The dreamtime is over.

The Bible teaches us that flesh is temporary. This is bad news for those who distrust God. Flesh is all they have.

Throughout the millennia, families and tribes have recited the genealogies of their past, and struggled to produce enough children to secure a cultural future. The bloodline of unseen ancestors and bright-eyed offspring, past and future, was reinforced, thread by thread, in stories around the fires of “now.” This was not the romantic picture so often painted for us. The struggle for cultural survival also involved blood and fire outside the camp.

David P. Goldman observes that in the ancient world a continual state of conflict would account for a loss of two per cent of the population every year, and that this would also explain the proliferation of languages and dialects. He writes that even in Christianity’s darkest hours (which were simply tribalism on a grander scale), it failed to kill a small fraction of the proportion which routinely and normally fell in primitive warfare. He quotes Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, “a survey of genetic, linguistic, and archeological research on early man”:

Even in the harshest possible environments, where it was a struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another… casualty rates were enormous, not the least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent’s society.¹David P. Goldman, “The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity” in It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, 90-91.

Of course, we see a similar emphasis on succession in the Old Testament. The fulfillment of the promises to Abraham was directly related to Israel’s continuity.

Goldman’s point is that the “primitive authenticity” taught in modern Western institutions is a fraud. In an attempt to avoid further damage to the environment, our children are being indoctrinated with the idea that aboriginal cultures worldwide, left to themselves, would have been self-sustaining, perhaps indefinitely, in an eternal cycle of life and death:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything and everything tries to be round.

In the old days all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion.

Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were.

The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950

Without exception, European migration around the world devastated tribal peoples. Colonists committed many atrocities, but our children are taught that the cultures in the conquered lands were somehow pristine, natural, balanced, sustainable—eternal.

With a worldview informed by biblical history, and indeed secular history, these “eternal cycles” are exposed as a downward spiral. The gradual degradation of ancient cultures and the loss of even primitive skills within these cultures has been well-documented. Paganism moves in circles, but if the fact of sin and the necessity of redemption are rejected, there is no eternity, not even a carnal “cultural” one. A civilization is a corporate Man. All men die. All civilizations die.

No culture is all good or all bad. For instance, despite its spiritual darkness, there is much traditional wisdom in native American culture. Huguenot adventurer Jean de Lery had great admiration for the natives, who seemed to be more virtuous than Europeans. In many ways the “primitive” worldviews of native Americans in the both north and south are more biblical than that of modern Christians, containing many elements which can be easily traced to their origin in the book of Genesis. However, spiritual history has moved on, and these cultures are merely ancient minds “preserved in amber.” The continuing work of God often leaves our “timeless truths” in the dust.

History moves in cycles, but there is always either regress or progress. Culture moves forwards or it moves backwards. All the indigenous cultures of the world, at the point they had reached when white men arrived, were “backward,” but backwardness is not a solid state. Life was a constant battle to avoid extinction. We can learn from the wisdom of any culture, including the tribal ones, but left to themselves, indigenous cultures would have continued to degenerate to the point of oblivion.

The idea of growth, progress and dominion is a Christian one. The Biblical history moves from family, to tribe, to people, to nation, to kingdom, to empire. When the enormous granite wheels of empire came into contact with the slowing spinning tops of tribal life, there could be no “cog wheel” correspondence. The results were tragic.

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison.  Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.

We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.

We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.

We had no written laws laid down,  no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape  before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota, 1903-1976

When colonists arrived, with their greed and diseases, things changed forever. These were deep cuts, but perhaps the most fatal was the change in philosophy. Cycles were out, and progress was in, a mindset which was born, arguably, of the “marriage-made-in-heaven” of Roman imperialism and the Great Commission. “Modernity” had arrived, and there was no way back. Despite the desperate efforts of tribal elders worldwide, attempts to revive and maintain the ancient animisms and languages have resulted in little more than nostalgic historical records, ornamental subcultural identities, and tourist exhibits.²Goldman also argues that Islamic fundamentalism is not offensive but defensive, a futile attempt by religious leaders to stem the inevitable secularization of modern Muslim nations. The old spirits are gone.

After a backlash by indigenous Australian cultures in the 1970s against the Christian missions, and a return to animism, the more objective Aboriginal leaders are facing the fact that this was a backward step for their people. Whatever the crimes of the colonists, and whatever the excesses of the missions, the leaven of Christianity which they brought with them forces any culture, any people, to rise, to grow up. It calls us from animistic childhood to adulthood, from a world ruled by animals to a world subdued by men. Our eyes are opened in a greater way to both good and evil and a judicial maturity is forced upon us. In many cases, indigenous people were not ready, but a return to the “childish things” of animism is impossible. The Gospel destroys tribal divisions and animistic thinking. Once the Gospel wakes you up, the Dreamtime is over.

John Lame Deer certainly has a case against civilization, but he is judging civilization through eyes opened by civilization. Worse, he is looking through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. John Wesley made a survey of human societies to see if any had overcome the effects of sin. Thomas C. Oden writes:

Among native American cultures with whom he had some immediate experience, [Wesley] observed as evidence of sin their constant intertribal warfare. He was especially disturbed by their practice of torturing defenseless victims. As one of the few English writers of his day who had actually spent time in the immediate environment of native American Indians, Wesley did not share the distantly conceived inflated picture of the noble savage that prevailed among enlightened French literati of the 18th century. Wesley punctured this picture mercilessly, providing a graphic depiction of how these natives were as deeply embedded in sin as the avaricious colonial British.³Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity, 163.

The preciousness of tribal life, in truth, rendered all life cheap. Tribes were cultures bent on self-preservation through bloody rivalries. A similar insanity might be observed in modern cultures, where the deaths of endangered species make the news but the culling of human lives through various means is considered a matter of survival. Goldman believes the fraud of primitive authenticity, the modern nature worship of environmental “animism,” is the environmentalist projecting his own presentiment of death onto the natural world.

Fear for the irreversible destruction of the natural world … substitutes for the death anxiety of the individual. Post-Christian Westerners confound their own sense of mortality with the vulnerability of the natural world. Sadly, it is not the end of the world. It is just the end of you.⁴Goldman, 183.

There is a perverse logic to this projection. In God’s wisdom, the flesh of the world and the flesh of Man are bound together by Covenant. Environmentalists believe their own flesh is a cancer upon the flesh of the otherwise “eternal” world, but the Bible tells us that Man and World are bound together for a purpose. The voyage of discovery is also a process of self-discovery. Subduing the world, however destructive it might be, is a positive feature of Man. Man and World are bound together not only for death, but also for resurrection.

By showing us that true eternity transcends cultural longevity, the Gospel of Christ removes the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15). This means that, since the resurrection, the fear of mortality for both the individual and the culture (and indeed, the planet) is now a “drawing back” from God’s desire for us. This is a lesson which Christendom failed to learn, and the factor which subsequently tore it apart.

Goldman observes that many minor cultures facing extinction found cultural transcendence in Christianity. However, their failure to leave pagan superstitions entirely behind perpetuated the old fractures, and led to a desire for nationalistic transcendence in a Christian veneer. Every European culture considered itself to be “the eternal people” to some degree. The American experiment succeeded because the old paganisms and nationalisms were deliberately left behind.

For all its flaws and fecklessness, America remains in the eyes of its people an attempt to order a nation according to divine law rather than human custom, such that all who wish to live under divine law may abandon their ethnicity and make themselves Americans.⁵Goldman, 372.

America is unique. It is not a redeemed culture but a melting pot of cultures. For Americans to backslide, they had to invent somewhere to slide, hence the liberal agenda and its historical revisionism (including naturalism). It is a manufactured pagan past disguised as a future.

America is not eternal. To keep His promises, God cannot allow it to be. For the sake of greater glory, the American vision is fading. However, the unmistakable success of the American experiment reveals it to be a microcosm for the future of the world—all nations submitting willingly to the Divine Law.

Goldman sees the continued historical perseverance of the Jewish identity as evidence of God’s promise to the rest of mankind, and here is where we part ways.

There cannot be an eternal people, not according to the flesh, because the flesh is obsolescent. Goldman’s God is Yahweh, yet He is a Yahweh of the past, a “Yahweh trapped in amber.” The Yahweh of today is not only the God who was born as the child promised in Eden, but the Man who never married or had children. The blessing promised to all nations through Abraham was not the merely the removal of the curse upon the Land and the womb (territory and offspring) but the removal of the fear of death in the promise of resurrection. These blessings were all poured out in Christ.

How then do we interpret Israel’s stubborn refusal to disappear? Goldman notes that while the Arab Spring will become a Winter (demographically-speaking) within one generation, Israel currently has the only increasing birthrate in the entire Middle East.

America is no longer the future, but the preservation of Israel is most definitely a testimony to something historical, not a glimpse of the way forward. Judaism serves as an antidote to gnosticism for Christianity, a miraculous testimony like the body of Lot’s wife a white, leprous memorial to a judgment in the past. Israel exists only because she is protected by the once dominant Christian nations who drew her under their wings. She too must eventually succumb to the Gospel of Christ or return to the dust.

Flesh is not transcendent. Flesh was designed to be transcended by fire. Israel, and indeed America, will be transcended. All God’s darlings end up on the altar. The promised child—whether it be European Christendom, the American vision, or the hope of Israel—is ever offered on Mount Moriah for the sake of greater promises.

There is no eternal people. All nations are destined for a larger melting pot, a hotter fire. Every tribe, every circumcision, every culture, every nation, every tongue, every familial baptism, every distinction founded on the old birth, is doomed. Hidden in every cultural and lingual extinction, every brutal war, every abundance, every natural disaster, every economic collapse, every trade agreement, every technological advancement, is the leaven of the Gospel. The yeast that continues to consume and assimilate every other culture, every blood, ancient or modern, is the fire from the unseen mountain, the Spirit of Christ. Here, at last, is the eternal people.

This is an essay from Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes by Michael Bull.

Having never been much interested in understanding Islam, it has been helpful to read David P. Goldman’s take on it. He is Jewish, (his glowing comments concerning modern Israel are a dead giveaway), but he is surprisingly objective concerning Christianity and Islam.

In the more circumspect of his recent books, he observes that the decisive difference between Judeo-Christianity and Islam cannot be found by arguing about the amount of violence in their respective histories. Their disparate characters are exposed somewhere closer to home:

…traditional society is incompatible organically with the first principle of law in modern liberal democracy: The state wields the monopoly of violence. Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the deeply ingrained notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of the family may employ violent compulsion just as the state does. [1]

His comparison of the Judeo-Christian worldview with Islam is very telling.

…we reviewed Islam’s deep roots in tribal society. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, in which every individual participates directly in the covenant with God, Islam retains the hierarchy of pre-biblical traditional society, in which the head of a family is a miniature head of state. If the Muslim womb is closing because of a failure of faith, we must look more deeply at the faith that has failed in its encounter with modernity.

Judaism and its daughter-religion Christianity sought to distinguish themselves from paganism. But what does “paganism” actually mean? In Franz Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion, the animal ties of common ancestry define the pagan order. Individuality in the Judeo-Christian sense is inconceivable, for every member of society must bear the same identity of blood and soil as every other member, and the single member of society can be nothing other than an expression of collective blood and collective will. For this reason every institution of pagan society, emphatically including family and clan, must collapse into the totality. Here is how Rosenzweig described the absence of individuality in pre-modern society:

In the thoroughly organized State, the State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State. The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.

As we have seen, the family is a miniature clan, the clan is a miniature tribe, and the tribe is a miniature nation. All the layers of society stand in relation to each other like nested Russian dolls, identical except for their size.

Ancient Israel, and later Christianity, constituted an alternative to pagan social order. The covenant between Abraham and the biblical God applies not only to the Hebrew nation but to every individual member of that nation. Through his covenant, God establishes the rights of every individual — emphatically including the weakest members of society — beyond the claims of tribe and clan, and provides laws, judgments, and ordinances which stand above the whim of any human magistrate or chieftain. No longer can the Roman paterfamilias command the death of his own children in the little empire of his home; the covenant protects every member of society directly. And no longer can a husband be justified in beating his wife because he acts with the legal authority of a head of state in miniature, as in Sura 4:34.

It is common to speak loosely of “three Abrahamic religions” and assume an underlying commonality among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But the defining experience of Judaism and Christianity is alien to Islam. That is the love of a personal God. The founding premise of Judaism is that God’s love for Abraham, “God’s lover,” extends by covenant to each and everyone of his descendants, as well as those who are adopted into Israel by conversion. Christianity proposes to extend this grace to all who believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Each morning, the observant Jew enacts a wedding ceremony with God, forming a wedding band with the leather strap of his phylacteries and reciting the words of Hosea: “And I shall espouse you to Me eternally; I shall espouse you in mercy and lovingkindness, in righteousness and justice, and you shall know The Lord.” The personal God of Judaism who loves the faithful soul with the ardor of the Divine Lover in the Song of Songs is unimaginable in Islam, for Allah does not condescend to enter into a relationship of love with mere mortals. Allah cannot bind himself to covenants that he himself cannot alter out of love for his Chosen people, as the biblical God did with Abraham and his descendants; much less can Allah become incarnate as a human being, as Christians believe God did, to offer salvation to all humankind.

Jews and Christians worship a God who cannot be like them, for their God is perfect and incapable of doing evil. For Christians, the incarnate God Jesus Christ is without sin. God is thus wholly Other, for we are imperfect: frail, mortal, and prone to sin. God does nothing without a reason, and his reasons always are good, even if they surpass our understanding.

Allah, by contrast, is beyond good and evil. His cosmic caprice determines everything, and if he so wishes he can make us commit acts of evil, even the ultimate evil of idolatry. Covenant is a concept alien to Islam. For by definition a God of covenants places a limit on his own power and enters into a partnership with a human society. Unlike YHWH of the Hebrews, the all-transcendent Allah does not stoop to make agreements with mere human beings.

Allah usually is described as “absolutely transcendent” but in comparison to the God of the Bible, he is rather more like us. That is what Rosenzweig meant when he called Islam a pagan parody of Judaism and Christianity, and Allah the “colorful panoply of the pagan Olympus rolled up into one,” that is, “a monistic paganism.” Rosenzweig’s use of the term “paganism” is not a reproach but a diagnosis. There is a pagan purpose to the reconfiguration of Christian and Jewish concepts in the Koran: the election of the Arabs in place of the Jews, as Professor Kalisch explains.

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[1] David P. Goldman, It’s Not The End of the World, It’s Just The End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, p. 261.
[2] David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), pp. 141-143

“Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates—indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere—in the Muslim world. The world’s population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the twenty-first century, by far the worst decline in human history.” [1]

So writes David P. Goldman in the introduction to his recent book, How Civilisations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too).

Goldman observes that the economic crisis in Europe is at root a demographic crisis, and the demographic crisis is a crisis of faith.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation. [2]

The secularization of Europe is tragic, but the loss of faith and subsequent demographic decline in the Muslim world is news to me. What’s interesting is that not only have the birthrates among Muslim immigrants in European countries (except Great Britain) fallen to current European levels within one or two generations, the birthrates in Muslim states are also falling dramatically.

Islam is a pagan parody of Judeo-Christian religion, says Franz Rozenzweig. But how does Islam respond to the encroachment of the modern world?

In Europe, a decline in religious faith underlies its demographic decline… In the footsteps of Western Europe, Islam also faces a crisis of faith that will bring about a demographic catastrophe in the middle of the present century. Given the prominence of what Westerners call “Islamic fundamentalism,” it seems odd to speak of a crisis of faith in the Islamic world. Striking statistical evidence supports this conclusion…

Although the Muslim birthrate today is the world’s second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birthrate of any other culture… The demographic position of the Islamic world has set a catastrophe in motion. It is hard enough for rich nations to care for a growing elderly population, but it is impossible for poor nations to do so. If America faces discomfort, and Europe faces crisis, Muslim countries face breakdown. [3]

Demographic decline due to literacy and modernity is not really news, even in Muslim nations. What is news is that this process is occurring in Islamic nations at a rate that is dumbfounding the experts. Muslim nations currently have a relatively young population, but that population is not having children. In response to the onslaught of modernity, this “suicide of Islam” is a titanic version of the self-immolation of an endangered tribe.

If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences. [4]

The political and religious leaders of these Muslim states are aware of the problem. Where the West is pessimistic, these nations are panicking. Faced with poverty and, in some cases, starvation, it is likely they will become not less dangerous but more so. Goldman’s take on the recent Arab revolutions is eye-opening.

Despite the desperate efforts of political and religious leaders, Islam’s response to modernity has been not only a sudden demographic decline, but in many cases a descent into self-destructive behavior.

The underside of Islam’s demographic freeze is an appalling breakdown of traditional mores… Under the facade of radical Islam, Iran suffers from an eruption of social pathologies such as drug addiction and prostitution on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West. It appears than Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay. A spiritual malaise has overcome Iran despite the best efforts of the totalitarian Islamists. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed. [5]

This statement is shocking enough, but Goldman’s evidence and breakdown of the problem is not only heart-rending, it exposes the Islamic hypocrisy for what it is — an impotent Phariseeism.

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[1] How Civilisations Die, p. ix
[2] How Civilisations Die, p. xxii
[3] David P. Goldman, It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, pp. 280-284.
[4] How Civilisations Die, p. 1
[5] How Civilisations Die, p. 45-46.

“That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.” (Luke 23:12)

“Secular humanism and Islam are merely the bipolar moods of Christless Christianity. They can be united only in suicide.”

Getting a grip on the Tabernacle layout helps us understand the architecture of Creation, the history of mankind and the structure of the entire Bible. After reading Mark Steyn on the Islamic/secular conflict in Europe, I was thinking that the same “Tabernacle” categories can be found in the world today. Whatever we do, however much we distort the truth, we are still bound by the walls and furnitures set up in Genesis 1. And, in my humble opinion, the light this sheds on the current conflict is not only revealing concerning its true nature, but it also helps us to predict its future.

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[1] See Priest, King and Prophet and Great Prophets.
[2] See Half Man, Half Beast.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but very few chose to live under communism.

ABSTRACT ART AND ABSTRACT MUSIC

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is under your control… But when you listen to atonal music, you are stuck in your seat for as long as the composer wishes to keep you. It feels like many hours in the dentist’s chair from which you cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow rather than admiring it at a safe distance…

After decades of philanthropic support for abstract (that is, atonal) music, symphony orchestras have to a great extent given up inflicting it on reluctant audiences… The ideological message is the same, yet the galleries are full while the concert halls are empty. That is because you can keep it at a safe distance when it hangs on the wall, but you can’t escape it when it crawls into your ears. In other words, your spontaneous, visceral hatred of atonal music reflects your true, healthy, normal reaction to abstract art. It is simply the case that you are able to suppress this reaction at the picture gallery…

THE REASON FOR ABSTRACT ART

You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. At least, you want to reserve the possibility of being creative, or of knowing someone who is creative. The trouble is that you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren’t one of them…

Your have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor rather than the God of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. You have stopped believing in God, and as a result you do not believe nothing, but you will believe in anything (to paraphrase Chesterton)… To demand the attribute of creativity for every human being is the same as saying that everyone should be a little god.

CREATIVITY IS RARE

But what should we mean by creativity? In science and mathematics, it should refer to discoveries that truly are singular, which could not possibly be derived from any preceding knowledge. We might ask: In the whole history of the art and sciences, how many contributors truly are indispensable, such that history could not have been the same without their contribution? There is room for argument, but it is hard to come up with more than a few dozen names…

We can argue about the origin of scientific or artistic genius, but we must agree that it is extremely rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann Sebastian Bach’s lifetime, we hear the work of only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians strove not for genius but for solid craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would emerge from this milieu has no consensus explanation… If we use the term creative to mean more or less the same thing as irreplaceable, then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them.

If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing. And if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that, if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first.

A BETTER MOTIVE

If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures. In the world of faith there is quite a different way to be indispensable, and that is through acts of kindness and service…

Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto “Glory belongs only to God” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard has he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists…

THE MODERN CULT OF SELF-EXPRESSION

To be taken seriously in the twentieth century, artists had to invent their own style and their own language… To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one’s fist at God and define one’s own little world, however dull, however tawdry, and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the artists the illusion of creativity.

In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the twentieth century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves int he absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse substitute for redemption.

It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You

Why do cultures commit suicide? Why are we witnessing a new great extinction of peoples? Why is the economic crisis really a spiritual crisis? Probing the inner workings of civilization in a tour d’horizon of cultural decline, Spengler argues that Europe’s postnational, secular dystopia is a death trap, that the onslaught of modernity has plunged Islam into an even greater crisis, and that the destiny of nations is decided in the human heart, by religion. Christian America, in spite of its follies and gullibility, has the spiritual strength to restore the faith of the West. This book presents, in one comprehensive volume, the wide scope of Spengler’s theories on Christianity, Islam, America, the financial crisis, horror movies, modern art, Israel, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, tribalism, the global balance of power, demography, and sex in the twenty-first century. These highly original essays may provoke you, even frighten you–but never bore you.

But Jesus knew their thoughts, and said to them: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?” (Matthew 12:25)

ACT I – An End to Sacrifice

“In AD70, the ‘office’ of Jew was finished forever (there are no more Jews in God’s eyes) and the “office” of Gentile was also finished. The middle wall was broken down. Any distinctions now are merely human distinctions.”

All Christians know that, in the death of Jesus Christ, God put an end to animal sacrifices, at least legally.

“Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week; But in the middle of the week He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering.” (Daniel 9:27)

Although Jesus’ death made animal sacrifice redundant, this wasn’t fulfilled in the “week” in the middle of which Christ died. Jesus’ forgiveness of His murderers left that week at a three-and-a-half. In God’s longsuffering towards Israel, they were not cut off “like Sodom” but given another generation. As this prophecy played out in the first century, the week in which the Covenant was “ratified … with many” was the final seven years, in the middle of which a “firstfruits” of martyrs left Sodom without any righteous remaining in it—ripe for judgment. [1]

In their rejection of the atonement achieved by the Son of God, the Jews kept the sacrifices going for another few decades. But as He had done with the previous Temple, God brought the hordes in as a flood to wipe out the sacrilege.

Revelation shows the Herodian harlot (a corporate Herodias) being destroyed by the Roman beast. But then the empire beast is destroyed. This confuses conservative commentators because they don’t understand the four empires as corners of God’s throne, four guardians for God’s people who turn bad, one by one, and are replaced. Rome didn’t attack the Church “outright” (as the Church) until Nero’s reign. In the Revelation, after failing to destroy the firstfruits Church with Jewish persecution and then false doctrine, this is the point where Satan calls up a new beast from the Sea. [2]

So, Rome was not destroyed in AD66-70, but it was most certainly all shook up. Four emperors in one year ended the old system. Jordan observes that the subsequent emperors were of a different nature. The empire’s office as a guardian for God was finished. In AD70, the “office” of Jew was finished forever (there are no more Jews in God’s eyes) and the office of Gentile was also finished. [3] The middle wall was broken down. Any distinctions now are merely human distinctions.

In Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, Peter Leithart makes the crucial observation that the first Christian emperor “desacralized” the pagan world through, among other things, a “baptism” of public space.

Paganism still had its place, but temples were increasingly overshadowed by large, and numerous, churches. (Leithart, p. 125)

As is ever the case, cultus is the foundation for culture. The unjust vengeance of Lamech led to the massacres in the days of Noah. The bloody rites of the pagans led to institutionalized bloodshed in the arena.

Combats in the arena reenacted the founding sacrifice of Remus by Romulus. According to Rome’s founding myth, Romulus “killed his brother for jumping over the walls which would define Rome and separate it from the non-Roman.” (Leithart, p. 192.)

The arena was also an instrument of imperial policy in the provinces. The spread of Roman power was marked architecturally by the spread of  amphitheaters. Not only were the arenas — built in a distinctively Roman style — visual reminders of the sometimes distant power of the emperor, but the bloody combats that took place on the sands reminded viewers of Rome’s willingness to use violence and gave restless provincials pause. Arenas embodied the empire; the gladiatorial shows and their amphitheaters were the “imperial process in microcosm.” (Leithart, p. 194).

Constantine’s discouragement of pagan offerings, and his promotion of the teachings of Christ, also put an end to the human sacrifices in the arenas. Criminals would no longer be punished by “serving” in the amphitheaters, but through a bloodless exile to the mines. (p.196.)

Constantine’s laws were more often Christian in effect than in intent. Outlawing gladiatorial shows struck down one of the main institutions for the propagation of Roman values, culture and power and was more transformative than Constantine could have known. (p. 304.)

So, the end of sacrifice in the Garden (through Jesus), led to an end of sacrifice in the Land (the final “Old Covenant” martyrs, the apostolic Church). This is what eventually led to an end of sacrifice in the oikoumene, the first century World.

[In Galatians 4,] Paul radically flattens out the distinction between Jew and Gentile. Unlike in Romans, here he does not say that all are under “sin” but rather that all are in bondage to the stoicheia. For Gentiles, as much as Jews, this bondage meant adherence to animal sacrifice, the keeping of days, the avoidance of contamination. (Leithart, p. 325.)

The “baptism” of Jesus and the “baptism” of the firstfruits church led to the “baptism” of Rome.

ACT II – The Baptism of Rome

“This ‘baptism of Rome’ was not in fact the investiture of Rome at all but an investiture of the Church.”

Through Constantine, Rome was baptized, and sacrifice in all these senses either came to an end or began to. Constantine stopped the slaughter of Christians. He refused to sacrifice at the Capitol during his triumph in 312. He ended sacrifice for officers of his empire, thus opening imperial administration to Christians, and eventually outlawed sacrifice entirely. He closed a few temples where sacrifices were being offered, though he permitted various forms of divination to continue… With Constantine, the Roman Empire became officially a desacrificial polity. If he did not entirely expunge sacrifice, Constantine displaced sacrifice frrm the center of Roman life and pushed it to the margins and into dark corners. Constantine’s reign marked the beginning of the end of sacrifice. He took away the smoky food of the not-gods (Galatians 4:8), and the demons began to atrophy. (Leithart, p. 328).

Leithart’s argument is that the Church did not “fall” in the fourth century, seduced by the principalities and powers. The principalities and powers that structure the world are not simply temporarily useful, potentially dangerous and ultimately doomed. Instead, they are there to be transformed from within. In effect, Constantine replaced the old sacrificial system with a new one. In a cultic sense, Rome was “decivilized” and “recivilized.” It was indeed the death and resurrection of an empire at its very heart. Leithart observes that Constantine welcomed into his city another city.

Christ’s is the founding sacrifice of the new city, the eschatological city. But that sacrifice is perpetuated by the body in mutual love and service… By virtue of this sacrifice, the Church does justice… When the Roman world passed through its “baptism” from bondage to the stoicheia, Constantine eliminated sacrifices to the gods in the earthly city and thereby renounced any claim that the Roman city was just a city. (Leithart, p. 330)

Through Constantine, the death of “brother Jesus” as a better Abel at the hands of the Cainite Herods exposed and usurped the death of Remus as a foundation for identity. The deaths of the apostles eventually exposed and usurped the arena as a foundation for culture. Identity and culture no longer needed appeasement. For Constantine, the future no longer needed to be constantly “bought.” The price was paid once and for all. The city could exist because the New Jerusalem was unassailable.

The baptism of Rome was indeed supposed to lead to the baptism of Romans, but not simply because they were Romans. While I agree with Dr. Leithart’s eye-opening reassessment of Constantine, I believe his adherence to the erroneous practice of paedobaptism causes him to misunderstand the baptism of Rome.

In the end it all comes round to baptism, specifically to infant baptism. Rome was baptized in the fourth century. Eusebian hopes notwithstanding, it was not instantly transformed into the kingdom of heaven. It did not immediately become the city of God on earth. Baptism never does that. It is not meant to. Baptism sets a new trajectory, initiates a new beginning, but every beginning is the beginning of something. Through Constantine, Rome was baptized into a world without animal sacrifice and officially recognized the true sacrificial city, the one community that does offer a foretaste of the final kingdom. Christian Rome was in its infancy, but that is hardly surprising. All baptisms are infant baptisms.

Yoder is famed for his patience, but in dismissing Constantine and the world he left behind, his patience failed. For Yoder, Rome was not radically Christian, Rome’s adherence to the faith was infantile, and because of that, he reasons, it was not Christian at all but apostate. He failed, as Augustine said against Pelagius, to give due weight to “the interim, the interval between the remission of sins which takes place in baptism, and the permanently established sinless state in the kingdom that is to come, this middle time [tempus hoc medium] of prayer, while [we] must pray, ‘Forgive us our sins.’” He failed to acknowledge that all—Constantine, Rome, ourselves—stand in medial time, and yet are no less Christian for that.

What can we expect in this middle time? Not much, Yoder thinks. He says that the project of Christianizing the state is doomed. The time when that could happen has long ago passed away. If he is right, we are facing nothing short of apocalypse. I believe that here too Yoder is wrong, and that we can escape apocalypse. But this can only happen on certain conditions: only through reevangelization, only through the revival of a purified Constantinianism, only by the formation of a Christically centred politics, only through fresh public confession that Jesus’ city is the model city, his blood the only expiating blood, his sacrifice the sacrifice that ends sacrifice. An apocalypse can be averted only if modern civilisation, like Rome, humbles itself and is willing to come forward to be baptized. (Leithart, p. 341-342)

Dr Leithart is, to some degree, longing for “the good old days.” He sees the future of Christianity in a “purified Constantinianism,” with infant baptism as the sacramental key. Yet it was precisely infant baptism that led to its failure.

Baptism is a new beginning, but it is not a birth “according to the flesh.” It is a second birth, an investiture with authority following submission to the Law of the Gospel. The end of sacrifice was only the baptism of Rome’s cultic heart, and Rome’s sacred heart was now the Christian Church, which had submitted to suffering and was now being exalted. This “baptism of Rome” was not in fact the investiture of Rome at all but an investiture of the Church.

What the investiture of the Church did, under Constantine, was put the entire empire officially under the sound of the Gospel. It condemned the entire empire to the death of repentance. But that is not submission to the gospel. It was the label of regeneration without the regeneration. This meant that Christendom eventually ran out of steam, out of Spirit. The culture is dying because it lost its cultic heart. And it lost its sacred cultic heart because paedobaptism distorted the very definition of what a Christian is. It confused culture with cultus because it replaced the walls of the New Jerusalem with the walls of the old one. It used baptism as a carnal, hereditary division (culture) rather than as the mark of repentance and faith (cultus). It introduced a new circumcision, invented a new version of the wall which the Son of God eradicated in His death and resurrection.

Worse, the conflation of citizenship with baptism through paedobaptism actually replaced the true Christian cultic heart with a false one. God is in control of history, and, as Dr Leithart demonstrates, Constantinianism was the need of the day. But what the invention of paedobaptism brought about was a reintroduction of pagan sacrifice in a very subtle way. It was, in fact, an apostasy, a falling back into the old ways, a “resacralizing” in a way that is entirely foreign to the New Testament. Paul called the first century Circumcision “the mutilation,” possibly referring to the self-cutting of the priests of Baal (Philippians 3:2). They attempted to make themselves acceptable to God without obedience to God. Although human sacrifice was never commanded by God, circumcision was always a symbolic child sacrifice, the real blood being shed by a substitutionary “innocent” victim, a redeeming animal. The priests of Baal sacrificed children to secure the blessings of their lord upon their culture. It was a “stimulation” of the natural order to achieve the supernatural. The Ethics of the Covenant are replaced with Magic. [4] Dr Leithart sees infant baptism as a “cutting off” of the flesh by water, but it is in practice an offering of flesh, an attempted “stimulation” of the natural in plain disobedience to God. [5] What our children need is the gospel. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:17).

In Christ, circumcision or uncircumcision, that is, hereditary divisions, became nothing (1 Corinthians 7:19). According to Paul, heredity is a pile of shit (Philippians 3:8). Paedobaptism, like circumcision, is a hereditary distinction, and heredity is nothing, unless that heredity brings with it the hearing of the gospel. But hearing is not believing.

In Christ, all hereditary divisions, all genealogical divisions, were wiped away. In Christ, Jew and Gentile became one new Man, but not through generation. It is only through regeneration. A Christian nation is a great blessing, but, contra Leithart, a Christian nation is not one where everyone is baptized. A Christian nation is one under the sound of the Gospel, ruled by the baptized, the “invested.” The goal is not worldwide baptism. The goal is worldwide regeneration-and-baptism.

I have argued recently that paedobaptism is “another gospel.” [6] It usurps the place of the gospel as the “first contact.” There must be the bloody death of a cut heart, and repentance, before there can be the resurrection of water. In the approach to God, the outer border is always blood; the inner/upper is always water. By placing the “water” boundary at the edges of the empire instead of at the boundary of the regenerate within the empire, Constantine’s Christian state sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

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ACT III – The Corpse of Constantine

“…the nations that adhered to Christendom as tribes rather than as individuals never forswore their love for their own ethnicity. On the contrary, they longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by Jesus Christ.”

Since AD70, any “holy” distinctions now are merely human distinctions. The boundaries of the New Jerusalem are defined not by flesh but by faith. We can see this within Israel at the microcosmic level: priesthood and people, with a boundary of water, the Laver. What Christ did was expand this “Land” model to encompass the World. Outside of credobaptism, there are to be no other boundaries recognized by the Church of Christ.

Paedobaptism is a fundamental misunderstanding of this act. It sees no fundamental change in the nature of the Covenant community, and so, seeking the same “Baalistic” carnal security of a boundary of blessing that is visible to the naked eye, it ties the boundary of Spirit to the boundary of family. Instead of “going viral,” the Gospel is locked up in Adamic family cells. Or worse, it is locked up in the boundary of the state. But the Gospel won’t be restrained. It not only transcends all human boundaries and distinctions (because the eyes of God no longer recognize them) it destroys them.

The body created by Constantine was only ever another boundary to be crossed. The investiture of Christ at His ascension led to the death and resurrection of Israel (the firstfruits, the first resurrection). The investiture of Israel led to the death and resurrection of the Jew-Gentile Church under Roman power: Garden, Land, World.

But God works in fractals. The investiture of the Christian Church under Constantine would inevitably lead to the destruction of Constantinianism. The Spirit is always working to break the old wine skins. How does He do this? He does it virally, that is, through regenerate individuals, the true baptism.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things objectively. I have quoted an atheist concerning baptism. [7] Now it’s time to hear from a Jew. In It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, David P. Goldman writes:

Neither Christian nor Jew cares much about the logic of salvation. The soul stands in fear and trembling, sick unto death—which is the same as sin—and reaches out for grace. The Jews do this as a kinship community—Blutsgemeinschaft, in Franz Rozenzweig’s world. Christians must do so as individuals, because as Christians they abandon the doomed ties of Gentile kinship and instead join the assembly (ekklesia) that calls them out from among the nations.

The remnants of Christian state religion rot and stink on the dying continent of Europe. Christianity cannot persist except as a continuing revival, a recurring conversion—as a sequence of singular events rather than as an orderly process.

Awaiting execution in Hitler’s prisons, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that, in a world come of age, the Christian religion no longer could exist as organized practice but only as an expression of individual conscience. America was created for precisely this purpose, to replace state religion on the European model with a religion of individual conscience. Such a religion must be schismatic, multisectarian, short on doctrine but long on inspiration. America’s kaleidoscope of Protestant denominations, so bewildering to Europeans, constitutes the only type of milieu in which Christianity has flourished during the past generation. Although Christian communities are burgeoning throughout the world, they seem to succeed best in emulation of the American version. With right the Vatican may defend the record of the Spanish inquisition [on the premise that, under state religion, heresy implies disloyalty to the state], but it alters not a jot or tittle of the awful sentence—oblivion—that history has passed on European Christianity…

All nationalism worships God in the carnival mirror of its own reflection. The exception is the Jewish nation, which understands itself to exist because God called it to his service. As Franz Rosenzweig observed, once the Gentile nations embrace Christianity, they abandoned their ancient fatalism regarding the inevitable extinction of their tribe. It is the God of Israel who first offers eternal life to humankind, and Christianity extended Israel’s promise to all. But the nations that adhered to Christendom as tribes rather than as individuals never forswore their love for their own ethnicity. On the contrary, they longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by Jesus Christ.

After Christianity taught them the election of Israel, the Gentiles coveted election for themselves and desired that their own people be the chosen people. That set ethnocentric nationalism in conflict both with the Jews—the descendants of Abraham in the flesh—and with the Church, which holds itself to be the new People of God.

Christian universal empire, from Charlemagne in AD800 to the Habsburgs in 1914, was by definition multinational, if not antinational. The Christians were the ekklesia, those called out of the nations, and only a truly universal elite could rule them…

Nationalism was to be suppressed. That is why the sixteenth century church did not tolerate translation of the scriptures into the vernacular… [But] Catholic universal empire, the “prison of the nations” in its nineteenth century Habsburg expression, ultimately was a failure. By contrast, the United States, a melting-pot nation of immigrants, achieved a transcendent kind of universality and thereby became the world’s dominant power. (pp. 42-49)

Bonhoeffer’s “expression of individual conscience” is anathema to the Federal Vision. On the one hand, we have Yoder decrying state religion, and on the other we have Leithart calling for a return to it. We have Leithart promoting the Church on earth as “one” and Yoder asserting it should only ever be a sort of underground “many.” What if they are both right and both wrong?

What it boils down to, possibly, is the failure to understand the sacred heart of the Shekinah, the incarnation, the glory of God dwelling in flesh. Leithart believes in a carnal (hereditary) baptism, a “one” in flesh, a unity based on blood. It clumsily identifies itself with Covenant at the cost of a true identification with Christ.. [8] Yoder, I assume, believes in a “one” that is only one in Spirit that cannot, or should not, ever achieve a governmental status.

The truth is that “Rome” itself cannot be baptized until the final day, the day of the “investiture” of the World. But until then, the Church is indeed already one, despite appearances, working like yeast within the nations. There will indeed be “growth rings” along the way, such as the fourth century, but they will only ever be an incomplete picture of the final reality. There will always be an “us and them” demarcation, a baptism, and it must never be confused with a human distinction of any kind, whether familial, national, cultural or international. That sort of baptism is the kiss of death to whatever parasite it was attached to. This is because human distinctions cannot by definition be universal.

Yoder doesn’t have a vision, let alone a federal (Covenant) one. Dr Leithart’s Federal Vision, being practically ethnocentric, simply isn’t big enough. If the Federal Vision doesn’t get “de-sacralized” at some point, it will take its place in the abyss relegated by the death and resurrection of Christ to all the “stoicheian” institutions of history.

A Constantinianism that is truly purified would be a Constantinianism without paedobaptism. In the long run, all paedobaptism can do is delineate another doomed tribe.

But the truly catholic Church marches on, and there is no locked door through which it cannot pass, no human institution it cannot transcend, and no boundary it cannot cross.

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[1] See The End of Shadows.
[2] See James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel.
[3] See The Future of Israel Re-examined.
[4] See Ray Sutton, That You May Prosper, Chapter 3, “Ethics” (p. 59ff) [PDF] and Baal’s Stimulus Package.
[5] See Cutting Off Flesh by Water.
[6] See Another Gospel – 1.
[7] See also An Atheist ‘Gets’ Baptism.
[8] See Another Gospel – 2.