of the outcome.    

“The future,” Rightmire reminds us, “remains future,” an observation which prompts both sighs of relief and sighs of disappointment. Whatever Jesus may have accomplished, he did not alter the linear flow of time, nor did he hurry it on its way. We are two thousand years into God’s proleptic triumph, and the promised future remains, as always, only a promise. One could argue that it was cruel for Jesus/God to have revealed an ending that remains interminably far off and that seems to have made little difference in the here and now in which we all, believers and unbelievers alike, must live. The proleptic Jesus seems like a suitor who, having proposed and even given his intended a ring to seal their engagement, casually walks out the door saying, “I’ll be right back; I’m just going to the store for a six-pack,” and is never seen again. Two thousand years later, loyal friends of the missing suitor continue to insist, “Of course he didn’t change his mind—he’s a man of his word! He’ll be back, we promise,” all the while glancing nervously at their watches.  

One could also argue that “proleptic eschatology” is a brilliant but unpersuasive dodge, a strategy pulled out of the apologist’s, um, hat. Proleptically, the apologist insists, Jesus snatched victory (over Satan) from the jaws of apparent defeat on the cross; he then emerged from the tomb as a proleptic demonstration, a “mission accomplished” moment. In proleptic perspective, the continued activity of the demonic Powers and Principalities is a desperate but doomed last stand—even they know they’ve lost. The proleptic good news is right in front of our eyes; the unredeemed world has been given the stamp of redemption and the seal of approval. All that is left for us to do, it would seem, is to collect our Jesus savings-stamps, so to speak, and stash them away in a safe place; they will be redeemable at the eschaton, which has already come but has not come yet.

That, at least, is the promise. You have the right to remain dubious.   

________________________

¹ Rightmire’s essay focused on the theology of Wolfgang Pannenberg, but his comments are germane to proleptic Christianity in general; I have therefore, in the quoted passages, omitted references to Pannenberg.

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.

_____________________________________

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. 

 

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