I am continuing to read through Paul Hinlicky’s book Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics. In a discussion on the scandal of particularity, and how that problematizes, even wrecks the more ethereal complexes of how divine simplicity has often been thought in the Great Tradition. Hinlicky, offers a nice sketch on Gnosis, and how that applies to our postmodern relativistic moment. Indeed, relativism always is grounded in the polytheism of multitudinous turn-to-the-subjectivities running around claiming that their way, their ideological/ethereal way, is the way. The result: people become a confused ‘muddle’ not sure of who or what to believe; thus they evacuate even the possibility that there could be some scandalous particularous concrete reality that coheres or corresponds with extramental reality that stands beyond them, not from within them. Hinlicky writes:

The deep suspicion arises rather from the ever-mushrooming gnosticism of Euro-American civilization; the new gnosticism arises as a desperate strategy of psychic survival under an imperium of political sovereignty that has lost the canonical story that once constrained its worst excesses and sometimes guided it in more humane directions. We call it “postmodernity,” and it means the collapse of the metanarrative of Christendom with the decay of the classical Western synthesis of Christian Platonism into the pluralist cacophony of contending interests that cannot discover a common good in a demystified and pointless cosmos of matter in motion. This new doctrine of despair ironically funds with apathetic nonresistance (i.e., the “whatever” response) the juggernaut of the biopolitical regime, first manifest in National Socialism, but now recurring by the Satan who disguises itself as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). In face of this monster with a charming face, liberal calls for secular unity or conservative calls for the restoration of Christendom are alike idle chatter. What is needed is the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who breaks into the strong man’s house and binds him (Mark 3:27). The deep battle for the future of humanity on this globe is one being fought along these lines within the hapless churches, ostensibly the representatives of the reign of God, though more often than not little more than funeral societies. Our situation is dire (Mark 4:9), and so the disputation undertaken in this book is a matter of some urgency.[1]

Another friend, who shall remain anonymous, but also a “PhD-maker,” shared the following with me today via private message:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but … one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. – William Shirer (in Adolph Hitler’s Germany)

So, Hitler’s Germany was prior to the postmodern moment, simpliciter, but its seedlings had already been planted years prior (just read Nietzsche’s prophetic insights). When authority structures (like governments, elitist cabals, etc.) are intent on duping the people, a necessary condition for that is that the raza are sufficiently schooled in thinking in fragmented and normative relativistic ways. We are clearly at that moment in world history, and we can see it in the eyes (not the faces, since they’re covered by masks) of those embroiled in the confusion and the subsequent fear being pushed onto the postmodern mind that lives under the delusion that their truth is truth (and what we see in mob-mentality is just a collectivist expression of that). Hinlicky, wrote what he did in 2016, I’m afraid what he was warning against (and others before him) has not been heeded; not even in the churches. As such, we have been taken captive by a Babylonian cabal who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy the fracked minds of the masses; neither knowing here nor there when it comes to reality or how to think about it.

The cross of Jesus Christ is the wisdom the Christian mind needs. We ought to avoid submission to mainstream narratives that appeal to the vanity of our own subjectivities, and instead seek out reality that actually corresponds to the real data. I could say more on this front, but I’m sure you know what I’m getting at. Pax vobis

[1] Paul Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 99-100.