Original introductory overview
A note to readers: my original plan was to write a book, as opposed to the desultory essays in this blog. Here is one of the introductions I wrote for it, and I publish it here because it is so timely helps set the stage for the essay to follow, which will take a look at the moral and religious problem represented by the present war in Ukraine.
Introduction
...while the True Church remains below wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
-TS Eliot: Hippopotamus
It is at times like these, times that try men’s souls, when the ships of church and state are cataclysmically rocked to their very foundations, that those same foundations are presented to us for closer examination, that their oft-hidden ancient groundwork is clearly revealed to us. Palimpsests peel back to reveal ancient art, and the ruins of ancient cities quake away to expose the ruins of even more ancient cities. We are forced in the tempest of our time to examine these fundaments, as on their strength depends our survival in the stress test of history, the history of the struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, between freedom and tyranny. As we watch in horror the opening of the maw of hell, it is only Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell shall never prevail against his church that gives us hope of escaping it.
The downward spiral of violence is the curse of humanity. Once it is initiated, it leads endlessly to the social and geopolitical cycle of military competition for preeminence, and the ancient ubiquity of this scourge is not all that different from what we are experiencing today in the modern world: wars and rumors of wars. On an on it goes.
It is in the thick of this same darkness that the light shone in deep darkness so many Christmases ago: through his promotion of the Kingdom of Heaven, which Jesus viewed as a reclamation, not a novelty, an opposite trajectory was set in motion, and this was the Good News! Man did not need to live in any way that was contrary to his good nature; if he was willing to be a disciple of Jesus, that is, to discipline his own behavior in such a way as to nip in the bud any aggressive tendency, it was possible to live life virtuously, nonviolently, doing only good and eschewing all harm and aggression, because this was the original intent of our Creator, His Logos, which was incarnated (fleshed out) in the life of Jesus the Anointed. The world has reverted to this same outer darkness of international and domestic strife precisely because we have failed to respond to the challenge of Jesus. If we would restore and strengthen this saving Christian trajectory, repentance is in order, on both the personal and national level. This is the long and the short of the message of this book. However bleak and unappealing it may sound at first hearing, the good news is that on the other side of this lies the Kingdom of God, or at least a much closer approximation of it than our sorry present, where evil forces have gained such control of our polity. As powerful as they have become, they have an Achilles’ heal, but it is not by countering their perfidy with our own, but by reverting to genuine repentance and Christian solidarity around the true principles of Christianity, not those which have been foisted on us by the false teachers of modern... churches. Historical errors by our Christian forebears are responsible for the present disorder. As we shall see, even the Christian Conservative movement, which alone has stood up to the present tyranny, is carrying forward these same errors into its projected future, and this can only have similar fatal consequences in the long run. So it is precisely to my brothers and sisters on the Christian Right that I address the discussion to follow...they must deepen their faith, which has indeed provided them the wherewithal to oppose the present tyranny, with a deeper understanding of the radical nonviolent, anti-mammonistic core of Christian discipline in order to arrive at a truly Christian future, rather than a recapitulation of our pseudo-Christian past, however “great” they mistakenly deem it.
We all must come to terms with the sordid reality of the history of “Christendom.” Kierkegaard saw through the illusion that Christendom answers to Christian moral principles. The historical tragedy is that the Roman Empire, under whose auspices Jesus was crucified, and whose morés were directly challenged by his followers, was able to a great degree to co-opt the Christian church to serve as its own vehicle. Power derives from the will to kill combined with the means to do so. The Romans were masters of this sinister art, and the instrument of its application, war, did not end with the supposed demise of the Roman Empire but proliferated….the actual internal behavior of medieval “nobility” was scarcely distinguishable from their Roman forebears; intrigues, assassinations, internecine murders, etc., etc., not only characterized royal behavior, bur reached into the political machinery of their Vatican front. Such behavior continues among the elites of the modern West, a murderous lust for power and wealth motivating those who constitute the ruling classes of this world….nothing really has changed, with wars becoming ever more deadly, and social inequality as measured by wealth distribution becoming ever more extreme. The Roman church and its congeners continue to promulgate the narrative of a Christianity that triumphed over paganism, but where do we witness a true value shift? Does Christianity consist of belief in a triune godhead rather than Zeus as the highest supernatural agency, or does it manifest more as behavior reflecting an orientation to universal love rather than a bellum omnia contra omnes? We can only sympathize with Jesus’ observation, citing earlier scripture, about phony religiosity: “These people worship Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.”
Jesus is frequently found in the gospel referring to his “mission.” He was sent to accomplish something, that something being the restoration or reinauguration of the Kingdom of God. As he felt his earthly life coming to a close, he imparted this same mission to his disciples. Christianity is a project. We are most fulfilled as Christians and as human beings when we are performing mission-driven behavior, our mission being to change the world from the rule of pretenders to the rule of God, and to humanize social relations on all levels. Though the “worldly” sort will find the prospect boring and uninteresting, the true Christian wishes nothing more than that the whole of his life should be enshrouded in his mission, and all of his or her actions circumscribed by it. God calls to all of us to help build his kingdom here on earth, and thus our “vocation” consists in the way we answer the call through our daily activity, every bit of which is intended to fulfill the divine mission. The world continues to be ruled by proud and hateful people, but only the loving and humble Christians will ultimately inherit the earth….it is God’s will, and is assured in the future, but how far in the future no one knows but the Father….we certainly seem far from it today.
I have speculated in the past that some modern technologies carry with them the ideology of their designer, in a process that is almost entirely unconscious. Be this as it may, can we ask this question in reverse? Is it possible that a religious ethic carries with it an implicit blueprint for a political economy to which it is implicitly inextricably wedded? Thew premise of this book is that the answer is a loud affirmative, and thus to explicate the politco-economic parameters of the Kingdom of God, the core kerygma of the Christian gospel. All major religions, and particularly the so-called “Abrahamic” faiths, are deeply embedded in a political structure. One reason it is important to fully understand this is the ethic of a religion may not be fully realizable in the absence of the politico-economic structure it presupposes, and most probably cannot be. The tension between the politico-economic implications of first century Judaism and Roman imperial hegemony forms the background for the tragic historical events that gave birth to Christianity: the majority of Jews failed to recognize Jesus as savior (messiah), as the incarnation of all that was important in their Law and their Prophets: they preferred their accommodation with Roman imperialism, or at least their leaders did. And so, ultimately, did the resistance movement that was earliest Christianity, as it became, after three centuries of marginalization and sometimes violent repression by the Roman authorities, the handmaiden of the Roman Empire. But both of these spiritual betrayals accorded neither with the will of God nor the social salvation plan of Jesus. We’ll be taking a closer look at the latter in the pages to follow. Suffice it to say for the present that Jesus’ plan was to make that which is just, strong, thus undermining the Roman ethos as it had infiltrated Jewish life. The Christian church was more ambitious: it wanted to make that which is strong (the Roman Empire) just. While it was able to score some successes on the domestic front, this plan was too ambitious by half; it has not worked out. Imperialism in its fully violent regalia is on display in many parts of “Christendom” --- it’s gone nowhere. Christians need to reconnect with the original plan of Jesus, the “ground up” method of changing the world, and discard any hope that the moneyed and powerful elites of this world will ever be serviceable to the cause of true peace and justice which lies at the heart of all that was good in post-exilic Judaism, and lies also at the heart of aboriginal Christianity, until it was, early on, replaced by “charity.” Charity is not to be disparaged, but practically speaking it serves as bandage, however necessary, on a wound created by an absence of true peace and social justice. Whilst it affirms the human connectedness that undergirds the gospel message, it also serves as a confession of failure to carry out the plan of Jesus for a true “ground up” total revolution against the vicious, asocial rule of Mammon and his minions.