Orthodox Historiography: The Great Schism As Interpretive Key For Understanding the Modern West

The history of Western civilization began in 1054 A.D.

The cultural forces which not only gave rise to but necessarily followed from the Great Schism have culminated in the world which we inhabit today in the modern West. The philosophical and spiritual ethos of modern Western man has its roots in the Great Schism. Everything that happens today, even–at the risk of forever dating this essay to September 2020–outbreaks of supposedly dangerous viruses as well as BLM protests–is in some way an outgrowth of this momentous occasion in the history of Christianity.

In 1054 the Latin speaking churches in western Christendom, by order of the Pope, excommunicated the Greek speaking churches in the east. The division between the two halves of Christendom had been slowly developing for several centuries prior to 1054 A.D. and the Schism ultimately occurred for two main reasons.

The first reason was the filioque. At the first council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. the Holy Fathers completed what we today call the Nicene Creed. These Fathers declared: “And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father.” These same Holy Fathers decreed that no one was to add or subtract from the words of the Creed as formulated by the council which, importantly, had the status of ecumenical. To say that the First Council of Constantinople was ecumenical is to say that it was a universally accepted council. The entire Christian world agreed that the Creed as formulated by the Fathers of the first council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. emerged out of and gave words to true Christian faith and was thus not to be altered in any way.

The Holy Fathers of the Council of Nicaea with Saint Constantine holding the Nicene Creed

Despite this universal understanding of the Creed, western Christendom eventually grew accustomed to reciting the Creed as follows: “And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” In Latin, filioque translates to “and the Son” and thus represents this later addition to the Creed.

The second reason the western churches broke away from the eastern churches was the former’s novel understanding of the Pope. Since the earliest days of the Church, the Pope was understood to hold an office of extremely high honor, given the connection of the city with the first enthroned of the apostles, Sts. Peter and Paul. The Pope was always understood as the first among equals. And yet all of the the bishops were understood to be just that: equals. This understanding that began to take root in the west of the Pope as supreme pontiff was a novelty and thus it was rejected by the eastern hierarchs of the Church.

At this point it is important to highlight that both disagreements which ultimately led to the Schism between east and west were the result of novelties that developed in the west without the consent of the universal Church. Neither the filioque nor the western churches’ understanding of the bishop of Rome can be found among the early church fathers.

By adopting these two positions and clinging to them despite reproach from the eastern Fathers, the western half of the Church began the process which culminated in the Great Schism. After this event the western half of Christendom became a schismatic body and was thus cut off from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church confessed in the Creed.

The subsequent unfolding of western history, from the rise of Scholasticism in the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, to the Protestant Reformation, to the so-called Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Liberalism and Democracy, to the various revolutions of the 19th century, to the Bolshevik Revolution and the two World Wars of the 20th century, to the Civil Rights Movement and sexual liberation of the 1960s, to the rise of Neo-Conservatism, to the September 11th attacks, to the rise of “woke” Progressivism in the last two decades–all of this has unfolded in the broader context of the West’s estrangement from the true Church of Christ and must be understood in this broader context.

Put another way, the western world exists and has existed for nearly the last millennium in a state of apostasy.

The honest Christian student of history is forced to make a decision when confronted with the Great Schism. Given that the Church is “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic”, we must decide which of the two bodies laying claim to this tradition is indeed the true Church which our Lord founded. Either the Latin speaking body in the west, now known as the Roman Catholic Church or the Greek speaking body in the east, now known as the Eastern Orthodox Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. It cannot be both due to the fact that these two bodies are no longer in communion with one another.

If, like me, you conclude that the Church which Christ founded remained in the east and that the west entered into apostasy in 1054 A.D. then all of western history must be viewed through the lens of this important ecclesiological reality.

On Wearing Masks

As far as I can tell, there are three reasons to wear a mask in public:

1. You actually think that wearing one will protect others and/or yourself from the Coronavirus.
2. You need to wear one in order to gain entry into establishments that require masks to be worn.
3. You want to be perceived as someone who is conscientious, mindful of others, sacrificial and virtuous.

For the sake of simplicity, we can name these three types of mask-wearers  in the following way: (1) the Earnest mask-wearer, (2) the Pragmatic mask-wearer, and (3) the Fashionable mask-wearer.

Most people, at least in my own circle, fall into the second category. Regardless of what they think of the utility of masks when it comes to slowing the spread of the Coronavirus, the Pragmatists don their mask when in public simply to get around without having to deal with any sort of unwanted confrontation. They comply for no other reason than to go about their business unmolested. I respect this position.

There are some, I understand, who are Earnest mask-wearers. I respect this position as well, so long as it is indeed held earnestly.

What can we say about the Fashionable mask-wearers? For one, we can say that it is difficult to tell the difference between them and the Earnest camp due to the fact that Fashionable mask-wearers masquerade as Earnest mask-wearers. No one admits to being a Fashionable mask-wearer. Instead, the Fashionable mask-wearer will have the latest studies on the utility of masks memorized so they can reference them when challenged to defend their position on mask-wearing. Such intellectual grandstanding functions as a bulwark against anyone who would call into question their status as Earnest mask-wearers. The fact that the Fashionable mask-wearer has memorized the latest studies and the most recent public health guidelines from the CDC or WHO(ever) betrays the fact that they are not really trying to convince their interlocutors as much as themselves of their own earnestness when it comes to wearing a mask in public. The thing is, the Fashionable mask-wearer really wants to be an Earnest mask-wearer which is why they take the time to look up the studies (or, more likely, the bastardized, half-digested, mommy-blogger regurgitation of the latest studies memefied for broad, Facebook-audience consumption).

So the Fashionable mask-wearer presents himself as an Earnest mask-wearer. Is there a way to tell the difference?

Yes.

I present to you the mask selfie.

Pictures of people on social media, usually taken by themselves, in the comfort of their own homes, all by themselves, wearing a mask.

This, my friends, is how you can tell the difference between an Earnest mask-wearer and a Fashionable mask-wearer. The former has no need to project to others their decision to wear a mask in public. It is not about receiving kudos as much as it is about saving lives.

But the Fashionable mask-wearer cannot help themselves. The accolades to be showered in, the Facebook likes, the hug reacts–these are just too much to pass up.

There is absolutely no reason to post a mask-selfie on social media–no health guideline or CDC-backed study or whatever–other than to signal that you are on Team Science and Team Science is cool. Just ask Bill Nye.

The reality is that wearing a mask is fashionable, it’s sexy, it’s in. And many people–more than are willing to admit–wear a mask for this reason and have the Instagram likes to prove it.

Fashionable mask-wearing is the latest form of virtue signaling, the most recent manifestation of the badge that cool kids wear to show that they’re cool kids or to show–and this is really the same thing now–that they are servile and compliant with the media establishment.

Needless to say, I do not respect the Fashionable mask-wearer.

 

The Folly of American Conservatism

In 1871 Confederate army chaplain and theologian Robert Lewis Dabney wrote the following on the American conservative movement:

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to donkeys. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

To those of us reading Dabney in the 21st century this discussion of women’s suffrage, that is, women’s right to vote, seems antiquated at best and at worst, morally abhorrent.

Of course women should have the right to vote just as men do.

No one today would dare to publicly defend the position that only men should have the vote. History has settled the matter.

But the fact that for us this question, whether women should be able to vote, is really a non-question, a question we know the answer to almost before it is asked–this illustrates Dabney’s point with perfect clarity.

His point is this:

Conservatives have historically conserved nothing.  Instead, they trail but a few decades behind Progressives, the hill upon which they die today becoming the conquered territory of Progressivism tomorrow.

Dabney himself, this great defender of true Conservatism, fails to see even his own capitulation to the demands of Liberalism. In defending men’s suffrage to the exclusion of women’s, Dabney admits that the institution of suffrage, in and of itself, is just and good and true. He just believes that the institution should be extended to men only. However, his position itself was the position of Progressives some years before his own time.

The Progressives of the early Enlightenment won the right to vote for men, much to the chagrin of the Conservatives of the time, this idea then became widely accepted even by Conservatives, and then the Progressive movement moved on to fight for extending the vote to women. So goes the movement of history since the glorious Enlightenment.

Neoreactionary thinker and political theorist Mencius Moldbug distills the falsehood at the heart of the Conservative movement down to the following proposition:

“…all the concessions made to the [Progressive movement] in the past are good and necessary, but any further concessions are bad and unnecessary.”

This can be seen today in Conservative political commentators like Dave Rubin (Rubin himself identifies as a “Classical Liberal” however in the modern American political landscape this label has essentially become synonymous with “Conservative”), who is gay married and yet bemoans the seemingly irrational demands of the current Progressive movement. This isn’t an attack on Dave Rubin as a person. It’s an attack on his bankrupt political philosophy.

Yesterday’s Progressivism has become Dave Rubin’s Conservatism. Today’s Progressivism will be tomorrow’s Conservatism.

The movement, despite its name, has conserved nothing.

The Methods of Modern Textual Criticism

My last post was intended to give some context to the work that modern Biblical scholars do in order to give us the Bibles that you and I read. In short, I noted that, because writings in the ancient world had to be copied by hand, mistakes and intentional alterations were commonly made while the books that made it into our NT were copied. This leaves us with thousands of various manuscripts and fragments, many of which differ from one another in more than a few areas.

What we have in our English NT are translations of copies that were made over a century after the originals were supposedly written. The earliest copy of Galatians that we have, for example, is dated to around the year 200 CE, some 150 years after the apostle Paul wrote the original.

Thus, the problem that biblical scholars are attempting to solve with much of their work could be summarized as follows: How can we know what the originals of the NT books said considering what we have today are copies of copies of copies that were written much later than the originals and most of which differ from one another due to errors (or deviations from the originals) made by the copyists?

I want to highlight some of the tools that scholars employ in order to help them solve this problem. (The following is summarized from Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus).

There are two categories of evidence that scholars look for when attempting to determine which readings are more likely to reflect the originals: external and internal. External evidence has to do with examining everything about the manuscripts themselves rather than what they actually say. Internal evidence looks into the content of each manuscript.

External Evidence

• Number – How many manuscripts support a given reading of a text? This criterion is rather straight forward. If more manuscripts support one reading over another then this counts as evidence for the reading that has greater representation being more original. However, in isolation this criterion offers us rather weak evidence. The fact that more manuscripts reflect a given reading over another does not ipso facto mean that that reading is more likely original. It simply means that the given reading was copied more than others.
• Age – How old is the manuscript? Older manuscripts are generally believed to reflect the original better than later manuscripts because it’s thought that texts get changed more with the passing of time. However, this criterion, like the ‘Number’ criterion above, must not be applied uncritically. Sometimes manuscripts that are in fact from a later time better reflect the original because they were copied from manuscripts that predate our oldest surviving manuscripts as well as the copies that the earlier manuscripts used. For example, a manuscript from the 8th century may have been dependent on a non-extant manuscript from the 3rd century whereas an earlier manuscript we have from the 5th century may have been dependent on one from the 4th. In this case, the 8th century manuscript would be considered more reliable despite its later date.
• Geography – Where was the manuscript written and how does it compare to manuscripts that originated in other areas? Readings that are attested to in multiple geographic regions are thought to be more reliable. If a number of manuscripts from Antioch, for example, support one reading whereas manuscripts from Alexandria, Rome and the region of Asia Minor support another reading then the reading from Antioch is thought to likely represent a local variation rather than the original.
• Reliability of the manuscript – Has the manuscript proven to be reliable in the past? After rigorously applying the above criteria as well as others to the manuscripts that we have for many years, scholars have been able to show that some manuscripts are more trustworthy than others. For example, if a manuscript from Rome represents one reading and a manuscript from Palestine represents another then scholars will take into consideration how both of these manuscripts have fared in the past with other variant readings. If the manuscript from Rome contains more variants that scholars believe to be reliable then this counts as evidence in favor of the reading in the Roman manuscript. Ehrman’s illustration is helpful: “When you know that a person is prone to lying, then you can never be sure that he or she is to be trusted; but if you know that a person is completely reliable, then you can trust that person even when he or she is telling you something you can’t otherwise verify” (kindle location 2089).

Internal Evidence

• Intrinsic Probabilities – What was the original author of this text most likely to have written based on writing style, vocabulary and theology? If a given reading contains words that can be found nowhere else in this author’s corpus or if the theology seems to contradict what’s known of this author’s theology from his other works then the reading under consideration is more than likely a later scribal addition.
• Transcriptional Probabilities – Which reading is likely to have been the result of a scribe’s  redaction? The more problematic reading is likely to be original based on the fact that later copyists would want to harmonize or simplify any difficult passages they were copying. This criteria, which many scholars believe to be the most reliable text-critical principle, is summarized well in the following adage: The reading that best explains the existence of the others is more than likely to be original.

Copying the Bible

Reading the Bible as we know it isn’t possible without the work of countless scholars who, over the course of the last few centuries, have devoted their professional lives to making it possible for us to do so. This was the point I tried to make in my last post and here I want to elaborate a bit on what that scholarship actually looks like. In short, I want to ask the following question: What sort of work is required in order to give us our Bibles?

I’ll try and answer that question with my next post but first some background.

From the beginning Christianity was a religion of the book. That is, from the outset Christianity was a movement that was centered around a number of writings that the various churches scattered throughout the Mediterranean found authoritative. This can be best explained by remembering that Christianity began as a Jewish movement and Judaism was also a bookish religion. Thus the early Christians, seeing themselves as a part of the Jewish tradition, understood the Hebrew Bible (that is, what Christians today call the “Old Testament”) as very much their own book. We could say that the early Church’s “Bible” was a form of what we today call the Old Testament. There was no New Testament.

It didn’t take long, however, for specifically Christian writings to surface. The apostle Paul began to write around the year 50 CE (some 20 years after Jesus was crucified) and the gospels that are included in our canon were soon to follow, being written sometime between 70-95 CE (Mark being the earliest and John the latest). These writings, along with countless others, many of which didn’t make it into our New Testament, quickly took on an aura of authority and so began to be widely copied and circulated throughout the Roman world.

I want to emphasize that last part: these texts were copied by hand. In a world without the luxury of the printing press, there was simply no other way to copy texts but by rewriting them by hand. This was no doubt a tedious and time consuming task.

But who was responsible for copying the texts of the early Church?

In a brilliant little book called Misquoting Jesus, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman attempts to answer this very question. One of the things that Ehrman makes clear is that outside the Christian community in the rest of the Roman world, texts were copied by professional scribes or literate household slaves. Generally speaking, the copyists were doing there work for others whether their patron or master. Within the Christian community, however, the texts were copied by those who themselves wanted the text. If a letter or gospel showed up in a Christian community and it was desired then a literate Christian from that community would take the time to copy the book by hand.

It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see how quickly something like this could get out of hand. And get out of hand it did. The Christian theologian and scholar Origen, writing some 200 years after the earliest Christian texts were produced had this to say about the matter:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please. (Origen’s Commentary on Matthew as quoted in Ehrman)

Origen mentions two types of textual alterations here. The first might be described as a simple slip of the pen on the part of the copyist and the second is a blatant changing of what the text said in order to, presumably, bring the text more into alignment with the copyist’s own theological agenda. Both were commonplace in the early days of these texts.

The result of these alterations, whether the result of an honest mistake or a blatant and purposeful changing of the texts, is that today we are left with thousands of different manuscripts and fragments most of which differ from each other in one way or another.

The task of the scholars whose job it is to help produce the Bibles that you and I read, then, is to figure out which of these manuscripts most likely represent the earliest form of the book under consideration. A number of brilliant techniques have been developed by scholars in order to aid them in this task and it’s these techniques that I’ll highlight in my next post.

The Bible And Anti-Intellectualism

I’ve been told more than a few times that I rely too much on the opinions of scholars when it comes to reading and interpreting the Bible. Instead of reading books that talk about the Bible, I’m told I ought to “just read the Bible” and “believe what it says.”

Those who advocate this just-read-the-Bible-and-do-what-it-says approach fail to acknowledge, however, the centuries of Biblical scholarship that have taken place in order to allow them to read their Bible in the first place.

The truth is, all of us, especially those of us who don’t know the Biblical languages (Hebrew and Aramaic for the OT and Greek for the NT), are dependent on the work of countless scholars who have devoted their professional lives to sorting through the wealth of ancient manuscripts in order to determine which ones are the earliest (more on this in another post) and then translating these manuscripts into English so that we can read them in our native language.

There simply is no such thing as “just reading the Bible” apart from the work of modern Biblical scholarship. If you read your Bible in English then you are dependent on the work of modern scholars.

The great irony of anti-intellectual Fundamentalism is that it’s fully dependent on centuries of rigorous intellectual achievement. That is, those who claim we ought not concern ourselves with the work of modern Biblical scholarship but instead on the Bible and the Bible alone are themselves dependent on the very scholarship that they scorn–and often unknowingly!

As if the Bible dropped out of the sky, bound and translated with a nifty 1 year reading plan placed at the back for your devotional convenience…

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See also: Reading the Bible Is More Complicated Than You Think OR Why Proof-Texting Is Bad OR The Lens Through Which I Read the Bible

 

The American Church’s Fear of Death AND How Neurotic Anxiety Makes Us Violent

In my last post I introduced the two different types of anxieties Beck discusses (basic and neurotic) along with the four main cultural shifts that have led to our denial of death in Western culture. The fact that death has become pornographic in our society betrays the fact that we are, deep down, enslaved to a fear of death that manifests itself in neurotic anxiety. Rather than confronting our fear of death we “indulge the collective illusion of a deathless society” (31). In short, we pretend we’re immortal.

Beck notes a number of ways in which this illusion is maintained. First, the illusion of immortality is dependent upon a constant bombardment of distractions, entertainment and comforts, all of which the “invisible hand” of the market is happy to provide for us. The industry of entertainment and distraction is a lucrative one and so the powers that be have a vested interest in keeping us enslaved to our fear of death. Ironically, a great deal of entertainment in America is centered on violence and death. It’s almost as if death has been relegated to another realm altogether. Death is something that happens only in the mythological realm portrayed on the big screen where it is at a safe distance from our real lives which show no sign of death or mortality.

This leads to the second way we maintain the illusion of our immortality, namely, by expunging our lives of every appearance or intimation of death as well as every weakness, debility, ugliness, etc. (McGill quoted by Beck on pg. 32). This idea helps us understand why, for instance, most Westerners are obsessed with looking young. We spend thousands of dollars on cosmetics or even surgery so that we can maintain our youth and not be reminded of the fact that our own death is nearing. In addition, the “American way” says we are to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps in order to achieve success. To ask for help is to be a failure. We all have knowledge of our own shortcomings and flaws however, one of the ways we indulge the collective illusion is by hiding them and, instead, projecting an image of self-sufficiency.

It’s not only our personal lives that are expunged of any reminders of our death but, in addition, our public spaces must be clean, shiny, spotless and devoid of anything that reminds us of our mortality. This is the third way the illusion is maintained: the poor, weak, sick, needy and deformed are relegated to the margins of society. Think of how awkward the sight of a homeless person on a nice suburban street is. Why does this make us awkward and uncomfortable? Because such “unsightly” folks shatter the illusion of perfection and immortality. We’d rather not have to see them; out of sight, out of mind.

Unfortunately, the Western church is nothing short of complicit in maintaining this illusion. Beck in his own words:

Vast portions of American Christianity are aimed at propping up the illusion, giving religious sanction to American death avoidance. We see this in the triumphalism within many sectors of Christianity–the almost manic optimism of church culture that cannot admit any hint of debility, disease, death, or decay. These churches are filled with smiling cheerful people who respond with “Fine!” to any inquiry regarding their social, financial, emotional, physical, or spiritual well-being. Due to many churches’ explicit and implicit religious sanctioning of the American success ethos, church members become too afraid to show each other their weakness, brokenness, failure, and vulnerability. Such admissions are avoided, as they threaten to expose the neurotic lie that sits at the heart of Christian culture and American society–that death doesn’t exist. (32-33).

It’s for this reason that the act of lamenting–of crying out to God in pain, sorrow and grief in the face of the evil in our world–has all but disappeared from modern American (especially Evangelical) worship services. This is true despite the fact that well over half of Israel’s prayers as recorded in the book of Psalms are laments. To lament is to admit that life is not going well, that we are weak and frail in the face of life’s seeming meaninglessness. To lament is to admit that it does not seem like God is in control. These types of prayers were a crucial part of Israel’s worship tradition however, they couldn’t be less a part of the modern Evangelical worship experience.

It’s also in this chapter that Beck introduces the work of psychologist Ernest Becker. There’s a million things that could be said about the way Beck engages Becker’s work but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just offer a short summary of his ideas. Becker theorized that human culture offers us a sense of meaning and self-esteem in the face of the existential angst that comes with knowing that we will one day die. In other words, every one of us is aware that we are going to die and this knowledge makes it difficult to find meaning in life. Culture, then, steps in with what Becker called a system of heroics which we all attempt to fit into in one way or another and doing so makes us feel like we have meaning and purpose. This system of heroics is essentially a set of life pathways that are commonly agreed to be “virtuous” or “honorable” or “heroic” within the society under consideration. For example, I would argue that in American culture some of our heroic archetypes are the “American Patriot” (one who, in word and/or deed supports the American cause no matter what), the “Self-Made Man” (one who beats the odds and becomes successful [read: “rich”] by means of their own hard work), or the “Cultured Navigator” (one who follows in the footsteps of Christopher Columbus and travels the world).

By fitting into these predetermined heroic “molds” we gain a sense of meaning and are considered a success by the rest of society. Our existential angst is covered over with our sense of personal accomplishment. Thus, Becker argues, our pursuit of self-esteem is driven by our neurotic fear of death. Our identities are ultimately founded on a lie. Whatever it is that makes you feel good about yourself, whatever you’ve accomplished that gives you a sense of meaning in life–this all, like us, will be ravaged by the sands of time.

In my last post I mentioned that the question driving chapter three of this book was the following: How does our neurotic anxiety, which is really just a manifestation of our slavery to the fear of death, make us violent? With Becker’s work on cultural heroics summarized, Beck ventures an answer. In essence, the only way a cultural hero system can “work”, that is, give us a sense of meaning and purpose in the face of life’s seeming meaninglessness, it must be experienced as “absolute, unassailable, true, eternal, transcendent, and ultimate” (41). Thus, whenever we encounter someone with a different cultural hero system we are forced to recognize a scary reality: our cultural hero system is totally and absolutely relative. It is less than ultimate. Our cultural hero system is just one among many. So what is our natural response to those who do not fit into our cultural hero system? Often, we demonize, oppress and marginalize them with the final goal being to completely eradicate them.

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Up Next: Principalities and Powers

How We Forgot About Death AND Why Ash Wednesday Is, Like, The Coolest Tradition Ever

A whole bunch of truth bombs get dropped in chapter 3 of Richard Beck’s The Slavery of Death. It just might be my favorite chapter in the book. In fact, I liked the content of this chapter so much that I’ve decided to dedicate two whole posts to it! It’s here that Beck turns from theology to psychology as he attempts to show that the latter discipline actually confirms what he laid out in part one of the book, namely, that our fear of death is the root cause of our sin.

He begins by introducing two different manifestations of our fear of death: basic anxiety and neurotic anxiety. A brief word on each of these:

• Basic anxiety is fear of death in the form of our need to survive in a world of either real or perceived scarcity. Your basic anxiety causes you to carefully monitor your physical well-being. Beck describes it as your fight or flight response, that side of your instincts that helps you to stay alive when you find yourself in a dangerous situation. You know how you get a bit crabby when you’re really hungry? That’s your basic anxiety telling you that you need to eat or else you’re going to die.
• Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, is related to our “worries, fears and apprehensions associated with our self-concept, much of which is driven by how we compare ourselves to those in our social world” (28). Neurotic anxiety “sits at the root of our experience of self-esteem, the motive force behind our vigilant monitoring of how we compare to others and to cultural standards” (28).

The question that drives chapter 3 onward is the following: How do these different types of anxiety, which are really different manifestations of our fear of death, make us violent? In other words, how might they be connected to our sinful behavior? When looking at basic anxiety the answer is pretty clear. When we feel physically threatened our sense of self is heightened and we are driven to compete with those around us for whatever it is we need whether it’s safety, food or shelter. When humans don’t have enough of those things that we consider basic necessities then stuff tends to get pretty ugly in a hurry. But what about neurotic anxiety? How does our pursuit of self-esteem make us violent? As I said, this is the question driving the chapter and Beck eventually answers it at the end. However, before getting there there are some preliminary matters that need to be discussed in terms of what neurotic anxiety looks like in our own society.

Beck begins his examination of neurotic anxiety in Western culture by noting four cultural shifts that have taken place since the Industrial Revolution that have changed our view of death.

1. Food. Back in the day food was closely associated with death because people literally killed their own food. Before eating a chicken you had to kill it, bleed it, gut it, skin it, prepare it, etc. When you actually ate the chicken you bit the meat off of the bones. Here in China when you order fish at a restaurant you get the entire fish. The eyes are staring back at you as you pick the delicious meat off its body, reminding you that something had to die in order for your dinner to happen. Beck asks us to compare the entire death-saturated process of killing your own food with eating the pinnacle of Western industrially processed food: a Chicken McNugget. Chicken McNuggets do not, in any way, resemble the living animal that the meat was once a part of. Food, in the West, no longer reminds us of death.
2. How and where we die. Back in the day people used to die at home with their family and close friends present. Every house used to have a “parlor” where funeral services were held for loved ones who passed away. With the advent of the modern hospital, death was removed from the home. Parlors turned into “living rooms.”
3. Relocation of cemeteries. Cemeteries used to be located on family property or at your local park or on your church’s property. Having cemeteries around served as a constant reminder of death. In today’s world we have relegated the cemetery to the edge of town where we don’t have to see it and be reminded of the fact that there’s a coffin-sized plot of land reserved just for us.
4. Modern medicine and longer life spans. The leading cause of death in the industrialized world is degenerative disease that comes with old age. The result of this reality is that we expect to live a long life, something that, back in the day,  only the naive hoped for. Death in our context, especially, an early death (anything shy of, say, 70) is experienced as a shock.

In summary, we have become largely insulated in our everyday lives from the reality of death. Death, even as a subject of conversation is considered a taboo. One who brings up death at the dinner table is dismissed as “morbid” or “dark.” Beck quotes Geoffrey Gorer who coined the phrase “the pornography of death.” The idea here is that death has become something that is off limits or illicit and should, like pornography, be kept out of public view.

What the “pornography of death” as well as the various cultural shifts we discussed above have done is helped to create the illusion that we are immortal, that we will never die. Beck:

What has happened is that all these advances have created an illusion of immortality, making it feel as though death has been banished from our lives. Because as a day-to-day reality, it largely has been. This is why speaking of death is generally avoided, why death is pornographic. Pausing to note death’s existence destroys the illusion. Rather than face the reality of death–which takes some effort in our society, given how death has been delayed–it’s easier to indulge the collective illusion of a deathless society. (31)

In light of all this I couldn’t help but be reminded of the church’s tradition of the Imposition of Ashes that takes place every year on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent. As a part of the liturgy, participants have ashes smeared on their forehead as they hear the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). Within a culture that wants us to believe we are immortal, each year we hear the opposite.

You are dust. You are mortal. You are going to die one day.

These are subversive words.

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Up Next: How the Illusion Is Maintained, The Ways in Which the American Church Is Enslaved to the Devil, and Culture as a System of Heroic Death Denial

On Christus Victor OR Is the Devil Real?

Chapter 2 of Richard Beck’s book The Slavery of Death wraps up Part One of the book in which he lays the theological foundation for his thesis that death, not sin, lies at the heart of humanity’s predicament. If chapter one makes clear that the Bible sees death as the problem, then chapter 2 attempts to outline what the solution might be. In short, chapter 2 is Beck’s summary of what has been termed Christus Victor–Christ the Victor–which is usually brought up in discussions about the various views of the atonement. For Beck, however, Christus Victor is more than just a theory of atonement. The word “atonement” itself tends to cause us to think of salvation in terms of deliverance from sin whereas, for Beck, salvation is a more holistic reality that includes, primarily, a freedom from the fear of death. To be clear, freedom from sin is included in Beck’s view of salvation. It’s just that, rather than being the root of the problem, sin is understood as a symptom caused by a larger ailment, namely, the fear of death itself.

So what does Christus Victor say about salvation?

In short, a Christus Victor telling of salvation emphasizes the power of Christ to emacipate, liberate, or rescue humanity from the power of death and the devil. Telling the gospel story through the lens of Christus Victor will highlight Jesus’ clashes with the devil throughout his ministry, clashes that eventually culminated in Jesus’ own death on the cross. Beck quotes New Testament scholar N.T. Wright’s book Simply Jesus:

Wherever we look, it appears that Jesus was aware of a great battle in which he was already involved and that would, before too long, reach some kind of climax. This was not, it seems, the battle that his contemporaries, including his own followers, expected him to fight. It wasn’t even the same sort of battle–though Jesus used the language of battle to describe it. Indeed, as the Sermon on the Mount seems to indicate, fighting itself, in the normal physical sense, was precisely what he was not going to do. There was a different kind of battle in the offing, a battle that had already begun. In this battle, it was by no means as clear as those around Jesus would have liked as to who was on which side, or indeed whether “sides” was the right way to look at things. The battle in question was a different sort of thing, because it had a different sort of enemy…. The battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan. (18)

I’ll be the first to admit that when talking about salvation I often hesitate to do so using the themes of Christus Victor. My hesitation mostly arises from my uneasiness surrounding any sort of talk about “the devil” in the context of our modern scientific age. I spend enough time trying to figure out what I mean by the term “God” that I usually find myself without the desire or the energy to entertain thoughts of a supernatural entity that is responsible for the world’s evil. Thus, I was thankful for Beck’s careful analysis of the devil and what he means to communicate by invoking the term. Beck has two responses to those who want to push back against this sort of language:

1. His book is focused primarily on the role of death in human psychology. In other words, Beck’s argument in The Slavery of Death can be followed and understood even if one has no desire to use the language of the devil/satan.
2. Using theological language like “the devil” can be helpful when describing actual realities that we are all familiar with but may lack the terminology to describe.

I found Beck’s latter response to be most intriguing. In essence, even if Satan is not a real person, many of us can bear witness to what it’s like to feel the moral pull of forces that we experience as greater than ourselves. Beck quotes N.T. Wright at length here:

Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme [of Christ’s conflict and victory over the satan], but we can’t expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from “traditionalists,” insisting on seeing everything in terms of “supernatural” issues, hardly helps either. As C.S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsession, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do. (20-21)

The forms that these “suprahuman” forces take in our lives is fleshed out more by Beck in chapter four on the principalities and powers. For now, let it be enough to say that I appreciate both Wright’s and Beck’s more nuanced view of the devil/satan because it relates to a real-life thing that is experienced by you and me rather than a supernatural reality experienced only by cooky Pentecostal types or an outdated and ancient “mythology” easily dismissed by highly evolved moderns.

With this excursus on the devil out of the way, Beck turns to a discussion of how salvation is evidenced in the life of one who claims to have been set free from the power of death. Once again, he makes use of the Eastern Orthodox’s perspective on the matter. According to the Eastern tradition, “To be set free from the slavery to the fear of death is to be liberated from self-interest in the act of genuine love. Thus the sign of Christ’s victory in our lives over sin, death, and the devil is the experience and expression of love. This is resurrection and life.” (24)

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Up Next: The Denial of Death

Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin OR Why Sarx Sucks

In my last post I introduced the thesis of Richard Beck’s book The Slavery Of Death, namely, that death, not sin, is at the heart of the human predicament. It’s no wonder that the first place Beck turns to flesh out this contention is to Genesis 3 where we find the story of Adam and Eve, their disobedience and subsequent exile from the Garden of Eden.

In the Western church we have traditionally read this story as the foundation of what we call the doctrine of Original Sin. This doctrine states that because of the disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, all of humanity has inherited a moral stain and sin nature that renders us inherently rebellious toward God and his purposes. In short, the West has read the problem that this story narrates as a moral one. Sin is the causal agent responsible for bringing death into the world.

The Eastern Church has come at this story from a bit of a different angle. In short, the Eastern Orthodox church understands the introduction of death into the world as the primary focus of Genesis 3. The question that is being answered here is not, “Where did sin come from?” but rather, “Where did death come from?” What can we glean from this passage when we approach it with this question in mind?

First, we notice that death was not a part of God’s original intention for creation. It’s seen as an invasion, as something that is attempting to thwart God’s purposes for his good creation. Beck quotes the following passage from the book of Wisdom* to add to the discussion: “For God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (2:23-24a NRSV). This fits nicely with what we find in Genesis 3: it’s the serpent who tempts Eve to disobey God hence, “the devil’s envy.”

But this is not the whole story. As Beck quickly points out, the devil needed willing participants in this story. Again, the book of Wisdom:

Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands; because God did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal. But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him… (1:12-16a, NRSV).

Thus, in the Eastern reading of this story death is the result of both the devil’s envy as well as humanity’s summoning of death. Beck summarizes:

…the primary purpose of Genesis 3 might be to provide a story about the origins of death rather than the origins of sin. Phrased another way, Genesis 3 might be less interested in explaining why humans are “depraved” than it is in explaining why we die. We do inherit a predicament from the Primal Couple, but what we inherit isn’t a moral stain. Rather, we inherit the world they have left us. We are exiles from Eden. The world around us is not as God intended it. Death exists, but this was not God’s plan.

This is the key to understanding why the Eastern Orthodox church reads Genesis 3 as the foundation of what they call the doctrine of Ancestral Sin (rather than Original Sin). Placing the emphasis on death rather than sin, the doctrine of Ancestral Sin says that the reason why death is in the world is because of the Primal Couple’s disobedience (our Ancestors’ sin). As their offspring, we now live in a world that is riddled with death and decay. Thus, the condition we inherit from Adam and Eve is, in Beck’s own words, “less moral than mortal.” 

Beck concedes that in the Genesis 3 story sin precedes death but with death now introduced into creation and Adam and Eve’s offspring now infected with mortality, death becomes the operative force behind humanity’s sin. Beck:

As mortal creatures, separated from God’s vivifying Spirit, humans are fearful and survival-driven animals, easily drawn into sinful and selfish practices. Because we are mortal and driven by self-preservation, our survival instincts make us tragically vulnerable to death anxiety–the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs.

Paul’s use of the Greek word sarx carries this idea, that death is the cause of our sin, into the New Testament. Sarx is used ninety-one times throughout the course of Paul’s letters and so, given the multitude of contexts in which this word is used, it is somewhat difficult to pin down a meaning. The word is often translated as “flesh” but Beck provides his readers with a helpful list of possible interpretations: “human limitation,” “natural limitation,” “weakness of the flesh,” “the weakness of our natural selves,” “the weakness of our human nature,” “the weakness of our sinful nature,” “sinful nature,” “fleshly desires,” and “sinful flesh.” Citing the work of New Testament scholar James Dunn, Beck brings us to 1 Corinthians 15 which he sees as an important passage when it comes to understanding Paul’s use of sarx. In this chapter Paul is discussing the resurrection and the nature of our bodies after the resurrection: “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, it is sown a natural body [soma], it is raised a spiritual body [soma]” (vv. 42b-44).” According to Paul, embodiment is not lost in the resurrection. The Greek word soma, meaning “body,” is used to describe what we will have post-resurrection. What is done away with in the resurrection is the perishability of our bodies (v.42b). Beck again: “While soma/body will be carried forward in the resurrection, sarx will be left behind. As Paul explains in verse 50, ‘flesh [sarx] and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.'” In short, sarx, which according to Paul will be shed at the resurrection, is human frailty and mortality, the very thing that Paul sees as the root of human sinfulness.

* The Book of Wisdom is a deuterocanonical (literally means “belonging to the second canon”) book which is read as inspired scripture in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions but is relatively unknown in the Protestant tradition. It’s important to note, as Beck does, that the book of Wisdom informs most Christian’s understanding of Genesis 3 as is clear from our discussion above. I’ve written a bit on canonicity and what it means for a text to be “authoritative” here.

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Next: Reclaiming Christus Victor