Chicago – River North
Caveat Emptor – Whether papal, protestant or civil: the emperor with no clothes is white.
God calls His plenty
the many
the mites and grains of sand
in history
The small
everybody
just shy of all
to teach the angels
how the mighty fall
The remnants of papal hierocracy in conflict with the emancipatory, Trinitarian epochalism of Joachim of Fiore continue to work out possibilities, echoing, reciting and impregnating a series of cultural syntheses for spawning oneness, the oldest desire of the flesh. This drive to create the ultimate temporal structure in personal, political and moral terms engineers systems of explaining the human condition, which always the morning after, by way of generational study, come to be judged inevitably flawed. The desire nonetheless energizes the production of professional white (western) knowledge, which, from a white (western) perspective, upholds the most suitable genre of understanding everything: the white (western) method of administering everyone else’s life. From the Fraticelli to the present-day flood of postcolonial refugees overwhelming the western [white] levies of Dominium the perennial confrontation continues between authority and conscience. By the testimony of Jesus in the Spirit of prophecy we pray, Father of the fathers of our flesh, finish what you have started, your Kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[Keith Sisson, Papal Hierocratic Theory in the High Middle Ages, From Roman Primacy to Universal Papal Monarchy (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009); Joachim of Fiore and the Franciscan Spirituals in Apocalyptic Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1979)]
In this, the first global, postsecular moment, we are witnessing the historicizing of white (western) secular modernity as grounded in Latin Christendom’s medieval synthesis. Beyond combining grace and nature, and reason and faith into a single, all-encompassing christianized explanation of everything, Latin Christendom created a kind of epistemological breeder reactor that produced more knowledge than it could consume. The fissionable material it split was a passion for a single scientific hermeneutic based upon fixed laws that could extract meaning from the working of nature and from historical development. Latin Christendom’s unstable political makeup split this fissionable passion into two bodies of law — one civil and the other ecclesial. This split released the energy needed for building the manufacturing plant in which the production of professional modern knowledge (scientific theology, jurisprudence and medicine) has persisted ever since. Latin Christendom’s university continues today as the secular modern university, by which through the research performed, whatever purpose desired is pursued with the confidence that nothing sought cannot be caught, controlled and converted into a serviceable state of subjugation.
By way of this hegemonic hermeneutic, since the twelfth century the educated Latin Christian (white) elite, and since the seventeenth century their secular (white) children, have presumed exclusive ownership of knowledge production and the privilege of overseeing the global marketing of knowledge-based products. They literally claimed legal right to own all natural resources they discovered and the authority to organize for their own benefit as laborers the inhabitants of the earth they encountered throughout the world.
Throughout this same period however men and women speaking a demotic idiom filled with end-time visions inspired by Joachim’s irrepressible egalitarian impulse have incessantly pestered this white cadre. The western (white) elite framing of world history first as divine providence and then as historicist progress has created a dialectic of calculated but brutal use of force regularly ordered to repress common resentments manifested as maniacal yet just outbursts of violence. In these last days, the apocalyptic endgame is upon us. The white monopoly has been broken. Rivers of knowledge flow in all directions, to and from all peoples of all colors. The Lord is now strengthening the common demands of equity for His own purposes by which He turns biblical prophecy into history. Doing so empowers the elemental forces of this world to drive the white (western) administration and order of things out from its comfortable hegemonic home.
The closing of the secular (white) modern era means western (white) theologians like their counterparts in the other academic disciplines whom they envy and work so hard to emulate, are losing their scientific residence. Manumitted western (white) theologians once again as refugees in the world are free to sing of God’s beauty on the way home. Perhaps by practicing the welcoming of encounter and by the aesthetic exercise of seeking the beauty of Jesus in the face of others, they will create a theology of hospitality grounded in the organon of hope so best to know where we are going. Perhaps they will cultivate strategies for celebrating and confessing God’s Kingdom and His King by taking up alternate political aims to those of faulting and controlling cultures and commanding or commandeering states. Perhaps they will remind their listeners that the Lord said His Kingdom is not of this world, is not derived from this world, making clear it simply is not from here. Perhaps they will encourage us not to despise the church of God, but rather urge us to gather around the Lord’s Supper reciting the Lord’s Prayer so we may better stir one another’s hearts unto loving one another, and unto doing good to all everywhere yet especially unto those who are of the household of the faith. Perhaps they can knock down their polemical and promotional fences so they may better see how to discover what God is doing in the lives of others, and thus too be blessed with a richer understanding of what He is doing in theirs. Perhaps they can show us the virtues of respect and the value of humility in pursuing healthy relations with others. Jesus knows.
Life is not a puzzle we figure out, a problem we solve or an untapped and wild domain we master. Rather, the abundant life now — today — rightly ordered, forms an organic mosaic of the One most beautiful, who is also the One who gives us life. He alone shines in the darkness of our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ. In the fullness of the Spirit together — as children of light who are light in the Lord and receive all things in His marvelous light — we see alert, with well-tempered soul, a sound mind and eyes wide open what the world cannot see, the light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
None of us with the eyes of our heart being so enlightened desire to see the visio beatifica alone. Wanting all to see we rush out into the entire world to preach the gospel to all creation, looking to meet those to whom God has given eyes to see, for He alone has made both the hearing ear and the seeing eye. We do so knowing our work prepares the nations for the day to come when they shall enter the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, which He Himself will illuminate by His glory. At that time, the nations shall walk by its light, and the kings of the earth shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it. We help prepare the nations for this moment by holding fast to the biblical sense of cultural egalitarianism. We know and celebrate that God is not One to show partiality, and that He has pronounced we should not call one another profane or unclean. Each should be taught so all may know — “You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not fear because of man for the judgment is God’s.” God Himself warns us to be very careful about this. “Consider what you are doing, for you do not judge for man but for the Lord who is with you when you render judgment. Now then let the fear of the Lord be upon you; be very careful what you do, for the Lord our God will have no part in unrighteousness, or partiality, or the taking of a bribe.” We are to remind one another, “If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each man’s work, then we should conduct ourselves in fear during the time of our stay upon the earth. For he who does wrong will receive the consequences of the wrong which he has done, and that without partiality.” If we show partiality, we are committing sin and God’s law convicts us as transgressors. For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy. Nevertheless, if we see ourselves for who we are by looking intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abide by it, not becoming forgetful hearers but effectual doers God will bless us in our endeavors with others, promising us mercy triumphs over judgment.
Intent on the one purpose the mind of Christ gives us; we offer the gospel in every cultural setting confident that in doing so God has prepared it to become an administration of life through which the Holy Spirit sheds the light of greater understanding of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. We know God Himself has made the nations from one beginning of our generations. He ordained the nations to live on all the face of the earth. He determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation. He did this so that within these cultural bounds of speech whoever perhaps might grope for Him by blindly feeling their way for Him might find Him. We know He is not far from each one of us. We also know that on our own none of us can find Him. Into this gap the church rushes crying out with the Spirit, “Come,” to those who thirst for the water of life, who are drowning in every stream of speech that has been flowing through the generations since our first parents first saw one another and spoke in the presence of God. The church does this to increase the number of brothers and sisters in Christ who in turn take the same message to others that too God has prepared for them to hear it.
The way of love however is greater even than this. We remember the Spirit instructs us to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Believing this we listen to the new stream of speech entering the church’s praise to receive the blessings it gives us, adding not just new voices but too new ways of seeing the beauty of Jesus as revealed in the Bible heard in another language. This gift enriches our sacrifice of praise to God, illuminating the truth from an angle and tangent that we never could have imagined or discovered. Fellowship becomes both fuller and richer as we together give thanks for His name. The will of the Father, the testimony of Jesus and the Spirit of prophecy strengthens this fellowship by also giving unseen vistas of the biblical landscape of life so shepherds and saints gain a wider and wiser scope for delivering and receiving instruction, exhortation, rebuke, correction and training in righteousness. This better equips us for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the true knowledge of the Son of God.
Thus life in Christ lived in another culture via another stream of speech contributes to completing the organic icon of the Lord of liberty and Giver of Life. By His shining His light through this cultural prism He gives the church eyes to see Him as no Christian had seen Him ever before. This increases the church’s capacity to glorify God. His light seen through this prism joins the light in which He has already bathed His saints. The additional stream of praise enriches the church’s worship of God. The new veins of praise and proclamation bestow upon the church illuminating insights that intensify our joy in beholding the beauty of God. The church receives new arrangements for singing the psalms, and the Spirit expands the depository of hymns and spiritual songs with which we sing in our heart to the Lord. Our giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even our Father, becomes richer and fuller. We glorify God in our manifesting together His manifold wisdom to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places, as we subject ourselves, one to another in the fear of Christ.
No single cultural construction of this mosaic manifesting the manifold wisdom of God stands alone as the one God sanctions as the authorized picture of His enchanted cosmos. The body of Christ is no more subject to normative whiteness today than in its beginning it was subject to a Hebraic exclusivity, a Hellenistic standard or a Latin imperium. There is no ethnic or cultural monopoly over the polity and the teaching of the church. Nonetheless, there is resistance to the fullness of freedom ours together in Christ. The cultural lust to claim ownership of this freedom while insisting upon having the exclusive authority to bestow it on others is relentless. We however should covet neither the Anointed One’s wife nor that which belongs to God alone. As the Lord said, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed.” He urged us not to lord over others or work to earn the title “Benefactor.” Instead, He said, “Let him who is the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.”
The quest for intellectual domination in the form of framing history nonetheless continues. Catholic apologist and devotee of romanticism Charles Taylor openly admits, “The Reformation as Reform is central to the story I want to tell — that of the abolition of the enchanted cosmos, and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith.”
Behold the definite article – see the pig in the poke by watching the cat jump out of the bag: The enchanted cosmos? No, a pretender, that is, an enchanted, white (western) cosmos. The white (western) social imaginary loses the beauty it truly possesses as soon as its admirers insist it is the only imaginary, the one enchanted imaginary sanctioned and sustained by God. The entire orchestra is not a hundred oboes. The whole body of Christ is not an eye. The enchanted cosmos of the white (western) mind of Latin Christendom whether catholic, protestant or secular is not the official and orthodox cosmos authored and approved by God. The western (white) mentality behind it is not the only way to decipher special revelation. Nor is its masterpiece the only way to depict the beauty intrinsic to creation made up of all things seen and unseen. Hubris is a two-sided coin. One side of the coin bears the marks of self-importance and self-confidence, and the other arrogant indifference or dismissive patronization of others. Hubris conducts hatred and blocks the circulation of love. Here postmodernity of the western white world joins hands with postcolonialism in the non-western world without color, and together, under the guiding hand of the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, usher us into the dawning postsecular moment in which He wants us all to seek Him, when now even today, He wants His children to see Him in the face of Jesus as no one has ever seen Him before.
Taylor accuses those closest to him of the violence and strife hubris and hate beget, while blind to the fact that his discourse carries the very same seeds of discord. In the name of a Latin Christendom that could not reform itself Taylor condemns Reform — that evil engine of disenchantment — “inflamed by a hatred of idolatry, which animated the grim-faced worshipers Erasmus saw emerging from the Church in Basel.”
Remember, whatever we ignore we absolve, for apart from the law there is no sin. Agreed? No! Rather, we cannot learn from what our elders taught us to forget.
If God’s grace gives us eyes to see that those before us dropped their guard against idolatry, are we not to flee from that in which they have entangled us? We know we are not to let anyone deceive us with empty words. We know the covetous person is an idolater who has no inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God. We know we are to consider the members of our earthly body as dead to greed, which is idolatry. God commands us to stop lying to one another. He calls us to live out the life of our new self in Christ, which the Spirit is renewing in knowledge after the image of its Creator. Who are the greedy if not “those with a strong desire to acquire and keep for themselves more and more money and possessions, because they love, trust, and obey wealth rather than God”? Who more so than those who rob others of their own love and devotion to Christ by drawing their faithfulness away from the stream of speech which God prepared for them that they might learn of His love listening to the Scriptures in their own tongue of their ancestors, family and community? Who more so than those who denied others to exercise their loyalty to Christ their King and to depend only upon Him for their existence? Who more than those who compromised their exclusive faith in Christ alone by interposing themselves as the custodians and executors of their sanctification so to make them Christians in their own image? This is not to blame the missionaries nor those who sent them; but rather the system of their origin that so conditioned and commissioned them. The idolatrous system from which we must flee conscripts and cripples both the missionary bringing the gospel and the listener receiving the good news through a language still held captive to the evil one, which the Spirit desires to take from the domain of darkness and pour into the life of the church. Is the church justified in turning a blind eye to this system of idolatry if those who benefit from it give a tenth of their gain for the gospel to go out into all the world, and thereby facilitates the expansion elsewhere of the same idolatrous system?
[Brian S. Rosner, Greed as Idolatry, The Origin and Meaning of a Pauline Metaphor (Grand Rapids: 2007), p. 129.]
Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.
Taylor catechizes the Reformation’s children enrolled in the academy, Latin Christendom’s legacy of knowledge production and managing its quality control. As if the apostle Peter did not teach virtue is the first vitamin supplement for our faith of a kind identical to his, with bonifaced irony Taylor tells those he seeks to subdue, “one can see how all this disciplined order-building prepared a great reversal. On the one hand, we have people who develop the disciplines of character, so that they can put some (for the time) impressive degree of moral order in their conduct. On the other, some of these people in association find ways to impose an unprecedented degree of order on society, or at least come to believe they can do so, given the right conditions.”
Conjuring his gaseous ghost to draw closer he writes, “Now both their action in expelling the sacred from worship and social life, and the instrumental stance they take to things and to society in the course of building their order, tends to drive out the enchantment from the world. This becomes progressively voided of its spirits and meaningful forces, and more and more the disenchanted world we are familiar with. In consequence the understanding of the subject as porous fades more and more away.”
[Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 77, 83].
Protestantism alone no more conceived the secular age than Onan’s act begot an heir for his brother Er. Just as a handshake between opponents suggests a social relationship to come but does not yet exist, so too the Augsburg agreement and the Treaty of Westphalia announce the coming of the secular age through agreements struck between Roman Catholics and Protestants. This telling of the story of secular origins as a collaborative tale has only fellowship and neither power nor profit to merit our giving it a hearing.
His evangelical popularizer adds, “In a way, Taylor suggests all conversions to Christianity in our secular age are, to some extent, reconversions, conversions back to a social imaginary that animated Europe in the past.” To confirm this he quotes Taylor, who wrote, “‘The hold of the former Christendom on our imagination is immense, and in a sense, rightly so.’”
[James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), p. 134]
Africa and Asia? Alexandria? Antioch? Jerusalem? Thiruvithancode? Edessa? Ardmore? Aksum? Vagharshapat? Sian? Wamesit? Removed, erased, irrelevant. The Sistine Chapel covers a multitude of imaginaries, pronouncing all others as sinful; and thus presenting the western (white) imaginary as the one upon which our mind should dwell because it alone is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute and is the thing of excellence worthy of praise
Only a Wissenschaftslehrer committed to the pure ‘I’, playing the role of a colonizing myope could hold fast to such a closed-minded and narcissistic outlook. The West’s heart readied for repentance and reparation must realize the daughters of Latin Christendom, the two together, the Catholic imaginary and the Protestant drive for order, have made globalization what it is today, in terms of both its hegemonic secular state and its long-standing service of providing a safe haven for whiteness. The Holy Spirit’s postsecular caldron of indigena coming to a boil in the twenty-first century, that is, the rising up of religious-based resistance to the secular-white West and the explosive growth of world Christianity, sets His desire against these tares sown in the world by the devil.
[Professor Willie James Jennings has shown us a better way that we might learn how not to take secular whiteness so serious. Read Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination, Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010). Begin by listening to “Can ‘White’ People be Saved: Reflections on the Relationship of Missions and Whiteness,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wRvaG9j53g, an address given by Willie Jennings, Thursday, November 2, 2017 at the Fuller School of Intercultural Studies Conference, “Race, Theology, & Mission.”]
A fuller and fairer understanding of this, A Secular Age, is to pronounce it the Age of Secular Whiteness, a project of Latin Christendom, entered into and advanced by both Roman Catholics and especially, magisterial Protestants, who together imagined, mapped and built the present scholastic, humanist, colonized and racialized moment we call modernity. As Dr. Jennings makes clear, this distinctive type of inner identity, personal discipline and social order holds up male whiteness as the standard, the meaning, and the purpose of achieving the fullness of being human, of reaching complete cultural maturation and receiving the benefits of perfect salvation. Latin Christendom conceived and foisted upon the world its deformed program in edification for its own honor of place and purpose in comparison to everyone else. It distorts the gospel and troubles the church. Anyone can be secular white, but upon realizing what secular whiteness is, who would want to be? Anyone who thirsts and wishes to take the water of life without cost may do so, and who, upon coming to know Jesus would not want to do so?
When are we going to wake up and strengthen the things that remain?
I do not believe, trust in nor rely upon the words of either Charles Taylor or James K. A. Smith. The “strange rituals of Christian worship” offer no exhilarative antidote to the carcinogen of secular whiteness, which their academic discourse enables by allowing the dominium of whiteness to remain unnamed. With the Book of Books He has given us, we who have been bought by His blood walk this the biblical landscape of life where He has put us to live before the eyes of the Lord, whether counted among the people of the nations or as a member of the Jewish nation. We believe in His name. We trust in His life of righteousness, passion, death and resurrection. We rely only upon Him today to live His Father’s love through the power of His Spirit. We are not waiting for Godot, or for Saint Francis or Martin Luther. We are waiting for Jesus, for He has said, “Yes, I am coming quickly.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
The irony of irony is that it is not ironic. We bend the knee to the imaginary “state of nature.” We ensconce ourselves behind the laws of nature and nature’s god. We accept as normative the concept “social contract.” We have built upon it our political temple devoted to freedom. However, although we either all enjoy or suffer its provisions we refuse to consider another idea that actually describes historical reality: the concept of a “Racial Contract.” The long-standing and on-going ignoring of this concept is itself an indicator of its validity, because such a rejection is precisely in accordance with it requirements. As the scholar that worked hard to make visible these binding fasces, Charles Mills explains. The “Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”
This is the case because “in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races–those who, unlike us, are raced–appear.”
Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, ‘The Lord knows those who are His,’ and, ‘Let everyone who names the name of the Lord abstain from wickedness.’ No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it.
“A genuine transcendence of [the] terms [of the Racial Contract] would require, as a preliminary, the acknowledgment of its past and present existence and the social, political, economic, psychological, and moral implications it has had both for its contractors and its victims.”
[Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 18, 76-77].
In a postsecular moment of collages and collapses, our cultural constructs come and go (Isaiah 40:8). The political concept of the “social contract” is an example of mauvaise foi, masking truth from a unitary consciousness in the midst of our tinkering about collecting oddments and ornaments like mushrooms in this, our darkening forest of flux. If we rely upon Olivier Roy to name this rummaging ritual, we would call it Holy Ignorance, “the worldview of those who,” as the New York Times reviewer of his work put it, “having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile.” As the reviewer points out, quite correctly I believe according to Scripture, “The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.” He of course is referring to the religious style coined ‘fundamentalism’. I read him to mean secular modern political science, and its apostles Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mills, Weber, Habermas and Rawls.
[Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance, When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. by Ros Schwartz (Columbia University Press, 2010), reviewed by Alan Wolfe, “Faith and Modernity,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review (12/24/2010). Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/books/review/Wolfe-t.html. Read 11/12/2017].
It is amazing that the lawyers, executors and keepers of the collective combination of memory and amnesia that makes up the still dominant secular imaginary coveted by the community of whiteness, have said so little about the single most powerful event happening everywhere right under their noses. This event is bringing into existence an alternative imaginary, a shelter for all of us caught up in the daily postsecular disruptions of global unfolding and re-wrinkling, as we draw closer to that fretful and homeless state of mind that comes with what Homi Bhabha calls cultural hybridity (Location of Culture, 1994). Charles Lemert asked in his work Postmodernism is Not What You Think — Why Globalization Threatens Modernity (2005), “If there is a global WE, might we call ourselves the dispossessed?” The answer is yes. Now is the age of all soul’s eve when God is putting everybody on the road home. He is shaking the nations. He is making us all wretched migrants of the earth.
At the same time, we are witnessing the translation of the Bible into the languages of all nations, laying down the groundwork for a far more inclusive, coherent and inviting alternative to the gibberish of both “globish” and global English. This is not an abstract process. As Zygmunt Bauman made clear in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), the entire modern project stands guilty because it was bureaucratic planning and administration, university education and scientific research, technological instrumentation and rationality in service to the modern state that produced the methods and motives for the implementation of this horrific initiative. Any theory of modernity — secular, postsecular or postmodern — and all who affirm modern civilization must face this genocidal nightmare and acknowledge its modern design. The Holocaust will not go away. It is not peripheral to what we now are going through. It has replaced the revolution for freedom as the igniting agency for moving history. Each of us simultaneously suffers the double agony of being displaced even while penning up another. Tens and hundreds of millions of people reading the Bible every day in their own language know this. Muslims know this. The people of Israel know this. The Jewish people know this. The sin of supersession is universal. Who will deliver us from this body of death? Rejoice degenerates and undesirables, for this too He has said, “It is finished.”
With Walter Benjamin we confess, “Every second of time was [and remains] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” Moreover, this is waiting; we press on sorrowful yet ever joyful, going out to greet Him, not knowing where we are going.
Proverbs 2:21-22
