Break Out Into True Liberty

An Invitation to Re-Arm

Rubens

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The world has proclaimed freedom, now more loudly than ever; but what do we find in that freedom of theirs? Nothing but enslavement and suicide!

The Brothers Karamazov VI, 3

Do not pursue false and deceitful gods. Abandon them, rather, and despise them. Break out into true liberty!

The City of God II, 29

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To complete this quodlibet I want to address three questions and then extend an invitation. Here are the questions: Does legitimate political authority still exist? What is its proper relation to ecclesial authority? What are we to make, not of a Christian state, which is where we began, but of the Jewish state?

Does legitimate political authority still exist?

Professor Pardy has lately provided a helpful account of the way in which liberal democracy has managed to resolve itself, through the managerial state, back into the system of rule by fiat that it was supposed to replace. He speaks of it as a new theocracy:

A theocracy is a form of government in which God rules, but only indirectly, with ecclesiastic authorities interpreting Godʼs laws for his subjects. In effect, those authorities are in charge. No one else gets to speak to God, so no one else knows what he means. Our managerial theocracy is secular yet works in a similar way. Rather than worshiping an external deity, the concept of “management” itself plays the role of God. Technocrats and experts are its priests and bishops. They determine what management requires in any situation.

In the West, there never was a theocracy, by this definition, but we needn't go into that. I agree that there is something like one today. And since it can't trace its authority to any divine source above and beyond it—false and deceitful gods excepted—or to the general consent of the governed beneath it, the question arises as to whether it is legitimate.

Much depends, obviously, on what we think legitimate authority is. In The Ways of Judgment, Oliver O'Donovan offers this theorem:  “Political authority arises where power, the execution of right, and the perpetuation of tradition are assured together in one coordinated agency.” Each of these three elements, he insists, is indispensable to genuine authority.

I agree with that, too. One of the most remarkable features of our time, however, is that, whatever is to be said of power or even of the execution of right (ius), tradition is plainly under sustained assault by those who claim to be authorities. Indeed, much of what they set out to do seems designed to destroy tradition. On that ground alone, I think we may doubt the existence of legitimate political authority in our own time and place.  

The war on the family, of which we took note already in part one, demonstrates that the attack on tradition goes to its very roots. Open border policies, combined with systematic censorship and state-sponsored disruptions and disinformation, reinforce that impression. The attack is not accidental, nor is the chaos uncoordinated. There are many signs that coercion is supplanting consent, as tradition is deliberately undermined. Reduction of tradition to consent was an earlier, more liberal phase of the undermining.

So far has all this gone that we appear to be witnessing the death, not only of political legitimacy, but even of the possibility of political legitimacy. Our situation is perilously close to that of Russia at the beginning of the last century, which led to disasters from which the world has not yet recovered; only those who are creating chaos today have many more spanners to throw in the works and many more tools by which to seize control.

Respectful obedience to legitimate authority, in matters that do not prevent conduct conforming to natural and divine law, has always been cultivated by the church for the sake of peace with the neighbour, for the reputation of its mission, and especially for the honour of God himself as the ground of all true authority, including that limited authority he has left the secular prince, whose vocation, pro tempore, is to be “God’s servant for your good.” But none of these purposes is served either by obeying morally invalid laws or by recognizing an invalid regime.

Just as disobedience to immoral laws can become a moral obligation in a legitimate regime, so can refusal to recognize a regime whose claim to authority has not been established or whose previously established claim has been falsified or forfeited. Do we not have instructive examples of that from countries that were forced into the Soviet empire, but afterward freed themselves from the puppet tyrannies imposed on them? And from Germany itself, during the second war?

How, though, do we tell the difference between an authority we must respect, and where possible obey, and a pseudo-authority we must neither respect nor obey? How does a regime lose its authority, passing over from the one kind into the other? We must wrestle with such questions, as they did in Germany then (recall Riebling’s Church of Spies) and may have to do again now. We must ready ourselves to give answers, drawing on resources in our tradition that go back centuries and touch in principled fashion on even the most difficult questions.

One sign of the passage is a high level of anxiety within the regime itself about public perception of its legitimacy. Another is its willingness to replace the rule of law with rule by law, to employ Pardy's distinction, and its readiness to resort to coercion through emergency law. When these signs are observed, as they are today throughout the West, a regime should be questioned more fiercely and resisted more firmly.

The next test of our resolve, since we failed the test that presented itself in 2020, may be another attempt at lockdown, something rulers have no moral, and often no constitutional, power to impose. Or it may be the imposition of a digital identity, a digital dollar, and the reimposition of internal passports. It is almost certain to involve heavy restrictions on freedoms of speech and of assembly. (One thinks again of what happened in Brussels recently.) Crippling taxation, the expropriation of arms or land, interference with exchange of information and the transfer of goods, manipulation or strangulation of the food supply—whatever it is, united we stand, divided we fall.

I say again, and especially to Christians, that it is morally wrong to respond to an illegitimate regime as if it were legitimate, just as it is morally wrong to obey an immoral law. Live not by lies, but by solidarity in the truth! Do not place civil law above natural or divine law.

What is the proper relation between secular authority and ecclesial authority?

With this question we back up a little, as I think we must do if we are to have any hope of preserving or restoring something that approximates legitimacy. For there is no possibility of starting over de novo; nor is that a desideratum, if O'Donovan's theorem is sound and the element of tradition is indispensable. Dismissals of “theocracies” past are no remedy to theocracies present or future. With my reader's indulgence, I will respond at greater length here, dividing my remarks into short subsections for digestibility.

The first thing to say is that the church recognizes, under God, four distinct kinds or spheres of authority: conscience, which is the capacity of a rational agent to discern created order and to recognize his present obligation to it; parental authority, which governs the family and has a promise of flourishing attached to it for those who respect it; secular authority, whether angelic or human, which governs peoples and nations in the times and place God has allotted them that they may flourish; and the authority of the church itself, both on earth and in heaven, an authority ordered to flourishing forever—lest man be left, like the flower of the field that flourishes only for a day then quickly withers, to the curse of his mortality.

It is the relation between the latter two kinds with which we are concerned, both of which entail authority over the many rather than the one or the few. Both are political rather than pre-political, and in that way more complex. They are obligated, however, to respect the pre-political kinds, which are more immediately related to the operation of natural law in rational agents.

Secular authority, which like parental authority can apply coercive power, is responsible for the ordering of temporal affairs insofar as they require coordinated action beyond the capacities of the individual, the family, and the natural communities formed by families and individuals. Where it does not respect those capacities, it violates the principle of subsidiarity and, just so, transgresses the limits of its authority. If the transgression is habitual or egregious, the prior consideration about legitimacy comes into play.

Ecclesial authority is responsible for preparations for life in the world to come. It has such powers, and only such powers, as are pertinent to that. These include binding and loosing as regards sin and grace, with oversight of liturgies, sacraments, and vows. They include whatever is necessary for successful conduct of the church's ambassadorial mission, including scrutiny of the message delivered and of the works of charity done in its name. Overreach is possible here as well, of course, as is dereliction of duty. But the church militant, doing what it does before God and his Christ, before the entire company of heaven, and before the eyes of the world as well—hence not in some private or arbitrary fashion such as Pardy indicts—is very far from being unaccountable! Scripture and tradition provide the measure by which it is held accountable.   

Now these two authorities have overlapping constituencies. Everything that makes for human welfare in the present age rightly concerns both, though not in quite the same way. For the church, though it has made enormous contributions to the development of our civilization—to its arts and sciences, its laws and economies, its education and healthcare—does not approach such things as ends in themselves, but as means to an end that exceeds them: the love of God and eternal life in peace. (This very relativizing to a higher end is what enables the church to make its unique contributions to culture.) The state, for its part, if we may use that expression as shorthand for secular authority, ought to acknowledge higher ends than those that lie within its own mandate, and show them deference. It ought not presume to direct the pursuit of them, however. It is enough to defend opportunity for that pursuit by seeing to a modest and just rule of law, and to confess (pace Rawls et al.) that the goodness and power of God provide the basis for the rule of law.

It follows that church and state should work together, as harmoniously as possible, without conflation of their respective mandates and powers. The former has generally been ready to do so, though not always with the humility required. The latter, of late, has refused to admit its limited mandate, to concede that it is not alone in ordering human affairs. Hence it has aspired to become both father and mother to the people; that is, to become a welfare state. In its efforts to be provident it has developed theocratic pretensions, passing from servant to served. “The necessary implication of government unleashed from theological constraint,” observes David McGrogan, is that government is under no constraint at all. What we can expect, then, is “government all the way down.”

Governance of this kind follows what McGrogan identifies, semiotically, as “the political philosophy of Satan.” That is strong language, but we may go further than that. Wittingly or unwittingly, it aligns itself with powers that have been cast down from heaven; with forces that envy, fear, and hate the church. Yet the fact that these powers—the same that saw to the death of Jesus but could not prevent his resurrection and ascension—have been cast down is the condition of possibility for cooperation of church and state. For the latter may, if it will, learn from the former that it is not divine and need not pretend to divinity; that the people ought, with God's help, to provide for themselves, and in charity to provide for one another; that both rulers and ruled may enjoy a greater operation of liberty.

The liberties the West has hitherto enjoyed came about precisely because secular princes did learn this, however imperfectly. They are being lost because those same princes, and the captains of industry who guide them, are no longer listening or learning. And because the church, no longer exercising its own authority, has conceded to them a false authority, aiding and abetting their idolatry.

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One way it has done so is by seeking harmony through “eirenic differentiation of religious from political affairs.” That absurdity Mehmed Çiftçi tries to overcome in his recent book on church and state. The interests of the city of God and the interests of the city of man cannot be herded together, willy nilly, like the flocks of Abram and Lot. Neither can they be divided neatly into non-conflictual spheres, as Lot hoped when he turned towards Sodom.

Little did Lot know that Abram would have to rescue him from the four kings to whom the king of Sodom fell; or that angels would have to rescue him a second time, leading him out of Sodom before they finished the job the four kings had started, calling down fire from heaven. But Christian bishops ought to know that the Lord of Glory was not crucified for religious reasons only; nor did he rise for religious reasons only. Both his death and resurrection were political affairs as much as religious affairs. They ought to know that, beneath the heavens, which by Christ's ascension have been purified and pacified, there are no non-conflictual spheres.

They are deluded who suppose that the city of God and the city of man can act as one if only they can rightly distinguish between religion and politics. Religion entails politics and politics religion. Rousseau grasped that, just as Augustine grasped it. That is why Rousseau wanted to confine Christian religion to the sphere of the soul; that is, to disable it by disembodying it.

Christians who are not deluded cannot agree to the disabling. The city of God is no ethereal city of the soul. In its eucharists it adores the crucified and risen Christ. It prays to God for “health of mind and body,” offering both mind and body to God in and with Christ. That is why Rousseau proposed to ban them from the republic or, if necessary, to execute them along with their Christ. How else can the state reclaim for itself the body that has been offered to God?

Christians respond by upping the ante. They announce what from the beginning they were told to announce. They announce the end of the age and of every city or kingdom belonging to the age. Their assemblies, they claim, are embassies of a kingdom not of this world, yet nonetheless for this world. They represent a kingdom that sits, and will sit, in judgment upon this world. They declare to the rulers that their rule has been made redundant.

They are not anarchists, however, like the fanatical anabaptists of the Münster rebellion or the fabulous libertarians of Chase Oliver’s party. They are not even alt-archists, which would more accurately describe the Münsterites. For the redundancy of which they speak is not one that instantly deprives secular authorities of their authority. They will be deprived of their authority when the saeculum is ended by the return of the King whom God has set at his right hand, upon his holy hill, the heavenly Zion. Meanwhile, they stand warned that they would be wise to make peace with him while they still have opportunity to do so. That is the whole point of the saeculum. It is an age of grace, though it is not an age of peace.

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Here another misunderstanding must be addressed. We have said that the kingdoms and rulers of the present age both are and are not redundant. We need also to say that they do not become redundant by reason of progress in the present age.

In the sacrament of baptism, the old man is replaced by the new, and he advances eucharistically day by day. But that cannot be said of the secular ruler as such, be he baptized or no. It is not the case, in the world at large, that the old man diminishes, like John the Baptist, while the new and messianic man advances. That is a heresy advanced by the prophets of the cult of progress, who were quick to explain that the church itself was only a passing form of the new man. They made themselves heralds of a “coming Man” who would arrive gradually, who by degrees who would master the arts of politics and religion, together with the sciences and technologies. Just so, would he unite the world around himself.

This is the man Teilhard tried to baptize and bring into the church, that he might lead the church back out into the modern world, combining “faith in God and faith in the world.” Teilhard, I note, received a little boost the other day from NPR, but orthodox Christians have known from the beginning what kind of man he was promoting. They even had a word for that man, lent them by St John: antichrist.

Make no mistake, the old man does not diminish in favour of the new as the age progresses. Rather, the old man advances along with the new and seeks to conquer the new. It is only at the return of Jesus that his redundancy will be fully effected on earth, as it has been in heaven. Meanwhile there is a place on earth for secular politics, which need not be secularist, and for worldly rulers, who need not be worldly in the sense alluded to by Jesus when he referred to “the archōn of this world.” For with the announcement that God has set his king upon Zion goes forth a call to live and to rule differently in the present age than in ages past.

There can be such a creature, then, as a Christ-loving prince, even a Christ-loving army. But there can be no such thing as a city or kingdom ruled by Christ in the secular sense. Even the church is not ruled that way. For Christ's presence, though guaranteed throughout the age, is sacramentally mediated; which is also to say, eschatologically suspended. Nor can there be, as Eusebius claimed for Constantine, a prince who rules for Christ. The idea of a prince who rules for Christ is really one and the same with the idea of antichrist. Even the pope is no monarch, but steward only. Beware, as I have said before, the beast from the earth.

The Christ, having ascended into heaven, does rule over all things. He is the King of kings. But his kingdom is of heaven and from heaven, not of or from the earth. It will come to earth only when he comes, and terrible will be its coming. Meanwhile, it can be welcomed and participated, but it cannot be transferred to earth or realized upon earth, save in the sui generis fashion of the Holy Eucharist.

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There is still an awful lot of confusion about this, which needs clearing up. Following Oliver O'Donovan, Çiftçi observes that there was a certain ambiguity in Christendom that arose by “gradually forgetting the missionary relation” in which the church stands to the world, a mistake easy enough to make in a predominantly Christian society, a society in which the announcement was indeed welcomed. The doctrine of two cities, under two distinct rules, threatened to collapse into a doctrine of one city with two complementary kinds of rule. Even where the original construct remained more or less intact, the notion that Christians could be full citizens of both cities began to prevail, persisting (argues Çiftçi) as far as the Second Vatican Council.

There it seems to have divided into two streams, that of the main body of the council and that of the social-kingship theorists or integralists. Neither stream is at all satisfactory, as I pointed out in chapter five of Desiring a Better Country. The former, seduced to some extent by modernity's one-dimensional notion of progress, failed to reckon with the parasitical growth of evil alongside good. They spoke rightly of the church's cooperation with all who seek the good, but inadequately of its confrontation with those who were pursuing evil in the name of good.

The latter, on the other hand, spoke rightly of the triumph of good over evil, but wrongly of a triumph to take place in the saeculum rather than at—and as—the end of the saeculum. Both improperly resolved the eschatological tension that belongs to our age and to the relation between the two cities. The shadow of Dante's De monarchia hung over them both.

Now, one can admire Dante for many things, but not for the dualism that translated politically into a theory of two universal swords, one with sovereignty over the soul and the other with sovereignty over the body. That was no proper solution to Boniface VIII's grandiose claims for the papacy, which had the pope wielding both swords—a dream still cherished by integralists who foresee a Marian millennium in which the state will serve the church on a global basis and the pope reign as a monarch. (How is that different, one wonders, from the Chabad-Lubavitch vision they love to hate; or is that why they hate it?)

It is worth remarking in passing that the current pope appears to be Boniface's mirror image: equally tyrannical in mien, sometimes, but with an eco-friendly vision that puts the church in service of the state on a global basis. Hence his constant interventions on things beyond the purview of his office, things about which he seems to know little except what globalists tell him. But his advisers are moderns, and modernity has responded with Rousseau, condemning the spiritual sword to complete irrelevance while handing the body over to the state entirely and binding it there with the cords of civil religion. Only occasionally does Francis seem to recognize this as a colossal error.

Anthropologically, the tension proper to Christian eschatology is not between corruptible body and incorruptible soul, but between corruptible soul-and-body (man as fallen) and incorruptible soul-and-body (man as redeemed, reconciled, and resurrected). Politically, then, the tension is between two cities or communities: the community of faith in the resurrection, in the impending “glorious liberty of the children of God,” and the conflicted community still bent on domination in the saeculum. The one strives to live in a manner consistent with its expectation of the world to come. The other has no such expectation and will not admit the fact that its archōn has already been judged, or even that he exists.

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We cannot restore the proper tension, however, simply by claiming with Çiftçi that a person or household belongs to one city or the other, and to one only. It is quite true that the cities themselves are fundamentally incompatible and their destinies diametrically opposed; hence, that one cannot belong ultimately to both. But it is also true, on a less fundamental level, that one can be both a citizen of the city of God, through baptism, and a citizen of some particular city of man, by natural birth or subsequent enrolment, with the attendant rights and responsibilities of each. Were it not so, the possibility of cooperation without conflation would again vanish.

Indeed, the vast majority of people have little or no choice as regards the latter. They may leave the church into which they were baptized or the country into which they were born; but, while they may be without religious identity, rarely can they be without civic identity. Or if, as sons of the kingdom of heaven, they wish their only identity to be their higher identity—“of Zion it shall be said, ‘This one and that one were born in her’”—and if, for that reason, they accept taxation or other demands from men not as obligations, but only for the sake of temporal peace, still they do not dispute, but rather affirm, that temporal peace is a desideratum.

They affirm also, then, that the place in which they dwell ought to have a system of just governance and honest finance. As I said, they are far from being anarchists. Which does not prevent them from pointing out with Augustine that only the kingdom of God can be universal; that only the church can be catholic, comprising the whole; that the larger human systems of governance become, the less just they are wont to be; that Babel cannot be built without forging chains of enslavement.

Insofar as legitimate political authority exists among men, however, taking up the task of pursuing justice within territories small or large, sons of the kingdom will submit to it as best they can, lending what support they can. They will not shirk their duty to proclaim Christ, or take from God what is God's and give it to Caesar, but they will render to Caesar what is Caesar's. They will not cooperate by doing evil that good may come, nor concede that this is what a people or state must do if it means to survive. They will not agree that its survival matters more than man's obligation to do good and only good.

They will show themselves good neighbours and honest subjects. To a law or policy that does not require their complicity in evil, they may be more or less favourable or largely indifferent; to one that does, they will be unfavourable and disobedient. But they will not be indifferent to the distinction between disobedience to a legitimate authority, acting illegitimately, and non-conformity in the absence of a legitimate authority. Nor will they acknowledge any state as a messianic fulfillment.

Which brings us to our last question and perhaps (if the reader is not yet entirely worn out) our most controversial question.

What are we to make of the Jewish state?

In the providence of God, Jews have lately returned to their homeland and founded there a state. Like any state, it contains both the virtuous and the vicious. It has enemies within and without, in places high and low. But unlike other states it cannot, despite its best attempts, be comfortably secular, much less secularist. For it does not quite belong to the saeculum, at least not the way they do. If we take it together with its ancient predecessor, which disappeared dramatically in the first century, it stands fore and aft the age. It has the unmistakable odour of the end, which accounts in no small part for the rage against it that is flooding the world.

The charge currently being laid—­either that it began as a haven against genocide, only to become genocidal, or that it was genocidal from the beginning—I am not going to entertain. Charges of genocide from people calling for genocide don't sit well. Cries for the death of Jews “from the river to the sea” have been heard around the world, even from the pizza Palestinians at Harvard. We have heard them here at McGill, too, as we still are. And the police have stood by, watching passively. The riot squads that went to Ottawa to to trample peaceful protesters on public property, putting an end to the Freedom Convoy, are nowhere to be seen.

What strange times we live in! Strange enough that I find it necessary to return fire. They were not mad, in pagan Rome, who cried out with Cato the Elder, Carthago delenda est! Nor are they mad in Israel, who insist that Hamas delendum est. I hope it can soon be said, though I am not confident, Hamas deletum est. That hope is not at all incompatible with prayers that the innocent be spared and the guilty punished, on both sides of the conflict, or with laments over the bodies of the innocent.

In Canada, I will add, one doesn't even need bodies to lay a charge of genocide. One doesn't need any kind of evidence at all. One need only be a grifter, or a liar, or a prig, or in the pay of wealthy men working their weaselly agendas. Or all of the above, for that matter; in which case one might even try to make “genocide” denial illegal, perhaps retroactively illegal. But more on that another time. We are supposed to be talking about Israel, not Canada, and about the peculiar nature of Israel. Though my reader may be surprised to hear it, it is misplaced faith in Israel that I mean to contest.

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In a new book shortly to appear, Irving Greenberg proffers an explanation of Israel by way of what is called narrative theology. He summarizes it in a short article recently published in The Jerusalem Post.

There was, he reminds his readers, an original deliverance event in which God led his people out of Egypt, freeing them from slavery to the Pharaoh. There was another notable deliverance event in which, during the exile, God rescued them from the murderous edict arranged under the Persian king by Haman. There has now been a third great deliverance event, by which the people of God have been rescued from enemies the world over through restoration to the land of their forefathers. Which means, says Greenberg, that “we must take the State of Israel seriously as a religious phenomenon.”

I do not disagree with that conclusion. I do disagree with much that is said in elaboration of it. Moreover, I am of the view that narrative theology, whether pursued by Christians or Jews, is, like liberation theology, prone to confound the relation between religion and politics. It is also prone to what Christians call Pelagianism. Greenberg's version of it is no exception, as far as I can tell.

He describes the third deliverance as the greatest thus far and for any foreseeable future. How did it come about? Not, as the haredi recommended and still recommends, by waiting for a miracle, for the appearance of the messiah; and not by agitating, whether at home or abroad, in hopes of creating the requisite conditions for that appearance. “After the Holocaust,” states Greenberg flatly, “it is crystal clear that the supernatural Messiah is not going to come.”

It follows that those fundamentalists who “draw upon traditions and fantasies [of divine intervention] to push for irresponsible policies will only squander the Zionist achievement and endanger the nation.” Modern Israel must learn to see itself as the fulfillment of messianic promises and behave accordingly.

The nation came into existence by human effort, which produced a miracle of sorts. Israel, Greenberg avers, “represents the restoration into history of life, justice, and society-building of such proportions as to match the scale of evil and death produced in the Holocaust.”  It must now proceed in the same spirit, with firm but prudent resolve, not by religious machinations or by military overreach. It has a grave responsibility to do so, a responsibility of world-historical magnitude.

It is important that this generation knows that it is writing the script of a new Scriptures of redemption for the world. We need to arise from the tragedy of 7 October and the worldwide outburst of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and persevere. If we do, we can achieve miracles beyond those already wrought. We can build a just society and a model for the world even beyond what was accomplished in the last seventy-five years.

“The fate of the covenant and of the covenant people is in the hands of this generation,” he warns. If Israel acts both with realism and with restraint, it “can press on to become the greatest Exodus of all time.”

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Now, that may seem rather a long way round to the simplest of counsel: steady as she goes; keep the newly-launched ship of state on an even keel. The tour is revealing, however. Greenberg's God does not seem to be the God of the exodus, unless the book of Exodus is read against itself as a story about reward for hard labour. Greenberg's messiah is not the prophesied messiah, a messiah from Israel and for Israel yet somehow distinct from Israel; mashiach is rather the people-and-state itself. Greenberg's salvation history is not about God saving Israel, but about Israel saving God. And what presents as a counsel of hope is really a counsel of despair.

Let me explain very briefly, by analogy between his “new testament,” if we may call it that, and the New Testament that has already been written.

Like the gospel narrative, Greenberg’s narrative centres on a holocaust. Only the offering was not voluntary, as it was in the case of Jesus, and it did not take place on a hill with crosses but in death camps with ovens. It was not a God-man who died, but God himself. Or, in the kabbalistic terms adopted by Greenberg, God “withdrew,” breaking the covenant and handing over to his people responsibility for their own fate. A resurrection followed: not the resurrection of a man, but the resurrection of a state, now to be a model state that will bring light to the world.

Perhaps when I have read more of Greenberg, I will understand him differently, but I do see this as a counsel of despair. Why? Because it takes the Holocaust as revelational ground zero. Everything before the Holocaust, from the beginning of time, was headed in that direction—not to the cross of Jesus in the first century, but to the cross of Israel in the twentieth. Ground zero is God abandoning his people. From which real hope cannot be derived; all is politics and false hopes.

The Holocaust, which certainly was genocide, is fact and not myth. But such a reading of the Holocaust is myth and not fact. Drawing on mediaeval mysticism of the kind that prefers paradox to precision, especially Chalcedonian precision, it turns from a Jewish virgin in Nazareth to something rather like the Great Mother of the pagans, by whose painful contractions the divine gives birth to the creaturely, the infinite to the finite. There is necessity here. The tzimtzum paradox supplants, not only John 1, but Genesis 1. God, though he contains everything, must decrease if man is to increase. Into this Lurianic scheme, the Holocaust is fitted as the death of God, and man becomes his own hope.

The truth about God revealed in the scriptures, the truth of the divine Name, is that God stands in need of nothing and is constrained by nothing. Far from being remote and indifferent, however, God is pure Giver and pure Gift. Tzimtzum theology, whether Christian or Jewish in form, is not so much poor theology as a rejection of theology, a necessary rejection once the theology of the incarnation is rejected. In it, if we are honest, is found only the weariness of which Qohelet complained, and Augustine too: the weariness of eternal recurrence, of a “narrative” that goes nowhere.

In Germany, once incarnational theology had been set aside even by Christians, the sign of the cross quickly crumpled into a swastika, the symbol of eternal recurrence. Messianic hopes were invested in Hitler and in a renewed German state. And what happened then? The occasional pogroms of old—wicked betrayals of “that taming talisman, the cross,” outbursts of buried “Berserker rage”—were rationalized, systematized, totalized. Thor’s hammer returned to his hand. The forebodings of Heine took shape as the Holocaust.

Berserker rage has appeared again on our streets and our campuses. Behind it there is something else, something more organized. Israel looks more and more like a ghetto, albeit a powerful and determined ghetto, with more than a few ruthless men of its own, doing things that ought not to be done. Is there really salvation in a Jewish state?

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Jesus didn’t think so. There was a time when Jews (rank and file Jews, not the late-Hasmonaean ruling class referred to in the New Testament as hoi Iudaioi) wanted to make him king of such a state, but he would not have it. He did not believe that there was salvation in a Jewish state. So they settled for others not much better than Judas the Galilean, and eventually for Simeon bar Kokhba. Things did not end well. They ended, as Jesus said they would, in a holocaust. “Year One of the Redemption of Israel” proved to be no such thing.

But now at last there is a free Jewish state, whose prospects Greenberg does not want to see ruined by misguided messianic enthusiasm. What was it the old scriptures had said?

Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away the judgments against you, he has cast out your enemies. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear evil no more.

This can be taken up into the new scriptures, but only if re-written by those who know that Israel must rely on itself. And how, I ask, is that different from what Jesus refused and warned against, what the prophets of old refused and warned against?

But now I want to extend the promised invitation, an invitation to reconsider. It goes out to the Jew first, but also to the Greek, in all sincerity.

Recognizing the Face of God

Ground zero is not God abandoning his people. Ground zero is God refusing to abandon his people when his people abandon him. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel!”

God did withdraw from his people, yes, and more than once. The once that most matters, however, the once that is altogether telling, was the time he turned his back on them for three awful hours on Zion, while they completed their covenant-smashing deed, pitting their regime and their own designs on worldly fortune against the testimony of John the Baptist, whom they had already killed, and of Jesus, whom they were killing. That was a deed more dreadful by far than when they built the golden bull at the foot of Sinai. Why more dreadful? Because the God who spoke to Moses as friend to friend was now speaking to them face to face. And they would not have him do so. They would stop more than their ears. They would stop his tongue.

In those three hours God hid his face even from Jesus, who had not broken the covenant but kept it. He had betrayed neither God nor man, but by man had been betrayed. By both Jew and gentile he was betrayed. During his trials, he remained almost as silent as that golden bull, but he did not hide his face from blows and insults. Can a face shine, like the face of Moses, when it is covered in blood and spittle? Yes, it can, but how differently!

He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him,
    and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
    he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  

Why did God turn his own face even from Jesus? Because he also despised him? That is what some men said, and still say, though to say it they have to deny his resurrection—God’s own verdict—and all its effects. Others say that he turned so that Jesus could suffer the punishment of our sins, which he had decided to bear. That comes near the mark, though I think the mark often missed in our attempts to elaborate it.

I am not going to make such an attempt here, but I will say this: Jesus was and is God turning toward us, so there can be no question of God being displeased with Jesus. We were the ones punishing Jesus. Had God not turned from that, his eternal love for Jesus would have broken out against us as wrath—fiery, thunderous, unbearable, unquenchable wrath, the wrath they feared at Sinai. The same God who turned his face from Moses and showed him only his back, because he loved him and did not want to destroy him, for three hours turned from Jesus, because he loved us and did not wish to destroy us.

Because God is love, and knows no necessity, he was able to turn his back. By turning his back he permitted Jesus to do what both he and the Father willed, to make atonement for his people by offering himself on their behalf in the very place of their abandonment to lovelessness.

That was an offer Moses had made on Sinai, but could not make good on, for he was only a man. Jesus, who was a man and more than a man, could make good on it, and did. He offered himself to his Father in complete trust and faithfulness, while man did the most faithless thing man could do.

Surely he has borne our griefs
    and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
    smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
    he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
    and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
    we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

This was not the death of God. (The very idea is monstrous, even if the idea in question is the death of God as an idea!) This was not the withdrawal of God. “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.” This was not a cleavage in God or a contraction of God. This was God being God, God for us. “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.”

When he makes himself an offering for sin,
    he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand;
    he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
    make many to be accounted righteous;
    and he shall bear their iniquities.

But why, then, the Shoah? What need was there for the Shoah, if all this be true?

The answer cannot lie in a theology of reparation, for reparation is voluntary. There were among the Shoah's victims some—Edith Stein and her sister, Rosa, for example—who went voluntarily to the slaughter, just as Jesus had done. But that is no explanation for the Shoah itself. The truth is that there was no need for the Shoah, save the need that Hitler saw in the infernal hubris of his thousand-year Reich. The Shoah was a practical experiment in the philosophy of Satan.

If we ask why God permitted it, we may as well ask why he permits any evil. Why did he permit our first parents to sin? It is the same question and must receive something like the same answer. For just there, where the serpent beguiled from a tree and the woman and the man took and ate of it, was the beginning of the experiment and of all evil on earth. Only in the reversal of this scene, where the woman who does not sin stands at the foot of a tree on which the man who does not sin hangs, is there a reversal of its consequences. Only then can we “take and eat” to life eternal rather than to death and judgment.

God permitted our first parents to sin because he would not force them to be free but only invite them to be free. God forbade, not to keep them from freedom, but to further their freedom. He forbade as an invitation to perfect their freedom by the freedom of obedience, that they might learn to share with his beloved Son in his own freedom. That enormous evil would come of their defection from freedom, God knew. He knew of the razing of Jerusalem in AD 70 and of its fate in AD 135. He knew also of the Shoah. More importantly, he knew of the cross, that outbreak of evil beyond all calculation, neither evil nor good being a matter of numbers. But the cross of Jesus redeems those who wish to be redeemed.

The Shoah was not redeemed by the re-founding of a Jewish state. It cannot be redeemed by anything to be achieved by that re-founding. It can be redeemed only by the cross. “No man can see my face and live”? No, he cannot. Not unless he looks on this face, this battered face that is the face of the Presence.

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It was the providence of God when Christians, the bones of whose brethren were strewn on the floor of the forum before being transferred to the altars, were afterward enabled to found something like Christian states. It was the providence of God when Jews, whose bones were burnt in the ovens of Nazi Europe, that post-Christian and still more foul Carthage, were afterward enabled to found a Jewish state. God brings good out of evil. Did he not raise Jesus from the dead? Will he not also raise with Jesus righteous Jews, even from the ash heaps of Auschwitz? Will he not save “all Israel”—indeed, every Jew and every Palestinian and everyone anywhere who dares to look on this face?

The founding of a modern Jewish state has its place in the providence of God; of that I am certain. But this state is not itself the messianic res. It is at best a messianic signum. And the people whose state it is still have choices to make, as Greenberg points out. The final exodus is indeed still to come, but it will not come gradually by some political will or triumph of man. It will come by a triumph of the pentecostal Spirit of God, “when they look on him whom they have pierced.” It will come suddenly, like lightning that flashes from East to West. It will come when the Face of God appears in all his glory and all look upon him, willingly or no.

Citizens of Jerusalem and Israel, citizens of the cities of the gentiles and those who have no city, prepare yourselves now. Pursue not the saviour state, which can only disappoint. Pursue rather a state called the state of grace. The more in a given state who are in the state of grace, the better the state of that state. Who knows? It may yet find a Christ-loving prince, while it awaits the Prince who is Christ. But whether it does or it doesn't, the invitation stands. Meet with Melchizedek, and offer yourself freely. Meet with Jesus and break out into true liberty!

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Feast of Mary, Virgin and Queen

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