Category Archives: Michael Gillespie

The Hellenic, the Neo-Thomist Origins of Modernity

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When Divine grace is separated from its reality in God, when grace becomes a thing, a substance, a quality infused into the accidents of humanity, it is only one small step removed from being integrated into the essence of what it means to be human. If this step is taken, and it has been in the ‘modern-turn,’ the turn-to-the-subject, the Gifter of grace no longer remains necessary, in a transcendent sense, as grace becomes materialized, immanentized, horizontalized into an ‘immanent frame,’ as Charles Taylor grammarizes. Indeed, Taylor writes with reference to what it means to be human in a frame wherein grace has become the possession, the generative reality of what it means to be a self-determined, self-constructed modern person in the 21st century:

There is another facet of this narrative of secularity which it is worth mentioning here, because of its ubiquity and importance in the “closed” spin on immanence. The story line here is this: once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves; from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see that these higher authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. This is a radicalization of the coming to adulthood story as it figures in the science-driven argument for materialism. It is not just that freed from illusion, humans come to establish true facts about the world. It is also that they come to dictate the ultimate values by which they live.1

Once the secular person came to imagine, through their new ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Taylor) that in fact the classical God was really just a projection of their own imagination, an inner to outer extrapolation of their best selves onto a cipher by which they might live and adjudicate life, they were able to bring diremption for themselves and determine that in fact they were God and thus gods after all. What secularism ultimately brings, this ostensible ‘come of age’ moment, is really just another expression of polytheism, a serpentine belief that humanity itself possesses godness, and thus are the creators of their own reality and existence (in a world where existence and essence have become a singular reality).

As I suggested at the beginning there is a theological origin story behind the secular-turn. Ironically, this turn has a Christian source, albeit as that source has been dressed down by a synthesis of Christian theology with speculative philosophical categories; such categories derived from the classical philosophers like Aristotle et al. The abstraction of grace from the giver or reality of grace, God, takes form most notably in the Catholic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Here we finally get a codification of a burgeoning philosophical frame baptized in the Holy water of the Church. It is the notion of ‘quality’ that takes decisive stage, or in fact ‘substance’ within an Aristotelian frame whereby Divine grace comes to lose its Divine character, at least in the sense that its reality is necessarily grounded in the triune being of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Once this move is made, as I asserted earlier, we are only a few small steps, a few small centuries away from ‘coming of age,’ among other contributing factors during and post-Enlightenment. But I find this abstraction of grace from the Divine life to be an interesting development towards modernity, ironically, even as that is given dye within the early mediaeval and Catholic sitz im leben of Thomas Aquinas (and those who received him, whether Catholic or Protestant Reformational). Helmut Thielicke describes the scenario this way:

We can see clearly at this point that what takes place in man, and not merely what happens to him, has become the object of theological observation. It is again evident, as was clear already with respect to the concept of the imago Dei in man’s original state, that the ontic element in the human ego pushes itself into the foreground. Then the theme of theology is not just the relation between God and man; on the contrary, theology then includes as an independent concern a treatment of “anthropology.” Here is where the fault lies.

The crack, or better, the cracks are themselves produced by the belt of tension which necessarily arises where men attempt to combine ontological and personalistic thinking. The greatest strain and the most evident rupture are undoubtedly to be found at the place where grace ceases to be a divine attribute and becomes an effect distinct from the divine attribute from which it emanates, ie, where grace ceases to be a personal relation to man (the “gracious God”) and becomes something which is ontically infused into man and which is thus present in man, demonstrably present. For it is precisely this distinction between the gracious God and the grace given [gratia data] which is the starting point of the distinctively “Roman” development of the doctrine of grace. To put it epigrammatically and therefore with tongue in cheek, what men want is not primarily God himself, but “divine powers which may become human virtues and qualities” (von Harnack). At this point where grace “visibly” passes into man in accordance with certain well defined practices, eg, sacramental operation, it ceases to be exclusively a subject and becomes a material object, “medicine.” This materialization expresses itself in a variety of ways . . . .2

It would surely be reductionistic to blame Thomas and Aristotle for the modern-turn to the self, and what Taylor identifies as ‘the coming of adulthood story.’ That is not my intention. I am simply noticing a Christian turn made at least within the lifetime of early mediaeval developments, that can plausibly help explain how this ‘enlightened-turn’ finally came to fruition. There are many other contributing ideational and socio-culture pressures that finally brought this turn to consummation, but I think it is notable that we already see these fault lines developing as far back as the Hellenic period of the classical philosophers; and then developed more Christianly with the arrival of Thomas and the Romans.

I am only minimally attempting to illustrate how secular ideas can be traced back to a Christian lineage. Charles Taylor, Michael Gillespie, my personal friend, Derrick Peterson, among others have done further work, more substantially, to demonstrate that my point is not ill founded. Christians have as much to do with the secularity of society as anyone else. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that what it means to be a secular-atheist in the 21st century is really just an expression of a Christian heresy that has attended the Church catholic by way of various expressions; whether those expressions be understood within the Church proper, or in society-at-large as the theater of humanity’s glory, albeit, devoid of the Spirit. Ultimately, when grace is abstracted from God and made a quality capable of being understood purely from the immanent frame of the ‘flatlander,’ it is at this point that Genesis 3 once again receives breath to breathe and make another attempt to elevate itself with zigguartic flare to the ‘high places’ of the living God.

 

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 580 kindle.

2 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 238.

 

 

Heidegger’s Techno-Cult is Nigh Upon Us

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Michael Gillespie continues to do a masterful job in treating what he calls ‘the ground of history’ in the thought of both Hegel and Heidegger. In this instance (what we will be reading from him below) we will engage with his development of Heidegger’s critique of modernity; particularly as that gets fleshed out in what we might call a technocracy. I want to share Gillespie on Heidegger at length because I think that what Heidegger thought, in regard to history’s reduction to technological determinism vis-à-vis human enablement and projection, is highly pertinent for what we are seeing unfold before our very eyes in the broader culture and global societies now. Let’s read along with Gillespie on Heidegger, and then I will offer some concluding comments following.

The will to power, according to Heidegger, is the penultimate form of modernity. In it the distinction of subject and object dissolves. As Nietzsche puts it: “this world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” The will to power thus makes possible the universal objectification of everything, for objectification becomes nothing other than the subordination of the will to itself. The end of the will is the subjugation of man and nature, i.e., power. This power, however, has as its end only the security of the will to will. The will to power is thus implicitly the will to will. As such it is merely the means to further means with no end beyond itself and thus fundamentally nihilistic. The will to power, which rests upon the recognition that God is dead, thus passes over into the all-encompassing and all-establishing will (Ge-Stell) of an irresistible world of technology.

The advent of will to power as the will to will opens up the possibility for the unlimited exploitation of everything. This occurs through the universal establishment of everything not merely as objects but as pure instrumentalities (Bestände) and through the subordination of all subjectivity and freedom to the overarching necessities of the will implicit in technology. Man is organized on a global scale by political, social, and economic agencies for production and consumption, and the earth itself becomes nothing but a reserve of energy and raw materials that are brought forth and directed by a technology that aims only at its own continuation and growth. The absolute technical state itself serves only to guide the total mobilization of human and natural resources for the unlimited exploitation and consumption of the earth. Politics along with all other institutions thus becomes an appendage of technology. In this “planetary imperialism” of technical organization subjectivity and modernity reach their end.

With the advent of world technology freedom is extinguished. The general conception of technology as a tool in the hands of a self-determining humanity is in Heidegger’s view a fundamental misunderstanding, for technology has a logic and necessity of its own that passes beyond human control. All men are governed by economic and technical necessities: the competition for the unlimited exploitation of the earth requires the objectification and subordination not just of some men to others but of all men to the world task. Man thus becomes human to the extent that he constitutes himself as raw material that has no determinate characteristics, or as a pure instrumentality that can be used as momentary necessity dictates. Man becomes an interchangeable part.

In the midst of this technological frenzy of production and consumption of subordination and exploitation, man fails to recognize, according to Heidegger, that it is the very subjectivity and freedom he regards as the essence of humanity that uproots him and casts him into uncertainty, insecurity, and alienation. Hence he does not recognize that all his striving only more completely obliterates his place in the world and his true humanity. Indeed, man and the world are thereby so transformed that the very possibility of a place, of an ethos, and hence of an authentic ethics and politics is extinguished. Man who had a home in the world in the context of the polis and traditional life is at home in the modern world everywhere and nowhere: as a pure instrumentality man can adapt himself to anything as homo faber man becomes mass man.

Man’s reaction to this universal homelessness and alienation in Heidegger’s view is not a thoughtful hesitation and reflection upon his own being but an overly hasty decision to fabricate a place for himself, i.e., to objectify himself and his tradition in such a way that every place becomes a necessary place, determined by the inevitability of historical development. The science that achieves this is History (Historie). As the science of the res gestae History is the objectification of what has occurred. Insofar as it is an objectification, however, History is severed from history (Geschichte) itself, from the tradition of which it was a part and in which it had a place, and hence can be made and remade according to the momentary necessities of power and technological development. In this manner History not only fails to establish a secure place for man but indeed itself becomes an, if not the, crucial weapon in the struggle for power and thereby more thoroughly fosters human insecurity and alienation. History thus serves only as an apologetic and polemic for the various conflicting forces concerned with unlimited objectification and exploitation and thereby becomes entangled in this conflict itself.

The resulting disagreement about the Historical interpretation of history in Heidegger’s view leads not the abandonment of History but to a relativism that rests upon the recognition of the subjective element in all History. However, this does not resolve the question about the character of history but only gives rise to a thorough confusion, which further obliterates the truth of tradition and man’s place in the world. This Historical confusion about history in Heidegger’s view is Historicism. Modernity’s response to Historicism, however, is not a return to or a reconsideration of the traditional but rather an ever more vehement attachment to a particular Historical interpretation and an increasingly comprehensive attempt to persuade and indeed to force others to recognize and accept its manifest truth. History thus becomes ideology and replaces philosophy, politics, art, etc., as the determinative explanation of human life.[1]

With the advent of the superclass, the oligarchs and technocrats, as they make their parousia (presence) known to the world, at least for those with eyes to see, what Heidegger (according to Gillespie) ‘prophesied’ in regard to the “masters’ of the universe” seems nigh upon us. When humanity abstracts itself from its ground in the humanity of the triune God pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ all that is left is a negated-self. This self must chart out in brave new ways in an attempt to construct a reality of its own making; particularly as that must be done against what seems to be an insurmountable and untamable natural order. As this self gains an ostensible mastery over the created order (per its own perception), it takes its self-assigned ‘freedom,’ which it has acquired by its conscious differentiation from nature simpliciter, and sublates it to this nature as that takes shape in technological machinery and apparatus. In this process the self hands over its self-constructed notion of freedom, and gives it to the technological commodities it becomes enslaved to in order to continue to advance and exist in this sort of monsterized and artificial world. In other words, the ‘man’ becomes the machine (nature simpliciter) out of pure survivalistic necessity; and as Heidegger divinized the distinction between raw-nature and humanity dissolves into a unitive abyss. This is the nihilistic way of the world order currently.

This reality transcends all party and social demographics. In America, for example, it doesn’t matter if you’re for Trump or Biden, on the left or the right, this sort of nihilistic technocracy as understood by Heidegger is the inescapable reduction of a humanity shorn of its groundedness in God’s extra life of triune love. Globalized humanity, which we already are, has been reduced back to a technologized people of Bab-el. We have divested ourselves, at least those who have not repented, of any semblance of what it means to be genuinely human coram Deo. There is only one ground of existence that does not finally dissolve itself into a techno-occultic liturgy of worshipping creation; and that ground, of course, has been gifted to and for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. The ground that God has graciously provided for us is nothing less than the indestructible reality of His life, which is mysterium Trinitatis. There is no other possibility for salvation from the inevitable dystopic technocracy that this world has plunged itself into. God in Christ is it; this is the Way.  

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 128-29.

Barth’s Covenantal Theology as the Reification of Hegel

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If you are familiar with Barth’s Covenantal theology, and how he reifies that in his doctrine of God and election, then the following development, from Michael Gillespie, on Hegel’s view of the state might be rather striking to you. Here is Gillespie:

This reconciliation of natural consciousness and spirit, of natural causality and freedom, of the individual and society is the state. “This essentiality is itself the unification of the subjective and the rational will: it is the ethical whole—the state, which is the actuality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom, but in which it is the knowing, believing, and willing of the generality.” True freedom for the individual is only possible insofar as his actions are in accordance with the general movement of spirit itself. The “freedom” of capricious natural desires is only license and in truth the subjection to natural causality. Real freedom is thus only possible in an through the ethical life of the political community which unites the natural desires of the individual with the rational objects established by society for those desires: it is only the state that can guarantee a reconciliation of these two through laws and education.

Human beings in Hegel’s view can be truly free only when they live within convention, within the prevailing ēthos, and yet they tend naturally to obey only their desires and to seek only their own satisfaction. The state imposes a necessity supported by force and ultimately by the power of life and death that constrains the individuals to act in accordance with prevailing conventions. The freedom that men enjoy within the state is thus not the freedom that arises from a mutual limitation of their natural freedom but the concord of individual and society, of the subjective will of the individual and the objective general will of the society. “The subjective will, passion, is the motivating, the actualizing; the is the inner; the state is the present-at-hand, actual ethical life. For it is the unity of the general, essential will and the subjective, and that is the ethical community.” The state in Hegel’s view is neither a collectivity of individuals nor a people (Volk) as a whole, but the concrete actuality and ground out of which both arise and within which both subsist. Both the subjective will, i.e., natural consciousness as both consciousness of nature and natural desiring soul, and the objective or general will, as the inner idea or rational form, constitute the twofold that in its synthesis is the state: “For the true is the unity of the general and the subjective will; and the general is in the state in the laws, in general and rational determinations.” What is fundamentally true and real is neither the individual nor the society but the state, which establishes and maintains laws as the expression of its rationality. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the absolute alone is true or the true alone is absolute. The state is not merely the corporeal and therefore ephemeral reconciliation of the individual and society but a moment of the absolute itself, of the ultimately real phenomenological ground. It is in this sense that Hegel concludes, “The state is the divine idea, as it is present-at-hand on earth.”[1]

Some say Barth equally suffers from Hegelianization, as much as the classical theists (who in many ways he is in critique of) suffer from Hellenization. No matter, it isn’t ultimately the form, per se, but how much the form is capable of being evangelized in a way that the pressure of the kerygma is magnified rather than the grammatical form it commandeers.

It is interesting though, when the thinker can see the parallels between Barth’s reification of God’s covenantal relationship to the world, and how that seems to be anticipated in Hegel’s philosophy of the state. For Hegel the inner ground of historic and civil order, per Gillespie is the state. For Barth, the inner ground of creation is the covenantal life of God’s graciousness. In this we can see how Barth was a modern theologian, indeed. Just as he flipped Kant’s dualism of the noumenal and phenomenal on its head, through the Deus absconditus/Deus revelatus combine in the hypostatic union of the singular person, Jesus Christ. Similarly, Barth flips Hegel’s style of immanentized dialecticism on its head by using his categories, and redeploying those in such a way that the creaturely realm is re-creaturized, and God is re-divinized by seeing the divine attributes that Hegel collapses into Geist, as understood as rightfully and always God’s to begin with.

This is how all constructive theology, and its attendant grammars, have always been done; i.e. by appropriating current ideation and philosophical constructs in such a way that the grammar supplied by said constructs is reified or ‘evangelized’ in such a way that the material content of the philosophic is so gutted, so non-correlationized, that the Gospel itself shines as bright as the morning sun shines on our weary and horizontal faces. Solo Christo.

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 90-1.

Collapsing the Risen Jesus into Mini-Me jesuses: Why Modern Humans Fear the Truth

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Modern philosophy, modern humankind is afraid of the Truth, according to Hegel. It’s because modern humanity is oriented by a turn-to-the-subjectivism. Of course, this fear has an antecedent source that transcends all periodization (cf. Gen. 3); it is humanity’s lapsed fear that an external reality (extra nos) will confront them in all their ‘godness,’ and tell them that they are No-God; and that the gods they worship are just self-projections of their deepest and most innate desires. Hegel, of course, was working between the antinomies set forth by Kant et al. wherein there is a rupture between the subjectivity of the phenomenal, and the objectivity of the noumenal. Hegel’s was an attempt to broach this dualistic impasse by thinking noumenal and phenomenal worlds together into a dialectic relief mediated by his notion of Geist (or spirit). But I don’t want to go down that rabbit trail too much, instead I simply want to highlight a thought that Michael Gillespie has, as he develops Hegel’s thought, more broadly, and in the process underscores how and why modern people fear the truth. In a nutshell: they don’t want their self-constructed worlds disrupted by something or someOne they didn’t have a hand in developing:

Why then does modern philosophy fear the truth that provides the basis for such a reconciliation? One might assume that this fear is the result of the real or perceived danger that religion and religious zeal or fanaticism pose to social and political peace. Hegel, however, discounts such an interpretation. The real danger to man lies not in the fanaticism of religion but in the fanaticism of revolutionary freedom and the tyranny of nature in bourgeois society. Modern philosophy fears the truth in Hegel’s view not because the truth is dangerous but because the truth upsets the world of satisfaction, i.e., the real of subjectivism that finds everywhere and always only what it wants to find, the world in which all standards are established by the individual himself, the world governed by unfettered natural desire or the emptiness of the categorical imperative and public opinion. Modern philosophy fears the truth in Hegel’s view because the truth means absolute knowledge and hence absolute standards that cannot be overturned by the caprice of passions and opinions. Modern philosophy is thus perhaps distraught by the lack of a real ground, but it fears an absolute science more than the abyss of diremption and alienation. Modern philosophy thus remains fundamentally subjectivistic and relativistic.[1]

More theologically we could cast what Gillespie is describing, under the Hegelian mantle that he is, as an intellectual Pelagianism. It is the desire of human beings to be the masters’ of their universes and destinies. Even in so-called collectivist communities, like we ostensibly find among the disenfranchised who make-up neo-Marxist communios, ultimately, the vision people have is driven by an inner-self-constructed reality that the individual, even in collectivist mode, constructs ex nihilo out of their own fertile imaginations. This is the stuff of critical theory. The idea that human beings have the ontological and noetic capacities to discern what went wrong, and how to fix it; without recourse to an ‘absolute’ notion of truth—and definitely without recourse to the living and Triune God. Ironically, as Gillespie has argued in another one of his books—Theological Origins of Modernity—all that humanity has done, which Christians know from Genesis 3, is methodologically collapse the attributes of the Christian God into themselves. Ultimately, they haven’t constructed anything, they have simply attempted to rip-off God’s glory, and attribute that glory to themselves. It is out of this vacuum, this rupture wherein the modern person has humorously, but tragically thought themselves the standard of all that is right and holy in the cosmos. The point: they haven’t imagined anything, they have simply stolen the material God genuinely constructed ex nihilo, and attempted to recreate a world out of that matter—this is natural theology.

All the chaos we see in the world can be explained by this intellectual (and spiritual) phenomena. It is the world attempting to be their own particularized jesus christs, motivated by the belief that they, by themselves, even in collection, can construct a situation wherein they, in themselves (in se), are the telos (purpose) of all that is and will be. It is an immanentization of God’s extra-eschatological life, fortified by the belief that humanity and the gates of hell were able to prevail against the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the source of the anarchy, and chaos we see attempting to disjoint the world as we thought we knew it. Don’t worry though, an Antichrist is on its way.

Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard; 3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.’” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die, 5 for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like God, knowing  good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. –Genesis 3.1-7, NET

 

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago&London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67-8.

The Materialist-Turn: And Why Do Marxists Revolutionize?

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I know many (most) of you read here for strictly theological posts, so you might have become off-put by all the ostensible “political” posts you have seen here over the last few months. The way I blog, ever since I started blogging (2005) has typically been to post wherever my reading takes me; not to mention, where certain cultural moments take us. This should help explain the character of my posts over the last bit of time. Beyond that, and more importantly, I don’t see “politics” as an apolitical or separate category from theology, per se. Politics operate in the theater of God’s glory, i.e. in creation, as such, anything political is going to also be a reality that is deeply theological. So, when I post on political theories, and politics on the ground, it is because I am a Christian who believes that the whole world is implicated by the cruciform life of God in Christ for the world. As such, my political posts are intimately related to my so called ‘Evangelical Calvinism,’ and its belief that The Holy Trinity is the Absolute Ground and Grammar of All Epistemology, Theology, and Worship. If God’s life for the world, in Christ, is the covenantal inner reality of all that is, and will be, then engaging with political theories in the world cannot be an unrelated facet of this theological thesis about who God is.

With the aforementioned noted, a sort of ground-clearing exercise, let me focus this post, indeed, on what Marxist theory is. And not just on what it is, but why Marxists must be intent upon radical revolutionary activities in order to usher in their materialist eschaton of Utopian and classless bliss of equality and equity for all (as that is determined by their self-referential materialist conception of reality). In order to get a better insight into these things, let’s read along with Michael Gillespie as he offers one of the better sketches, that I’ve seen, of what Marxist theory and activity entails:

The first and certainly most politically significant of these Hegelians was Marx. In Marx’s view there is not distinction between history and nature or facts and values. In this respect he remains within the Idealist horizon. His thought, however, takes a distinctly materialist turn. History in his view is the “interpretation of things as they actually are and have occurred” and consequently “every profound philosophical problem dissolves into an empirical fact.” The historia rerum gestarum is thus merely the reflection of the truly real res gestae. Actual history, however, is understood not as the reconciliation of human freedom and nature but as the concrete development of the means of production that will ultimately allow man to master nature and establish a realm of perfect human freedom and creativity. In this sense Marx returns to the Enlightenment idea of progress. This doctrine in his hands, however, is radicalized even further through the subordination of philosophy to history. Whereas the Enlightenment and Idealism had both recognized that philosophy is prior to history, i.e., that the eternity of reason first makes the actual comprehensible, Marx believed that history as the res gestae determines the character of all philosophy. Philosophy for Marx is ideology, and far from revealing the truth about man and values only reveals the prejudices and desires of a particular age and class. Marx, however, does not thereby fall into relativism. History gives man direction. Indeed, it alone is the source of truth and it alone can tell us what we ought to do: it is “our one and all.

History directs man by indicating what is to come next, thus presenting him with a moral imperative to join the avante-garde and prod his slower-moving contemporaries into action. But since history is dialectical, its ultimate goal only appears on the threshold of its actual completion. Marx, like Hegel, recognizes an absolute moment in which the whole course of history and its final destination become apparent in contradistinction to Hegel, however, this knowledge arises in Marx’s view before the actual completion of history and thus serves not so much as an explanation but as an instigation to action. Marx, however, radicalizes the Enlightenment idea of revolutionary acceleration. For the Enlightenment, revolution may be necessary if all efforts at reform fail; for Marx, revolution is an inevitable and unavoidable aspect of progress. Marx thus views revolution not as a lamentable necessity but as a positive duty, not as a course that man can enter upon only with a heavy heart and deep distrust but as the most noble and glorious of human deeds.[1]

Having a better grasp of Marxism has descriptive value, which in itself can bring a much needed perspective. It is interesting, the idea of a ‘materialist-turn,’ in the real world there is no such thing as a purely “materialist” world. But this is what Enlightenment rationalism brings us: i.e. a turn to the subject as the measure of all reality, by definition, results in an disenchanted world, that only our material eyes can observe and ponder. This is one of the greatest deceptions the angel of light has perpetrated on his kingdom of darkness: i.e. making the world believe that the he does not exist, and that all there is is a reductive-physicalist world that humanoids have the capacity to control and manipulate to their own desired ends. Marx, in my view, was a purveyor of satanism in its most vile form; as his theory has been applied, world-over, we can see, how indeed, his theory coheres with the Destroyer’s mode of stealing, killing and destroying. We see this deception being lived out now on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and other streets around the US and the globe.

There is no possible convergence, no critical appropriation of Marxist theory, with the Christian vision of the cosmos. God is the antecedent reality that logically and chronologically precedes the physical world and its given economy. Marx wants to flip this taxis or order on its head; unfortunately for Marx, he has been flipped on his head as he has come, and will come face to face with the risen Christ on that great day of White Throne judgment. My hope and prayer is that many caught under this Marxist (and globalist) delusion will quickly repent, and realize that ‘today is the day of salvation.’

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 17.

German Idealism and the Hegelianization of Portland

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When on the streets it is probably safe to surmise that even the most sophisticated social theories barely reflect what originated in the mind of their originators. In other words, once something hits the streets it ceases being merely academic or theoretical, and becomes something concrete and fleshy. This doesn’t mean that attempting to understand Marx’s ideas, or Hegel’s, or Heidegger’s et al. is an engagement in futility, but it does mean that when we look to the streets, and attempt to place these theoretical frameworks on the backs of the grunts ostensibly enfleshing these ideas, that they immediately depreciate in their original value and become something else; something less sophisticated, and instead, more crude and vulgar. This is not to say that in their genesis, that these socio-historico theories were all that aesthetically pleasing either; but relatively speaking, once they are collapsed from the brow of the scholar onto the back of the ‘useful idiot’, I would posit, they tend to take on an unseemly character of their own. And so it makes it that much harder to engage in cultural pesher, and say this is that.

The aforementioned noted, let’s see how Michael Gillespie describes Hegel’s German Idealism, as that applies to socio-historico theoretical framework, and potentially begin to grasp how that might be playing out in the world even now. Gillespie writes:

German Idealism, especially in its culmination in the thought of Hegel, represents the first, the fullest, and perhaps the most profound attempt to come to terms with the meaning of history. Idealism had already accepted the Enlightenment doctrine of historical progress before the Revolution and even supported the Revolution at its beginning, but in light of its disastrous conclusion found it necessary to reconsider both history and progress. The result was a new view of historical progress based on a new understanding of the relationship of man and nature. Early modernity had given precedence to nature and natural law while the late Enlightenment had recognized human freedom and revolution as decisive. Idealism attempted to reconcile these two elements in a new understanding of reality. Nature according to Idealism, does not dictate laws to animalistic man, nor does man stand as the absolute master of nature. Both are necessary to one another and are reconciled in consciousness and reason. History thus is no longer understood as the total liberation of man and the utter subordination of nature but as the dialectical process of their reconciliation. The end of history is thus not a self-positing humanity free from all natural constraints but a humanity whose freedom is coincident with a rational nature. History itself is thus conceived not as a linear development or the mere accumulation of knowledge but as the dialectical development of consciousness. History thus repeatedly leads man into contradiction and guides him to his goal only by first misguiding him through every possible error. It is, therefore, impossible to extrapolate from the present on the basis of mere calculative reason in order to predict the future because such a prediction is always only a universalization of the present and that means the universalization of one particular error. Consequently, any revolution that seeks to establish total or radical human freedom is necessarily misguided.

Hegel, however, claims that history has come to its end and fulfillment in his own time and that it is possible to retrospectively survey the totality of historical development and to know absolutely. This knowledge is not, however, the basis for a revolutionary transformation or fundamental reformation of society and leads in fact only to the completion of the basic changes that have already occurred. Idealism thus ends in the notion of acceptance and reconciliation.[1]

Thesis ––> Antithesis ––> Synthesis ––> Thesis::Geist. This is Hegel’s theory of history.

I live next to Portland, OR (PDX). PDX has been in the news more than other cities lately because of the rioters, and their attempt to thwart the Federal building, and its protectors. When I attempt to place their philosophy next to what we just learned from Gillespie about Hegel, in particular, and German Idealism, in general, it makes for an interesting experiment.

We often hear, and I have propounded it myself, that the organization Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization (and this, because its founders claim it to be). Personally, I think, whatever they are, they are being exploited by a greater international agenda to reconstruct the world into the machination its gods wish it to be. No matter, is what is happening on the streets in PDX (and elsewhere) fitting with what we just learned of Hegel? It does seem to operate with the sort of confidence Hegel had about where he was in history (at his time)—As if the practitioners in PDX ‘claims that history has come to its end and fulfillment’ and that because they are able to see the errors of the past, and now have ostensibly advanced beyond those in a new found consciousness, they can usher in a world of ‘acceptance and reconciliation.’ This seems to be the ideology, the spiritual aspect of it all. But then they seem to take a Marxist turn, a materialist turn, and believe that it isn’t simply a matter of ushering in a world of acceptance and reconciliation, but that this world must be busted through via revolución. It’s ironic in a way: Marxism is just the immanentization of Hegelianism into materialistic dress. Once reality is reduced to a crass materialism, there is less ‘spirit’ (geist), and more brute force, like cogs in a machine, that wants to force a new world order into existence. Maybe the spirit that is left over from Hegel, is that these revolutionaries hope that the new world order is one based on acceptance and reconciliation; or equality and equity for all, but an equality and equity that is shaped by the forces of a classless materialism that ultimately, and ironically, has an inhumane character that cares less about the people and more about the machine (and the machine is really just the technological mastery and manipulation of nature) that is, indeed, the greater good.

I’m just spitballing.

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 14-15.

Christian History::It Is, Jesus

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Christian History is both similar to, and yet distinct from Greek conceptions of history during the time of Christ. Not surprising, a Christian notion of history has Christ as its centraldogma. Unique to Christian history is the concentration and even delimitation to other notions of histories that the resurrection and person of Jesus Christ present it with. I wasn’t going to share the following passage in this post, since I’ve shared it multiple times in other posts, but it is quite pertinent to the insight I want to share from Michael Gillespie on Christian history. The following is from Robert Dale Dawson, and his insight on how Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection of Christ impacts all of reality at a primal level. Dawson writes:

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[1]

And here is Gillespie on Christian history. Maybe you will see how what he writes about the development of a Christian understanding of history qua Greek history, coheres quite nicely with the theological account of history-making referred to by Dawson with reference to Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection. Gillespie writes:

This synthesis of Christian theology and ancient history brought about a decisive and fundamental change in the conception of history itself. The original Greek sense of history as witness remains in Christian history, but it is no longer the knowledge of what is seen but the knowledge of God through the witness of the Apostles. History which had sought the eternal in the actual thus becomes the revelation of the eternal as such, the witness to the hidden truth or meaning of events as a whole, which comes to light and hence visibility in and through the Word, i.e., in and through Christ. History thus comes to rest not upon seeing or contemplation, i.e., not upon the immediate experience and apprehension of the eternal, but upon the authority and through the mediation of Scripture, i.e., through the Word itself. Thus history for Christianity is not the enquiry into or the account of events with a view to extracting and immortalizing noble deeds but the faith in the single event, the kairos, that reveals the hitherto hidden truth and order in all creation.

All Christian history in this sense is written sub specie aeternitatis. Time is no longer understood as the realm of transience, governed by caprice or destiny, but the unfolding of eternity backwards and forwards out of the moment of creation, i.e., out of the kairos in which Christ comes into the world. This single event is thus the key to all creation, since every other event follows from it and is only comprehensible in terms of it. History in this sense becomes prophetic, for just as the Old Testament prophets were able to foresee the coming of Christ by means of divine inspiration, so on the basis of this new dispensation the significance of the entire past and the entire future becomes comprehensible.[2]

If you are interested in reading a deeper theological account on these things you can always crack open sections of Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 where he elaborates with his normal genius on the concept of kairos that Gillespie refers to. To be clear, Gillespie’s development isn’t with reference to Barth, per se, but Barth, for my lights, exemplifies this conception of Christian History better than any other theologian that I am aware of. It is important to understand that for the Christian, history isn’t simply ditch wherein we must attempt to cipher out its esse, nor is it simply a linear unfolding of brute hard facts (even though history is made up of factual and concrete events); but for the Christian, history, is always understood from its eschatological telos as the Christ always already sits front and center as the gravitas from whence all of history flows. If this is the case, then Christian history is less focused on the linear unfolding of events, and their reconstruction, per se, and more focused on the apocalyptic in-breaking of history’s ultimate reality in the risen Jesus Christ. In other words, for the Christian, history is about Jesus because Jesus is God’s history for the world yesterday, today, and forever.

I cannot think of a better passage of Scripture to end this post on, but from what we find in Colossians 1:15 and following. Here we see the doctrine of the Primacy of Jesus Christ, and His emphasis as the image of God, as the firstborn from the dead, from whence all of reality is oriented and grounded for time immemorial. I leave you with a passage that the Scotist thesis sees as central, and what some have called ‘elevation theology’:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. 18 And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.19 For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, 20 and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.21 And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled 22 in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight— 23 if indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard, which was preached to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, became a minister.

 

[1] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

[2] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6-7.