Rubente Dextra
Paradise Lost (Book II, 170-174) : "What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, / Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, / And plunge us in the flames; or from above / Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?".
A lot of Christians say that Jesus sits on the right hand of God, and while (as a believing Christian) I affirm this is true, it is also true that Christ IS the red, right hand of God. It was Justin Martyr's conclusion that "the angel of the Lord" was the pre-incarnate Christ. This means that Michael, leader of the hosts of angels, is the risen Lord. Hence, Jesus' words that He could call a host of angels to minister to him, for He is their captain. Christ is the stigmata of God. He is the double-oath that God will fight to save His world. Hence the sword coming out of his mouth to devour his enemies, in the book of Revelation.
This is difficult to understand, because we tend to picture God anthropomorphically, sitting up there in the sky, remote and distant, like a Deistic watch-maker for all practical intents and purposes, lacquered over with a mask of highly emotional and personal preferences having to do with whatever we like or love. Perhaps He is a great liberal sentimentalist, or a budding Leftist SJW, or a conservative liberal old codger who likes to play golf?
This hollowing out of Christianity by Theism has been well documented. Whether it began with William of Ockham (thesis of Richard Weaver), Duns Scotus (thesis of Benedict XVI), or with the Reformation-Puritan strain which eviscerated Christianity of all magic, miracles, sacraments, and European cultus, what happened definitely happened.
Modern Theism itself shares a lot of similarities with Deism, which had virtually nothing in common except for the name with authentic Christianity. Theism provided a conduit for Deism and Enlightenment to acculturate and grow and ferment within the Christian Church. So much so that now, the Yale Divinity School thinks it's more than While there is nothing inherently wrong with thinking of God in certain ways, this externalizing of God into the distant Sky-Father has tended to sweep away all its competitors, largely because He delivered the goods in the form of modern Science, and was capable of widespread acceptance among the "cultured despisers of religion". Additionally, it served a valuable purpose in locating God totally outside of man, so that man's fallen nature was rationalized and to a degree justified, in that it left all initiative and guilt for this schism in the hands of an unaccountably hidden God, Who was either sitting on His hands, or working so crazily it was hard to get on the same page with Him. The Deists leaned towards sitting on His hands, and the Theists had the huge problem of explaining the existence of radical evil, reversals in Fortune among the Christian peoples of Europe, and also the arbitrary and narrative-dependent nature of constructing a coherent "full counsel of God" out of the chaos of modern industrial civilization. The best work Voltaire ever did was on this very difficulty, in the hilarious and vulgar satire Candide. I am not despising the sophistication of either of these camps: the Gifford Lectures would not exist without a strong tradition of speculative philosophy in both of these camps.
The problem is not that Theism or Liberalism exist (in a bare naked pragmatic sense): the problem is that people have fetishized these schools of thought as substitutes for the Kingdom of God. So much so that it is difficult to even convince the Liberals that the Left is their enemy, because, frankly, the Liberals are an alternate (American ersatz) religion, just not as up-to-date and consistent as full Monty Leftism. But they are (nonetheless) very different, and actually quite opposed. Despite all the obvious motives to understand this, people trapped within "worldview arguments" have trouble differentiating between blue-on-blue incidents and Broken Arrow scenarios. Part of what makes our Kali Yuga times so difficult is precisely that no one really knows, in the fog of metaphysical war, what the Hell is going on out there. Because this is simply reflecting the state of their inner man.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of God moves in the actual cosmos, not necessarily bound by what is "dreamt of in your philosophies". Western rational theology has neglected the immanent and the intuitive and the mystical side of the Divine, and subordinated this to the "enlightened and rational" pieties of the day. These Leftist Mega-Fallacies (like Mega Fauna and Flora) are so big they are hard to see; for example, the Non-Central Fallacy is constantly combined with Idolus Triba (or "rape by the Zeitgeist") gets you Antifa and the Leftist Witch Hunt we are witnessing forming up around us, everywhere, today.
All of this is kindergartener stuff, child's play, fighting with mud pies (at best). A colossal waste of human time and energy. And it misses what is most important about what is really going on in the Modern World - Man is running very far behind the Cosmic Time, and we need to catch up.
Thanks to Cologero Salvo at Gornahoor, we have an interesting quote from Rudolf Steiner:
There is in man an inclination, a proclivity, to know what may be called in a general sense, the Divine. The second inclination in him — that is, in the man of today — is to know the Christ. The third inclination in man is to know what is usually called the Spirit or also the Holy Spirit.This perfectly encapsulates the challenge of modern Times, which stem from being downstream of the Incarnation.Although representing the middle term, the Incarnation actualizes and energizes (rooting and fermenting the energies of the Divine within human history, perception, and experience. God reparsed the ancient Narrative through the living tongues of flame on Pentecost, thanks to the Incarnation.
We will examine more implications of this in Part II. Suffice it to note that, when one is not in synchronization with God's "deep time", or "cosmological-ecological Time", the power of the Logos operative in Creation begins to appear as The Red Right Hand of God, compelling, coercing, dictating to man with necessities and through privations. Thus, the Left is continually obsessed with rooting this out, because the spiritual experience is one of waste and acedia. And they will only make it worse. In order to have peace, leave the Left Behind. And develop these inner tendencies which Steiner talks about, operative in the deep recesses of man's being, to bring man into sync with God's good and gracious timing.When this happens, Necessity becomes Freedom: the Logos becomes, not the Red Right Hand, but the beating heart of God's numinous Love for Creation. Christianity is utterly antithetical in spiritual actuality from anything which is compromised by Leftism, even the "modern Right". Anything else will leave us as "damned devils" who believe, but tremble.
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