the sinner

Hell in the Orthodox conception is a form of redemption, where even those who resist God freely (which, when the creature of time is swallowed up, becomes for eternity) will be burned continually by God’s unwavering presence, since he will never leave us nor forsake us, no matter what crimes we have committed, and God as Creator of all things is an all-consuming fire, likewise consuming all things, and yet he preserves and does not annihilate us, allowing our individual wills and minds to remain as they are, even resurrecting our bodies so that nothing of us is lost, despite our wasting of the gift of life in his image. This allows us to seek salvation through continually confessing the gravity of our failure, and the unapproachability of God (a theological reality), and to say with the fathers of the desert, “I am kindling for the fire, fit only to be burned, and surely all will be saved and I alone condemned – I do not know the sheep, but I am one of the goats”, and yet also with even St. Job, who was deprived of everything, “I know that my Redeemer lives” as, trusting in God and seeking his mercy continually, we release ourselves to the reality inaugurated by the Creator, who by becoming his creation, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, has redeemed all things, and is redeeming them, and will redeem them, and does redeem them, and will never cease redeeming them, forever and ever, Amen.

A fundamentalist preacher once said, “If you want to start an argument in an elevator full of Jews, ask ‘What is a Jew? Is it a religious person, an ethnic person, or a citizen of Israel?” Before anyone screams “racist”, it isn’t racist – he happens to think Jews are the “people of God”, which is a tenent of dispensationalist fundamentalism, which is what that was.

But he has a point. What the heck does being Jewish really mean? You ask different people, you get different answers. And for all the sort of “well, there is some consensus” that people try to pass off on us to calm things down, that seems sort of like a cover for real and serious disagreement, which if you’ve ever lived in an international city which includes all kinds of Jews, you get immediately.

In the same way, this word “Christian” is thrown around so much, and by people who can’t get along, that you get the impression that it’s not one thing. Here again, peacemakers do what peacemaking personalities do in any context – they try to smooth it over – “well, but there is some consensus” – no, there’s not. Not by a long stretch. You get someone saying “we pray to the same god” (do we? some of us think the god described in Sunday School is imaginary.) or that we agree on the essentials (what essentials? some of us don’t think there is such a thing as essentials).

Critics of “Christianity” do the same thing (it’s so easy to be a critic – you don’t have to be religiously literate – don’t have to really know anything – you just have to have a kneejerk response to the worst examples of what you’re criticizing – of course, in debate, the man with integrity selects the best of his opponents, not the worst). Critics talk of “Christianity” and “Christians” as though they concur with those who smooth things over – that we’re talking about one thing – which is convenient, because by simplifying it to that degree, you can dismiss or criticize it more easily.

The fact of the matter is that most of what passes for “Christianity” in media, in public culture, and in any visible way, isn’t even vaguely related to historic Christianity at all (“salvation” as accepting something, getting your own “personal saviour”, the rapture and all that crap, and even the “Bible”, which didn’t exist in the early Church – and, if you listen to TV or some Sunday School, has become a collection of “books” to be “studied” so you can “come to the truth” – gone is any sense that these were ever purely liturgical works meant to be sung (what are those choir-instructions in the Psalms about), not collected into a single “book”, and certainly not read in your lap in some auditorium as you squint to get answers to personal religious riddles, like a Ouiji Board or a Magic 8-Ball).

Furthermore, if you listen to “Christians” you’re led to believe that there was Jesus and the Apostles, and then corruption set in, and then Constantine politicized it all, and then 1200 years of ‘darkness and dark ages’ until Martin Luther unchained the “bible” and you get Jerry Falwell. Really? It’s amazing how many critics of “Christianity” (no wonder) have actually accepted that story as real, in varying levels of sophistication. This, despite the fact that decent historians of the period would tell you (e.g. Joseph Strayer, Norman Cantor) that the so-called “dark ages” didn’t exist. Some of the most complex works of architecture, literature, learning, and culture were created during this supposed blank spot, and it’s not true that the Roman Catholic Church controlled all of it, by any stretch, or that people lived in a kind of destitute, blind slavery. You could make an argument about the city or Rome itself, after the Goths, but Jeez, that was a backwater of Europe – it’s like saying the U.S. is Hildale, Utah. Heard of the Hagia Sophia? It’s one of the architectural wonders of the world. And that’s just getting started.

If I raided your closet, dressed up as you, and went around being taken seriously as you, doing and saying things you’d rather die than do, wouldn’t you expect anyone with any acumen to eventually learn the difference? Well all right, that’s if it was you. What if it was Elvis? Ever seen an Elvis impersonator on a Vegas stage or TV or at your cousin’s birthday party and thought it was the real thing? If he was drunk on stage in Vegas, would you go home and say “Elvis is a drunk. I don’t think I can listen to his music anymore.” Reductio. The thing the so-called Christians have done that screws it up for everyone, including people who might otherwise know something about it, is that they’ve made it so anyone can say they’re a “Christian”. What, all you have to do is “accept” something, right? And maybe “believe” a few things. So that’s what Christianity is? Badger puke. So for the last 1000 years or so, anyone can claim to be Elvis, so to speak, and the thing is *you* the critic are just as much a believer, because you took that premise seriously. You actually listen and call these folks “Christians”, despite readily available historical information to the contrary.

The point is, some of us who know that history, and might be tempted to talk about Christ very differently, are thinking, ‘Jeez, if these people are Christians, then I’m nothing of the kind, and vice versa.’ and ‘Whatever god they are talking about doesn’t exist.’ and ‘This rapture crap is stupid -there’s no such thing.’ Now, it’s easy to claim that “all religion is made up, and none of it is real”, because that keeps you from needing to know anything about the “all” you’re talking about. Blanket statements simplify things, all right. Might as well say Elvis never really existed, or you don’t exist, since I stole your clothes. And yes, anyone who has listened to amateur critics go on about “religion” in general (is there such a thing?) in a coffee shop, has heard argument by definition (“all religion is x, therefore religion is y”) – e.g. “all religion is the speculation of one man who invented it”, “all religion is man-made”, “all religion is a belief in magic and the supernatural”. And the “y” invariably means, therefore “crap”. Well, certainly what passes for “religion” in the equivalent of the tabloids, that stuff schlepped out by anyone who can open a storefront and accept donations is crap, but some religious people aren’t telling you anything, don’t need you to join, don’t hand you any literature, and don’t make it a point of explaining to you what they’re doing or thinking about it. Some religion isn’t a belief system at all, and I’m betting, if you’re one of those coffee shop critics, you don’t know whit about it.

Thing is, logic says the “all of these people, or all of this thing” simplifications are shite. First, you can’t sit on theological illiteracy and claim you know the basis of “all religion” based on dime-store reasoning, any more than I can speak of “all football fans” being violent, or “all Americans” being slobs. If you don’t know, you don’t know – it’s like claiming “the US is the greatest country on earth” when you haven’t ever lived anywhere else, let alone everywhere else. Some religion is based on history, which actually happened, and is distinct from religious philosophy, which is a form of speculation (i.e. ‘someone thinks it might be so’). Some religion is historical, in other words, and some ahistorical. If you’re not even making that distinction, it’s like saying “evolution is proven science!” or “evolution is just an unproven theory!” without even getting the difference between macroevolution and microevolution, and what’s actually been done in the real of experimental science in this area, and what hasn’t.

And yeah, any sophomore can say “history is just what someone thinks happened – you weren’t there” (neither were you, but there’s more evidence for a lot of historical events than a lot of current ones – were you there when Osama bin Laden died? Which of the four times?). Saying things like that means you’re not taking your own reason seriously, let alone anything else. Subjectifying all history means your comments are even more subjective – i.e. you’ve removed the ground of your own argument, since that would include everything you think you can describe about what religion really is, or what happened instead of what didn’t happen. That’s the problem with armchair criticism – it’s all fun and games until someone actually thinks.

Not everything critics say is without merit, of course – and, it can be hard when different groups seemingly calling themselves the same thing are at odds about whether that’s in fact, true. But easy answers that say, “well, they’re just arguing with themselves, they’re all the same thing” are just as made up and oversimplified as a lot of the criteria you hear coming out of the least intelligent voiceboxes on TV. Hasn’t your own career even been oversimplified to the point it made you disgusted with the ignorance, or your region of the country, or your country, or your cultural preferences, or any number of things you take seriously? But aren’t some of the people who do what you do actually some of the reason it gets stereotyped that way? We owe it to each other to be a bit more liberal, and try to understand distinctions, and not just say all Republicans are Ollie North and all Democrats are Barney Frank, and be done with it. That’s cave man thinking.

My solution to this stuff doesn’t get wide approval, but I really don’t care – it works exceedingly well for me. If someone asks if I’m a Christian, I tell them no. It’s quite simple – what they think of when they mean that word is imaginary to me, and is a system of religious philosophy, and I’m not a believer in religious philosophies – I’m not even a ‘believer’ in systems of belief. Orthodoxy isn’t primarily a belief system – it’s an ascetic activity – it’s something one does, like Yoga or photography. You might need to think about it, but it’s not primarily a system of thought. Some Orthodox don’t agree with me, but I think my way of doing it is the most honest, when people are looking for a simple answer, not a conversation or deep analysis. If someone asks if I believe in “god” I usually say “no” because, again, I think what they’re talking about in most cases is imaginary – the guy in the sky, Charlton Heston, that guy Pat Robertson talks about – these, to me, are like comic book superheroes, in a weird kind of world where nothing is cool and no one has fun. Nope, I don’t believe in the tooth fairy or Easter bunny, either. More on this, in a sec.

Even if someone wants to debate “religion”, to cater to that assumes religion is one thing which, again, is ignorant, or if they want to debate belief in “god”, then to accept the ground of that, one has to accept the premise that “god” is a describable philosophical construct, a ‘something’ of religious philosophy, a concept of speculation, and that he has attributes the way a human being ascribes attributes to a thing or other human beings – he is just, he is kind, he is good, etc. But I’m an atheist in that regard – such a god doesn’t exist. We have a people among the Orthodox called Hesychasts who keep us in mind of that. They teach us to remove all false images from our minds and conventions of speech, because all such constructs are idolatry, are constructions, are invented, are man-made, are thought of. If there were a “god”, he would be unknowable, and beyond being unknowable, because unknowability too is a construct. Therefore, the Hesychasts do not so much believe as act. This is not a course in religious history, but a little wouldn’t hurt, from what I hear out of most critics.

The “god” people describe is, inherently, a speculation (= made up = imaginary). It’s a circular argument – a god who can be described couldn’t be “god”. If they want to talk monotheism, I point out that Orthodox people are not monotheists. We do not believe in (or in our case act because of) a countable “god”, of whom we can say “there exists one of him”. And we are more ready to say that God does not actually ‘exist’ in the sense that people can think of existence – God’s “existence” is the last thing we could believe in. One could talk about this at length, and I’ve done so elsewhere, but that’s not the point.

The point is critics who try to bundle everything for simplification don’t have the answers they think they do about “all religion” or even about “Christians”. To “hit” something, logically and rhetorically, in your conversation, you have to at least know it. And lumping things together, invariably, means you don’t know. This is why we call it “ignorance” when people make hasty generalizations about “all Jews” or “all white people”. It’s just, with “religion” or “christianity” or “christians” somehow we miss that it’s just as philosophically primitive.

One last illustration. Just because there’s no Santa Claus, doesn’t mean St. Nicholas isn’t a real person. And if you can unpack that, it pretty much answers oversimplifications and ignorance with a logical construct that is truly simple, but not simplistic.

At the coffee shop today, a confident young man is explaining to a credulous young girl how if anyone shows up claiming to be a messenger from God, they’re not a messenger. Then he explains why: “because God doesn’t want….”

It doesn’t matter what comes next; you see the problem. 🙂 By speaking for “God”, in terms of what he supposedly wants, you’re that messenger, the one we should ignore. I ignored.

Protestantism: how it’s wrong when everyone else does it, but OK for you, because you’re right.

A friend of mine writes on esoteric matters and one of his recent video talks got my attention. He was discussing dispensationalism as an ‘engineered ideology’. You’ve probably heard the tenets of dispensationalism, even if you don’t know that word. It’s the Protestant evangelical theory of the imminent disappearance of millions of people (Protestant evangelicals) into the sky – an event called “the rapture” – after which, according to the theory – there will be a 7 year “tribulation” on the earth (terrible things happening – rivers boiling with blood, etc.), and Israel will fight as ‘the earthly people of God’ against the antichrist who has taken over a “revived Roman empire” and stamped everyone with his insignia. Then Israel gets martyred, and the Savior returns with his angels to win the war, inaugurating a 1000 year golden age of peace on the earth. Then the world is destroyed after all, and judgment occurs. Or something like that (it’s been a while since I looked closely at the various charts they’ve made, so a few details might be off).

Dispensationalism is not part of Christian tradition: My friend points out that this is a relatively recent system and, quite correctly, that it is not part of historic Christianity, but is in fact considered a heresy by the Orthodox Church and was, at least until recently, by the Roman Catholics too, and still is by Reformed Protestants. It became the dominant preoccupation among religious fundamentalists in the West, based on the popular ‘study bible’ notes of C.I. Scofield (someone who wrote in the margins of his book a lot), and was propagated by Dallas Theological Seminary and the gazillion independent evangelical churches those graduates founded and inspired during the Goldwater-Reagan era, and so was linked with neo-conservatism as a quasi-religious political ideology (see Sharlett’s book “The Family” if you’re interested in how that really happened) and therefore with the military industrial complex Eisenhower spoke of. It is largely the reason why the US considers Israel an inviolable ally to this day – seemingly unaccountably (any politician challenging that doctrine is signing a political death warrant) – and also for the massive opposition to climate science, with private studies funded by corporate energy lobbies (the ones who have been benefitting from the last few wars) and backed by religious ideology.

Most Christians consider it heresy: One point, that this friend made, I think is particularly worth repeating – and that is that dispensationalism has become so prevalent that the average person, who is religiously illiterate, thinks that’s just what Christians believe. People seem completely unaware that actually any Christianity with a history going back more than a few hundred years holds to nothing of the kind and considers such ideology alien if not repugnant. Keep in mind, Protestantism itself is of fairly recent vintage. That particular Protestant ideology, eschewed by Reformed Protestants but adopted by the Brush Arbor Revival movement that gave us mass evangelicalism and populist politics, incidentally, is even more recent.

It’s inconsistent with what Christians have always said: All of this “Left Behind” stuff would be baffling to Christians just 5 centuries ago, before there were any Protestants at all. Back then, there was no looking at Hebrews as a special people – Christians (Orthodox and Roman Catholic) considered themselves the new Israel whose Messiah had come, fulfilling all the Patriarchs and Prophets, just as Reformed Protestants do now – an idea they inherited from the original stream, if you will. The idea of a separate chosen people and the validity of some kind of re-instituted animal sacrifices as atonement for sin in a rebuilt temple, which dispensationalists push for according to their theory, would have been considered most dire heresy to anyone receiving the blood of Christ in the Christian liturgy. In the West, you’d likely have met the Inquisition for such an unChristian proposition, if you’d said something like that in the wrong era.

2000 years of ‘end times’: As for the 21st century being “the end times”, no one thought that in the 4th century, of course, nor the 5th, 6th, etc. There have always been moments of hysteria among ordinary people, but the Church has maintained that the ‘last days’ began when Christ came, fulfilling all the Patriarchs and Prophets. In other words, the ‘last days’ are all the days of the Church itself.

There are many antichrists: As to specific events and trends that signal the death throws of the world, the thinking of the Orthodox includes various opinions, but a general consensus is that there are and have been many antichrists, many tribulations, and many fallings away – that these things have occurred in every age, and will occur again. That is not to say that there will not be a finality to the world at some point, and a rather bleak one, a necessary working out of Death to its logical conclusion, in a kind of fascist enthusiasm for leadership and authority, with people clamouring to be led and for someone to be ‘strong’ on their behalf, trying to use power to bring all the world under one overriding system of cultural influence. You see it now, don’t you? To say “government” now is to think of something dominated by an executive, isn’t it? Hardly what the founders of the fledgling US would have considered a balanced republic.

One world culture: It’s interesting that just a few years ago, evangelicals were up in arms over “submitting” to anything like a “one world government”, calling that the great “babylon”, but they were working doubletime to ensure the world submitted to their own nation’s hegemony, and outraged when anyone even expressed disagreement with its consolidation of power (remember the French on Iraq?). But creating a one world *culture* – a monoculture – is virtually a stated goal of the same evangelicals, not just politically (in terms of “furthering our interests”) but religiously as well. That’s literally what “evangelicalism” means – to evangelize the world – to make it, specifically, evangelical – to self-propagate. And when that culture is operated from a political ‘city on a hill’, that’s exactly what a one world government is. It’s a city with “many hills”, on which the one harlot perches, as the prophesy goes. So, it’s easy to be skeptical about the prophetic doubletalk.

All sizes of Antichrist, sixty for the price of one: Likewise, we don’t question whether Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin were the antichrist – of course they all were. So was Diocletian. Herod was an antichrist. So are all the various little antichrists – Gaddafi, if you like – the list is very long. Most of them, during and since the cold war, have actually been funded and supported alternately by the United States or Communist Russia – now just the US. I find that interesting, in the wake of all the little revolutions against various antichrists happening all over the world, the vast majority of which we plan to ignore and allow to be crushed, and so the power of antichrist to be consolidated for the sake of a ‘stability’ and ‘flow of energy resources’ to the one great nation (the ‘superpower’, if you like). The one big beast supports a crown of many little horns. You’ve probably met an antichrist in a corporate setting, or a family, in a religious venue, or on the roadway driving a big vehicle and railing at you – micro-antichrists of a sort. The world is awash with any number of us ready to step up in any capacity to act as antichrist of whatever power we can gain. The person matters less than the personality and the power that is exalted as the basis of humanity and human interaction. Craving for power is high witchcraft, and you’ll see it on the airwaves, as people squint and talk about exercising the ‘power’ of “jesus” too. The ideal culture of antichrist occurs when it no longer matters who you elect to rule – you get the same thing – it could be any one of us because, eventually, it’s all of us.

Dispensationalism itself is part of the “falling away”: As for apostasy, we could read forth a litany of ‘fallings away’ – the Protestant Religion itself is a falling away from its Roman ancestor (and a logical conclusion initiated by an original falling away of one Patriarchate – the Roman one – from the other Patriarchates of the world). Evangelicalism is considered a falling away within Protestantism by other Protestants, watching their break with Rome further fragment into 10,000 denominations – as many as there are storefronts to support them. Dispensationalism itself is an example of falling away within Evangelical denominations, too, and from the tradition and eschatological thinking and analysis of the originate Christendom. The children repudiate each other, and their children’s children, just as they deserted their mother.

The “falling away” began with the first humans: The world itself fragments. As the poet said, “the center cannot hold”. That’s what we Orthodox mean by Death – first, the fragmentation of man physically (his body from his soul – do we not find them in conflict?), then of man’s soul itself (his mind conflicting with his will at odds with his emotions), of man from man (conflict among people), of the one man and the many, of one multitude and another, of man from ecology (man and all other natural creatures and things, even the world itself, the whole cosmos), of one animal species and another, one plant species and another – the lion slaughters the lamb, and the little boy spears the lion, and we all bend our plowshares into swords, and death is evermore, and sorrow and crying go on and on, and of course man from his creator – the one thing is not somehow separate from the other – it is the meaning of Death indicated in the dis-integration of all things, and addressed beyond all measure in the Incarnation. Want to see apostasy? Look at greenhouse gases. Look at war. Look at extinction. Look at epidemics. Look at how many marriages fall apart. We are always, all falling away.

Tribulations aren’t magic acts: And tribulations we have known all along. Need we enumerate them? Sure, it’s not done yet, and there’s going to be some really bad stuff go down, but it’s not without (so far) ten thousand years of tremors leading to it. An incredible blowing out away from paradise, spiraling from eternity toward entropy. Even the cosmos itself is said to be an explosion, expanding away from a fragmented center. This magic act stuff of people flying off by the gazillions isn’t happening, and certainly isn’t the point, even if it weren’t itself a form of religious apostasy – a falling away in its own right, in its pretense at ‘flying’ away.

Why would these people be raptured? I mean come on, are there really that many people who are without pride or hypocrisy or hatred or anger, who have given their surplus to the poor, shelter to the immigrant and foreigner and stranger, relieved prisoners in prison, made sure the sick had health care? That’s who Christ said the righteous are, right? And if there are a lot of such people, as many as say they are ‘saved’ in their hearts, are they really the people who have consistently done the opposite all this time, and voted against it, and lobbied against it, and screamed on talk radio about how they shouldn’t have to, and no one’s going to make them, and have erected enormous political seige engines to lay waste to anyone trying to see that it gets done? Good Lord, if they’re right about the rapture, they’re not the ones going!

The rapture as a ratline operation: The “rapture” sounds more like a Gaddafi exit strategy than justice being served or the righteous being rewarded – if anything, it’s a way out for the people who made sure the poor didn’t get public assistance, the immigrant got chased out as quickly as he arrived, the prisoners got neglected with worse treatment not better, and the sick died for lack of healthcare not healed by the willingly parted with coin of good samaritans. The rapture is more like an elevator ride out of danger to the great bomb shelter in the sky after nuking Hiroshima, draining the world of resources, starving most of the people on the planet, poisoning everything that was pure, creating the longest running period of nonstop warfare in human history, and bringing on a climactic extinction event. If there were a rapture, it would seem more like a post-WWII ratline escape to Argentina than a joy bus to cloud 9.

You’re needed here – your work isn’t done: Besides, the people with the rapture bumper stickers have been the ones clamouring for strong central leaders, the very people we need for antichrists to succeed and to get all that important work done building up that “one world government” that binds all other governments to its will, ensuring our interests are followed, and extending this particular culture into every corner of the world where “American” values can be understood, to mix a little Hal Lindsey, Darth Vader, and nearly every president since Reagan together. My own view is that whenever the people talking about the rapture get what they want, politically, economically, and religiously, we’ve got another antichrist on our hands. Remember the last one? The little devil doesn’t have to be able to string a coherent sentence together – heck golly gee, we could even see the first female president in that role in 2012 and rest assured it won’t just be more mooses that get shot from helicopters then, don’tcha know? Don’t get excited if you voted for Obama, though – same policies, difference of degrees, different face.

Which way is Rome? What about the great city among all cities they call the “whore of bablyon”? You’ve probably heard that phrase. The dispensationalists say it’s a symbolic “revived Roman empire” that weds economic, religious, and political power into one monolithic monoculture that dominates the whole world. Um… I thought we have that already. When I learned the Pledge of Allegiance, I thought that’s what we were saying – “one nation under god” – just one – not many. And currently, that nation is driven by a corporate-evangelical-neoconservative nexus of power. Do you deny it?

Eschatology is sociology: See, this is where I think they almost have it right. Eschatology (the science of prophesy) is really a sociological analysis projected forward to its logical conclusion by people with discernment – it’s a social science, as much as anything. The ancient tradition says basically, ‘hey, when you see this (aforementioned) power nexus occur, you’re looking at the culture of antichrist or, if you prefer, an anti-Christian culture’. And the fathers that wrote that stuff knew full well that “anti-” means not just opposite of, but having the trappings of the thing it is opposing – a counterfeit. In other words, the culture of antichrist, in the view of the original Christians, will mimic and proclaim itself as a “Christian civilization” and will oppose all other civilizations in its bid for hegemony (check out Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations http://goo.gl/yiBWR – it’s a neoconservative bible and almost dispensationalist-like blueprint for the necessary wars of the future that will resolve all civilizations into one).

All antichrists are puppets: In short, it will be an unparalleled imperialism, under a princely executive, at the ostensible head of an economic-religious-political power structure with enormous military power (yep, that’s what the prophesy says – it says, to paraphrase, ‘you should see his armies – mess with the bull, get the horns!’ ) – but that leader, who will attempt to dominate the whole world in the name of that all-consuming, all-dominating “city”, civilization, or “nation/empire” will be just a puppet, according to the tradition. Maybe it’s even just the office of the executive and a succession of such leaders, but I think it’s certainly both. What is really behind him is the systemic evil that supports such a thing, an almost nebulous reality one could call ‘the beast’ (some have called it ‘the octopus’, some ‘leviathan’, some a ‘monster’) and, underlying that, the personal enemy of all mankind himself – the one for whom ancient pagans tossed babies to burn in the belly of Molech, whereas modern civil religionists toss white phosphorous at the babies – more efficient that way. The thing about the illusion of a presidency is that long-term policies are too important to be left to the exigencies of a single person and a 4-year timetable. A shadow government *must* exist in any successful world power, or it simply couldn’t get anything done. In that sense, it’s absolutely necessary that any president and any antichrist be a puppet. The change that’s evolving is simply that the conglomeration of power structures is becoming “multinational” as we like to put it in stock reports – or “global” when we advertise or picket it.

Onward Christian soldiers: Among the ways evangelicals tend to err is in thinking the systemic antichristian society is a single political structure, a unigovernment, like some pristine nation, instead of a massive multinational set of relationships governed by influence from a center of power which is at once both national and global. Nationalism itself feeds the culture of the beast, if you will, and blinds us to the tradition as it is elaborated before us. Anyone who has touched governmental bureacracy knows the smell of brimstone quite well, though. What, did they think you’ll know the beast by a one-page tax form, a balanced budget, and no filibustering in congress? Simple is too simplistic. Likewise, they tend to think there’s some kind of new religion, like spectacular devil worship, that will be the cult surrounding the antichrist. They fail to look at what has happened to their own religion, and how it has become the dominant political force, a civil cult, at the apex of power, a religio-political reality, and to correctly assess the antichrist living in and through that coopting of anything like real faith they might have had. You don’t vote for Sarah Palin because she makes any sense – you do so because of ideology – and religion reduced to political ideology is the ideal religion of antichrist.

Mark of the beast: In short, if I were looking at the bumper stickers, then looking up and looking around for candidates for all of this, and I had a strong background in the ancient form of Christianity that typifies Orthodoxy, I would have to shrug and burn my draft card, rather than hand out a tract on a “rapture”. There’s a ticket to ride, all right, but it’s going the other way. You know it’s weird, they still ask for that darned thing (draft registration) any time we do anything official, even if we’re too old. Did you register? Yes, sir I did. You spelled my name wrong, so I’m officially not in the system, for the umpteenth million time – but here, I’ll take the mark… (I’ve filled out the darned form to re-register half a dozen times over the years).

If there’s a mark of the beast, though, it would seem to be whatever credentials make one successful in the beast’s society, wouldn’t it? So, in this society, that’s being White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Republican. Being a WASP, and all that goes with it. Another way of putting it is that I’d need to be an evangelical fundamentalist neoconservative, or at least comfortably existing in their world, under their influence. A more skeptical and rationally anarchistic way of putting it is that I’d have to just participate, in nearly any way, in the system emanating from the USA. It allows plenty of room for participation – protest, within reason – dissent, within reason. It just asks for some basic signs of upholding the core, underlying premise, and then you can have your parade. After all, haven’t the last few wars been fought in part to enrich certain energy, arms, and security investors, in part to ensure the operation of the physical power plant that keeps the beast’s heart beating, but also, at some level, to eliminate genuine resistance – the kind that says ‘we’re not participating at any level – we’re going to oppose you at every level’? I think that’s exactly what’s going on. Certainly, it fits well with that Huntington thesis, again.

Does the mark work? The evangelical WASP thing, though, probably seems unfair, but it seems even more unfair to those who aren’t part of the good old boy ‘network’ that makes that mark work. Doubt that it exists? What do you think a political coalition is? It’s a nexus of corporate lobbies and moral doctrine disseminators that shape society in a way that best benefits the interests of a particular type of person at the expense, one can easily argue, of some other types of people. Natives over immigrants, corporations over individuals, tax-exempt religious institutions over non-exempt ones, Christians over Muslims, or whatever. And that’s without even appealing to the lowest examples of those who wish blacks and women had never got the vote. Someone with integrity argues with the best, not the worst, among their opponents. Of course the mark works; it works very well. The mistake is in assuming it’s an actual tool and die stamp or some kind of microchip. If there were a microchip, it would just be a symptom of the order, as another form of control, but not the total story. The mark is, according to tradition, the political, economic, and religious currency of the realm – and the mistake is thinking of it in terms of one one person getting some kind of tattoo on his one forehead. Instead, it’s a system that supports, sustains, and entitles participants in the beastly system – not a magic stamp reduced to a meaningless microdot on the hand, but a full ideological reality involving one’s mind and one’s labour.

Understanding marks: The Christians who actually wrote those original texts would have gotten it, as they touched their own foreheads and hands together with a different mark, the sign of the cross – ‘my mind, my gut, my strength is marked by my hand with this sign.’ The titillation over a mysterious mark has more to do with iconoclasm in the Protestant evangelical mind, that rejects physical signs themselves as inherently spooky and evil, and that skews the reading, so they go looking for which microchip or barcode is the bad one. The people that wrote the books have always had physical signs and icons of many kinds, including lots of marks. If you’re a Westerner who has been to an Ash Wednesday service and gotten the cross marked in ashes on your forehead, you know there’s something very old which that’s left over from. The Orthodox are continually marked in many similar ways, all year long.

You’ve got it, and you don’t even know it: The thing is, even if you’re “against” all that global hegemony and system of personal control stuff, the US has been pulling you farther right, while calling it center, so to speak, and using dialectic to get a little concession there, a little more over here, until basically if you’re not an evangelical fundamentalist neoconservative, you’re just being inconsistent. Shop at Walmart? What’s the difference then? You might as well be. Don’t shop at Walmart, but sending your kids to patriot camp? Er… public school? Same thing. What kind of conditioning do you think they’re getting in there? Centrist, moderate, “balanced”, conditioning. <evil grin> They’re being conditioned to take their place and pursue their role in the system, and not to want to overthrow it or refuse all participation, or some such thing. School is about citizenship, not learning, otherwise it would be bad at the one, and good at the other, not the opposite. Have a job, pay your taxes? We all give tribute, in some way, right? No, we’re all evangelical fundamentalist neoconservatives, in some sense, right down to the most herbal progressive of us – let’s not fool ourselves. We’re all children of antichrist. How’s it going, brother?

—

No evangelical ‘bar code’: I should say that I realize any number of people reading this might be believers in the system we’re talking about. I won’t try to convince any one individual. I never argue with belief when I encounter it. People believe all kinds of things. Aliens among us. Elvis being alive. Healing scarves sold on TV. Effortless diet plans. Talented “contemporary christian” musicians. That Sarah Palin, or that sorority bimbo you’re dating, is actually quite intelligent. Respect in the morning. In fact, credulity, and this age of creedence is, in my view, one of the principle conditions necessary to progress toward that final antichrist – people must be conditioned to believe, and believe easily, not necessarily in traditional magic, but in things that have the equivalent epistemological value – easy currency that distances one from tradition (makes us ahistorical) and discernment (e.g. logic). I just won’t argue religion because, generally speaking, religion is magic in this contemporary culture.

Not gonna argue: Besides, my interest is only in saying look ‘this stuff’ isn’t ‘our stuff’. I am willing to concede, on a theoretical level, that you may well be right, and the god I pray to is a fiction (it is certainly not the Protestant evangelical god), and the church on which I will forever stake my salvation is a blindness (it is certainly nothing even remotely like Protestant evangelicalism). But I don’t think so, obviously, and I seem to be doing fairly well, epistemologically speaking – unlike Kansas ( http://goo.gl/WXbqx ), an icon of what evangelical fundamentalist ideology can do to shift a people away from the kind of authetic self-interest that protects their families and communities from decline and harm, by getting them on a kick of “national self interest” and appealing to their ‘morality’ as a temptation to exercise control over others, and so be lured into the culture of power .

So if you’re of a mind to convert, convince, or cajole me, I can tell you it won’t even flower into a discussion. This is, for my part, a monologue. Not every article is a debate – almost none of mine are – and I’m well aware of the fragmenting tendency in evangelical religious circles toward continual argument. Orthodox people, properly, aren’t trying to discover truth by arguing. We simply say this stuff isn’t what we received from Christ, the Apostles, and the Fathers, and preserve to this day. In fact, to consent to argue it, would be one possible form of participating in the very alien deviation from tradition, or apostasy, we must necessarily oppose.

The process is: argue, fragment, reduce fragments to any shared denominators, transform the shared denominators into central essentials, unite under a banner of coalesced power to go after others together for a similar process of synthesis and mutual conversion. It might easily be, in effect, participating in the very culture of antichrist I’ve been describing, which necessarily is a force for fragmentation, and then reconsolidation and control (which is why the myriad fundamentalist “christianities” (sic.) are united under a political force, coopted into reducing their interests to “moral issues” and blind support for corporate interests, by having been transformed into cultures more amenable to integration into a political-economic reality – that is, said culture of antichrist.

So if you’re inclined to dislike what I’ve written, all I can say is I’ve written worse, and probably will write worse still, but the writing itself doesn’t change the fact of the distinction I’m drawing – which is the point, not anything that could be argued. Or as Christ said, “Does this offend thee? It gets worse…’

To believe in a transcendent reality is to necessarily believe in a transcendent justice and vindication. When you see those who kill people indiscriminately, or for money, those who torture, those who conspire to deprive people of their basic human needs, you see people who, regardless of the emblem they wear, or what they do at prayer meetings, or the acclaim they receive because of wearing a uniform and serving some national ideology or local sense of “law and order”, you see people who don’t believe in a transcendent reality. If they say they do, they are liars. If they did believe, they would fear what will happen to them, and the rising up of their victims. Whether they’re US soldiers at Fallujah or Abu Ghraib, or US intelligence and security people who tortured or murdered or committed massacres, or they are the armchair ideologues who enabled them, or they are Qaddafi’s paid murderers in Libya, they are atheists apart from any religious confession they may pretend, even to themselves. They are bereft of belief. They are apostate to all. They will, with us all, face judgment, but they don’t fear it – they don’t really think it’s there or it’s going to happen. You judge what someone believes by what they do, apart from what they say. Action is belief. There is justice coming, though – and I don’t mean to put things off with a shrug and say “I’m not going to get too concerned about the present, because judgment is coming – they’ll get theirs”. No, that’s someone who believes in the transcendent, but not the reality of the present – someone who is denying the Incarnation, if they are a Christian. Now is real. This is real. And the justice to come is real. And it all matters. All of it. When the sparrow falls, it matters. One who cannot contain both belief in a transcendent reality and belief in the here and now cannot be a Christian, at least. He cannot be an Orthodox person.

When a monk says “I am nothing”, I think he’s saying that what I am and what I think I am, in my passions, are not of the same order. Likewise, when he says “I have done nothing good” or “what I have done is nothing”, I think he’s saying that what he has done and what he sees he ought to do are so far removed, that there is no comparison. It’s the same, in a way, as when we say that if God exists, I don’t, and vice versa. There is no analogy between contingency and the Holy Trinity. To say “I am nothing” is not to deny that God created me, nor that God loves me. It’s to say that all that I have attributed to “I”, quite falsely, has no analogy to what I really am designed to be – we are created in the indelible image of God, but the likeness of God is something only reachable through theosis. Somewhere along the lines, Death seeped into my best efforts, my best intentions, my seemingly “pure” motives.

A cake is not terrible because it’s fallen. But it’s not what we mean, exactly, by “cake”, nor was it the intention for that particular cake. It might taste delicious. It might be wonderful in its mess and failure. But it’s not a cake, not really. As far as cake is concerned, it’s nada. And that’s because a cake is more than just the shape, or the taste, or any of the components – it’s the far greater sum of the whole.

We might do things well, and so thing we are “good” according to one order of thinking. But to say simultaneously that what we call “good” is nothing, is to say simply that there’s no analogy between God and man. I can achieve good only in a broken way. I can become good only in that way. But brokenness isn’t analogous in any way to the whole that we were meant to be, untroubled by Death. That whole is more than the parts we see broken, as if gluing them back together would create what God had in mind, let alone make it godlike. “I am nothing” means “there are other worlds besides these”, that not everything is of this order, not everything is subject to Death – just everything that I see. In that sense, “I am nothing” is the quintessential expression of faith itself.

I am nothing is to say that being made in God’s image does not, in this Death that consumes all that is, confer godlikeness. The image and the likeness, precisely by the severing sword of Death, have become disconnected, flung apart, so far apart that there is no longer any analogy.

When we read in the scriptures, “if I have not charity, though I move the mountains, I am nothing” and we listen to all the monks denying that they have charity, saying “I have not loved,” “I do not love”, “I know nothing of love – I have only failed at love”, meaning that what they have achieved of love is so far removed from the love that God tells us about and has revealed in Christ, so un-analogous, it is only consistent, and indeed the same thing for them to say “I am nothing” for exactly the same reasons. All that I am is so far removed from what I am meant to be and what Christ truly is, and I someday may be through theosis in Christ, that today I say “I am nothing”.

The fallacy the general populace makes is to think all things are of the same order, making God only a “higher” form of eggplant. But these monks would say that it is so far removed that if I were to attribute an “order” to things, God would not be of any order, and vice versa. To say “I am nothing” is not so different than to speak of the darkness of unknowing, or alternately that God “dwells in unapproachable light” – these things, again, simply underscore the failure of analogy between the created order and the Holy Trinity. Indeed the life St. Paul described (“the thing I do is the think I would not, and the thing I would not is the thing I do”) is another way of saying not that he didn’t do ‘good’ things, but that this the good of those things is so far removed from the good he is striving for, that it is not the goodness that we do, make, or think, or *are*, that is in question from the words “I am nothing”, but rather the limitation of our own vision of the good, because the only good we see is the good accessible to this created order, this contingency, this orb of existence revolving in Death.

The vision the monks have is of things beyond the created order. They’re saying that compared to my best and all I am in contingency (which is forever) and in Death (which is not), the other is everything, and I’m nothing. This is badly written, and I’m not wise. I am not really able to say what the vision is the monks have. Because I listen to them, doesn’t mean I can tell you what they are talking about. Only someone who has seen what they can see can say. Even to repeat is to lose, in ‘translation’, the meaning, when I do it – it is to recontextualize and reduce it and even misuse it. So forgive me for where I have erred. This blog is a way of looking and trying to listen, and to remember and to think, far more than it is an attempt to tell anyone anything. I realize that’s unconventional – it’s just what works for me.

I used to teach my catechumens that if anyone speaks against the Fathers, or the monastics, or the Bishop, to cross themselves discreetly, and dismiss themselves as quietly and politely as possible, and go outside or get away. St. John the Small used to do as much whenever anyone was spoken against, and his example is fruitful. Perhaps I should close my ears and run away, as did St. John. But in this case, hospitality and the possibility of giving shape to this place for future visitors seems to invite comment.

Someone stopped by the other day to drop off a blanket potshot (submitted a comment to the site): saying the quotations (the words of the Fathers) are “worthless” without sources. I’m always fascinated for a moment or two by those whose sole mission seems to be scrawling a “what you’re doing is nothing – it’s worthless” on things they don’t like or are unfamiliar with. We don’t usually publish such comments here, because they start needless and fruitless discussions. But I will respond to the general trend.

As Franky Schaeffer once observed, back when he was Protestant, it’s very Protestant to give things a label, even when they don’t need one. Nothing can go without comment. A mountain must have a ‘verse’ scrawled across it. A sunset isn’t commentary enough – it needs a slogan attached. It’s part of the overall mentality that all things must be placed in categories – right/wrong, true/false, correct/incorrect – and our job is to help you do it. A tree is suspect without an appended ‘word’, because all things, in this mentality, are reduced to concepts, to didactic, pedantic propositions. A tree, by itself, might lead  you to the ‘wrong’ conclusion. A tree is therefore ‘worthless’ without a ‘point’ made about the tree in a format that can be categorized, debated, and easily referenced. You gotta be careful – you might end up hugging it, or protecting it from loggers, and that wouldn’t be “Christian”.

Case in point, we do generally attribute any quotations. It might say “St. Seraphim of Sarov” or “Our Father among the Saints, Maximus”. But this is insufficient for the Protestant visitor. Instead, he wants the exact page of some edition of some work, so he can go and look it up and compare it to other ‘sources’. But that’s just the issue, isn’t it? Sources. We already know what the sources of our Faith are – these are not up for debate, are not a matter of conjecture, and do not need to be proven among our people. And we’ve said repeatedly that this is an internal discussion. First, the blog is an interior one turned outward as an act of Confession, and secondly the content of our fathers’ words is for our fathers’ people. It is not really for someone who is attempting religious archaeology to construct their own religion from sources they did not produce in a context they are specifically rejecting and cannot duplicate. As someone once said, ‘If you believe the Apostles’ words, then join the Apostles’ Church!”

In the same way, we’ve pointed out that the Holy Scriptures themselves were written by us, by the Orthodox, for us, for use by us in the context of our community. They are liturgical works, concerning Jesus Christ, written by a people for themselves. For someone else to come along and wish to argue with us about what we meant when we wrote them, or whether our fathers intended them for use as our fathers used them, is silly. Protestantism must ever take other people’s works, revise their meaning for import into an alien context, and then claim that the original authors did not know what they were doing, saying, what they meant, and were using them incorrectly. It’s the equivalent of you telling me that some poem I wrote is not about what I say it is, nor written in the context from which I know I wrote it, but is about the sister who I never had dying in the childhood abroad that I never lived. Or more accurately, is about your sister who I never met, who lived her entire life in a country I never visited, and who rejects everything I thought or believed when I wrote it. It gets that absurd.

We know who St. Seraphim or St. Maximus are, and we know what they said, did, wrote, and what it means (they’re part of our community), and we know what to do with it. The notion that somehow this must be posted on a door in Wittenberg, like Martin Luther’s 95 theses, to try to gain the acceptance of people who have nothing to do with it at all is equally absurd. The Orthodox do not offer our religion as one of many religious philosophies to be held up to the light of something external (and presumably superior) for it to be judged. What would that superior thing be? We deny that there is anything superior to it, or anything outside or alongside it that is the science of determining its efficacy as truth. As C.S. Lewis has said, truth is its own justification – if a thing is really true (if a thing is *reality*), nothing external can be drawn upon to validate or invalidate it. When a thing is true, there is no appeal beyond that. Real is real, even if everyone and everything else said it isn’t. If the “Warren Commission” of religion made a pronouncement on what is and isn’t real, it wouldn’t change anything, would it? What is, is. And we Orthodox do not merely *argue* that our Faith is true, do not *conjecture* that it is so, do not *hypothesize* or offer a theoretical set of “claims” (to use the Protestant parlance – think Josh McDowell); we are not constructing a religious philosophy; we act and live in it as true, as ultimate, as comprehensive of the cosmos and all created things. We have received what we have received from the Incarnate God, in person, in the flesh, and there is no further court of ‘validation’ or appeal. As one witness said, “Whether this (jibes with your religious philosophy or not) I can’t say, I can only tell you what happened to me.”

‘Sources’, as such, are for people trying to *prove* something, trying to argue in favor of something to some *external* party, trying to support a *propositional theory*. Indeed, in that respect, to such a person intending such an endeavour, Holy Orthodoxy is indeed worthless and would remain worthless if we listed chapter and verse, since the intent of the person is not to become Orthodox but to build his own religion as a construct of his mind – something an Orthodox mind can have no interest in.

But to those of us who are Orthodox, and seeking salvation, by which we don’t mean anything like what a Protestant would mean by such a word, we find it very worthwhile and far from worthless to hear the words of one of our fathers saying, “Keep your mind in Hell, and despair not.” This is one of our own, who is glorified, speaking to those of us aiming for that very thing. It isn’t for those who are trying to fabricate a historical context for themselves out of parts of other people’s religion in a religious Piltdownism. Such a revisionism, some might say fraud, can only be perpetrated by those who, for example, have already rejected the notion that God became man, physically, laid physical hands on other men and made them bishops, who themselves repeated this process, until the Church remains gathered around that very succession of bishops to this day. If one accepts that, one goes where the bishops are and discovers their Faith, one does not ignore Christ and create another “Christ” out of concepts that are more conveniently portable, adaptable, and transferable to anyone with a store front and a feeling that God appointed them to “cook their own meth”, so to speak. We’re not trying to “prove” that there’s a succession of bishops, as though historical reality itself must be submitted to another source of validation – but we’re living in that reality. We were there, and our fathers led their children to those men, and they led their children, and so on as it happens to this day. The attempt to come up with a validation for history (that we ourselves are experiencing first hand) is only sensible among those who aren’t, in fact, part of that history at all – and in fact, the result is the fabrication of an alternate history situating people that never were into things that never happened.

The sources of our Faith are those of our Faith. Take this example: the (Greek) Orthodox do not have to have sermons in which they’re constantly saying “in the original Greek it says…” (something prevalent in Protestant settings) – because they never lost Greek as the West did. They never ceased the constant recitation of the actual original in their Churches and monasteries to this day. They aren’t doing religious archaeology, they aren’t trying to piece together a mystery amid the ashes of the Great Schism, at which the West departed Orthodoxy, or among the bones of the Reformation, at which one part of the Schismatics departed another part of the Schismatics, or within the chaos of the Great Awakening and evangelicalism, in which each individual “believer” (of various propositions and doctrinal statements and personal philosophies) departed from each other and created 50,000 denominations of Protestantism and invented quite a few previously unheard of religions, establishing for all those “believers” schism as the basis of faith itself (and therefore the need for constant proofs and references to establish one’s intellectual pedigree). The Orthodox aren’t trying to figure out what piece of a millenia-old puzzle goes where, while operating with a box cover that looks like a 20th century Sunday School painting of ‘Jesus’. They aren’t having a “dialogue” with the saints or an “encounter” with ancient Christianity, and they’re not antiquing for the beauty and splendour of a golden age that somehow no longer exists for them. They are just living their lives, praying, remaining in the same community they always have, as established by Christ, and following in the same well-trodden footsteps of holy men that they always have, leading back and forth to Christ like a ladder to Heaven on which angels ascend and descend.

This is why you don’t see the Orthodox carting around 20lb tomes and looking up and quoting references to one another in lunch rooms, trying to figure out how to solve various problems from whether its right to watch R-rated movies to free will and predestination. That latter, for example, is a Western heterodox problem – a Protestant and Roman Catholic one – it has nothing to do with Orthodoxy. We didn’t invent that construct, it’s not a dilemma that arises in Orthodox thinking as it is for someone whose sole “sources” are a theoretical system of dialectic and requisite proof texts, and we’re not possessed with solving it for someone who’s part of a culture of religious philosophy that necessarily produces  those dilemmas for them. We’re not inventing a religious philosophy; we never were. Why would anyone want to go through that, when the end result is submitting one’s “belief”, one’s intellectual and moral fidelity, and the fidelity of the heart, to something self-created (invented) and fictional?

The god of such a system doesn’t exist – he’s a figment of various imaginations – a gazillion individual schismatic ones – a construct of vocabulary or of concepts, himself merely a super-concept, a ‘pure essence’. For all the evangelical talk of a ‘personal relationship with “Jesus” in one’s heart’, it turns surprisingly quickly to a war of philosophical constructs where whoever has the most presumably authoritative “sources” wins – but even that, any first year logic student can tell you is a running Appeal to Authority, and hence an unreasonable non sequitur. The god of those sources is just a footnote in the imagination, a bibliography in the mind. That god is about as formidable as a big Excel spreadsheet (I’d pit a VAC computer from the 1970s against him any time), and just about as conducive to overcoming the chains in which people live in their hearts – pride, anger, jealousy, rage, accidie, despair, despondency, vainglory, vengeance, dissipation, bitterness, and the other various passions that have produced such agony in the heart of each individual person, visible in phenomenon like the constant need for stimulation (my music, my games, my news, my TV, my movies, my magazines, my friends, my texting, my phone, etc. etc. to try to drown out the cry of the heart in an anguish against which ‘having the right answer’ is no match). There is no peace, and the great spreadsheet of references in the sky just makes it worse, not better – for that god has no power to purify the heart of such diseases of death.

It is a privilege to have the opportunity to elucidate what we are not. For that, the comment is appreciated. For what it recommends, we can only respond that you must do your own research – we’re not here to do it for you, and we certainly can’t be involved in helping you create a personal heterodoxy, since that would be, for us, to commit apostasy. One again, this is merely the blog of an Orthodox Christian who, while failing utterly in all things and at all times, is striving (including by means of this blog) to be united to God in theosis. But he has only just made a beginning, and keeps failing again. So even if you were striving for the same thing, he couldn’t help you. He does, however, find the words of the fathers to be of inestimable worth. By their prayers and yours may he be saved.