\n\tIf the historical facts were analysed,\u201d wrote a cynical Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), \u201c[we would see] that no state has ever been founded without
\n\treligion as its base; and . . . that the Christian law is at bottom more injurious than serviceable to a robust constitution of the state.\u201d1 Rousseau was
\n\treferring to the biblical law to love one\u2019s enemies, to humble oneself and to resist evil nonviolently. He went on to declare that a \u201cChristian republic\u201d
\n\t[based on the gospel ethic] \u201cconfronted by Sparta or Rome . . . will be beaten, crushed, destroyed.\u201d2 Anyone who has read the New Testament cannot help
\n\tagreeing that the gospel ethic, not to mention the eschatology and the apocalyptic, represents insurmountable barriers to the building of what might pass
\n\tfor a Christian state. And at the outset I must specifically state that a perfectly serviceable civil state can and might ideally be built with a citizenry
\n\tof godly Christians. But a state structurally and consciously Christian simultaneously falls victim to a private view of what Christianity itself is, and
\n\tsells itself to the ancient gods of power and entitlement.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tOf all the barriers to establishing a modern Christian state the ultimate is apocalyptic, or, precisely, \u201cthat ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan,
\n\twho leads the whole world astray\u201d (Revelation 12:9).* In fact, \u201cthe whole world,\u201d according to 1 John 5:19, \u201cis under the control of the evil one.\u201d If \u201cthe
\n\tdevil . . . leads the whole world astray\u201d or controls it, the crucial question becomes: how does a Christian state establish itself in the world? How does
\n\tit escape demonic deception? How does it resolve the perennial problem of evil, within and outside its borders? These questions are fundamental. The
\n\teradication of evil or establishment of a just and moral order is the raison d\u2019\u00eatre for a Christian state—indeed, the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of every state that has
\n\tclaimed divine sanction since time immemorial.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIn his famous code, Hammurabi declares that Anu and Marduk have named him \u201cto cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil.\u201d3 \n\tBut, paradoxically again, evil is not restricted to the origin of order; its ordering activity is renewed through ritual. Marduk\u2019s victory over Tiamat, his \n\tTo be sure, the diverse worldwide movements to control unbridled violence by criticizing the gods and moralizing mythology again suggests an extra-human \n\tgods was sharper in Greece. Attacking the violent atrocities of the gods, Euripides, a tragedian, has Heracles, one of his characters, ask: \u201cWho would wish \n\tAlthough Jaspers puts the origin of ethical monotheism in the Axial Age and credits it to classical prophets, it in fact antedates the prophets. It dates \n\tThis negation is encapsulated in the very first verse: \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth\u201d (Genesis 1:1). Here, \u201cGenesis, by speaking \n\tThe Fall is deemed a myth by some. And true, it can\u2019t be coordinated with history as we know it. But the serpent\u2019s lies—that \u201cyou will not certainly die\u201d \n\tAnd \u201cthe revelation,\u201d to cite Erich Auerbach, \u201cseeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own reality into its world, feel ourselves elements in its \n\tTellingly, reflecting the historical fact that \u201cno state has ever been founded without religion as its base,\u201d it reveals that behind all world empires, \n\tStill, Christians recognized Caesar\u2019s authority, still gave him what belonged to him. As such, the thrust of their denunciation was to drive a wedge \n\tPut together, the disenchantment of nature inscribed in the Genesis creation story, the desacralization of politics expressed in the apocalyptic polemic \n\tIf, as noted, the mythological infrastructure was congenitally infected with violence and the gods were demons, according to the New Testament, then \n\tMedieval violence has been excused or belittled as an aberration, attributable to the crudeness of the time. In The Formation of a Persecuting Society<\/em>, If the historical facts were analysed,\u201d wrote a cynical Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), \u201c[we would see] that no state has ever been founded without religion as its base; and . . . that the Christian law is at bottom more injurious than serviceable to a robust constitution of the state.\u201d1 Rousseau was referring to the biblical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[304],"tags":[136],"class_list":["post-6291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-january-february-2015","tag-january-february-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\tParadoxically in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish<\/em>, evil is coextensive with the origin of things. First, the gods come into being from Tiamat, the
\n\tprimeval chaotic mass (personified as the \u201cmother of them all\u201d); then the new gods brutally murder Apsu, the primordial father. When Tiamat tries to
\n\tavenge, she is killed and sliced in two by Marduk, who becomes king of the gods. And the cosmos—heaven and earth—is formed from Tiamat\u2019s sliced corpse.
\n\tMarduk then slays the chief of the rebel gods; and from his blood humanity is created to be the slave of the gods. In this myth, like all pagan myths,
\n\tviolence or evil \u201cis not an accident that upsets the previous order; it belongs constitutionally to the foundation of order.\u201d4\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tascendancy to the summit of divine government, was solemnly recited, mimetically reenacted and ritually dramatized by the whole society in annual public
\n\tfestivals. And, as Paul Ricoeur rightly observed, in these rituals \u201chuman violence is thus justified by the primordial violence.\u201d5 The deep dread, the
\n\tscrupulous care taken to follow these rituals, should disabuse us of the fallacy that there were ingenious or infantile inventions. In any case, all
\n\tprimitive societies and ancient civilizations described their religious experiences as \u201ccoming,\u201d \u201crevealed,\u201d or \u201chanded down\u201d to them—in a language, in
\n\tother words, that tellingly suggests extra-human agency.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tagency in archaic religions. Tellingly, all of these movements tried to create a gulf between humans and the gods. Karl Jaspers coined the phrase \u201cAxial
\n\tAge\u201d to describe the almost contemporaneous appearance of these movements in the eighth century B.C.E.: Confucianism and Taoism in China, classical
\n\tprophecy in ancient Israel, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and philosophy in Greece. The criticism of mythology and the\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tto pray to such deities?\u201d and denounced myths as wretched lies of the poets.6 Plato also excoriated the poets for sanctifying the violence and immoralities
\n\tof the gods and excluded them from his republic.<\/p>\n
\n\tto the seventeenth century B.C.E., to the patriarchs, who like the primitives described their spiritual experiences as coming, revealed<\/em>, or handed down<\/em> to
\n\tthem. But inscribed in their experiences was an implicit anti-pagan polemic. To be sure, the history of ancient Israel began with \u201ca double<\/em> exodus—the
\n\tpatriarchs\u2019 exodus from Mesopotamia and the great exodus from Egypt.\u201d And in both cases it constituted \u201ca vehement repudiation of both the Egyptian and
\n\tMesopotamian versions of cosmic order.\u201d7 If evil, as noted, was foundationally inscribed in these orders, then the Genesis creation story stands alone in
\n\tits negation of the cosmological basis of violence and evil in ancient times.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tabout the origins of heaven and earth, denies the eternity and, a fortiori, the divinity of the visible universe.\u201d8 This is radical disenchantment.
\n\tElements of nature, which pagans regarded as gods and mediums of the sacred, become mere matter, inert objects, and creations of God. Swept away at a
\n\tstroke here is all the mythological freight about the violent generation of the gods (theogonies) and generation of the cosmos (cosmologies) whose primary
\n\trole was political, to legitimize royal authority and social hierarchy. Again, the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 is unequivocal: the origin of evil is
\n\thistorical<\/em>, not primordia<\/em>l. It began in \u201ca creation which has already had its absolute beginning<\/em> in the creative act of God.\u201d The intention of Genesis 3
\n\t\u201cis to set up a radical<\/em> origin of evil distinct from the more primordial<\/em> origin of the goodness of things.\u201d9\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tand \u201cyou will be like God\u201d—can be coordinated anthropologically with ancient history. The pursuit for divinity and immortality are key mythological themes
\n\tand are expressed institutionally in divine or priestly kingship and hero worship; and cosmologically in the fusion (or, more precisely, con-fusion) of the
\n\thuman and the divine, the living and the dead, the religious and the political, to create a closed, all-embracing universe. If the Exodus signified a
\n\tradical exit from this closed universe, it also marks the beginning of the historical drama of salvation, whose chaotic episodes and inscrutable backdrop
\n\tforces are deciphered in \u201cthe revelation from Jesus Christ\u201d (Revelation 1:1).\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tstructure of universal history.\u201d10 To be sure, written in Greek, under the Roman Empire, but drawing deeply from the Hebrew Bible, the Apocalypse
\n\ttransverses the four ancient streams—Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman—that flowed into Western civilization.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\trepresented by grotesque monsters, is \u201cthe great dragon . . . that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray\u201d
\n\t(Revelation 12:9). This insight into the demonic base of imperial Rome is the reason Christians refused to worship the emperor. Incidentally, according to
\n\tElaine Pagels, contrary to modern \u201cenlightened\u201d skepticism, pagans agreed with early Christians that the gods embodied real elemental powers in the
\n\tuniverse; but while pagans revered them as divine patrons, Christians denounced them as demons, fallen evil angels.11\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tbetween Caesar and the gods, paganism and the empire. This was radical desacralization of politics. A psychological accompaniment of this desacralization
\n\tis humility, the renunciation of pride, the recognition of one\u2019s creaturehood before God. And this humility finds its classic demonstration in Jesus, \u201cwho,
\n\tbeing in very nature God, . . . made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness\u201d (Philippians 2:6, 7). The
\n\tservanthood of Christ inverted the Roman hierarchy and made the Christ the only \u201cmediator between God and mankind\u201d (1 Timothy 2:5).\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tagainst pagan gods, the dehierarchization personified in the servanthood of Jesus and His exclusive mediatorial role, fundamentally negates paganism\u2019s
\n\tmythological infrastructure. This negation reprises the question of \u201cthe process of Christianization . . . the nature and modes of authority, by which a
\n\tuniversal Christian church . . . came to replace a universal empire.\u201d12 For in all the noted spheres—nature, politics, society, and spiritual
\n\tmediation—nothing changed. Nature was still enchanted, politics still sacralized, society still hierarchized. Even the gods, with all the mythological
\n\tfreight, survived in art and literature and popular religion, all under the patronage of the church.13\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cChristianization\u201d embedded violence and demons in the gospel, the Apocalypse in particular. By the late Middle Ages \u201cit came to seem that the world was in
\n\tthe grip of demons and their human allies were everywhere, even in the heart of Christendom itself.\u201d14 In fact, clerics projected all of the demonic
\n\tattributes on Jews and heretics, until they became in popular imagination identical with the devil himself.15 And in a grotesque parody of the end-time
\n\tdestruction of the wicked, clerics burned thousands at the stake. This materialization of the apocalyptic is also behind the Crusades and revolutionary
\n\tmillenarian sects that flourished in medieval Europe.16\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tR.I. Moore presented a compelling counterargument,17 horrifyingly confirmed by the reappearance of sacred violence in our time. The phenomenon of ISIS in
\n\tthe Middle East is a case in point. Political theology, as Mark Lilla warned, \u201cis the primordial form of political thought and remains a live alternative
\n\tfor many peoples today.\u201d18 And it \u201cremains a live alternative\u201d because the devil is real and alive, masquerading as an angel of light (2 Corinthians
\n\t11:14). That is why the Apocalypse is very clear: the devil must be destroyed first and by God (Revelation 20:10) before the kingdom of God is established
\n\ton earth. Accordingly, any Christian or godly state built before the destruction of the devil has him, the archdeceiver, embedded in the design and
\n\tstructure. \n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"