If You Want To Know the Symbolic Meaning of…

Another amazon review of Inquiétude, this time from Rich Bledsoe. Read here.

An excerpt from a new book, Metropolitan Manifesto, by Rich Bledsoe.

Institutions say they want change, but this is at best a schizophrenic desire. Change requires pain and nobody wants pain.

Death and Resurrection Motif in the Bible

The entire backbone of this manifesto is the application of the biblical motif of death and resurrection to the leader’s situation. This begins with his/her survival in office, but must then have a broader application than that. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has understood the death and resurrection motif as the key to Western history as no one has. For the life of the Church and the Kingdom of God when things appeared to be at dead ends, over and over, it turns out to be the beginnings.

We see this pattern in the Old Testament. God brought a wicked world to an end in the flood and saved only eight people in the ark. But the end of that first world carried the promise of the rainbow with it as God promised He would never again flood the earth and made a covenant with all living things (Genesis 9:8-17).

A few generations later, He initiates a program of redemption when He calls Abraham to Himself, and promises to bless the whole earth and all peoples in Him (Genesis 12:1-3). This calling of Abraham is a calling that is over against universal judgment as He had exercised in the flood.

The family of Abraham develops for four generations, and then seventy people are called down into Egypt where eventually they are enslaved (Genesis 46:27). It is significant that seventy Hebrews go down into Egypt. Seventy is the
number of the nations, being derived from the table of nations in Genesis 10. Whenever the number seventy arises, it is symbolic of the nations.¹An example of this would be in the Gospel of Luke, which is the Gospel to the Gentiles. In Luke 9, Jesus sends out the twelve to the Jews, which number is symbolic of Israel being the nation of twelve tribes. Then in Luke 10, He sends out seventy to cities He is preparing to go to, some of which are in Gentile areas, and include Gentiles. Egypt is a fiery furnace and slavery in Egypt is a kind of death. These Hebrew people are going down into Egypt to die for the world. Their enslavement is in place of a universal judgment that would once again destroy the earth. The Exodus is a resurrection. Israel emerges from the furnace of Egypt in new life and is raised from the dead by Yahweh. Israel now proceeds to explicitly become the priestly people to the entire world.

If the death/resurrection motif is not clear in the Egyptian experience, it is made explicit in the Babylonian captivity. Return from Babylon is directly likened to a resurrection in Ezekiel 37. This passage presents a vision
of a valley of dry bones coming together, flesh coming onto the bones and breath entering the resurrected bodies. This is Israel and Israel is coming back from the dead.

Jesus literally fulfills the death and resurrection anticipated in Ezekiel 37, and the Church is baptized into His death and resurrection. The disciples are sent forth to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and they are to disciple the nations, not just individuals. Whole nations begin to take upon themselves this identity of “death and resurrection peoples” in analogous ways to Israel.

In previous chapters, we have spoken of the pattern of death and resurrection entering the life of the counselor to the king, as well as to the king himself. The hope for the leader is that his own experience of death and resurrection can become the experience of the institution he has headship over. Each institution is partaking of an era of a particular form of death and resurrection. It is in this that Rosenstock-Huessy has seen so deeply into. Hence, it is the explication of these patterns that become a way of giving orientation and hope to leaders.

Scapegoating and Cyclical Time: Hopeless and Hope

The first time I met privately with one of the leaders in our city, I said, “I am praying for you to make it in your office to seven years.” I hardly had to say another word. This person was almost as far down the road on this issue as was I. She said, “Before I came here (she named an important official in another state) X said to me, ‘When you get there, I want you to break the four year curse.’ “ Indeed, nobody had made it in this particular office for more than five years in nearly forty years. This was a very moving issue for the official. Momentarily, she appeared to be near tears. She was very touched. I then told her that her first year would be a honeymoon, the second a bit tougher and the sheen would be gone, and between the third and forth year, all hell would break loose. “If there isn’t a crisis, one will be invented. They will attempt to crucify you.” Several years later, a crisis indeed was invented. I got a call one evening, and it was the chief of staff wanting to know if I would see this person. A time was arranged, and I had a meal with her and her husband. We discussed the crisis. “How long have you been here?” She thought for a few moments. “Almost exactly three and a half years.” (This is significant, because Christ was crucified at 42 months, or 3 1/2 years into His ministry).

A number of years later, I had meeting with another person in that same office. I began by saying, “You know, you have about one more year before they come after you.” He got silent. He was a very seasoned politician in his previous life. He knew exactly what I meant. He then said three things. “You have been around here a long time, haven’t you.” It was a statement, not a question. I said, “Yes.” “You’ve seen this before, haven’t you.” Again, it was a statement. “Yes.” Then he did ask a question. “What sect are you from?” I told him my affiliation (Presbyterian). He was very silent and thoughtful, and our interview ended. I never saw him again, but he resigned a few months later. When he left, he left with a hero’s departure with the press trumpeting all that he had achieved. He had been there a little more than two years. What I knew was that he was getting out of Dodge ahead of the lynch mob that he knew was coming.

What follows in this section is not presented as a law, but as something that has typically functioned as one of the first acts of wisdom or interpretation that begins to win the king. The typical first act of wisdom in my experience has to do with a kind of prophesy regarding scapegoating and cyclical time.

This is the information that understandably has had the most immediate and often the deepest effect on almost all officials with whom I have counselled. This understanding is a combination of things that I have learned from Edwin
Friedman, Rene Girard and James Jordan.²Friedman, E. (1985), Generation to generation: family process in church and synagogue. New York, Guilford Press. Bailie, G. (1995), Violence unveiled : humanity at the crossroads. New York, Crossroad. Girard, R. (2001), I see Satan fall like lightning. Maryknoll, N.Y. Ottawa Leominster, Herefordshire, Orbis Books; Novalis; Gracewing. Jordan, J. B. (2007), The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Powder Springs. GA, American Vision.

Time is of the utmost in importance to anyone who is appointed or elected to any given office. As often as not, the reason someone is newly appointed or elected is to bring change and resolve problems that the institution has been experiencing. This, however, is not really the case. Institutions say they want change, but this is at best a schizophrenic desire. Change requires pain and nobody wants pain. Ray Bakke has said that the first rule of all pastoral care is that all change is experienced as loss, even if it means a net gain in the long run. People want change until it means change, and then what we all want is for the same tune to be played, with the hope that this time it will be different.

The Bible is replete with numbers and many numbers have a typological content. One of the most basic numbers is the number seven. The world was created in seven days, and all through the Bible we find time being structured on sevens. Israel’s long term calendar was so structured with a weekly Sabbath every seven days, a Sabbath year every seventh year and a Jubilee year every seven times seven years. The Gospel of John is extensively structured on
sevens, as is the Book of Revelation, and Daniel prophesies about seventy weeks of years (7 X 10, Dan. 9:24).³There are seven miracles and seven discourses in the Gospel of John, and Revelation has seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls.

The number three and a half is obviously seven cut in two. We first find it employed when Elijah prays for it not to rain, and it does not rain for forty-two months, or three and a half years. Three and a half is a curse. It is a time of completion, of creation or recreation cut short or in two. (James 5:17, I Kings 18:1, Daniel 9:27, Revelation 11:2, 12:6, 13:5). Jesus was crucified at about three and a half years into His ministry. The implication is that His life was cut off or cut in two. He bore the curse for us.

When someone enters office, it will take somewhere between seven and ten years to bring meaningful renewal.⁴Rosenstock-Huessy, E. (1947), The Christian future: or the modern mind outrun. London, S.C.M. Press. Cheyeny, T. Climbing Past 400 In New Church Attendence. In our current environment, this almost never happens. Most leaders are cut off in the middle. In my experience, most leaders are effectively cut off before they have been in office for four years, and most will quit somewhere around five years. This means that renewal never takes place and that the old dysfunctions just continue. Most of our institutions are not being renewed, and at some point the dysfunction could become complete.

In order to keep renewal from being brought by the leader, the leader must be removed or have his or her effectiveness destroyed. This happens through the process of blame and scapegoating. If a crisis can be found at hand, that will do. If one cannot be immediately found, one can always be manufactured. And this will happen with the greatest intensity somewhere between three and four years, at approximately three and a half years. In other words, the leader will be crucified. If he or she can survive this time, then they can make it to seven years, and be successful in bringing renewal. In this, they virtually pass through a resurrection.

If a resurrection is not experienced, then a new leader will be brought in, usually with great fanfare, to solve the problems that the previous leader could not resolve. What has really happened is that things are just going in vicious cycles, and the same thing in all likelihood will happen to the new leader. No real renewal will happen, and further decay and degeneration will continue to plague the institution, and will probably get worse.

Capturing the Conscience of the King

This forms the background of the capturing of the conscience of the king. Since the infamous 60s, when the fervor of the French Revolution was introduced into our universities and our cities, crucifixion of some sort is now almost inevitable in all positions of leadership in the United States.⁵This is true in most parts of the country, except the Deep South and those parts termed the Bible belt, which are still more stable. But in those parts of the country, the problem is often the opposite where officials stay and stay and form a good ol’ boys’ network that is just as impervious to renewal. In my experience, almost no leader in any significant position lasts more than five years in his or her tenure. As an example, I have discovered as a result of my ministry that university presidents in this country routinely play a game of musical chairs about every four years. A deep intuitive knowledge exists, that it is impossible to survive in any presidential, or chancellor position, beyond an early era before conflict has developed. Leaving at four years is often a way of avoiding what appears to be inevitable destruction in that position. It is leaving ahead of the final and inevitable destruction and end of intolerable and impossible conflict that has by that time already been inaugurated.

My entry into many offices has been an understanding of this and speaking of this reality to the various leaders I have met. Understandably, there is hope of something better or more coming of what appears to be inevitable destructive conflict. Interest in talking with me is usually prompted by sheer self interest. People pursue these positions often for noble professional reasons, as well as sometimes, out of sheer personal ambition. Someone coming to them and speaking of an inevitable destruction of their position in office is certainly an attention getter. However, that discussion sometimes follows some kind of power encounter that has also been an attention getter. The prediction of the nightmare of coming conflict that will be utterly destructive is sometimes the first opening that the counselor has to begin to speak wisdom. Almost nobody else will broach such a subject, and, if they do, it is never broached with hope. Hope in the coming darkness is the advisor to the king’s great weapon and entrance. Who but a Christian, and particularly a Christian pastor, could better offer the hope of resurrection from the dead?

Metropolitan Manifesto: Half the world’s population now lives in cities, and that is where the Church must learn to serve. Rev. Richard Bledsoe has spent his life as a pastor to city leaders in Colorado. Over the years, he has become the unofficial bishop of his city, a recognized adviser to the king. In Metropolitan Manifesto: On Being a Counselor to the King in a Pluralistic Empire, Bledsoe lays out the theology behind his work, explains how to minister to leaders, and shares the lessons of his long experience. The Metropolitan Manifesto is an essential, inspiring testament to the transformative power of the gospel in today’s world.

An excerpt from a new book, Metropolitan Manifesto, by Rich Bledsoe.

The ancient and pagan world was conquered by martyrs. Can modernity be re-Christianized by anything else?

Death and Resurrection

The death and resurrection of Christ is now the central and final fact of the world, and it was the decisive blow to evil. I am going to argue that it is also the central reality of leadership. The theory of leadership presented in this book is a theory of martyrdom. One must experience a type of death before one can be raised to new life and authority to deal with evil and problems that are otherwise intractable.

There is nothing new in this. The Church Calendar, which is used by all liturgical communions (Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians), remembers a saint for every day of the year, and it remembers them not on their birthday (other than Jesus on Christmas and a handful of other figures), but on the day of their martyrdom or of their death (the day of their exodus to Heaven). The ancient and pagan world was conquered by martyrs. Can modernity be re-Christianized by anything else?

Islam is the perverse mirror image of Christendom,¹Leithart, P. (2007). “Mirror of Christendom: Why Islam Exists and What To Do About It.” Views and Reviews: Open Book Occasional Papers 24:15. and it is today attacking the West by the power of false martyrdom. Is it not necessary to re-understand the power of martyrdom in Jesus Christ? Even if full martyrdom is not called for, a real encounter with death still is called for.²John Collins states that every “Level Five” leader that he and his team encountered, were marked by peculiar humility combined with extraordinary power of will, and many had either experienced a religious conversion or had come close to death and come back from that experience. Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to great: why some companies make the leap–and others don’t. New York, NY, Harper Business. pp. 17-40. David only became a great king, for example, because of his years in the wilderness fleeing Saul, and this constituted a kind of death. Paul overcame the Roman Empire from whipping posts and prisons. In today’s world, authority still comes by means of wildernesses and what seem like whipping posts and imprisonments. We are called to have “eyes to see,” so what may be typically viewed as hazards to be avoided, or hardships to be resented, may instead be seen as paths to transformation.

On a very large scale in the modern world, leadership by martyrdom can be seen in the extraordinary downfall of Communism at the end of the 20th Century. In the triumvirate of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and John Paul II, Reagan and John Paul both had narrow escapes from death when both nearly died at the hands of assassins. Both of them believed they were spared by God for the mission of toppling Communism. Reagan, who had always had a belief in predestination, had a great deepening in his faith that God’s hand was in all things and especially in this.³Kengor, P. (2004). God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life. New York, Regan Books pp. 197-216. It is doubtful that either man would have had the authority or wisdom to do what they did had they not come back from the dead.⁴It has become the minority report that Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul were the real force behind the collapse of Communism, and it is now commonly said that the entire event was somehow “inevitable” and would have happened no matter what. But it is very odd that during that era, Reagan alone was predicting the collapse of Communism, and the people now declaring the “inevitability” of its collapse, laughed at his bumpkin notions, and declared that Communism “was here to stay” and that it had now been amply proven that the Soviet style command economy had produced “remarkable results” fully the equal of the West.
D’Souza, D. (1997). Ronald Reagan: how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader. New York, Free Press. Chapter 1, “The Wise Men and the Dummy.”
Anthony Sutton demonstrated that Communism, because of its economically self destructive nature, was repeatedly on the verge of collapse through the early to middle twentieth century. It was however, repeatedly propped up by the West, and not allowed to collapse. Sutton, A. C. (1968). Western technology and Soviet economic development. Stanford, Calif., Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace Stanford University.
Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul pushed the tottering giant to the cliff’s edge and did nothing to stop it when it began tumbling. It was also the case that the combined rhetoric of these leaders disestablished any vestige of moral respectability left behind the Iron Curtain. Mikel Gorbochev certainly did his part. He appeared to want the demise of his own empire.
He seems to have begun to believe in something else. Reagan on several occasions told his advisors that he suspected Gorbechev to be “a secret believer.” He was right. Gorbechev made his faith public in 2008 when he made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Francis of Assisi.

The Advisor to the King Goes First

The advisor is likewise called to experience death and resurrection. If he or she does not, they will lack the requisite authority to help the leader they are dealing with.

The two great biblical models for advisors to the king are Joseph and Daniel. Both experienced death and resurrection in their lives.

Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and taken to a foreign land. That was a death. He was then imprisoned because of his virtue while faithfully serving his foreign master. He was eventually raised from the dead by being called out of prison as an interpreter of nightmares and then appointed the Prime Minister of the entire nation. He finally revealed himself to his brothers in Genesis 45 (“‘I am Joseph; does my father still live?’ But his brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed in his presence….‘I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt.’” Genesis 45:3-4) This is one of the first typological foreshadowings of the Resurrection of Christ in the Bible.

Daniel likewise was a refugee. He also faced death when he was put into the lion’s den. His three associates and friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego, were likewise thrown into the fiery furnace. In both cases, there was an emergence in a resurrection.

The advisor must pass through great trial, grief, sorrow and difficulty or he will be unequipped to give the requisite help. Much of his calling is to enable the leader to pass through crisis, and sometimes crisis of great magnitude. What but the power of the Cross of Christ could possibly give someone the necessary strength and power to successfully pass through such deep waters?⁵This calls to mind this amusing passage from G.K. Chesterton’s great novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. Garbiel Syme volunteers to become a philosophical policeman in the battle against world-wide anarchism, and he meets Sunday in a completely dark room, and the following conversation ensues when he is recruited for his new position:
Somewhat dazed and considerably excited, Syme allowed himself to be led to a side-door in the long row of buildings of Scotland Yard. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he had been passed through the hands of about four intermediate officials, and was suddenly shown into a room, the abrupt blackness of which startled him like a blaze of light. It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced; it was like going suddenly stone-blind.
“Are you the new recruit?” asked a heavy voice.
And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.
“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.
“I really have no experience,” he began.
“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of Armageddon.”
“But I am really unfit——”
“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.” “I do,” said the other —“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”

A Particular Account

A friend of mine gave a personal account that conveys the heart of this conviction. In an early pastorate, he came to a place of complete deadlock with his church. In all too typical fashion, he became the lightening rod for all of the problems in the church. He was blamed for everything and was repeatedly attacked and lied about. In one horrific congregational meeting, he was personally attacked and vilified and accused of numerous things that were clearly untrue. He described going home, putting his head in his wife’s lap, and weeping like a baby. This went on for hours. He finally felt as though he had come to the complete end of himself. Astonishingly, he believed that it was God’s will for him to stay and not to resign.

The next day, he went to his elders and said that he was determined to stay and that he would not leave. They were stunned. My friend was a dead man. He had been murdered the night before. And yet, here he was, alive and refusing to leave his post. What does one say to a dead man come back to life? They were speechless. That was the turning point. From that time on, he had the authority and wisdom to deal with that church’s failings and needs. The church changed and prospered.⁶The accuracy of this account, and permission to use it, was confirmed to the writer in an e-mail from Rev. Williams on February 28, 2009.

Only a leader who comes back from the dead has the power to do this. And likewise, if one is called to be a counselor to leaders who will themselves have to experience this, then the counselor must likewise go through the same fires in some way before that can be a reality.

Metropolitan Manifesto: Half the world’s population now lives in cities, and that is where the Church must learn to serve. Rev. Richard Bledsoe has spent his life as a pastor to city leaders in Colorado. Over the years, he has become the unofficial bishop of his city, a recognized adviser to the king. In Metropolitan Manifesto: On Being a Counselor to the King in a Pluralistic Empire, Bledsoe lays out the theology behind his work, explains how to minister to leaders, and shares the lessons of his long experience. The Metropolitan Manifesto is an essential, inspiring testament to the transformative power of the gospel in today’s world.

How will the world judge God
when given the opportunity?

For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:5)

You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34)

The aim of the testing of Adam was to qualify him to be a co-regent with God. Rich Bledsoe argues that the question of God’s existence is not ontological but ethical at heart. History is Man’s attempt to either eradicate God’s rule, or to make God co-regent with Man.

The account given of the creation and subsequent fall of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis shows the beginning of ethical selfism. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, and God refers to them as those who have come to know good and evil. What this means is that they now have fallen away from knowing the will of God, and of being able to obey it, and they have now, like God, become the authors of morality. They themselves will be the determiners of what is good and of what is evil. Their own selves become the source, and this is now thrust upon them. From that time forward, the creation of morality will be an onerous, and impossible, human burden.

The modern world is now far more self-consciously “selfist” than the world was five minutes after the fall, and more so than it was in Jesus’ own day. The seed if implication has been developing over time. And just as selfism leads to darkness in regard to the very possibility of self-knowledge or of any knowledge of the world, it also leads to darkness in regard to actions that are good, and actions that are bad. The assumption behind human ethics now is that the world and humanity are self-complete without reference to God, and this always leads to self-looping vicious circles in regard to human actions, because humanity is not self-complete, but pretends that it is. We are saddled with this as a curse, but generally speaking, the human race understands it as its own highest glory.

…the Bible indicates that inquiries into the existence of God are never neutral theoretical musings. They rather always have a particular ethical edge about them. They are interrogations, and have the character of accusation about them. The deepest intention of questioning the existence of God is not ontological; rather, it is ethical. There is something prior to the question of existence, and the existence question is clouded. If I am god, and my determinations are final, then it is simply impossible for the God of the Bible to be God, or for Jesus to be God. The ethical accusation is that God is unjust, and has no right to be God since this is now my office. If he exists, then his sheer existence is blasphemy. If he exists, then he is my enemy. It is necessary either to mute his existence and remake him as less than the almighty God of the Bible, one who is smaller, who is satisfied to, at best, co-exist with me, or it is the case that he simply does not exist. If he does exist as the almighty God of the Bible, then this brings confusion and dissonance. If I cannot dismiss him, then I must accuse him. Dismissal is actually accusation, and in all likelihood there is a veering back and forth between the two. The mindset of fallenness is double-mindedness. In all cases, it is necessary to take things into one’s own hands, and become one’s own god determining good and evil for oneself.

Interestingly, God seems to take a step back and allow us to do just that. He says that he will give us a great privilege. He will allow us to create a law, and then he will judge us by that law. Whatever judgments we bring to those around us will become the same standard of judgment that he will test us by. We have accused God of being an unjust judge. So God allows the privilege, and lets us determine our own standard. Hence, Aristotle will be judged by his own golden mean, Kant by his own categorical imperative, Sartre, who wanted to legislate for the entire world in his every decision, will be judged in the same way. In other words, it is a very dangerous thing to have the very power of determining both good and evil; it is fraught with terrible ironies. Jesus warned us about this in one of the most misused and misunderstood of all biblical texts. “Judge not, that ye might not be judged” (Matt. 7:1). The modern world quotes this often as a biblical justification for complete ethical tolerance, but it means exactly what it ways. You will be judged as you judge, and we have now all had this burden inescapably thrust upon us.

…There is a further step to this quandary. Even beyond being judged by our own standards, God has said that he will even permit us to judge him. As a race, we have declared him “out of court.” We have determined that he is unjust. As we judge God, we too shall be judged, for we have declared that we are gods. “On that day when, according to my Gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom 2:16). Jesus, who is the very word of God, was handed over to men to be judged. How will the world judge God when given the opportunity? Our judgment of him was self-damning. Here the reality of the divine law connects with the reality/unreality of man’s self-created law. On what basis of self-made law was Jesus crucified? Jesus was condemned because he claimed to be God, and because he claimed to be the true source of the judgment of good and evil. This was called blasphemy, and for this he was put to death. If this same standard is brought against his accusers, what is the result? It can only be death, for each judge tacitly made exactly the same claim. If you claim that God deserves to die because he claims to be God, then you too deserve to die because you make the same claim.

The result is that every god will damn himself and every mouth will be stopped, and all secrets will be judged by Christ Jesus.

Excerpts from Richard Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and post-Obama Era, 26-31.

If you are interested in being young, thinking young, and having progressive, up-to-date opinions on all subjects, and if you are particularly interested in establishing “social justice,” beware.

From the blog of Richard Bledsoe:

How odd the world is. Pharisees gave the pretence of caring about the justice and righteousness given witness to in the Torah. But instead, God’s righteousness was subverted by giving priority to the “traditions of the elders,” and the Word of God was buried under a mass of habits, traditions, and precepts inherited from past fathers. In doing so, they actually “became like the nations around them,” because such traditions were the whole fabric of all of the ancient world outside of Israel. The Word of God is startling, surprising, and its reception, application, and result, could never be foreseen or predicted.

Revelation created something unheard of and impossible outside of Revelation. It created a future. There could be no future for ancient pagans, because all of life was a repetition of the traditions of the elders. Such repetition simply meant nothing new could ever happen. But, the Prophets, in particular, gave new promises of new life, of redemption, of renewal of all things in ways never dreamt of, never thought of before. God promised over and over, to “do a new thing.”

Jesus was the future. He was the startling New Man who would renew all things. He therefore opposed the Pharisees adherence to “the traditions of the elders” which buried the Torah under a mass of dead human precepts. He did so over and over, and in every instance of opposing “the traditions of the elders,” he does so by quoting the Hebrew revelation, what we now term The Old Testament.

As the Gospel has taken hold through history, we see a gradual overcoming of the habits of the ancient world. The Reformation was a re-affirmation of the text of Scripture (Old and New Testament) over against a whole lot of new “traditions of the elders” that had come to cling to the church over the centuries. The very heart of Martin Chemnitz’s Examination Of The Council Of Trent (published a generation after Luther) was the greatest of all defenses of Reformation Doctrine by showing that the very structure of Roman Catholic and Trentine theology, was that its structure was a virtual repetition of Rabbinical Theology. The Rabbis had a secret oral tradition that supposedly came down from Sinai, and Trent claimed an oral tradition that came down from the time of the Apostles. In both cases, the secret oral tradition (known only to the highest clergy in both cases) took practical precedent over the written text. But, Jesus who was the future, always forced the priority of the written text over all secret oral traditions. The Reformation forced the same issue. And, it must be said that Rome has been extensively forced back to the written text as it has tried to do war with the children of the French Revolution. The traditions of the elders were substantially what gave fuel to the Revolution in the first place.

Phariseeism has been disappearing. So is the world now, in an untrammelled way, becoming righteous?

I am skeptical. There may be forward movement, but in hardly an untrammelled way. There is a great new set-back. The devil is clever. If you can’t beat them, join them…

If the traditions of the elders have been the way of blocking the new future that will be created by the New Man in concert with His Word, then let us (says the Evil One) do the opposite.

What we care about now, what we will make the new public opinion (say the Principalities and the Powers) is youth and the future. All things (including the Word of God) can now be subordinated to Youth and a Utopian Future. But this utopian future created by the Planners of the Omnipotent State, is a world of perfect stagnation. It is remarkably like the static cyclical world of the traditions of the elders.

It is the novelists who have seen this. The “dystopias,” the brilliant satirizations of the coming leftist utopias, those great novels of Orwell (1984), Huxley (Brave New World) and most insightfully, CS Lewis (That Hideous Strength).

The new Phariseeism is established by lifting up youth and the future. And, the engine that propels it is the very concept of Righteousness and Justice that is derived from the Bible, from Christianity. In this way, a new hypocrisy is ensconsed. The text of the Word of God is effectively subordinated to The Up To Date Opinion, The New York Times editorial page.

If you are interested in being young, thinking young, and having progressive, up-to-date opinions on all subjects, and if you are particularly interested in establishing “social justice,” beware. You might be in the neighborhood of the new Pharisees. You might be party to creating a stagnant, unchanging world of perfect oppression. And it is all in the name of superior righteousness.

“The Left has now won, and Leftism is an auto-immune disease. It has nothing to do with any of the diseases of paganism. It is completely and wholly a reaction to Christianity.”

In an article on the Trinity House blog, he makes some helpful observations concerning the ability of humanity to turn anything into rebellion against God — including many of the blessings of Christianity.

Victimhood and the Gospel

The texts of Christianity have been slowly at work, under the power of the Holy Spirit for 2000 years now. If we could be magically transported back into the world of two millennia ago, modern Americans would be shocked at the cruelty of that world. There was no concern for the victim. Now things have reversed, and it is necessary to shroud oneself in the garb of victimization in order to have any aura of moral respectability. One can see satanic cleverness in the evolution of the modern world. As the victim has been rehabilitated, it is now possible to exploit very old fashioned possibilities from that position. The Gadarene madman of the modern world might have been able to use his life and experience as a platform for new acts entirely unknown to antiquity.

Fredrick Nietzsche, from a profoundly anti-Christian perspective, spoke of a “transvaluation of values.” His claim was that Christianity universalized and further developed what he saw as the perversions of Hebrew “slave mentality” and morality.

Read more…

Image by Doug Hayes (I think)

Richard Bledsoe has kindly reviewed Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key on amazon.

“The Bible is an earthy, pungent, dazzling, aromatic book…”
(p. 191 Bible Matrix II)

Bible Matrix II following Bible Matrix I is a development and advancement. In Bible Matrix I, the author cut his teeth, and wrote an interesting and very helpful introduction and guide through the Bible. Here, he is chopping his way through thick, dark forests, and not many have been where he goes before. Mike Bull certainly can see things and put things together that I never could. The author sees fractals as perhaps the most basic reality of Bible structure (as it is also utterly fundamental in nature, God’s other book) and he sees them everywhere. He sees boxes within boxes as one revelation from God unfolds into the next with greater complexity and fullness.

The great American political philosopher, Leo Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) with the theme that medieval and earlier philosophers practiced writing books with complex structures and hidden meanings, in order to hide their true meaning and escape persecution by illiberal regimes. Some of Strauss’s own disciples have perhaps written their own books with complex and hidden structures and messages hidden within them. Allan Bloom purportedly did so in several of his volumes.

There is an interesting parallel to what Michael Bull has written. God has hidden his meaning, not per se to hide it from illiberal regimes, but from sinful and unsubmitted eyes. But, if one will submit to God’s covenant structure, one can begin to unlock the hidden meanings previously hidden everywhere. A five-fold covenant structure begins at the beginning, and is a prism through which the seven creation days in Genesis 1-3 shines through, and is then this is unfolded fractally, through the whole Bible to the very end. In the Creation Days, we see the first three days being days of creating a form, and the last three days as days that fill that form. The seventh day is a day of completion and rest. The author is a graphic designer, and has the gift of visualizing and graphing patterns that are very complex.

I recently wrote this to the author:

“As far as I can see, all of the long, ‘mind numbing’ descriptions of architecture in Exodus, Ezekiel, and elsewhere, supply patterns that have been waiting for gifted interpreters (such as you) to come along and decipher for the rest of us. I have long used the ‘form and fill’ pattern in the creation days of Genesis. But then to replicate that all over the place… well it is wonderful. Your capacity to SEE things as a graphic designer, and to be able to diagram them. I well remember diagramming sentences in the 7th and 8th grades. I was no good at it. Here you are diagramming the whole structure of the Bible and God’s Covenant workings.

“I recently read CS Lewis’s introduction to a new translation of a little volume (On the Incarnation) of Athanasius. He said that it was often his experience that in reading a serious work of theology (like that volume) it was far more devotional than reading a devotional work. I have felt that way in reading MATRIX II. Your book deserves to be widely read and absorbed (it is not the sort of book one just reads–one needs to live with it and let it soak in).”

BMXIIreview

The “Too catholic to be Catholic” goodness continues, with Rich Bledsoe and James Jordan pitching in from different angles:

Excerpt from Rich Bledsoe – We’re All Protestants Now

“High places” belonged to the childhood of the human race (cf. Galatians 4). The idolatries practiced by Rome and Orthodoxy, are childish practices… Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy seem to be in the same soup as Presbyterians and Lutherans and Baptists in terms of the kind of idolatry that we are really struggling with. Converts to earlier forms of the church have simply complicated things by making ideologies of childhood toys.

Excerpts from James Jordan – One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church

The Eucharistic Meal is not what you or I think it is or may be; it is what Jesus does. If I’m wrong about the theory, does that mean Jesus is not present?…

Catholicity of practice is, sadly, missing from Orthodoxy, Hard-core Baptists, the Church of Christ, and most of Rome. Rome won’t “rebaptize” Protestants, but neither will she give us communion unless there happens to be no Protestant church in the area we can attend. This is at least an improvement over how things were when I was a child, before Vatican II. Orthodoxy says our baptisms stink, and have to be cleansed by “chrismation,” a ritual nowhere found in the apostlolic scriptures. As Peter Leithart wrote recently on his blog, anyone who is truly committed to catholicity will have a hard time joining one of these sects…

…is the church Apostolic? Here again, we have sects that claim something called “apostolic succession,” a notion that cannot be found in the Bible. In fact, Paul is at pains repeatedly to deny any succession from the earlier apostles. I’m happy with the notion of ministers ordaining ministers and Christians baptizing Christians, but ultimately the succession in the Church is by the Spirit.

See also:
Too catholic to be Catholic
Separated Brothers

“Men of power and prestige sacrificed their lives for women and children of the lower class, many of whom were indentured servants, day laborers, and domestic workers. On this flotilla of self-absorption, self-sacrifice became a prevailing virtue during a crisis moment, and the powerful chose death that the powerless might receive life.”

The era of such brave sacrifice is gone, along with the Christian worldview that sustained it. Progressives accuse conservatives of nostalgia for a culture that is past, a time we cannot recreate. They are half right. It is gone forever, but the future (or “eternal utopian present”) imagined by progressives is unsustainable, if not downright destructive. We agree on the death of the old culture, but have very different ideas about the future.

A future “godly culture” will come, but it will be nothing like any of the old ones because that’s not how God works. His process is death and resurrection, self-sacrifice and Spirit-increase—first the natural, then the spiritual. Masculinity has been beaten to death, and many Christians (and even secularists) have woken up to the consequences. Many are attempting to revive it, but Rich Bledsoe believes, like progressives, that the old, domineering masculinity was bad:

Along with everything else, masculinity in its original natural form is dying. I don’t know about any of you, but when one is virtually anywhere in the “third world” it is amazing to me as an American, the extent and degree of masculine control over everything. As an American, and one who lives in a particularly liberal town, this kind of unthinking, effortless, control, which is as natural as a fish in water, is almost incomprehensible. I recently read an account of a missionary kid who was American by birth, but reared in Japan for most of his youth, being especially amazed upon returning to America at the degree of rudeness and “yelling” that went on here from women to their men in public. But he said what amazed him the most, was that the men “took it like whipped puppies”. Indeed.

I think the natural power of the male is over. He can rebel against it all he wants, but it is struggling in quick sand. The more struggle there is, the faster he sinks. The patriarchal head of household church movement is completely artificial and is NOT a return to something spiritual, but something natural, and it is nature that is dying.

The only way forward for masculinity is to die. Jesus was the first man to give up his natural masculine powers. The Kenotic poem of Philippians is the essential telling of this story. It has now caught up with the world. It is only in dying to what is natural that masculine authority and headship can be raised again and come back in a new “final” form that is shorn of nature.

Now, I know everyone will want details on what this means. All I know is that every man I have ever seen who tried to revive nature ends up being an ass. I have seen cases of the most macho masculine and by nature controlling men, with what are undoubtedly very high male hormone levels, just rendered helpless by the current culture. They thrive no better than an Apache warrior in modern Arizona. And in fact, the reality is exactly the same as for the warrior. He can only die, and be raised as a Christian, which looks very different and does not exist by humiliating and degrading women and children.

I think everything in the natural world exists by rivalry. In the natural world, the man is the man is the man by overpowering rivalry over against the female and the children. In God’s world, this is undone. In reality, it may well be that large elements of all of this death have only come to pass as late as the 20th century.

Rich Blesdoe, The Death of the Masculine

So, don’t panic. Our cultural ship is going down, but it has to. A resurrected manhood and womanhood will soon rise out of the current tragic confusion.

“Jesus does what no medicine man
or witch doctor is able to do.”

And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man,
the one who had had the legion, sitting there,
clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. – Mark 5:15

Rich Bledsoe’s old blog is a goldmine. Here’s an excerpt from The Dysfunctional Family of the Gadarene Madman.

A friend of mine who is a Christian clergyman, and is from India, and has demonstrated gifts of exorcism, tells me that the power of the witch doctor is the power of being able to command lesser demons to leave by the power of a greater demon. But the demons are never banished. They just transfer place or position. In the case of this text, the demons of the village were all put on this one poor man who became a representative demoniac, and bore the pain and agony of the entire community in himself.

There are four descriptors around the demoniac that we need to look at.

First, he is chained, but in his madness is so crazed that he breaks the chains and cannot be restrained. He is the recipient of the accusations of the demons of the village. The very character of the devil is that his is “an accuser” (Revelation 12:10, Zechariah 3:1). Accusation is the most galling of all experiences, and he is accused day and night by the devils who have taken possession of him who used to accuse the community. Now along with the demons, the whole village also accuse him.

Secondly, he is naked. (Luke 8:27, Mark 5:15) This is a symbol of shame, and he thus bears the shame of the entire community.

Thirdly, the text says that he cuts himself with stones (Mark 5:5). In the Greek, the term is “autolapsis”, which literally translated means “self stoning”. In other words, the madman executes himself by stoning, which in the ancient world was a ritual form of execution. Hence, he is executed on behalf of the community as well. Finally, he lives amongst the tombs, (Mark 5:2, 5) which as a fulfillment of the other curses on him means that he is already dead. He bears death and damnation in himself for the whole rest of the community.

The demons immediately begin to beg that they not be sent out of the country, and beg instead that they might be sent into a herd of swine that are nearby. Now, this is ambiguous. The swine are in fact a mirror image of the village. There are about 2000 pigs (Mark 5:13), and in fact the demons may be begging to be allowed to re-enter the people in the village, for whom the madman is a surrogate. To the demons, the people are as unclean as the pigs, and either allows for their occupation. But Jesus mercifully does not send them back to the village people, but instead sends them into the nearby pigs, and they, driven mad by the incursion into them, rush off of a cliff and into the Sea of Galilee.

To fall into the sea is to fall into the abyss. In doing this, Jesus does what no medicine man or witch doctor is able to do. He does not just exchange one demon for another from one place to another, and that in a temporary fashion, but Jesus banishes them forever, and sends them back to the abyss.

I recommend reading the entire article, and its sequel, The Gadarene Madman and the Modern World. Bledsoe demonstrates that the relationship between the demoniac and community are exactly the kind of “triangulation” observed by Edwin Friedman to be the problem in all dysfunctional relationships, whether personal, familial, institutional or corporate.

Of course, I have to tie this to the matrix, at least its “festal” strand. The first chapters of Matthew follow the Feasts, and place this event at Atonement. [1] This means that the communal dysfunction of scapegoating (as expounded by René Girard, particularly concerning the treatment of Job by his advisors [2]) is Man’s unjust, twisted method for obtaining corporate healing without reference to the mercy of God. It replicates the reaction of Cain to God’s atoning mercy (an event which also appears at Atonement within the narrative of Genesis 4). The scapegoat in the end was not Abel, although that was Cain’s intention. Abel himself became an acceptable offering. The scapegoat was Cain himself, who could not bear his shame and so rejected the mercy of God. The community he founded was a primeval “Gadara,” and Lamech continued to deal with its demons through bloodshed. The blame shifting continued until the entire culture was cutting itself. [3] The bloodletting continued and  increased until the Great Flood.

These primeval events were similar expressions of blame-shifting. “Shifting” is the work of the witch doctor. It’s a form of “cooking the books.” Rather than take the shame and blame and be forgiven, fallen corporate Man (Greater Eve) can’t take vengeance upon historical Adam, so she finds someone else to take the rap. Of course, the time came when the Man she found to vent her fury upon, in a demonic hysteria, was her One True Husband. This led to unfathomable mercy, but also to the avenging of all the scapegoats in the history of atonement, beginning with Abel, in AD70. The Revelation tells us the story of their enthronement.

In the end, it is God who cooks the books. Jesus is the Great Medicine Man, the White Witch Doctor. But He removes our sins from us as far as the East is from the West.

________________________________

[1] See Why Jesus Healed Some.

[2] James Jordan writes:

Job is clearly some kind of king. He is the leader of his community. He is the Chief Cornerstone, while Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are his “three mighty men,” the other corners of the realm. It is because Job is the king that the other men arrive to try and force him to step down.

(The Hebrew word for “army commander” is “corner.” For other examples of chief corners and three other corners, consider David and his three mighty men, Daniel and his three friends, and Jesus with Peter, James, and John. On “corners” and “three mighty men,” see Biblical Horizons 121. Compare also Jesus with the Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, as discussed above.)

Job as king is the “greatest of the men of the east” (Job 1:3). He employed hundreds of people and fed the poor. The disaster that overcame his household was, thus, a disaster upon the entire realm. The poor were starving, and hundreds of people were either killed or out of work. The sores on Job’s body were a sign of the lesions on the body politic of which he was the head, a point no ancient reader would miss.

This realm or political “house” has fallen because the Chief Corner, Job, has fallen. The other three corners, thus, step in to try and repair it. Their fallacy is not in seeking to restore their society, but in the way they seek to do it. Their desire is for Job to step down by admitting fault, so that one of them can replace him. God’s intention, however, is to take Job and this society through judgment and resurrection, and to reconstitute a new and better society afterwards (as happens in chapter 42).

Job’s position as king or leader of his people has been skillfully analyzed by Rene Girard in Job: The Victim of His People, translated by Yvonne Freccero and published by Stanford University Press in 1987. Despite the many flaws in this book, it makes clear that the attack upon Job came not because he was an ordinary person, but because of his preeminent position in this community, which had fallen into chaos seemingly as a result of God’s judgment upon Job, their “king.”

The book of Job, then, is not just about the sufferings of a righteous man, though it is that in part, and can be preached that way. It is also about chaos in the body politic, and the position of the suffering king within that chaos.

James B. Jordan, Was Job an Edomite King?, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 130.

[3] The innocent victims in our society are most obviously the unborn. But perhaps this sheds some light on the growing problem of self-harm in our culture. Biblically, we should also remember the priests of Baal on Carmel cutting themselves. Paul ties this factor to the Circumcision in the first century, those who considered it to be somehow redemptive rather than simply signal.