“By the imperative, time is formed into a cup, still empty but formed for the special purpose of being filled with the content demanded by the order.”

The Imperative Comes First

Essay by John Barach

As many people have pointed out, in Christian ethics, the indicative precedes the imperative. First God says, “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” and then he gives the Ten Words (“You shall have no other gods before me…”). First Paul tells us what Christ has done and who we are in Christ, and then he summons us to act accordingly. First comes the good news of what God has done for us and then comes the summons to respond in faith and love and new obedience.

But when we look at the very beginning of Scripture, what we discover is that the imperative came first.  God creates the heavens and the earth, and then the first word God speaks is a command: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).  Now, that’s not the first word in the Bible — first comes the narration, the story of God creating the heavens and the earth, and the description of the earth at the time of creation — but it is the first word recorded that God spoke with regard to that creation. He creates the world. It’s dark, unstructured, and unpopulated, and the Spirit is hovering over the deep. The narrative reminds us that there’s always an indicative implicit in and before the imperative, so that the imperative assumes and develops a personal relationship between commander and commanded, so that the imperative is never mere imperative but rather is a vocation.  Nevertheless, in terms of God’s speech in history, the imperative comes first, and surely that’s significant.

With regard to man, something similar is the case.  In Genesis 2, which develops and expands the account of Day Six in Genesis 1, we learn that when Yahweh God placed Adam in the Garden, he spoke to him: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Here, the first thing Yahweh God says is indicative (“Of every tree of the garden you may eat”), but it’s an indicative indicating permission (as opposed to a mere statement) and is tied to the next clause in the sentence, which is an imperative disguised as an indicative: “you will not eat” is indicative in form but imperative in force, meaning “don’t eat.”  So the permission given in the first clause also shares something of that imperatival character. Again, there is a lot of implicit indicative here, including the personal relationship of Adam to Yahweh God who is his creator and the commander.  But the first thing Yahweh God says to Adam has the force of a permission and a command with regard to the trees, something imperatival in force.

Returning to Genesis 1, we find that God’s work with creation takes the form of a series of imperatives, moving through the days of creation up to the sixth day, when man is created, male and female. While the events in Genesis 2 take place first, before the creation of the woman, in Genesis 1 the first word of God to the pair, to man as the image of God, male and female, again takes the form of an imperative.  God’s first word to Man (male and female) is not a description of creation, not a presentation of all of God’s goodness, not a report about how God made man in his image, not a promise of what God would do for Adam and Woman.  Instead, it’s a command. Sure, it’s a blessing, but it’s a blessing in the imperative: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28).  Only after that does he go on, in the indicative, to say that he has given man the green plants and the trees for food (1:29). The first thing Adam and Woman heard from God was an imperative, and surely that’s significant.

In fact, we can go back before the creation of man to the first word God spoke, and again it is an imperative: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).  That’s not the first word in the Bible — first comes the narration, the story of God creating the heavens and the earth, and the description of the earth at the time of creation — but it is the first word recorded that God spoke with regard to that creation. He creates the world. It’s dark, unstructured, and unpopulated, and the Spirit is hovering over the deep.  But then comes the imperative and things begin to change (“And there was light”). Again, the imperative comes first, and surely that’s significant.

What does an imperative do?  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s observations are helpful here:

The imperative not only commands the listener; it at the same time lights up an alley of time into the future. A trail into time is beaten by the logic of any order given. A high tension current places the moments following the order under the expectation: will this command be followed up and fulfilled? The term “fulfillment” used in this connection is significant. By the imperative, time is formed into a cup, still empty but formed for the special purpose of being filled with the content demanded by the order. The action following the order is not a blind accident of the moment. By having been ordered, it has become organized into one “time span” which stretches from the moment in which the order was given to the moment in which the report is echoed back: “order fulfilled.” Orders connect two separated human beings into one time span, of which the imperative forms the expectation, the report the fulfillment (The Origin of Speech, 46-47).

When God speaks to man for the first time and uses the imperative instead of the indicative, he is creating what Rosenstock-Huessy calls a “time cup.”  There is now a dramatic tension in the story: Will Adam and Woman obey God? Will they be fruitful and multiply? Will they have dominion over the animals? What will they do in response to God and to his commanding word? His order now orders their lives, revealing to them their calling, their responsibility, their relation to God and to the world– revealing how they are to use and order time.

The imperative creates the story that follows: by creating the expectation and setting the standards for judgment, it makes the story that follows what it is.  Without the imperative, it would just be a story of God creating man and then man doing, well, whatever he felt like. There would be no tension, no expectation, no hope, no sense of satisfaction at a job completed, no disappointment in failure and rebellion, and no corresponding joy at redemption and restoration — by which I mean: restoration to the original task and calling, the calling of maturation, fruitfulness, multiplication, and dominion.

But there was an imperative, an expectation, an impetus forward, creating the story.  It’s a story in which, in an important sense, the indicative does precede the imperative: God takes the initiative (as he does even in the Creation narrative) and man responds; God acts on our behalf so that we then can and do respond to him in trust and obedience.  In all imperatives, there’s at least an implicit indicative that underlies it, as I’ve said above.  But what makes it a story is that it’s a time cup, an imperative-created expectation awaiting fulfillment. We still look forward to man’s fulfilling of the mandate given in Genesis 1 (and so does God), with the joyful certainty because of Christ (here’s the all-important indicative!) that it will be fulfilled. In fact, even the imperative that was God’s first word in his creation (“Let there be light”) has not yet been fulfilled to the fullest extent, and all of history — and all of our lives — are meant to be aspects of that fulfillment until the earth is full of God’s glorious light.

History — the history of the world, and our history — is a time cup, formed by God’s imperatives.

“If the creed is not considered dangerous, divine worship is emasculated.”

A creed is either worthless or worth everything we have. Here’s a classic quote from an essay by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy entitled “The Peace of the Pirates” in Planetary Service (1978).

I have had the honor to have been considered a public danger more than once in my life. The first time was in 1912 when I wrote, “Language is wiser than the person who speaks it.” My thesis almost foundered on this disturbing reality of the Holy Spirit which I had perceived. Balaam’s ass was considered unscientific!

It occurred a second time in February 1919 before the Versailles Treaty was signed. I called upon the German legal profession to offer their protection for the Kaiser and the generals, and let the Allies—as they in fact did in 1945—put the legal profession on trial instead, so that the indispensable new planetary law could come into being, once we had been made liable. The reader can imagine the effect. I wanted to do away with the immunity of the German professor! So I left the “institution of higher learning and limited liability.” It happened a third time in 1935 in the U.S.A. I was considered a blemish on pure science, because I referred to the workings of the living God in a lecture hall. Again, Harvard University, objective, free of “values,” felt that it could restore its honor only by contemptuously shoving me off into the theology department. These three opportunities were related to our three articles of faith, 1912 to the third, 1919 to the second, and 1935 to the first. I was so audacious as to invoke them. Presumably I have survived, thanks to this trinity. It cost me my native country, my colleagues, and so-called science.

…The distorted thing about our position today is that almost nobody who is earning his daily bread with the Christian creed realizes that the credo may be deadly dangerous. Only laymen believe that, or people like Bonhoeffer who take off their frocks. If the creed is not considered dangerous, divine worship is emasculated. The creed is either high voltage or empty straw.

(Thanks to Charles Hartman for the recommendation.)

“Matthew understands Jesus to be the rightful heir of the chieftaincy who instead volunteers to become the Victim at the tribe’s feast. But by being the voluntary victim, he becomes the first victim in the world who can speak.”

An excerpt from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s “Fruit of Lips”:

“…as oral as Peter the fisherman must have been and as much as he probably detested ink, Matthew certainly was familiar with paper work and written records, only too well. Since we do not expect him to be employed inside his old activities, where he had used writing for superficial purposes to say the least, we may expect him to fight elsewhere…”

Now, we read that he was not received in good society. And on the other hand, he begins with Jesus’ place in the social register of Israel. He stresses this fact that his master belonged in the very best society, as the son of kings. And he goes on to show that there were privileges connected with this social place which Jesus abandoned. “The son of kings should be scotfree” (Mt. 17.26). He should not pay customs duty nor any tax, be it capitation tax or the half shekel tax, as Jesus smilingly says (Mt. 17.27). But, Matthew goes on to say, the reverse happens.
He expresses the whole meaning of Jesus’ life in terms of an account, and I am sorry to grate the refined feelings of the suburban reader, but he does say: He gave his life as the price for buying back many (Mt. 20. 28).

This is not a figure of speech with Matthew. Matthew understands Jesus to be the rightful heir of the chieftaincy who instead volunteers to become the Victim at the tribe’s feast. But by being the voluntary victim, he becomes the first victim in the world who can speak. Nobody had ever spoken in this role. But victims, though mute, were essential. The association between the ancestors and the living was based on the common meal at which the dead partook as though alive, and the whole burial and funeral rite was based on this association between the dead and the living. The spirits of the dead asked for food, and these ghosts were bloodthirsty if they were not fed, according to the faith or superstition of all tribes. We accomplish the same by high entrance fees into clubs or fraternities. In this manner, we become members. Sacrifices were the core of ritual since they alone incorporated the group and gave it a legal status as a public corporation, beyond the grave, beyond the accidents of birth and death. Sacrifice, then, was the only means of establishing order and of creating legal persons.

“The price of a good dinner party is the complete silence kept by those who serve and by the food which is served.”

And to speak the proper names, to make the proper movements at these sacrifices was essential. They were that which we hold essential as table manners. To how many people of our own time table manners are the yardstick of promotion, membership, fellowship! The table manners of antiquity were equally strict. With us, a waiter at table is not expected to join the conversation of his own accord. Even less do we expect the roast-beef and the fish to talk. The price of a good dinner party is the complete silence kept by those who serve and by the food which is served. And my whole paragraph will be condemned by any reader of good taste because I mention the remote possibility that the roast-beef might speak. And this is Matthew’s whole point. The verdict ‘bad taste’ – how often had he heard it turned against himself and his bad company – he knew to be more murderous for a man than any other crime.

Society expects us to play the rules of the game. It is inexorable if we break this etiquette. And yet, I had to commit this breach of etiquette myself if I wished to introduce Matthew at all. For herein lies his real achievement. He is the only Evangelist who tells of Jesus’ escape to Egypt when Herod murdered the children of Bethlehem. The whole point of Matthew is that though Herod could not murder him, he was murdered by good society for his breach of etiquette because he insisted on giving or lending speech to the victims of society. That Jesus spoke as the victim, made him impossible. Matthew scandalized the Jews. After all, they had nothing but burnt offerings since Abraham did not slaughter Isaac. They were highly civilized. In Sweden it could still happen a thousand years later that a king butchered six of his sons to placate the spirits. When he turned to his seventh son, the people saved the child, became Christians and gave up human sacrifices.

But Israel, after all, was the nation of Abraham and Moses. To this day, all Jews think that the Gospel is in bad taste. We read the word “scandal” in our texts, but “bad taste” would really convey better the whining under the Gospel. The ritual of any society – and I am afraid, we lose sight of this more readily than of anything else – protects itself by this violent recoiling. It does so at all times and in all places. Matthew: “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the Elders by not washing their hands before meals?” the Scribes asked. “Why do you,” Jesus retorted, “transgress God’s command and deny your own parents something they need because it is ‘consecrated’?” “You have made futile God’s words for the sake of your table manners.” (Mt. 15. 2-6). “Eating with unwashed hands does not make unclean.”

Against the taboo of table manners, Matthew “sins” and Jesus “sins.” For, Matthew shows Jesus as the speaking victim, as the meat and wine who begin to speak, in the midst of dinner. The shock administered by Matthew is wonderfully formulated by a modern critic:

“The reference to eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood is impossible in an Aramaic Gospel in Jerusalem in the first century; nothing could be more repugnant to Jewish ways and feelings. Words such as these would horrify Jewish residents of Jerusalem, then or now. The Jews were and still are, utterly opposed to the drinking of blood which the Law repeatedly forbade. It would be difficult to imagine a sentence less likely to have been written in a Jewish Christian circle anywhere at any time. No Jewish evangelist could have recorded it.”

This is an eloquent paragraph and the feeling of vomiting is probably well nigh aroused in many a reader. The humor of this passage lies in two facts: first, that the critic deals with John who in this matter simply affirms Matthew. The critic tries to refute the Jewish origin of John. And he ignores the case of Matthew, who obviously wrote for Hebrews. The second humorous fact is the modern assumption that every scandal can be avoided. The Jews stoned Stephen, killed James, jailed Peter because they were furious. The lamb, the blood, the bread, all these terms, of course, were blasphemies. But the whole history of the Church was based on this fury. Paul in Athens when he for once tried to be adaptable, was a complete failure. Matthew was abhorred and the Gospel was abhorred and, be honest, is abhorred by all men of good taste today.

“Matthew knew that the pudenda of life were real. That it was less bad taste to speak as the victim, as bread and wine, than to do the act of Condemning the Just.”

The price of all ritual is sacrifice. When we bind ourselves to a ghost of the past, to a piece of paper, to a house, to a grave, we are apt to spill somebody else’s blood for the purpose. And so it is to this day. This is all right if it is in our consciousness which price we pay. But Jesus created a brotherhood where before the victims had been drafted. But the Eucharist is still a scandal to a Jew. It makes him vomit, quite literally, as it would any man of etiquette. Matthew knew that the pudenda of life were real. That it was less bad taste to speak as the victim, as bread and wine, than to do the act of Condemning the Just. He [Matthew] was immune against the mortal disease of good society. He knew that everything has its price. And that nothing is more expensive than freedom from the taboos of good society. And so he ceased to call the first man who had spoken for the victims and as a victim, by his name in society, son of David, Son of Abraham, as he had begun in Chapter One. This taboo was broken, Matthew, in his last chapter found himself in the infinitely more exciting society of sinners who no longer were bound together by high entrance fees but by the name of the first victim who had spoken out loud.

It is not impossible, by the way, that Matthew went to Ethiopia. Now, the point of this mission would be that the Ethiopians, to this day, observe the whole Jewish ceremonial as well as the New Testament liturgy. They circumcise and baptize; they observe the Sabbath as well as the Sunday. One cannot tell; but it would be in accordance with the Word of the Gospel if this duplication happened because of Matthew. Because the only disease which he fought was the superstition of ritual. Manners must be; but manners are not more than manners.

Matthew, by illuminating the breaking of table manners, went over primeval ground. In primeval days, table manners had. been the creative elements from which the body politic sprang. Instead of snatching food from each other – in our C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps of the unemployed this beastly snatching was not rare and always indicated the loss of camp morale – like the animals, the introduction of common meals created a new peace of mind. Around the meal for the dead, or perhaps more exactly, with their dead, the new incorporation took place. Food was placed between the living and the dead, and both partook of it, in one spirit and in one name. Hence, sacrificial meals were the first constitutions of mankind. Here it was that the community was enacted because the stomach’s enlightened “self”-interest was forgotten when the best pieces were reserved for the dead and later, the gods. Permanency eclipsed the interests of the living generation. The accidents of birth and of being alive were overshadowed by the eternity of the dead.

In the cooling shadow of this permanency and eternal order, peaceful arrangements were made between friend and foe; hospitality, the right of the enemy to eat with us, was introduced and became possible because ritual showed man his place in the succession of endless times. Here, people did not eat like the animals but they toasted each other by their full name. The salutation at meals is primeval. Men greeted each other and thought of each other at meals as “convivials,” id est, as co-livers, as now the other fellow’s life counted more in one’s own eyes, than the “self.”

To these primeval foundations of society Matthew takes us back. John spoke to peoples who knew the arts and sciences. Luke spoke to the greatest religionists and puritans of the ancient world. Mark spoke to the civilized inhabitants of the temple state. But Matthew penetrated, by his “bad taste,” to the most archaic layer of all society, to the tribal layer of ritual. Hence, Matthew gave a version of the Gospel which had to become the most universal and the most fundamental feature of the new Way of Life. The Mass and the Eucharist, the inner core of all divine services is written up in Matthew.

Since he made it clear that Christ bought, by his sacrifice, the salvation of the sacrificers, it was now written that the victim of every meal, that [namely] bread and wine, spoke to the dining communion and invited them to shift with their master to the other side of the counter, so to speak, to the side of the victim. In the Mass, every member is invited to be sacrificed or to be ready to be sacrificed for the salvation and the renovation of the world. In the Mass, the first victim invites the others, the partakers, to a service in which they themselves are the offerings. In the dullness of the average mind, this fact rarely makes a dent. People have degraded the divine service to a church parade or a social gathering. But the Church was built on the faith that from now on, no divine service was permitted unless the people considered themselves as the sacrifice offered. The whole expression of a Body of Christ, with the head in Heaven, meant exactly this, that we who would crucify the Lord every day, in our rage and envy and indifference, now, with our eyes opened once for what we have done and are doing, declare solemnly: We now, together with our Head, step on the side of the silent victims and offer ourselves to our Maker so that he can remake the sacrifice as he pleases. How else could ever a new inspiration befall us as a people unless we offer ourselves as the body for this inspiration? Time and again, man has to be ripped open by the ploughshare of suffering and open himself like a dry and desiccated earth to dew and rain. And ever since one men did this manifestly all alone and by himself, his congregations relieve the members of the total pressure of absolute loneliness. In every generation, the group which may be remodeled, may increase, until the whole of markind will be allowed to fall silent and to cleanse themselves from the chatter and clatter of the day, and to listen to the Spirit, simultaneously…

“The minds which scorn the sacraments as myth or obsolete, never fail to frighten me by their childishness.”

Matthew, the most drastic, the least mannered, also is the most elementary evangelist. Through him, we have received the ritual in writing. Our era would otherwise have been without any dress for its nakedness. It is very nice to leave obsolete clothing behind you, but our era needed dress, some dress, just the same. Now we received the power of ritual free from superstition or myth or magic. Everybody can understand Matthew — child and genius, warrior and farmer — unless his heart is alien to self-sacrifice. The minds which scorn the sacraments as myth or obsolete, never fail to frighten me by their childishness. What an ignorant and uneducated heart they must have; how the gristmill of their brain must have crushed all serious experience of life and of their own deepest hopes! Usually, these same people expect to be adored by their family, read by the public, paid by their endowed institution. How can they expect it unless man’s nature is fulfilled by his entering the ranks of the offerings? It is our highest nature that we should be offerings. “Liturgy is only another name for Almighty God’s table manners.”

The victim made eloquent, the world heart crested by responses, the No of God turned into an intermediary medicine of suffering on the road to a new incarnation, the human soul God’s newest poem — these were the four glad tidings. The blind alleys of ritual, temple cult, Israel, Greece opened up to each other. And these four men succeeded because they were immune to the specific disease of speech which their tidings deluged. This is the reason why it is faulty to call John Hellenistic, Mark Egyptian, Matthew Judaizing, Luke Pauline. The restoration of free speech by the Gospels proceeded by a matching of opposites. Neither does the prophetioal John write for the Jews, nor does the learned Luke write for the Greeks. The fisherman Peter writes for the scientific world. And it is not a man of good taste and good standing who by his first Gospel matches the Old Testament, but the in-no-way venerable publican.

(Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Fruit of Lips, pp. 66-74.)

Jordan writes:

From ancient times it has been known that Matthew wrote first (despite all the nonsense of liberals during the last century). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in his out-of-print book The Fruit of Lips, presents some compelling arguments to show that each of the gospel writers was adding to the previous writer, and in fact that each gospel picks up where the preceding one left off in terms of theme.

Matthew presents Christ as Ox/Moses. His book is full of speeches, for the ear is central. Jesus is law-giver. God is the Father and the God of heaven, and “kingdom of heaven” is Matthew’s term (pointing back to the symbolism of the Tabernacle).

Mark presents Jesus as a man of action. Mark presents Jesus as Lion/David, performing great works, swiftly going here and there, for the hand is central. In Mark, Jesus always does things “immediately.” Mark is shorter than Matthew not because Mark wrote first (what a silly argument!), but because Mark does not provide the great sermons. The field of action is the land.

Luke presents Jesus as the Eagle/Prophet, interacting with gentiles and women much more than the other two. In Luke, Jesus is always on the move, and half of his book is taken up with the Travel Narrative to Jerusalem, for the foot is central. The Spirit receives the great emphasis in Luke and Acts. The field of action is the world.

Finally, John presents Jesus as Man, the Image of God. The phrase “son of man” used in the other gospels points to Jesus as second Adamic priest, king, and prophet. The phrase “son of God” used in John points to Jesus as the image of God, true humanity as well as true God. John’s Jesus tours the sanctuary, which represents heaven. Thus, John puts us in the Throneland.

James B. Jordan, The Production of the New Testament Canon: A Revisionist Suggestion.

Now, Fruit of Lips is back in print.

John the evangelist was asked in his dotage why his sermon was so short that he would only say, “Children, keep each other at heart.” He gave the famous answer, “For two reasons: it is enough and the Lord has said so.”

The four gospels suffice since every one of the four claims made by Ichthys has become “lips” in one man’s dramatic change of mind. The Lord has made these four claims, no more. And he has said so. Let us read the Gospels once more: Do they give evidence of actual dependence beyond the “material” used? Yes, they do. They beget each other.

Every Gospel begins exactly at the point to which the previous Gospel has progressed on its tortuous path. The last word of the one sets the tune and is the overture for the next. The “last word” is not meant in a literal or pedantic sense; by it, we understand the last step of thought, reached in the dramatic progress.

If this is so, then the Gospels continue each other, each beginning to think and to speak where the previous evangelist had ended, and turning his final word into an opening of a new drama. Matthew’s last word is that Jesus has become the Son of God, in the sense of the Trinity. Mark begins: The Son of God (not “the Son of David,” as Matthew). Mark ends with the “Mission of the ministers of the word.” Fittingly, the missionary Luke begins with “the ministers of the word.” Luke, furthermore, ends Acts with a long statement: That the Jews have ears and do not hear and have eyes but do not see, but “the Gentiles shall hear.”

Majestically, John breaks in at exactly this last word of Acts: “Indeed, the darkness has not seen the light, the world has not seen it, but his own have beheld his glory, and we have seen him.” Also, Luke ends with the power of the Gospel; John begins with the World’s Power.

This is not an accident, this connection of ends and beginnings. Laboriously every Gospel works itself up to its climax. Easily the mantle of the Gospel writer then falls on the man who is prepared best to take over at this very point.

A detailed chart follows, but you will have to purchase the book for that: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Fruit of Lips.

.
The view that the death and resurrection of Christ purchased back for us the innocence (and innocent world) of Genesis 1 seems extremely childish to me now. How did we miss the fact that the Old Testament is filled to overflow with deaths and resurrections, personal, familial, national and imperial? There was no death before sin, but the scenario deliberately set up by God in Genesis was to bring Adam to a point of making a wise judgment. He was to crush the head of the serpent. In a sense, he was to kill death. His obedience would guarantee future life, but his obedience itself was a form of death. Obeying God is a daily dying, but as Paul understood, it was a dying so that there might be rejoicing on the other side. Obedience is a death that makes a judgment call to purchase, nay, miraculously create, new life. The original creation was set up, wound up, to go somewhere better, to be something greater.

Peter Leithart gave some lectures on the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 2008:

In Rosenstock-Huessy’s view, the once-for-all event of all once-for-all events is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

“The crucifixion and the last judgment would not be known today as everyday occurrences in our lives if they had not occurred one-for-all with terrific majesty.” The whole experience of death and resurrection is something that Jesus plants into human history, and then reproduces in countless ways.

“In the crucifixion, with the accompanying darkness, the rending of the curtain in the temple, etc, that which is to happen finally has happened once already. For the faithful, the second coming of Christ as judge really began with His first coming. The crucifixion judges us all because we know that we would have behaved like Pilate or Gamaliel or Peter or Judas or the soldiers. The last judgment will make known publicly what those who have died with their first Brother already experience daily: that our Maker remains our Judge.”

Because of what Jesus’ death and resurrection bring into human history, this is the beginning of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “the Christian era.” It is a new epoch of human history. It is an irreversible epoch of human history. Once the Christian era begins, you can try to leave it, but you are still borrowing what it provided for you. You still remain, he says, “a man of Jesus.” You can either resent the fact that Jesus is your Master, as Nietzsche did, or you can submit to it and be content with being “Jesus’ man.” Those are the only two options in the Christian era.

But it is the once-for-all event of the cross which has made possible the experience of repeated deaths-and-resurrections in life. Rosenstock-Huessy is not just talking about the resurrection of our bodies from the dead. He does believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and of humanity at the last day. But he says that the death and resurrection of Jesus, planted into humanity, makes death and resurrection a daily occurrence for men, and a civilisational occurrence in the history of the world.

How is death and resurrection a daily occurrence? One premise that is found all the way through Rosenstock-Huessy’s work is that life means vulnerability, life means suffering. To live means to experience shock, to experience failure. Human beings are always being torn in pieces. We are always being torn apart. We always have conflicting demands placed on us. People place conflicting demands on us. Our own conscience places conflicting demands on us. And many of these conflicting demands are equally valid and yet we have to make a choice. So we are constantly faced with these kinds of existential crises.

What Jesus provides in His death and resurrection is not just the idea that these experiences lead to life, but the reality that these experiences of being torn, of suffering, and dying and putting away the old are gateways to new life. The cross becomes the gateway to renewal. That is the reality that Jesus planted in human history.

In 1946, in “The Christian Future,” Rosenstock-Huessy describes a time in his own life some twenty years earlier when he felt like he was experiencing the cross. He writes, “I felt that I was undergoing a real crucifixion. I was deprived of all my powers, virtually paralysed, yet I came back to life again a changed man. What saved me was that I could look back to the supreme events of Jesus’ life and recognise my own small eclipse in His great suffering. That enabled me to wait in complete faith for resurrection to follow crucifixion in my experience. Ever since then it seemed foolish to doubt the historical reality of the original crucifixion and resurrection.” That is an interesting existential argument for the resurrection: “I am convinced of the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection because I know what it’s like to die and rise again.”

This is the possibility opened for us by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Death ceases to be something to be avoided, something to be bypassed, something to be ignored. Instead, death becomes something to be anticipated and accepted as something that has a positive value for life. The death that he is talking about is a death to anything that has gripped us, any form of life that we have been living (such as an earlier occupation, or an earlier stage of life such as singleness, divorce, or death of a spouse). All these can be embraced as pathways to new life instead of as things that bring an end to your life.

One of the ways in which Rosentock-Huessy expresses this is in Christianity’s capacity to slough off old gods through Jesus’ revelation of the living God in His death and resurrection. The living God is not the God who is timeless but the God who endures through death — through every death, every epoch of history — into new life.

By “gods,” he means any power that dominates us, any power that poses to us a question of life and death. But Jesus shows us that we can die to these gods and still have new life. He says, “By learning to anticipate the inevitable end which the pagan fights off, man has robbed death of its paralysing gloom. Anticipating the worst, he can bury his dead in time. A pagan was ready enough to die physically for his family, temple, guild, nation or race, but these he held to be immortal and therefore without flaw. He could not admit the necessity of letting them die when the time had come, hence all went down together.” What Christianity reveals is the possibility of giving up even these deepest loyalties, these temporary “gods,” and still hoping for something new.

You might devote yourself for a considerable period of your life to the pursuit of money. It dominates you. You do what your pursuit demands you to do. What happens when there is a financial crisis? Can you find a new life on the other side of that. Rosenstock-Huessy says, Christianity says, “Yes, you can! There is life on the other side, beyond the death of the old god, the life of the living God who endures all crises, all death-and-resurrection experiences.”

Anticipating death is one of the particular virtues of Christian civiliation. The civilisation is not set up to keep death at bay, but rather its pattern of life is set up to anticipate death and to embrace deaths of various sorts in recognition that those deaths are going to lead to resurrections.

“Christianity is not a decadent worship of death for its own sake, (as someone like Nietzsche would say) but the discovery that including death in life is the secret of the fullness of life.” Monks and hermits, for example, die before their deaths. They die to their families, they die to any pursuits they might have had outside of the monastery, but their existence proves that death is an essential element of living. In fact, death is its sharpest ingredient. Any father, manager or teacher has to practice resignation and let the young learn by doing things he could do better himself. That’s a kind of death, for he knows that one day he must die and they must take his place. That is anticipating death. Christianity gives us the assurance that this is possible. If people don’t anticipate death, then the various tearings in life make us vulnerable to all kinds of evils. [1]

Some more thoughts:

This is the essence of Covenant succession, and this generational succession was built into the Creation. The genealogies matter. Adam, as father, manager and teacher, was to anticipate death, not ignore it or avoid it. He was to pass sentence, avenge his “church” and execute judgment upon sin for the sake of his future offspring — embodied in the Mother of all Living.

The sentence was death. Adam was to administer the curse delegated to him by God upon the serpent. Adam himself was to bring both death and life into the world through this wise judgment. But Adam failed. The Bible gives us a Messianic line from Adam to Jesus. The same test is played out over and over, in persons, families, nations and empires — and even Covenants. All bodies, all Tabernacles, wax old and pass away, and so do the old gods, the old satans.

But the living God is always doing something new. He implants Himself into the history. Israel sins and God gets torn up over it. Yahweh makes Himself vulnerable, a Tabernacle, a house designed to die. Yahweh tears Israel up and then brings her out of the grave, but, unlike Adam, He understands that this can only be accomplished if He goes through it with her.

As a new Adam, Jesus brought death and life into the world — death for the serpent, and life for us. But we are not sky-watching, heaven-pining pietistic gnostics. The ascended Jesus is still, by His Spirit, Emmanuel: God here with us.

This new commission is also a succession, a new history, a new conquest. Jesus has a lot to teach us along the way as He makes us as wise concerning good and evil as He is. And He is building an entire worldful of such people, a civilisation of self-sacrifice, passing sentence upon death, with death, until death is destroyed. As Christians become more and more “epistemologically self-aware,” obedience-as-Covenant-tool becomes the foundation of civilisation, the process of resurrecting the nations, until the Church itself is the Mother of All the Living. This is the postmillennial hope. [2]

____________________________________________
[1] Biblical Horizons conference lectures are available from www.wordmp3.com
[2] On the Roman church’s failure to understand this process, see Prisoners of the Future.

or Being a Truly Impure Thinker

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” John 14:15

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

You must be logged in to see the rest of this post.

Join now for a year for $15!

_____________________________________
[1] Available from www.wordmp3.com
[2] Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, “Farewell to Descartes” in I Am an Impure Thinker [PDF]
[3] See Marriage as a Promise of Wine.
[4] See Eat Local and Die.
[5]  See Touch Not, Taste Not, Handle Not.
[6] See Knowledge and Wisdom.

 

“Nobody has the power to bless or be blessed who has lost the vigor to curse. Our society is so polite that it cannot curse social evils and prefers to blaspheme God instead.”
- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Judgment is not destruction. Judgment is assessment. For every beast rejected and sent to outer darkness, there is a redeemed beast that ascends to God. AD70 was the ultimate Yom Kippur, the outworking of the cross. Passover always leads to the Day of Atonement, the Day of the Lord when the flaming sword turns to and fro.