The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain.
His blood-red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?— Reginald Heber, “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” (YT)
In my last post, we discussed man’s present condition, in which he lives in a city of his own creation, founded on a murder of an innocent, far from God and the communion of the Garden of Eden, instead intertwined with his technology which threatens to overtake him and also undermine the lifeblood of the city in which he lives, even as it supplements his own mortal and fragile life. I left off, intentionally, with a kind of cliffhanger about Christ’s plans, and it is to this point that I return. Christ most certainly has a plan for the city and her technology, and it is far more interesting than anyone gives Him credit for, so here we will attempt to illuminate.
As Westerners, we are so entrenched in Christianity, and our modernist impulses to protest against the notion of Christianity’s influence are meaningless. Fish, after all, are ignorant of the concept of water, but one would be foolish to deny water as an integral part of a fish’s environment. As people who essentially take Christianity for granted, lurking in the background like dihydrogen monoxide, this means we often fail to ask ourselves some very fundamental questions that might occur to us were we actually naïve to Christianity.1 We cannot even begin to ask ourselves the question, “What is God’s end plan for man?” until we delve into the question “What did Jesus actually do here on Earth?”. How Christians have answered this question throughout the millennia, even if not directly, has varied greatly, and each answer has very serious consequences for the future of the world that we call the West.
Kingdom Now or Someday?
Crown Him the Lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.
His reign shall know no end, and round his pierced feet
Fair flowers of paradise extend their fragrance ever sweet.— Matthew Bridges, “Crown Him with Many Crowns” (YT)
One of the most sharp divisions in how Christians have answered the question of the point of Jesus’ actions here on Earth manifests most strongly in a very particular corner of theology. Few Christians engage in this directly, of course, even if they act like they broadly agree with the conclusions, but to understand we must tackle it head-on.
In a very particular corner of Protestantism has lurked an intriguing theology, one most commonly referred to as “Kingdom Now”. This is sometimes also called Dominionism, Dominion theology, or the “Seven Mountain Mandate” (yes: singular). Its most full expression in Protestantism makes it a challenge for the researcher to properly parse out its different variations and flavors, given the Reformation’s vehement rejection of hierarchies and imprimaturs, so we must speak a little more generally and understand that the specifics may vary denomination-by-denomination, congregation-by-congregation, pastor-by-pastor, and believer-by-believer.
Today, Kingdom Now is perhaps most associated with the famous, but often controversial, Bethel Church of Redding, California, having been popularized by Bethel’s lead pastor Bill Johnson in his books When Heaven Invades Earth and Invading Babylon; it seems most commonly directly asserted in somewhat similar, charismatic Protestant churches, although certainly not all of them. In 2016, many factions of the Kingdom Now movement found themselves quite enmeshed with the election of the Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency, although it is important to distinguish Kingdom Now from this particular instantiation, especially given that it significantly predates 2016.
It was in this context, however, that Jan Markell, a woman who I would describe as a fundamentalist Protestant, teeing up an interview with apologist Dr. Ron Rhodes, provided a concise explanation of Kingdom Now in a conversation shortly after the election in 2016:
“Where are we going? Well, there are some in the church who say we are now in a new day, but let me clarify that the next hour is not necessarily about the politics of Donald Trump. As a matter of fact, it's not about politics at all; it's about how a segment of the church is reacting to politics, and that would be those who believe in a Kingdom Now, Dominionism, type of theology: that the church can make the world perfect; that the church will bring us back to the Garden of Eden as we seize the mandate given in Genesis 1:28.
Now, there's some other titles that we can use other than just Kingdom Now: Dominionism; you might hear the theology we're going to discuss this hour called Reconstructionism, perhaps postmillennialism. You're going to hear about the New Apostolic Reformation. Some of this goes back to the Manifest Sons of God, Latter Rain, Joel’s Army, and more, and they have a lot in common.
At the same time, there are variations of theology with all of these groups, but all believe that the church has the ability to take the Earth back in some capacity, and some believe, to a sort of Garden of Eden perfection. So, many who embrace these movements think we can have Heaven on Earth, right now, and that the church must take dominion — and that's based on Genesis 1:28 — and bring back some kind of — well, Eden — perfection. The case will be made this hour that the church is not in the business of taking anything back from Satan, other than the souls of men, that the Earth is, quite frankly folks, a sinking Titanic. Jesus will take dominion during His 1,000 year millennial reign, but, as I said moments ago, at the election of Donald J. Trump, as a result of that, the Dominion theology folks and others -- the various fractions mentioned -- believe even more strongly that we're going to head back to some kind of a restored, revived, renewed, perfected country, and maybe even the world, and the church will lead the way.”
In one of my favorite questions I have ever heard, Mrs. Markell then asks her guest, “Would you say that the source of some of this — well, the confusion and the issue that we're dealing with this hour — is it ignorance or is it arrogance?” (This also became the title of their full talk, “Dominion Theology: Ignorance or Arrogance?”) She follows up her question with a very typical fundamentalist perspective of humanity as she wonders aloud: “Why would anyone think that fallen mankind can be credited with much of anything? I mean, have these people forgotten the sin nature of man?”
As Ms. Markell suggests above, Kingdom Now is also a part of a conversation about the millennial reign of Christ, and there is no better way to get a group of diverse, overread Christians to start a knife fight than to put them in a room together and ask their positions on the millennial reign — a scenario in which premillennialists draw first blood against the postmillennialists while the amillennialists hug the wall and frantically search for the door — but to discuss this here requires reading the books of Ezekiel and Revelation so closely that the nose touches the page, and I will instead approach understanding the Kingdom outside of this framework for purposes of this post.2
Those Christians most opposed to Kingdom Now (generally, premillenialists) believe that, as described by Ms. Markell above, the arrival of the Kingdom is inevitable, but it will not be the work of man, because that would assume a blasphemous level of spiritual arrogance as the depraved, fallen man is not capable of bringing about the Lord’s Kingdom, and will instead happen at some point in the future when Jesus deigns to descend from the clouds above. Until that blessed moment, however, the weary work of Christians is plod on in this planet of the prince of darkness with nothing but a laser-like focus on “soul winning”, that is, converting “the lost”, people who are not believers in the salvific work of Christ, to Christianity. This conversion process is supposed to broadly look like acknowledging Jesus as Lord (generally taking on the view of penal substitutionary atonement) and perhaps — although this is a touchy subject as well — changing one’s life to behave in a more virtuous manner and may or may not include a traditional Christian baptism in actual water.
Dr. Gene Kim, another fundamentalist and premillenialist pastor based in Berkeley, California, described this view well:
“What should Christians do about [the demise of the world]? Nothing. People die. People go do their things. The devil's going to build up his one-world-order system. All Christians need to do is focus on their church activities and winning souls to Jesus Christ, because it's all about the souls, all right? The whole world can go to hell. Why? Because it will go to hell. The Antichrist has to take it over and then we have to wait for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords at the end to come and make things right now.”
Pastor Andy Woods, author of The Coming Kingdom, argued, quoting broadly from Protestant theologian J. Dwight Pentecost3:
"This is really the heart of the argument [for Kingdom Now], right here. The key argument is Jesus is currently reigning on David's throne [from Heaven], so anybody that's teaching Kingdom Now theology argues that point. [...] David's throne, in the Old Testament and Gospels, is always presented as earthly. I've given you 1 Kings 1:11-12, which clearly teaches, among many other verses, that David's throne is earthly. […] So the Davidic heavenly throne changes the original meaning. Now, to some people, that's no big deal. To us though, it is a big deal, because if that's true, that basically makes God a liar, because when He communicated the Davidic throne in Old Testament times, He always portrayed it as earthly. [...]
Number four: though Christ is now the chief cornerstone — Ephesians 2:20 — 'and a stone that causes unbelievers to stumble' — 1 Peter 2:8 — He is never portrayed as a ‘smiting stone’, as He will be when He comes again. See, Daniel 2 is predicting a ‘smiting stone’, which instantaneously destroys the empire of the Antichrist. That's not how Christ was described at His first coming. He's not a smiting stone. He is a cornerstone: Ephesians 2:20. And he is also ‘a stone that causes unbelievers to stumble,’ but He is not that — at least in His first coming, that sudden ‘smiting stone’. Number five: the Stone (Messiah) — in His second coming — will crush and end all the kingdoms of the world, but the church at the first coming of Christ has not, and even till the present day, has not conquered the kingdoms of this world. [...]
And so don't expect the Kingdom of God to materialize on the earth until the Antichrist comes, the seven-year tribulation period unfolds, the New World Order takes place, and at the conclusion of that time period then Jesus will establish His Kingdom. None of those things have happened yet, chronologically, so don't expect the Kingdom of God to materialize until that chronology takes place. [...]
My point is: Jesus is not reigning on David's throne. Well then, where is Jesus? [...] He's at the right hand of the Father, not functioning as Davidic King but as high priest after the order of Melchizedek. That's how to understand the presentation of Christ, and yet this is not what Kingdom Now theology is arguing today. They're all arguing that Jesus is on David's throne."
Jesus wept.
This gross misinterpretation of the Book of Daniel to justify Kingdom Someday Christianity is hopelessly dripping with modernist influence and results in an understanding of Christianity that is so profoundly uncharismatic that it is no wonder the Woke will inherit TikTok.
No book was more important to the historical Jesus than the Book of Daniel. Jesus was an apocalyptic figure who likely spent some time with the similarly weird cult in the nearby Qumran community, a group of continually fasting volcels who were all quite obsessed with visions about the end of the world and knew the Book of Daniel inside and out. To suggest that Jesus wouldn’t have understood Himself as a fulfillment of Daniel 7 in His present work is to miss His own self-understanding.
So, let us uncover how the Mashiach understood His own work here on Earth.
The Conquest of Jordan to Jericho4
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,
Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,
And the walls came tumbling down!
Right up to the walls of Jericho
They marched with spear in hand;
"Go blow them ram horns," Joshua cried,
"Cause the battle is in my hand."— Traditional, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” (YT)
The question of “What did Jesus actually do?” must be focused on His ministry, which began at age 30. Jesus’s ministry began at age 30 not because the Blessed Mother had finally kicked Him out from playing video games in the basement, but because this was the traditional age at which a man could assume the office of priest (Numbers 4:3). Jesus’ ministry begins when He is baptized in the Jordan River and He, at that point, assumes the symbolic role of priest.
Now, to fully understand the meaning of Jesus’ baptism, we must turn to the man who baptized Him, His cousin, St. John the Baptist. It’s easy to sketch out a hazy backstory for the Baptizer as some sort of slightly crazed, trailer-trash-adjacent figure, perhaps unfortunately tinged with the lower genetic quality of elderly maternal eggs, someone who today would watch InfoWars and talk a little too much about EMF radiation, but that is an unformed view of the Baptizer.
St. John the Baptist was the only son of a very high status, influential man, Zechariah. Zechariah was a priest in the Jerusalem Temple, and, before our modernist impulses categorize and dismiss St. John the Baptist as a Pastor’s Kid — PK — we must understand that, in the pre-Enlightenment world that was first century Judea, Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem and all the activity that surrounded it — the arrival of swarms of pilgrims, the purchase of sacrificial animals, the merchants, the ritual cutting of animal throats, the engagement with the priestly class — was not simply tucked away in a modernist, fictitious, separation-of-church-and-state box marked “For Religious Purposes Only”, but was instead deeply intertwined with the socio-political self-understanding of kingdoms of Israel as a geopolitical entity and as an ethnic and religious identity. Herod’s Temple could not be more intertwined with this self-understanding; it was the hallmark and the pinnacle of the literal lifeblood — the sacrifices made to an angry God — of the people of Israel, which is why its destruction by the Romans in 70 A.D. marked such a dramatic shift in the history of the Israelites and the Judaic religion. St. John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, was one of a small handful of men who by birthright was allowed to enter the Holy Place before which stood the veil of the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum which could only be breached once a year by only the High Priest.
We cannot even understand St. John the Baptist as analogous to a son of a very famous and influential pastor, like Joel Osteen or Rick Warren, because that too doesn’t capture the scale in our separation-of-church-and-state culture. While it would scandalize some in Christian circles were the sons of one of these pastors to take a highly wayward path like becoming the next Marilyn Manson, such a turn would still not quite capture the widespread shock. Instead, understanding St. John the Baptist is much more accurate if we imagine his choices as proximate to those of a son of someone like U.S. Senator Mitt Romney — a wealthy man, an important person in the influential Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and a member of the powerful United States Senate — winding up on Andy Ngo’s Twitter page of Portland mugshots looking disheveled, vaguely anti-government, anti-religion, and uppity amongst a group of similarly unsavory-looking ne’er-do-wells. That is something that would not only cause massive shock in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but would also wind up in national news and require Sen. Romney to issue a press release and do some level of damage control. When St. John the Baptist not only refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps, but takes to the Jordan River to reject and verbally denounce the worldly, Jerusalemite way of life and the immoral client-king who keeps it all going — as well as baptize people in a river, an action that in and of itself is a middle finger to the Temple, which I will discuss in another post — this is the level of rejection and scandal we must understand is happening here.
Now, to understand Jesus, and what exactly He is doing here at the Jordan, we must turn to the famous forebear whose name He shares — Yeshua, or “Joshua”, whose story is told in his eponymous book.
From the very first line, the Book of Joshua frames its protagonist as the heir to Moses, whose first assignment is to cross into the Promised Land that was denied to his predecessor:
After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ aide: “Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.
In seeing Jesus as the new Joshua who himself was the new Moses, we can understand St. John the Baptist as the new Aaron. Exodus 4 tells the story of how, at Moses’s request, God appoints Aaron, Moses’s brother, to “speak to the people” for Moses in the office of a prophet.5 Aaron, Moses’ brother, is also appointed as a priest. In introducing St. John the Baptist’s father Zechariah, Luke points out Zechariah “belonged to the priestly division of Abijah” — a descendent of Aaron through his son Eleazar — and also notes that Zechariah’s “wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron” (Luke 1:5).
St. John the Baptist was undoubtedly baptizing the masses at the spot by the Jordan where Joshua was believed to have crossed over into the Promised Land after 400 years of exile in Egypt and 40 years in the desert:
And the Lord said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel, so they may know that I am with you as I was with Moses. Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’” […] And as soon as the priests who carry the ark of the Lord—the Lord of all the earth—set foot in the Jordan, its waters flowing downstream will be cut off and stand up in a heap.” So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant went ahead of them. Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.
Following the Lord’s instructions, Joshua instructs his men to mark the spot at which they crossed over the Jordan:
So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood. And they are there to this day.
In choosing to be baptized, “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15), Jesus is retracing Joshua’s footsteps. He is retaking the Promised Land as the New Covenant. This time, however, the Promised Land is taking a new form, that of a kingdom, and this ambition will necessarily require, as it did in Joshua’s time, wrestling with the powers and principalities of this world.
Joshua’s first strategic move after crossing the Jordan is to take a pagan city, Jericho, albeit through nontraditional means of warfare:
Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”
So Joshua son of Nun called the priests and said to them, “Take up the ark of the covenant of the Lord and have seven priests carry trumpets in front of it.” And he ordered the army, “Advance! March around the city, with an armed guard going ahead of the ark of the Lord.”
When Joshua had spoken to the people, the seven priests carrying the seven trumpets before the Lord went forward, blowing their trumpets, and the ark of the Lord’s covenant followed them. The armed guard marched ahead of the priests who blew the trumpets, and the rear guard followed the ark. All this time the trumpets were sounding. But Joshua had commanded the army, “Do not give a war cry, do not raise your voices, do not say a word until the day I tell you to shout. Then shout!” So he had the ark of the Lord carried around the city, circling it once. Then the army returned to camp and spent the night there.
Joshua got up early the next morning and the priests took up the ark of the Lord. The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets went forward, marching before the ark of the Lord and blowing the trumpets. The armed men went ahead of them and the rear guard followed the ark of the Lord, while the trumpets kept sounding. So on the second day they marched around the city once and returned to the camp. They did this for six days.
On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city! […]”
When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.
Joshua and his men raze the city, destroy, and burn it, before Joshua pronounces a curse:
“Cursed before the Lord is the one who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho:
‘At the cost of his firstborn son
he will lay its foundations;
at the cost of his youngest
he will set up its gates.’”
The condemnation of Jericho by Joshua stands in the tradition of the Israelites uncovering — unveiling, apokálupsis — the pagan tradition of sacrifice, which appears to have been a traditional practice in the construction of cities. As Jacques Ellul notes in The Meaning of the City, “In Joshua’s prophecy there is neither choice nor redemption. Perhaps it is true, as scholars say, that the sacrifice was part of the foundation rites. It was probably thought necessary to drive out the demons who traditionally haunted ruins. […] And there is no reason to reject the traditional understanding, which is that the sacrifice was the eldest son of the founder.”
Some 500 years later, the prophecy is fulfilled in 1 Kings 16:34 when Hiel the Bethelite “lays in the foundation” his eldest son and “set[s] up in the gates” his youngest son. A very contemporary view expounded to Christian laypeople is to suppose that Hiel’s sons somehow passed in the course of Hiel’s work and he buried them in the city, and this is taken as a warning that the Christian should not “rebuild strongholds” that God has already torn down in one’s life or go against God’s direction in matters that are cursed. This is really hopelessly modern view that reads Christian mores into a time that predates the birth of Jesus. Somewhat similarly, Mr. Ellul comments:
“Certain historians, unsure as to why rebuilding Jericho should be cause for a curse, but never reluctant to speculate, have proposed (with great virtuosity transposing a nineteenth-century attitude to the eighth century B.C.) that the custom of child sacrifices may by Hiel’s time have disappeared from use among the Semitic peoples, and that the consciousness of the people, scandalized by Hiel’s act, explained by by inventing the prophecy of Joshua and his curse.”
The reader familiar with the work of René Girard, however, clearly sees Joshua’s warning and Hiel’s subsequent act. Joshua is standing in the work of the God who is working actively against the pagan sacrificial system and bloodlessly tearing down the walls of pagan cities. In this way, reading Joshua’s curse is not at all a summoning forth of a particular future, but a statement of facts: men will build cities and they will continue to do so, for the time being, with human sacrifice, and those who engage in human sacrifice — as did Cain — are cursed, from God’s perspective.
Now, Christ too may be shown Jericho immediately after His baptism in the Jordan at the top of Matthew 4. Jesus is goes out into the wilderness, where He fasts for forty days and forty nights, after which “the tempter” comes to him:
“If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.
The devil first offers Christ fleshly desires through food, glory through a supernatural feat (alluding to Satan’s own fall from Heaven), and most importantly, at the end, he offers Christ the most tempting prize of all: power. As Christ refuses Satan, Satan continues to proffer more dazzling offers up the hierarchy of desire: food, glory, and power. But Satan shows his cards with the last offer. He shows Christ “all the kingdoms of this world and their splendor” and says to Him, “All this I will give to you” which strongly suggests that the kingdoms of the world are Satan’s to give. And it seems to be Jericho that Jesus is shown: documented tradition dating back to St. Helena in the fourth century A.D. identifies a particular high mountain located just northwest of the city as the “Mount of Temptation”. Jesus would have had a clear view of the city that Joshua took and the city that was rebuilt on Hiel’s sacrifice of his own flesh and blood, twice over.
Satan’s implicit assertion that the kingdoms of the world belong to him would be correct, in a sense — you’re not wrong, Walter…. As we discussed in the last post, the city of man is inevitably, inexorably founded on a murder, on the division of the envious accuser. It is man’s stolen refuge from God’s sentence of wandering. And the city, we must remember, is all of us. As Mr. Ellul notes: “We must not forget that the city is the symbol of the world, especially today, when it has become the synthesis of our entire civilization. […] We are in the city, even if we live in the country, for today the country (and soon this will be true even of the immense Asian steppe) is only an annex of the city.”
Christ rejects this founding murder, but to do even that, His narrative arc must sweep in the story of the first murderer, the father of the city. To understand how this is possible, however, we must go back to the story of Jesus’s ancestor, the man whose throne Jesus is born to inherit: David.
David Dooms the City of Man
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens (Guided, guided)
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin (I am guided by)
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons (Ooh, ooh)
First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin— Leonard Cohen, “First We Take Manhattan” (YT)
The biblical David, who has a fun story arc no one really appreciates, starts off as a little shepherd boy, chosen to be king, who not only slays Goliath but lays the foundation for the death of the city of man.
In 1 Samuel, the prophet Samuel is instructed by God to go to “Jesse of Bethlehem” because He has rejected Saul as king and selected from among Jesse’s sons “a king for [the Lord]”:
“How can I go?” Samuel asked. “Saul will hear of it and kill me!”
The LORD answered, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ Then invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you are to do. You are to anoint for Me the one I indicate.”
So Samuel did what the LORD had said and went to Bethlehem. When the elders of the town met him, they trembled and asked, “Do you come in peace?”
“In peace,” he replied. “I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Consecrate yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.”
Then he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice. When they arrived, Samuel saw Eliab and said, “Surely here before the LORD is His anointed.”
But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or height, for I have rejected him; the LORD does not see as man does. For man sees the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart.” […] Thus Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, but Samuel told him, “The LORD has not chosen any of these.”
And Samuel asked him, “Are these all the sons you have?”
“There is still the youngest,” Jesse replied, “but he is tending the sheep.”
“Send for him,” Samuel replied. “For we will not sit down to eat until he arrives.”
So Jesse sent for his youngest son and brought him in. He was ruddy, with beautiful eyes and a handsome appearance. And the LORD said, “Rise and anoint him, for he is the one.”
So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward.
After an absurdly long time, David finally becomes king of Israel and conquers the Canaanite city of Jerusalem, from whence he sets up the capital of the kingdom of Israel.
After [David] was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.”
Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you.”
But that night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, saying:
“Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’
Mr. Ellul:
“Historians find great reasons for David’s choice of this recently conquered city as his capital. […] We could go on at length about its strategic worth and how easy it was to fortify, about the political necessity of choosing a completely new capital, and of the value of making the political capital what was already the religious capital. But after all is said, these considerations are secondary. What transforms this military city is David’s act: in the name of the Lord he made with her a pact of love. David knew the meaning of the city. […] Nevertheless, he wanted to make of this city so recently heathen the home of the ark. Up till then, the ark had always been in the country, in private homes. […] But now David is bent on making his own city into the city of the ark, and soon the city of the house of the Lord.
[The Lord’s response to David] is a kind of refusal to enter the city. […] [T]he Lord then grants to David’s immediate posterity the permission to build the Temple, but it is really nothing more than accepting David’s wish. […] By this means God gets a foothold in man’s world. He chooses a city, or rather he lets man choose a city for him (after all the city belongs to man!) and by accepting from David’s hands the consecration of man’s counter-creation, God intervenes in the world where man wanted to refuse him entrance. And it is by the hand of man himself that it happens. […]
Cain’s immense undertaking is doomed to failure by David’s act, for henceforth man will no longer be at rest behind his walls. From that moment when Jerusalem becomes the city of God, the city is no longer man’s.”
The meaning of Jerusalem to Jesus and in the history of salvation is too large a topic to go into depth here, but, at a high level, we can easily surmise the importance of Jerusalem, David’s city and the seat of the Temple, to Jesus. Throughout His entire ministry, Jesus is keenly aware of Jerusalem as a spiritual power and seems to intuit that it is all the dominions and principalities within her that will be the means of His own death. Immediately after He enters Jerusalem in a kingly processional on Palm Sunday — because He will shortly be crowned at the Cross — Jesus speaks to the city herself directly as He weeps:
“If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace! But now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will barricade you and surround you and hem you in on every side. They will level you to the ground—you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”
If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace… You did not recognize the time of your visitation from God. By this point, Jesus has realized that the message of the innocent victim — “what would bring you peace” — will not be immediately accepted. He will be rejected, cast out down the Via Dolorosa, and will go the way of all innocent victims. But Jesus, even in His weeping and His agony, is nothing if not a patient man. He knows that the arc of history will inevitably bend toward Him.
Redeeming Cain
I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead
I just need some place where I can lay my head
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, and "No!", was all he said
Take a load off Fannie, take a load for free
Take a load off Fannie
And you can put the load right on me— The Band, “The Weight” (YT)
It’s a cute, even twee image: a young Jesus at the feet of His adoptive father St. Joseph, hammering nails into wooden pieces, foreshadowing His death on the Cross at Cavalry. But this is a half-correct attempt to understand the symbolism of Christ that ultimately fails, because there is little we can glean from a Christ child who will do some vague work with the instruments and materials that surround His own death, and also, it’s probably quite wrong.
The assumption that St. Joseph was a carpenter in the way that we understand the profession of a woodworker seems to arise from an overly narrow translation of the Greek word tekton in Matthew 13:55, the only part of the Gospels that describes St. Joseph’s profession (“Is this not the carpenter’s son?” ask the Nazoreans when Jesus comes back for a visit; this same story is also told in Mark). However, this word tekton can take a broader meaning to that of the trade of a stonemason, a builder. Just a few miles from Nazareth, where Jesus was raised, the Jewish client-king Herod Antipas was ordering the construction of stone buildings in the city of Sepphoris before and during the life of Christ, providing ample work for St. Joseph, and the record seems robust that stonework was the predominant means of construction in this period. Moreover, when we view Jesus as a stonemason, a builder, much of the New Testament become more clear:
But some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, rebuke Your disciples!” “I tell you,” He answered, “if they remain silent, the very stones will cry out.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”
Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone.
As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him…
That Christ would taken on the profession of Cain is no accident; it is in fact His entire purpose in coming as the Messiah, because He comes to redeem the entire human race, all the way down to the first murderer Cain. The root of the Greek noun tekton, “tekhne”, is the root of our English word “technology”. That Jesus is a builder means He cuts rocks: this is a form of technology that is seen as “profaned” in the Book of Exodus, and so Jesus takes on a profaned profession6:
And if you make an altar of stone for Me, you shall not build it of cut stones, for if you wield your chisel on it, you will profane it.
Mr. Ellul writes:
“Jesus had no home. His entire life, from birth to death, was a life of wandering. Just when he was about to be born, an event transpired that made his mother leave home. [..] She and her husband must go back to the city of their origin, to Bethlehem, a little town in Judea — in fact hardly a town. But Bethlehem is also the city of David, where the descendant of David must be born, which gave the great king his eternal worth. And in this very city there is no room for the Christ. [...] If the world is as such as the Bible describes it, it is normal for it to close up when the son of God appears, as a poisonous orchid springs shut at the touch of danger. There is no room for the Prince of Peace, and he must find a hole in the stable of an inn. He must not be born in a noble home. Men must not put themselves out of their way to take him in, these men of the city. Those who come are shepherd of the field, and travelers. But men settled in the city can only have Herod’s idea: he has come to bother us, to trouble us, to change our kingdom and our habits — he must be killed. Herod, a true prince of the city. […] When Rome has finished the census, Jerusalem takes over its campaign against Jesus: ‘When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him…’ (Matt. 2:3). Jerusalem is a city, and its order is no different than any other city’s. So it takes measures early to force the rebel and the blasphemer to flee, even if he is as yet only a babe in swaddling clothes.”
As Mr. Ellul observes, Christ retraces the steps of Cain, taking on his technological profession, but also taking on the curse that Cain rejected in favor of embracing the city of his own hands. Christ, in His ministry, is a wanderer, forever skirting away from cities, and in His aversion to lingering too long in that capital of cities, Jerusalem, we see traces of the Yahwehist shyness toward being tied down in the cities of man. Jesus seems to know what fate ultimately awaits Him in Jerusalem, and how He will be sentenced to death there and then expelled out to a place where He will look on the city of man as He dies in agony.
But the childish construction we have of Jesus as a carpenter so familiar with wood and nails, together with the theology of penal substitutionary atonement, belies Christ’s work on the Cross. Broadly speaking, penal substitutionary atonement assumes that Christ is a “perfect offering” to God the Father, because the injustices committed by man against the Father are so great as to merit a truly terrible punishment, a tortured, agonizing death followed up by eternal damnation into the pits of Hell, but the Father offers the Son to Himself as a substitute for man and places all the sins of man on His shoulders. Following this logic, it is only by “being washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb” that the believer, accepting Christ’s redemptive work as a substitute for his own sins, can be “guaranteed” eternal life. This theology breaks down at many points; for purposes of this narrow discussion we will note how it breaks down at its failure to fully encapsulate the symbolism of Calvary and in so doing, fails to capture the purpose of Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection.
Christ’s final act of wandering is a rewinding of Cain and Adam’s own journey, an expulsion out of the symbolic city of Cain — here, Jerusalem — and back to the Garden of Eden in Calvary. Back in the Book of Genesis, after they eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden7:
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
The purpose of the banishment in Genesis 3 is not to punish Adam and Eve but to “guard the way to the tree of life.” First, God makes “garments of skin for Adam and his wife and [clothes] them”. Christ will undo this; at the Cross, the Romans strip him of His garments and cast lots for His clothing (Matthew 27:35) so He returns to the human nakedness of the Garden. Christ wears a crown of thorns, by which He takes on the curse of man in Genesis 3:
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten from the tree
of which I commanded you not to eat,
cursed is the ground because of you;
through toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your bread,
until you return to the ground—
because out of it were you taken.
For dust you are,
and to dust you shall return.”
Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you. Man’s curse to work with the thorns of the earth become Christ’s crown. Christ’s Cross becomes the Tree of Life, and He its fruit for eternal life. Man will never go back to the Garden — Christ knows that — but He finishes the work of God that was begun in the Garden. If we fail to incorporate the Garden into Christ’s work at Calvary, we leave the Bible with a half-understanding of Jesus’ purpose.8
Jesus did not come to the Earth to be punished severely for man’s sins because the Father demanded it in His severe justice. Above all, He comes as a babe in swaddling clothes, arriving in the epoch of the greatest empire the world had ever known, to be crowned king by them:
Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company around Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And they twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on His head. They put a staff in His right hand and knelt down before Him to mock Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!”
Futurism is Christian Dogma
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.— Nicene Creed
What the Christian conceptions of the Kingdom so often miss is that a futuristic understanding of its conception is written right into the Nicene Creed, the profession of Christian faith first set down in 325 A.D. Christians do not look to the past. They are not inherently conservative. Instead, Christians profess that they “look forward to […] the life of the world to come.” This is the very last phrase of the entire three-article Nicene Creed, and the Greek word “μέλλοντος, méllontos” is perhaps too fancifully rendered in English as “to come”; this is not some artistic turn of phrase but rather a direct reference to events that will occur in the future. The Latin translation of the original Greek uses the word “futuri”, a declension of “futurus” which describes events that will occur; i.e., the future. Simply put, Christians profess in the Nicene Creed that they believe in the future.
To this point, in his essay “Against Edenism”, entrepreneur-investor Peter Thiel writes:
The future will look very different from the past. The Garden of Paradise will culminate in the City of God—“the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. . . . The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. . . . The city does not need the sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light” (Rev. 21:10–24). The river of life will flow down the middle of the great street of the city, and the tree of life will mean that the curse of death is lifted (Rev. 22:1–3). There is continuity with Genesis, but to Eden there will be no returning.
We do not need the Bible to know that such a return is not possible. This planet could sustain 10 million people with a comfortable pastoral or agrarian existence in Neolithic times. By contrast, the necessary precondition for the planetary civilization of 10 billion people that will be Earth in the twenty-second century is a highly advanced level of science and technology. We cannot change this reality, although we are free to pretend otherwise. […]
Technology means doing more with less. In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner. It is not clear whether a capitalistic economic system could function without growth; and it is unlikely that a representative democracy, which requires the give-and-take of win–win compromise, would continue to function. In the Malthusian end state, resource constraints would reduce marginal human existence to eking out bare survival. Even an anti-Malthusian thinker like Julian Simon acknowledged as much, when he argued that more people would be a great good, but only because he optimistically believed that they would invent many new things and thereby increase living standards for everybody.
We are much further from this technological cornucopia than we would like to believe. Six billion people live in the emerging world and are daily beset by resource and pollution constraints. The Green Revolution in food production has decelerated tremendously since 1980, and so the average calorie consumption in rural India is lower today than it was in 1970. China has increased industrial output, but the failure of clean-energy technologies has meant massive environmental devastation. And even the United States finds itself at a strange crossroads, as the rate of technological progress has been insufficient to guarantee higher living standards. For the first time ever, the younger generation has reduced expectations and hopes for the future—there are just not enough well-paying jobs for the many college graduates, to say nothing of everybody else. Large numbers of people cannot afford healthy food and are nutritionally starved, though this hidden Malthusianism perversely manifests as an obesity epidemic. More locally, in Manhattan the scarcity of affordable housing (or equivalently, the failure of technological innovation in skyscraper construction and transportation) means that rent increases far outpace wage increases. Urban slumlords benefit at the expense of everyone else, even though this scarcity gets dressed up with aesthetic sentiments.
If a scientific and technological utopia was the hallmark of the Enlightenment, then perhaps the distrust of that utopia is the hallmark of the post-Enlightenment, postmodern West. The widespread nature of that distrust is a good measure of the degree to which postmodernity has displaced modernity. It is a point of broad agreement between the so-called Christian right and the Hollywood left and just about everyone in between, with only minor differences in the exact details of what is to be disliked, whether it be stem-cell research or fracking technology, or perhaps radical life extension as contrary to God’s will or bad for the environment.
Just about every science-fiction movie of the past quarter century portrays science and technology as a trap that humanity is building for itself. One may choose from a menu of dystopias, from The Terminator to The Matrix to Elysium to Avatar. A film in which a Luddite, an environmental extremist, or an FDA regulator is the arch-villain does not get made; as it so often does, Hollywood both creates and reflects the broader cultural consensus.
The history of the twentieth century is a history of this loss of hope in the future. With the benefit of hindsight, the dawn of the nuclear age and the Manhattan Project may appear to have been a key turning point, a great achievement that led to tremendous disillusionment. This disillusionment hit with full force in the 1970s, when the successor Apollo program collapsed and the baby boomers redirected their energies toward interminable cultural wars. Whether by chance or design, scientists were placed on a short leash and made to spend their time writing grant applications for modest extensions of existing paradigms. The reign of science foretold in New Atlantis culminated and terminated at Los Alamos.
The optimism of Bacon and Hobbes belongs to a bygone era. And perhaps there always was something profoundly contradictory in optimism and atheistic materialism. In the nineteenth century, Engels could still finesse matters by noting the apparent discrepancy between the never-ending progress of dialectical materialism and the heat death foretold by the second law of thermodynamics, but then reassure his readers that such a decline was far in the future and could therefore be ignored! If atheist optimism meant an escape from nature, then today’s atheist pessimism means an acceptance of nature, and of the many gruesome accidents and the terrible rule of chance that that entails. The physical theories of our age resemble the Epicurean accounts of the atoms randomly moving through the void, and it should be no wonder that quasi-Epicurean physics naturally lead to Stoicism and Epicurean hedonism. I badly miss the misguided optimism of a Faust—at least he was motivated to try to do something about everything that was wrong with the world. Faust seems morally superior to Nietzsche, that first environmental philosopher, who opposed both Christianity and the techno-scientific utopia in willing a return to Nature, a counterfeit Eden bared red in tooth and claw.
Judeo-Western optimism differs from the atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered. The tyranny of Chance will give way to the providence of God. This movement from chaos to order begins in Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. . . . And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’: and it was so” (Gen. 1:2, 9). We are to store up “treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matt. 6:20)—a place where chaos and chance have no dominion. More important, perhaps, it is a necessary condition for personal immortality that one can exist in a place where no accidents can happen. Such a place did not exist for Lucretius or Epicurus, and the early moderns like Bacon and Hobbes elided this question. But with God all things are possible.
Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present. Given a choice, it makes more sense to ally with atheist optimism than with atheist pessimism—and we should remain open to the idea that even Faust’s land-reclamation project is a part of God’s larger plan. After all, in the Bible, the sea is the place where the demon Leviathan lives, and it symbolizes the chaos that must be rolled back. And chaos will be rolled back all the way: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . . and the sea was no more” (Rev. 21:1, emphasis added).
The “Tower of Babel Defense”
See this house is divided
See how we're broken in two
It's just a Tower of Babel
and everybody's so confused— Natalie Merchant, “Tower of Babel” (YT)
A frequent defense used by Kingdom Someday Christians against the case for techno-futurist optimism, the point of view suggested by Mr. Thiel in “Against Edenism”, is to point back to God’s judgement on the Tower of Babel.9 This is a very short story in Genesis 11:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Wretched Watchmen over on YouTube criticized “Against Edenism” and provided a relatively standard expression of the Tower of Babel Defense in his argument:
“[Mr. Thiel] urges Christians to accept the inevitable and the necessity of progress. […] He's talking about getting to God status. He's talking about, we need this technology for God to work through us and it's [Kingdom Now theology] about bringing the kingdom now, building the kingdom now. […]
He is comparing this goal of the smart city and smart technology, as well as the brain implements and implants, to the New Kingdom. He's talking about how this smart city that they're putting out there, that they're building -- that's the New Kingdom. That is the kingdom that we are supposed to be building. [...] Ultimately — and if you haven’t figured it out now — ultimately, it’s going to be puffed up, going back to the Tower of Babel, becoming gods. Have you noticed that everything literally comes down to that? One world religion — is going back to the Tower of Babel. The one world economy – that’s literally going back to the Tower of Babel. One world government — is going back to the Tower of Babel. The smart city stuff? Going back to the Tower of Babel. The neurotech stuff? Going back to the Tower of Babel.
It’s literally all about getting back to the Tower of Babel, every single bit of it is about getting back there. That’s it. And everything that they’re pushing is about getting back to that. That is proof that Satan is controlling what is going on – or, I wouldn’t say controlling, but he’s pushing this stuff the way that it is because that is how it started all the way back in Eden, because it Satan says, ‘I'm just as powerful as you, God,’ — false — and then tells Eve, ‘You can be just like God,’ and then sin comes in.
The Tower of Babel is about the idea that they were gods, they were on God's level, and that's why He's scattered them; that's why He removed the one world language, He removed all of it. And that’s why, when you see all the different religions out there, all the temples and the pyramids, and everything, it’s all in the shape of the Tower of Babel. Everything’s connected. Everything’s going back to that. Doesn’t matter if it’s made with dirt, clay, and stone, or if it’s going to be the highest technology that we’ve ever had on planet Earth here. It’s all trying to reach the same goal, and that’s what [Mr. Thiel] is pushing.”
I find these arguments quite insufferable, and that they are from Christians is almost excruciatingly painful. However, the best we can do is attempt to deprogram Protestants from their intense addiction to the left hemisphere and their very narrow, modern, language-based way of conceiving the world and their own faith. Protestantism is a technological religion, a system of belief impossible without the printing press, but its adherents are incapable of seeing it this way.
This perspective is an outright denial of the Incarnation of Christ. It is therefore heretical. Nowhere in the Tower of Babel Defense is there contemplation that the Tower of Babel occurs before the birth of Christ. In fact, Christ is not discussed at all. He couldn’t be, because if one were to really start reading Christ into this story, the Tower of Babel Defense would fall apart. So, we will correct this error and map out a proper understanding of the story.
Mr. Ellul provides a starting point:
“They all have one language. And they have undertaken to make a name for themselves. A humanity capable of communicating has in its possession the most terrible weapon of its own death: it is capable of creating a unique truth, believed by all, independent of God. By the confusion of tongues, by noncommunication, God keeps man from forming a truth valid for all men. Henceforth, man’s truth will only be partial and contested. […] The result of this confusion is dispersion and a halt to construction. The city is not destroyed, but the builders separate and stop building.”
From a Girardian perspective, God’s intervention in the project of the Tower of Babel is very simple: the Tower of Babel is only inviting a mimetic crisis that will demand the sacrifice of an innocent victim. “Then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them,” God says as He looks on Babel. A one world language invites homogenization that will lead to undifferentiation and eventually, of course, the apocalypse.
As Mr. Ellul notes too, “the city is not destroyed”. Genesis says simply that the builders “stopped building the city” of Babel because God had confused their languages so they were unable to work. This directly implies that God has deeper intentions for the city. It is also important to stress what does not happen: God does not destroy the city, and God does not even issue an injunction or a curse against continuing the project. He simply makes it infeasible to move forward by introducing an element of differentiation through separate languages.
Then, finally, we have to read Christ into the story. God does not exist interminably in conflict with man, forever making proclamations against man’s activities that are forever bound, but instead God is always working with man in a long project, over vast expanses of time, to redeem man’s being, man’s activities, man’s inclinations, man’s projects, and the project of the city (and technology) is no different.
The very clear immediate parallel in God’s ongoing project of redemption to the confusion of languages at Babel is the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”
The very first action that St. Peter takes after this outpouring which brings together language and common understanding, is to proclaim the truth of Christ as the Innocent Victim:
“You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. […] This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear. […] Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
It is very clear, reading these stories together, that the purpose of God staying the construction of the Tower of Babel and reintroducing a homogenized language at Pentecost, is solely to protect the Innocent Victim, who in Himself inhabits the reality of all innocent victims. God knows that cities are built on sacrifice of the innocent, and that undifferentiation leads to further sacrifice. But now that Christ has come into the world — to open His mouth in parables and speak things hidden since the foundations of the world — there can be a new truth formed, a Real Truth, one that acknowledges the reality of the story of the Innocent Victim, as St. Peter instantly proclaims with the tongues of Pentecost, and this is very distinct from the agreed-upon social truth of Babel that is ultimately a lie.
Because of their belief in this Truth, Christians do not build the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is built on murder and the lies that cover it up while masquerading as truth. Christians are empowered by the Holy Spirit, who Jesus calls “the Spirit of Truth” who will “tell […] what is yet to come”:
“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.”
Christians are empowered for one purpose: to build the New Jerusalem, the city that is not our city, not man’s, not founded on murder and lies, but the city that belongs to God. The New Jerusalem already exists from God’s point of view; He is her founder, He gives it a name. It is not our city that we have given a name to and, in so doing, claimed our own dominion over, like the pagans at Babel, but, as Christians participating in the hierarchy of Heaven, and taking on Christ within ourselves, we are manifesting through the power of the Holy Spirit the Will of Christ in this world — this world that God gave man dominion over and then won back dominion through the Cross, this world that belongs to Jesus as King. Christians do not set out to build the New Jerusalem in accordance with this proper understanding and then accidentally find themselves building the Tower of Babel instead. No: the task of Christians is to build the New Jerusalem.
This is a view that properly reads Christ into the story of the Tower of Babel and gives us an understanding of the Christian’s work with respect to the city. This is a perspective that appreciates the Incarnation of Christ as completely and utterly transmuting man’s project into His own designs, taking David’s invitation to reside in the city to its fullest manifestation.
The Coming Glory of the City of God
All in a moment
All in an instant
The body was broken
And it was finishedSo let us begin
The celebration and the ceremony
There's silence on Earth but the heavens are roaring
Telling the story of the coming glory— For King & Country, “For God is With Us” (YT)
Mr. Thiel’s essay quoted above might be alternatively titled “After Edenism” because it is not necessarily that Eden or Edenism is to be outright rejected from the Christian’s perspective, but rather simply recognized as a work of God that is already completed, already past. “To Eden there will be no returning”, to expand on Mr. Thiel’s phrase and add a theological dimension, because Christ has already retraced the steps of Cain, been bestowed the crown of thorns, and assumed the nakedness of the new Adam to go back to the Garden and become the fruit of the Tree of Life. All of this is so that the work of Eden in man’s destiny can be completed. Anyone who understands the Kingdom as a restoration of Eden is incorrect. There is nothing left for us in Eden.10 We are going to a city. Mr. Ellul:
“When the Scriptures become more precise, it is always to describe the future under the aspect of a city. So it is with Ezekiel and all the prophets, without exception, and so with Revelation. […] What is coming is the city, not heaven. There are no clouds for angels to float on, there is no blue space. […] What is coming is not heaven, but what is beyond the heavens. […] Nor is the conception of paradise as nature made perfect correct. […] [The] notion of paradise as a garden with trees, flowers, birds, and fountains, as a haven from the torments of the desert, is purely Islamic.”
How then, our premillenialist brethren might argue, can the Kingdom exist now? The time of the Gentiles has not run its course!, they argue as they thump the Bible. Jesus does not sit on the literal throne of David in Jerusalem.
These arguments fail because they do not account for a Girardian reading of Jesus’ work nor do they consider a symbolic reading of Jesus’ life. (Protestants, who I spar with here because they are the most responsible for advancing these arguments in the present day — I won’t even get into Anselm here but we have to acknowledge that he died a very long time ago — also misunderstand symbols because of their very modern construction of the world, which is part of their issue when looking at the life of Christ, but I will not go into further depth about this problem here. However, I will acknowledge that the effects of post-modernity has recently helped Protestants to a better, if still incomplete, understanding of symbolism.)
This very modernist view assumes a conceit of the manifestation of the Kingdom that is simply not true.
In “The Kingdom of Heaven”, Orthodox icon carver and symbolist Jonathan Pageau explains, using the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant as an example:
“The first thing to notice is that there's a few layers of meaning that are brought together, a few analogies to help you understand what it is that Heaven is and what is the Kingdom of Heaven. So, the first thing that is mentioned is, of course, a king, because the kingdom is related to a king. Therefore, a king is a good image understand what it is that Heaven is: that is what is above you in terms of a hierarchy of relationship. [...] [It's something like a hierarchy that lets] the level underneath it exist without being completely subservient to it. At the top, it gives a certain amount of freedom for the lower levels of the hierarchy to exist. [...] We understand that every level of this hierarchy of beings, this hierarchy of of relationships has its own existence to a certain extent and is not completely dependent from the levels above him.
And so you can understand that the manner in which the Kingdom of Heaven is described is as the relationship in a hierarchy between that which is above and that which is below. [...] [This notion] that Heaven is just the dome in the sky, and that Jesus is sitting, you know, above on on clouds, and He's going to come down, it's a completely materialist interpretation. You can see that this is already discounted in Scripture itself. It's already discounted in the words of Christ, who describes the Kingdom of Heaven as a relationship, a hierarchical relationship of different causality. [...] It is described as a relationship of that which is above, very much in the way that we understand a boss today. This is the manner in which Christ understands Heaven, and so He is giving an allegory, He's giving a story to help you understand the relationship of God to creation. [...]
[T]he manner in which Christ describes the relationship between that which is above and that which is below is actually the notion of a pattern to be embodied: that is that what we receive from Heaven. We have to embody it ourselves in the world, that is the the grace that we receive from Heaven -- it has to be embodied in the world, or else it loses its reality: it is not a Kingdom of Heaven, it is not a rule of Heaven over the Earth.
So, the image of the king [being able to give a complete other level of value] to that which the servant is able to then give horizontally, let's say to the other servants in the house, this is a way to help you understand a difference in quality which is very hard to capture in a parable. [...] [I]t's represented as an amount so much that it actually would be completely impossible for any normal person to pay that back. He owes so much that he could never pay it back. It's a kind of apophatic way to help you understand that we're dealing with another level of grace, another level of relationship between the servant and the king, to then the servant with the other servants at the same level.
So, the Kingdom of Heaven, that which we receive from above, is now reproduced on the horizontal level. That is, you have to embody the pattern which comes from above and that is how you are a participant in the Kingdom of Heaven. That is how you are a participant in Heaven, that's how you receive the Kingdom of Heaven. And so there's nothing arbitrary about the way it's described. [...] What's important to understand as well is that it really is not just a question of ethics, it's not just a question of morality. It is a question of that which makes you exist, at the level you exist, and that you embodying it is what is continuing to make that world exist. [...] You're going to embody that at a horizontal level that has more to do with a kind of practice, a kind of engagement, dedication, focus, and an energy that you put into something.
It's different than the notion of ethics, or doing ethics in the weird way we talk about morality today, or even the idea we think about in terms of ‘rules’. It really has more to do with allegiance to the pattern, that which gives the pattern above and then is manifested in the world. One of the things also shown here is that these types of patterns actually don't appear so much as abstract things. [...] The truth is most of these types of patterns are personal, they appear as personal examples, examples that are then embodied in the world. [...] In the case of Christ, of course, we also believe that He has gathered all of this into Himself. St. Paul talks about how Christ is, at this moment, ascending the hierarchy and dominating over all these principalities and thrones. So, the idea is that He is invisibly becoming the head of something, so you don't see the fruits yet. You can think that Paul was just imagining things, but after a few hundred years, Rome completely converted, and the world converted, and it's still happening in Africa and Asia — there are still huge movements toward Christianity. You could say that Christ is still ascending, in a secret way, ascending the hierarchies of principalities and still subjugating different principalities to Himself.”
It is this understanding of the manifestation of the Kingdom that gives full weight to the Incarnation of Christ. As I’ve reviewed above, Jesus’ ministry had a very specific end goal: to take back dominion over the kingdoms of the world that Adam lost to Satan. This dominion looks like undermining the socially-agreed upon truths of scapegoating that hide the founding murder of the city in favor of presenting the real truth of the Innocent Victim and offering a way forward for a new means of human togetherness through a recognition of one’s own scapegoating impulses and receiving forgiveness from the Innocent Victim Himself. If we understand hierarchies properly — not as matrices of oppression but as organizations by which power is shared and effectuated in service of an external goal — we can appreciate how Christ not only shares His dominion with believers but also how believers are tasked with the transformation the world in the service of Christ, in building the New Jerusalem. This appears to be Mr. Thiel’s point in “Against Edenism”, that a world in which Christians are engaged with and actively supporting advances like extending human healthspans, curing cancer, and transforming the environment to support human flourishing looks much more like the ministry of Christ than the anti-technological, paper-bag-over-over-the-head, quasi-doomsday-cult attitude advanced by Christian fundamentalists. The traditionalist fundamentalist conceit, articulated by Mrs. Markell above, that humans are so fallen that they cannot “be credited with much of anything” is another rejection of Christ. That humans are fallen and disordered is true, but that humans are beyond redemption is false. The very message of Christianity and the infusion of the Holy Spirit into the believer is an immediate transformation of our world. We cannot appreciate how different this world was before the advent of Christ. Men would regularly rape women. Children were viewed as almost subhuman. It is the very process of Christ’s haunting message through time that has upended our world and forever altered humanity and our means of relating to each other. That is the power of the Holy Spirit as St. Peter professed to the crowds on the day of Pentecost. This narrow and misguided understanding fails to comport with other fundamentalist principles, such as the importance of “soul winning” or comporting one’s lifestyle in a “virtuous” manner. To what end, if not to manifest the Kingdom? The entire purpose of converting the masses to Christianity and of changing one’s behavior is to align oneself with the hierarchy of Heaven so that God’s Will can be done “on earth as it is in heaven”. This is a process of transforming the world, not of negating it as we eagerly wait for the day Jesus comes down from the clouds in a chopper, throwing out a ladder to airlift us up to Heaven as bombs burst below like it’s the fall of Saigon.
As I have written before, the apocalypse is already now. Jesus’ impact has already become manifest in this world, now, because of His death and resurrection. We are struggling to live with each other and move forward because of Him. The Incarnation has forever disrupted our world. Lest we misunderstand what this means, Jesus foreshadows this work in his healing of the demoniac at Gergesa, a place of Gentiles:
Then they arrived at the region of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As [Jesus] stepped out on shore, a man from the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had not worn any clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me,” for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. […] Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd stampeded down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. [….]
Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they became frightened. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then the whole throng of people of the surrounding region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.
Jesus’s act of healing the scapegoated demoniac and restoring him to the community is literally terrifying . The people are “frightened”. The “whole throng of people of the surrounding region” ask Jesus “to leave them, for they [are] seized with great fear.” Jesus has upset their entire way of organizing. They were a whole because of the demoniac; now that he has been restored to full health, and able to speak to the community’s treatment of him during the long interim of his possession, how can they go on? They can’t; in one reading of this story, Jesus is especially cruel to this community because he restores their scapegoated victim before His own truth has been made whole in His death and resurrection. They have no divine victim yet from whom they can seek forgiveness and discover a new means of human togetherness. We, living in the long shadow of the Cross, have more available to us than they.
To exist as a Christian in the modern world must mean not only believing in the future, but in seeing how the future can break through in our present, even through the work of our sanctified hands — the same hands that Christ redeemed even through taking on Cain’s techne. We are like our spiritual mother Rahab, abiding within the walls of the city of Jericho, yet working toward the birth of something new. The woman is at work in the kitchen, adding just a dash of leaven to the dough; she’ll cover it and return to it doubled. The mustard seed, the size of a speck of dust, will, in time, flourish into a giant tree that gives shelter for the birds. Our knowing glances and secret messages mean little to the passers-by, but all our work done in faith will help bring the Kingdom that is to come, one fine day: and that is the Christian hope.
And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.
In “Four Quartets”, T.S. Eliot writes:
“We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
CallingWe shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
In a recent discussion with Bishop Robert Barron, Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, elegantly stated, “It seems to me patently true that we still live in a society that is utterly saturated with Christian assumptions and that it has ceased to be Christian for utterly Christian reasons.”
For a short but solid synopsis on the millennial reign and the three major schools of thought, I refer the interested reader to Dr. Thomas Schreiner’s explanation in this video.
I’m well aware that I excerpt healthily from Pastor Woods’ argument and there are many points to his argument that I leave unaddressed; my objective here is not necessarily to argue for postmillenialism but rather to critique at least some of the premillenialist arguments against it and my narrowing of the focus here is toward that end.
For a more thorough analysis of the events surrounding the original conquest of Jericho, I refer the interested reader to Gil Bailie’s Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads at Chapter 8, “Crossing the Jordan Opposite Jericho”.
Moses may have had a speech impediment, possibly a stutter, which would have made him an ideal candidate for scapegoating, the specter of which is raised in the story of the bronze serpent in Numbers 21.
For the astute reader who raises an eyebrow that I am possibly laying a path here for an argument for hyper-grace, I very much see your point. I have a broad assumption that it is quite possible to distinguish Christ taking on Cain’s profaned profession from other arguments for hyper-grace, but I have not thought this through to make the argument at this time.
I credit all my understanding of Calvary to Jonathan Pageau. More at this link.
I would be remiss not to also note the role of Christ’s mother Mary in revisiting the Garden as the New Eve, but that is a topic for another post.
It is only with some reticence that I use the phrase “the case for techno-futurist optimism” to describe Mr. Thiel’s “Against Edenism”. I’m not quite sure Mr. Thiel would use that phrase himself to describe that essay and I certainly have a great deal of difficulty imagining him ever voluntarily self-identifying as an “optimist” in the way that it is colloquially used today. In my own view, Mr. Thiel views the world and its future as a well-trained chess player: he is certainly aware of the possibilities of how a game can be won, but also aware of all the many ways it can be lost. That being said, I am also aware that I am almost too familiar with Mr. Thiel’s thought such that it has become difficult for me to feel that I am ever doing justice to all the nuances in his Weltanshauung, but I do believe that is at least fair and not outside the bounds of reasonableness to describe “Against Edenism” as at least a hopeful attitude toward the possibilities of future technological development that, put simply and in a cursory overview, could be called a “case for techno-futurist optimism”.
For reference to the interested reader, this post is conceived to be the final in a three-part series which starts with the Garden (“You Can’t Go Home Again”) and moves to the City (“Wielding Technology in the City of Cain”). To add to my Garden post, I would also note that Genesis 3:7, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes are “opened”, they realize their nakedness, and they immediately sew “fig leaves together” to “coverings for themselves”. That God implicitly rejects this clothing in making Adam and Eve “garments of skin” before sending them out of the Garden, and Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree in Mark 11, is a worthwhile commentary on God’s view of the Garden in the end destination of man.