There is a lot of fog out there right now, I get that. But it is very disturbing to me to see almost all theologians and pastors out there simply writing off the idea that there could be an evil cabal of globalists attempting to steer the world toward a one world government as some sort of fanciful dystopian novel that only so-called conspiracy theorists could maintain. This is quite disillusioning to me, really. It’s as if all the talk that these folks do about the triune God, Jesus Christ, creation, the fall, human nature, redemption, the church, eschatology so on and so forth is merely a discussion taking place in a parallel universe. In other words, I am starting to think that most Christians, insofar as they follow the lead of many pastors and theologians, are in fact functional Docetists. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines Docetism this way:

Docetism is not properly a Christian heresy at all, as it did not arise in the Church from the misunderstanding of a dogma by the faithful, but rather came from without. Gnostics starting from the principle of antagonism between matter and spirit, and making all salvation consist in becoming free from the bondage of matter and returning as pure spirit to the Supreme Spirit, could not possibly accept the sentence, “the Word was made flesh”, in a literal sense. In order to borrow from Christianity the doctrine of a Saviour who was Son of the Good God, they were forced to modify the doctrine of the Incarnation. Their embarrassment with this dogma caused many vaccinations and inconsistencies; some holding the indwelling of an Aeon in a body which was indeed real body or humanity at all; others denying the actual objective existence of any body or humanity at all; others allowing a “psychic”, but not a “hylic” or really material body; others believing in a real, yet not human “sidereal” body; others again accepting the of the body but not the reality of the birth from a woman, or the reality of the passion and death on the cross. Christ only seemed to suffer, either because He ingeniously and miraculously substituted someone else to bear the pain, or because the occurence on Calvary was a visual deception. Simon Magus first spoke of a “putative passion of Christ and blasphemously asserted that it was really he, Simon himself, who underwent these apparent sufferings. “As the angels governed this world badly because each angel coveted the principality for himself he [Simon] came to improve matters, and was transfigured and rendered like unto the Virtues and Powers and Angels, so that he appeared amongst men as man though he was no man and was believed to have suffered in Judea though he had not suffered” (passum in Judea putatum cum non esset passus — Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. I, xxiii sqq.). The mention of the demiurgic angels stamps this passage as a piece of Gnosticism. Soon after a Syrian Gnostic of Antioch, Saturninus or Saturnilus (about 125) made Christ the chief of the Aeons, but tried to show that the Savior was unborn (agenneton) and without body (asomaton) and without form (aneideon) and only apparently (phantasia) seen as man (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., XXIV, ii).[1]

Even though, as this definition rightly notes, Docetism did not arise out of the church’s teaching, as a negation, it did penetrate the thinking of the churches in regard to the way some attempted to think the relationship between the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ. But I underscore this definition in order to use it as an analogy to help me think about the aloofness of the many pastors and theologians out there when it comes to concreto realities taking place in the socio-political spaces of our world system. It’s as if this class of people in the church cannot fathom, cannot imagine that just maybe what the Bible trades on over and over again, particularly in its Old Testament witness, just might be present and formative in our 21^st century period.

What I have come to realize through this last year is that even those who claim to be theologians of retrieval, i.e. those most steeped in the desire to leap-frog the modern period, in regard to their theologizing, is that they are slavishly ensconced within Enlightenment rationalist categories. In other words, to refer to Charles Taylor’s category, they function within a disenchanted frame when it comes to thinking a God/world relation. It’s as if they cannot imagine a world, a modern secular world wherein devils and goblins still inhabit the heights and the depths of all that is and takes place in the world. It’s as if they cannot imagine a world wherein the darkness of the human heart is so great that it seeks space and power with the devil himself. It’s as if they believe sin and evil is a theological and abstract principle, a ‘Docetic’ principle that has no real life correspondence with the shape of this current world order. It’s as if they cannot imagine that Baal, Moloch, and a host of other Ancient Near Eastern deities, you know the ones we are confronted with constantly in the Old Testament witness, could be a real and present danger, not just theoretically, but concretely in the real and lived world we inhabit day to day. What kind of theology is this?!

Beyond this the Apostle Paul writes: “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Colossians 2:13-15).” Is this merely a theoretical, a Docetic world that has no concrete contact with this world system? Did Jesus in the incarnation&atonement not enter into this world, in our humanity, into a world that was thoroughly ecclesiopolitical in the sense that the sacred and secular were so intertwined that they mutually implicated each other? In other words, did Jesus operate in a world just like ours, with the same satanic and demonic spirits that filled the world with their dark presence back then as they do now or not? When you read pastors and theologians summarily write off the idea that the rulers of this world system, the ones in flesh and blood, just might be operating in concert, quite overtly, with the satanic and demonic underworld that has always already been pervasive as the shape of this world system I have to wonder if these pastors, theologians, and the Christians who follow them actually believe that the reality of the biblical world is real or not. Jesus believed it was real, and He acted like it.

At the very end of the day why do these pastors, theologians, and Christians who follow them simply write off the possibility that our world system just might be EXACTLY like the one that shaped the Ancient Near East; save the fact that we live in a modern “enlightened” period wherein such ‘spiritualism’ has been superseded by the saeculum. But the secular hasn’t subtracted anything from the ANE understanding of the spirit filled world; instead it has materialistically collapsed and conflated that world into an ostensibly disenchanted world that in fact remains just as enchanted by satanic worship as was the ancient pagan world. And the people of God are no different now than they were in the Old Testament ANE context. The church and her leaders are just as syncretistic as the priests of Israel were. And the world leaders we have seated in the ‘high places’ are just as spiritualistically and syncretistically oriented as the ancient pagan world was; but just under the gloss of a materialist and secular world-frame. The idea that this is all a conspiracy theory—that there is a satanic world cabal that worships the creation and power (climate change) rather than the Creator, and that they are attempting to enact their vision of the world onto the world writ large—is a phantasmal world that only the overly educated could take seriously. In other words, you have to be into Docetism, and other abstractions (for whatever reason) to simply not see what is happening in the world right now.

Maranatha

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[1] Catholic Encyclopedia: New Advent.