Uncommon Era
Reflections on the redemption of time
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It was only coincidence, I expect, that filled the night skies with the whir of wings and unfamiliar lights in the run-up to Christmas, as if some new messiah were slouching to Newark to be born. The authorities, naturally, insisted that the unusual was only the usual in somewhat concentrated form. They use the same technique, every four years, when they tell us that the usual is unusual; though I do admit that AD 2025 got off to a spectacular start in America, politically speaking, and that I've rather enjoyed the show. Call it the new order of barbarians, if you please, but thus far I much prefer the new to the old. Ask the average Brit, who is still stuck with the old, in its Starmer edition, and he'll tell you how thankful you should be. On the other hand, those pundits who observe that America has passed from one executive tyranny to another are not mistaken, nor those who think the appointment of Paula White to lead the new White House Faith Office a sign of our diabolically confused times.
Here in Canada we're stuck in limbo, which is fitting enough, I suppose, for a country that, for a whole generation, stood idly by while Trudeaupians laboured at the old order. Only the Freedom Convoy stands out as an exception, by doing their idling on Wellington Street, and the authorities are still persecuting its leaders. When Poilievre comes to power, the first pardons must go there, and a monument be built in their honour. If instead Mark Carney comes to power, and the Liberal globalists remain within the precincts of power—whatever happens, of course, they already control the civil service, the courts, and the Senate—the country itself will deserve no pardon. Its monuments, including the rule of law under the sovereignty of God, will continue to collapse. Fret not about America, O Canada! Look to yourself, for you have fallen far from your own former greatness.
This piece is not about politics of that sort, however. It is not about UAP either. It is about the numbering of our years according to politics of a quite different sort, as I should begin to explain.
On the Recording of Time
Ordinary politics references the coming or going of notable political figures, pegging our years to their deeds and demands, their taxes and their tariffs. Take Luke 2, for example: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrolment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Luke here orients his audience by tagging the events he is describing to the tenure of the imperial officials under which they took place. That's how things were done, and are done still. “In the first days of the second term of Donald J. Trump, a decree went out that there should be many decrees”—that sort of thing.
In Luke 1, however, having begun with a reference to “the days of Herod, king of Judaea,” who fancied himself a great monument-builder like Caesar, Luke has already subverted this whole scheme of reference. He recounts its sudden interruption by an authority not of this world at all. This interruption took place in the form of an announcement to a man whose name was Zechariah, who was doing his duty in the temple in the days of a high priest whom Luke does not pause to identify. The interruption is an interruption of sacred time, even before it is an interruption of secular time.1
Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, it fell to him by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
And you will have joy and gladness,
and many will rejoice at his birth;
for he will be great before the Lord,
and he shall drink no wine nor strong drink,
and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit,
even from his mother’s womb.
And he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God,
and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah,
to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,
and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,
to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”And Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel, who stand in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak to you, and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”
The angel, one imagines, in delivering this rebuke, draws himself up to a towering height, his friendly countenance suddenly turning very stern. For Zechariah, though a priest of God, has expressed doubt about the word of God brought to him from the presence of God. Sentence is promptly pronounced. If Zechariah can say nothing sensible it will be best, for a time, that he say nothing at all. A new order—an order for which the whole of the old order of prophets, priests, and kings existed—has come upon him, his reservations notwithstanding.
Zechariah finds himself in the position of the pagan, of the kind of man who can talk about nothing but the decrees of Caesar or the circuses he has arranged; only Zechariah, who ought to know better, cannot talk at all. He finds himself in this position because he is conscious only of the curvature created by the fall, which has limited his years to some fourscore. He and his wife are advanced in years and incapable of a child. Time is their master. Though a bondservant of God by office, he is nonetheless a bondservant of time, and he does not know how to reconcile these two facts.
But something is happening here that will alter time and change man's relation to time. And Zechariah is going to be party to it, by fathering young John the Baptizer, whose years will not amount to two score before Herod serves up his head on a platter. Luke's reader, too, may be party to it, by readying himself for baptism. Even the pagan can be party to it, if he dares to be. Of course, he must first fall silent for a bit, and let the angel speak, something he (and we) may have trouble doing.
On the so-called Common Era
That the year we are now in has the number it does is a modest trace of the change in question. Annus domini nostri Jesu Christi 2025 is not numbered for any ordinary king or kaiser, belonging to some historic succession of kings or kaisers, each sovereign in his time. It is not numbered for any president or prime minister, or from the founding or re-founding of any republic. It is numbered for the true messiah, on whose shoulders rests a new order that really is new, and ever shall be new—a veritable kingdom of newness that will never grow old. It is numbered for the one whose coming was heralded by emissaries of the eternal city of God, which contains all novelty worth knowing about; by angels of light convening in heavenly chorus (whether with the whirring of wings or not, I cannot say) to sing to rustics and to sheep in the fields beyond Bethlehem, where neither Herod nor high priest would deign to set foot.
Admittedly, it took more than five hundred years, from the birth of the messiah, before the BC/AD system of numbering was devised, and nearly that long again before this system came into regular use in the Carolingian era, by which time it was already tainted with certain political ambitions belonging to luminaries of the city of man. It is still tainted today by those who take it, not as a sign or trace of an interruption, but as a mark proper to a secular dominion of kings and priests. It is tainted also by those who make use of it while pretending that it marks nothing at all, calling this age the Common Era.
The common era? What nonsense! We do not live in a common era, but rather in a contested era. If CE/BCE stood for Contested Era and Before the Contested Era, that would be sound enough; for the present age is nothing if not the age in which the dispute between the two cities, the city of man and the city of God, has broken out into the open. It broke out into the open when the events Luke describes took place.
Our common era, such as it was, began so long ago that we have forgotten its beginning. It began with the fall, and the only thing common about it was that every man born into it was also a man who died out of it. Through Moses we were reminded of its beginning. Through Jesus, we learned of its ending. Hence the dispute.
Psalm 90, a prayer of Moses, the man of God, begs of God: “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
For we are consumed by thy anger;
by thy wrath we are overwhelmed.
Thou hast set our iniquities before thee,
our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.All our days pass away under thy wrath,
our years come to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are threescore and ten,
or even by reason of strength fourscore;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Such is the truth concerning our common era, a truth that only the foolish ignore, until they can ignore it no more. Still more foolish, however, is the one who ignores the answer God has supplied to that other petition, the one that immediately follows in Psalm 90: “Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” The answer was given when a certain son of David, born in Bethlehem, was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” Then it was, that the common era came to an end and the contested era began.
The contested era is contested because, as Paul says, certain men have from that Son “received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.” Some will heed the invitation, while others will refuse it, as Jesus predicted. The heeding and the refusing are what Luke goes on to describe in his Gospel and in The Acts of the Apostles. And here I wish to say that it is not altogether a bad thing that those who begrudge the numbering of our years by reference to the birth of Jesus, now propose to rename them if not to renumber them. For, by doing so, they implicitly acknowledge the contest at the heart of the age.
As for us, we mark man’s years with the sign of the cross, not of the cradle only, when we refer to them as years of our Lord. When we speak of living anno domini nostri, we speak of living in a year that affords new opportunities to acknowledge Christ as Lord, to live in his service. For their part, they have no such wish and make no such acknowledgment. That is why they prefer CE to AD as a denomination. Yet they only highlight the question, the question proper to the age: Will we, or will we not, have this man to reign over us?
Whether he does actually reign is not the question. That question has already been answered by God himself. Jesus is Lord of the World, a fact none can alter. The question, rather, concerns the obedientia fidei. Who will offer it? The age we live in is not a common age, and cannot be a common age, because some refuse to offer it. It will only come to an end when it is quite clear who refuses and who doesn’t.
On the gift of recapitulation
When exactly the age will end, we do not know. Its beginning we do know, a minor discrepancy in our knowing notwithstanding. When the BC/AD system first appeared, existing calculations concerning the times of the relevant officials were some four years off. Jesus, we now think, was born no later than the year designated 4 BC. So it has been 2029 years or thereabouts, not 2025, since the appointed hour at which the Son of God came to our fallen race in order to redirect the time of our lapsing into the time of our salvation. To effect that salvation, he died by crucifixion in the spring of AD 33, at some thirty-seven years of age. He then rose from the dead, pursuant to a divine verdict overturning the verdicts of Caiaphas and Caesar, or of Pilate on behalf of Caesar. Unlike us, he no longer ages, for he no longer belongs to our age, though our age belongs to him. It belongs to him, as does everything else, by right of recapitulation.
When we speak of recapitulation, which we must do if we are counting time thus, we are not speaking merely of the round of liturgical feasts by which Christians mark every passing year, regardless of what else may happen in it. That is a symbolic recapitulation. But there is a real recapitulation to which the symbol points; viz., the once-for-all redemption of time, and of man in time, accomplished by Jesus. In just thirty-seven years he summed up and brought to a head everything that concerns man.
St Irenaeus, whose name is prominently associated with that doctrine, tried to stretch the life of Jesus by a decade, in support of a pastoral feature he found, or thought he found, in St Paul, whose doctrine it is; but his attempt was unnecessary and unconvincing, even misguided. Jesus, he said, lived to be “an old man for old men,” just as he had been an infant for infants and a young man for young men. Given what we did to Jesus, there may be a sense in which that is true. But thirty-seven years was all the Son of God needed to track and trace fallen man; thirty-seven years, to discover the “lost sheep” he went forth to find, and to rescue it from the ditch into which it had fallen. After that, he began to inhabit a new time of his own making, or rather of the Spirit's making—a time in which one neither ages nor dies, a time in which one is ever fecund and fruitful in a manner incomparably superior to that in which men, whose days come to an end with a sigh, are so briefly fecund now.
We may reference this new time as resurrection time, but we may also call it shabbat time. It is time, but it is not our present time, and it is not measured as we measure time. As Jesus insisted, man was not made for the sabbath, but rather the sabbath for man. And he himself, having reformed and perfected man, has become Lord of Shabbat, which no longer comes and goes, cyclically, as we ourselves come and go. It abides, for it is itself an abiding with God. Entering into it, one abides in it and by it and does not pass away. Such is the result of his recapitulation.
Irenaeus, that most worthy doctor of the church, was remarkably insightful on all of this. He recognized with Paul that the time we presently experience is not absolute but relative. Even before the fall, it was merely provisional in character. The time that for Jesus now is, and for us will be, is time as it is meant to be. For the Word of God, in becoming incarnate, took up the provisional fashion of man as created in the beginning. He took up our mortality (that is, the possibility of dying) without being condemned to death. He therefore could follow us into death, which he did without deserving death or being in its debt. Breaking the power of sin and death, he made possible the advance of man to the permanent arrangements belonging to his perfection.
These eternal arrangements are unlike the present arrangements, though they are arrangements of the same thing, as Irenaeus is careful to observe. In the final transfiguration that shall effect them, “neither the substance nor the essence of the creation will be done away with,” he insists, “for faithful and true is he who established it.” God, in other words, did not create our world in vain or make empty promises to us concerning it. It is only, as Paul says, “the fashion of this world,” the present scheme (σχημα) or configuration of the world, that will pass away. It will pass, that is, from “those things in which an overstepping has taken place, because among them man has grown old.” The curvature created by the fall will be corrected, the scoliosis in man and in nature will disappear.
We should not be surprised at this. God foreknows all things. He foreknew man’s transgression and fall. In his providence, “the present scheme of things was made temporary.” It was designed to be capable of correction. Indeed, its future transcendence was in view from the beginning. When the present arrangements have served their purpose “and man has been renewed, and flourishes in an incorruptible state so as to preclude even the possibility of becoming old, then shall be ‘the new heaven and the new earth’ in which the new man shall abide forever, always holding fresh converse with God.”
Irenaeus understood recapitulation as that act of God in Christ by which the existence of man—the time of his coming to be, we might say, which because of sin is also the time of his passing away—is reconstituted, in order that man, after all, might not pass away but rather abide and make progress, and the world abide with him.2 It is reconstituted by one who, in the midst of our disobedience and unbelief, offered his Father, on our behalf, the full obedience of faith we had withheld and the true gratitude we had neglected. For thirty-seven years, and for three hours on the cross—hours we really don't know how to measure at all, save in the daily eucharists by which the church renders thanks to God through him, and in the acts of her martyrs—he perfected our humanity in himself. But if true humanity was perfected in his death, it was perfected also through his defeat of death, about which a further word should be said.
On the defeat of death
A recapitulation is the retracing of an argument, a recovery by the speaker of what has been scattered abroad over a wide-ranging discourse, in order to bring it to a head, to present it whole and complete, such that it serves his rhetorical purpose. Something analogous happens (as Nathan Adams reminds us) when the speaker is the Word of God, who comes to address humanity in person.3 His subject matter is nothing less than man himself—man in his relation to God, and in his digression from God. To this subject he can and does speak with unmatched eloquence. He speaks from beyond the heights of heaven, being “true God from true God;” and being a man, he speaks also from the depths of the womb that bore him, from the manger that cradled him, from the cross on which he was hung, from the rock in which men laid him to rest. He speaks as no other ever did or could speak. He speaks as one person in two natures.
These claims go back to Paul and to John and to the primitive baptismal confession of the church in Jerusalem. They are passed down to us through the church fathers who, 1700 years ago exactly, began fixing them dogmatically in the formulas proper to them, through a series of councils that began in AD 325. In AD 2025, it is still believed that the very Word of God that the heavenly court heard, when it heard the solemn pronouncement, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness,” came to fulfill that pronouncement by being made man himself, man in time.
What man was he made, if not the man who, after being made, thought to ascend to the heights, to be as God, but instead fell back into the dust from which he had been drawn? The man who overstepped the mark, who advancing in years only grew old, and did not know how to number his years aright; the man who was never perfected, nor attained his proper destiny? He was made this man, yes. That is what every council has declared. Yet he was not this man in one crucial respect. For his own descent, his own turn towards death, was not an act of pride, but of humility. It was not a fall, nor the consequence of a fall. On the contrary, it was an embrace of the good. It was a perfectly free decision to pursue the good willed by his Father. Through this descent of his, the steps of man, both before and after the fall, were retraced, that man might be recovered and brought to perfection after all. And not merely retraced, then, but also reversed. For fallen man, as Irenaeus says, is the man who has been “turned away backwards” from his true destiny.
The present course of man does not lead to “union and communion with God.” The present course of man leads to death. It leads both to the first death, which brings to an end the time he knows, and to the second death, which confines him to a time he does not wish to know—to a sort of paralysis of time from which there is no escape. For there, in the last decay of time, man “rests” only on his own conflicted and tormented self. The Word's retracing of man's course was an accompanying of man into the first death, an accompanying in which he himself was not dissipated through any corruption. The second death he did not enter, for he died the first death in a fashion that eliminated any need for the second.
How so? It is said in the scriptures that Jesus, as a lad, grew “in favour with God and man;” which is what he continued to do as an adult, until he fell out of favour with man because he refused to fall out of favour with God. We false men then put him to death. Yet even in death he made of himself a freewill offering to the Father on our behalf. He died, not by the command of God, nor because he himself was condemned of God, but because he willed what the Father wills; namely, the salvation of man. He died by the hand of man, but not by any necessity of man. For he was not declining towards death against his will, nor was he unable to escape the sentence of death that had been passed on his fellow man by God and on himself by his fellow man. It was in absolute freedom that he pursued his course—his course of love and subjection to his Father, first of all, and mirabile dictu to fallen man as well, that he might take the latter's place as one condemned.
Thus did he defeat death, not by evading it but rather by overcoming it with the power of life, resurrection life. Thus did he effect the reversal of our course and achieve the glorification of our humanity, removing our condemnation by overcoming both its causes and its consequences. As Anselm later explained, he situated himself alongside us and made satisfaction for sin, that eternal punishment might be avoided. He turned the first death against the second, that the second need not follow the first. Rising from the dead, he ascended to his Father and our Father, to prepare for us a place with the Father.
On self-defeating thought
Time, with space and like space, is time for something. As such it is already liberty. Ultimately, it is time for communion with the Father, who brought it into being for that very purpose, and with the Son who mediates it, and with the Spirit who makes it altogether joyful. The denizens of time, in its new creation mode, will be incorruptible—freely incorruptible and incorruptibly free—by virtue of this communion. We who, with Zechariah, still groan under the burdens and disappointments of fallen time, not quite managing to realize or rejoice at the liberation that has been announced to us, must have some sympathy with those who have trouble hearing the angel at all. Yet we must not concede to them that it is not their fault if they have not heard an angel speaking sotto voce. The angel is not speaking sotto voce. It is speaking out loud. The problem lies in their own refusal to be silent sufficiently long to hear what it is saying. They are too quick to mount an objection.
Tertullian, facing with Paul and Irenaeus the objection that we cannot, as creatures of flesh and blood, hope to enjoy incorruptibility—an objection not unlike Zechariah's objection that an elderly couple could not hope to enjoy a child—joined them in defending both our animal constitution and our hope of immortality. He did so by appealing to that same dominical saying about the sabbath being made for man:
But, you object, the world to come bears the character of a different dispensation, even an eternal one; and therefore you maintain that the non-eternal substance of this life is incapable of possessing a state of such different features. This would be true enough, if man were made for the future dispensation, and not the dispensation for man. (Res. 59)
Only it’s not true, for the reason already specified. God has designed the world to come precisely to accommodate man. Therefore man, as man, may hope to inhabit the world to come.
We may paraphrase all three theologians thus: You who say that only in intellect or spirit, not in flesh and blood, can anyone enjoy that which is eternal, put up a false barrier to your own salvation. You set time against eternity, and the flesh against the spirit. You think like a gnostic, in thinking that the only proper goal of the human spirit is to escape from time into eternity—or, despairing of eternity, to occupy itself entirely with time. You then subject the saviour himself to this scheme of yours. Instead of thinking christologically about creaturely reality, you think about Christ according to your own notions of that reality.
With what result? The saviour is no saviour, not for man qua man, for whom there can be no such salvation. Jesus was a just man, unjustly killed; but just a man, for all that. He did not rise, and neither shall you, unless by “rising” is meant absorption into what used to be called the World Soul. To speak of all things being summed up in him is to talk nonsense, unless the sense in question is nothing but the projection of an abstract or universal truth onto a particular teacher of that truth, who might as well be the Buddha as the Christ.
In all this, you are mistaken, because you insist on approaching things backwards. You will not let the saviour show you how to think—Paul calls this sharing in the mind of Christ—but propose rather to show the saviour that he is not the saviour, for there can be no saviour. Moreover, you make the assumption that man, who cannot be saved, is a means, not an end. He may be a very dignified means; so dignified, perhaps, that he is the very instrument through which the World Soul cognizes itself, or the way God realizes God as Geist. But these are just fancy ways of saying that man is made for shabbat, not shabbat for man.
The materialist, of course, has his own version of this circular line of thought, though he professes not to believe in thought. He too operates on pure assumption, an assumption that leads, as it must lead, to nihilism. Dostoevsky warned us, did he not, that this diabolical circularity could only mean “beginning all over again with cannibalism”? The true alternative—that shabbat is made for man, not man for shabbat—does not thus limit the possibilities for man. It does not consign man to nothingness. Man was nothing before he was made, and he certainly did not make himself. He was made by Someone and for Someone and therefore is someone. He is not nothing and nothingness is not his proper destiny.
But is this alternative also based on mere assumption? No, it is based on testimony: the testimony of the prophets and apostles. No dose, however verbose, of Hegel or Feuerbach or Freud or Jung or any of their disciples—even quasi-Christian disciples such as Jordan Peterson, if I do not mistake him—can reduce that testimony to a play of symbols. Prophets and apostles sometimes speak symbolically, yes. It belongs to the creature made in the image of God to produce icons and to create semiotic systems. But only gnostics and false apostles think that man is saved by the stories he tells himself; that death and resurrection are only conversions of the psyche by way of such systems.
That is the very thing Irenaeus laboured so hard to refute. True apostles, as he maintained in his own day against the soteriological cannibalism of Basilides and Valentinus and the rest, speak first and foremost of actual men and women and of real events. Above all, they speak of Jesus Christ, the saviour of man, and of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths,” says Peter,
when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honour and glory from God the Father and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
Jesus Christ is the man for whom shabbat was made, and nothing should be said about any putative shabbat that does not correspond to him and to what he achieved in his recapitulation of man, and of all things in connection with man. That is the other alternative, the apostolic alternative, according to which one thinks soundly on the basis of things that actually take place. “For in things that are, as they are, we believe,” says Irenaeus: including the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
On true and false redemption of time
Now, there are those who do believe these things, but who believe them too simplistically. They may even have in mind that our Lord, sitting among the angels in his glory, is counting out his days with us in this aging universe of ours, albeit without aging himself, even at 2029. On their account, he is both Melchizedek and Methuselah. Well, at least they allow that eternity is not hostile to time and that it is capable of receiving actual humans—humans not hostile to eternity. But they, too, overlook the fact that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath.
Perhaps they know well enough that, whether in their provisional or their perfected form, all things are made for the man Jesus Christ, in and through whom they are summed up and made glorious.4 Yet they underestimate the transformation that has already taken place, the transformation witnessed by the heavenly court, to which the prophets and apostles have been made privy through interruptions that amount to breaches in time, or rather to bridges between times—the old time and the new. Jesus is not Methuselah, but the new Adam, and, just so, a new and very different Melchizedek. It must not be forgotten that, while the first arrangement of things applies to us, as to everything we see through our microscopes and telescopes, or in our liturgies, for that matter, whether secular or religious, it does not now apply to him. He is King and High Priest of the new arrangement, to which the old is but a supplicant.
Otherwise put, and better: There are two kinds of glory, one provisional, the other perfect; and these are not hierarchically, but eschatologically related. Therefore there is no room either for defeatism or for triumphalism. To aim for that which is glorious, not as a way of escaping this present age, nor yet of dominating it, but rather as a deliberate orientation within it—a humble, eucharistic orientation—is our own role in the redemption of time.
We shall have other roles, no doubt, in the resurrection. We fulfill our present role when we live by sober-minded hope in the coming of the Lord of Shabbat to effect the the regeneration of all things. We fulfill our present role by living thankfully and obediently, in faith, hope and love. We do not fulfill it, but instead subvert it, by investing in some golden age of our own fancy, promised by a political prince or a prosperity gospel preacher or a techno-optimist who thinks reprogramming more promising than recapitulation.
“Take heed how you walk,”advises Paul, “not as unwise but as wise, redeeming the time, for the days are evil.” The year designated AD 2025 is redeemable by us in just that sense. It presents a kairos, a precious moment or opportunity, that people of genuine faith may prayerfully seize. But AD 2025 is certainly not a measure of man’s collective progress towards what is glorious. Nor is it a measure of Christ's supervision of man's progress, from some point of leverage beyond our sight or ken. It is merely a measure of the time, the time of our lapse or fall, that has elapsed since we learned of our salvation. It is not a way of counting up towards the full appearance of his glory or ours, which is the mistake the Carolingians began to make and that adherents to the myth of progress still make.
Were it the appearance of glory we were counting towards, we would not be counting up at all, but rather counting down to the parousia—the parousia of the Lord of Sabaoth, of the armies of heaven, on that great and terrible day of the LORD of which the prophets and apostles spoke. God has relieved us of that temptation by refusing to divulge when the parousia will be. So we count up from the glory already revealed to the shepherds and magi, that we might not forget, as the years come and go, that the Lord of Shabbat appeared in our midst as guarantor of an eternal rest that will come and not go; that is, of that perfected arrangement of things in which the horizons of man will be all and only joy. And we count backwards from the same point because we know that man needs, and has received, his recapitulation.
Luke does mention that Zechariah belonged to the priestly division of Abijah, subtly sending the reader back to the days of King David, whose exploits in the power of the Spirit he will use as a prophetic backdrop to his account of King Jesus the Crucified.
“For if indeed there are to be real humans,” he says, “it is necessary that there be also a real plantation belonging to them, that they not excel among things that are not, but make progress among things that are.” That is how he commences the passage from which I have been quoting, the passage at the head of the final chapter of Against all heresies. His entire dispute with the gnostics lies in the background here, together with allusions to Genesis 1–3, Hebrews 11-12, and 1 Cor. 1:18ff.
Adams, who is one of two doctoral students of mine working fruitfully on Irenaeus, argues that on the latter’s scheme of things, the perfection of free and authentic humanity—the kind of humanity that is fit for eternal life—requires first the learning of a loving obedience. It is in Jesus, not Adam (as the author of Hebrews says), that this learning has in fact taken place. The other student, Ryan Scruggs, is focused on the eucharistic economy of gracious giving and grateful receiving that Irenaeus develops, an economy for which contemporary philosophy is seeking without (otherwise) finding. I am grateful to both men for creatively pursuing these tasks and for encouraging me to take them up again myself.
See Eph. 1:9f.: “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him (εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν, ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ), things in heaven and things on earth.”
'Ask the average Brit', or ask the average Aussie: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/02/the-australian-perspective-britain-is-in-worse-shape-than-you-thought/
What modern gnosticism looks like: https://sdgthoughtleaderscircle.org/deep-and-rapid-transformation/. As Bruce Davidson advises at Brownstone (https://brownstone.org/articles/the-collectivist-evolutionary-religion-of-the-un/) watch the video. When you've done that, turn to James Alexander's "A Biblical Analysis of AI: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/16/a-biblical-analysis-of-ai/. O yes, and review "Doctrines of Demons" on Desiring a Better Country.