Where was [Jesus] during this time? Suffering for us? No, he was in paradise. He says to the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” We have a translation of the Apostles’ Creed that says he descended into hell. That’s not very good. The Moravians say he descended to the place of departed spirits, which I think is good. We could say he descended to Sheol.
Most accurately, we would say he went to paradise. And that’s having a party. Your Good Friday service, after the Good Friday service, have a party afterwards. Break out the champagne. Jesus is down in paradise having a great time with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Naaman the Syrian. They’re all down there partying hearty. I mean, I grew up, Good Friday service is over, and we sang—it’s a pretty hymn, but the words aren’t good in my opinion anymore:
O darkest woe! Ye tears forth flow! Hath earth so sad a wonder, God the Father’s only Son Now lies buried yonder.
Well, if we’re seeing through the eyes of faith, and not the eyes of despair, what we want to participate in is much more festive on Friday night and Saturday. Actually, the Eastern Church treats Holy Saturday more festively. But it’s very much medieval for us to treat it, “Oh, it’s a mournful time. The service is over. Everyone should leave. We’re going to turn all the lights off and everybody should leave in silence. Don’t say anything as you leave.” I have come to question that.
Jesus’ second death, it was the death that Adam and Eve were supposed to have, the death that leads to glorification and resurrection. Jesus ascends out of the tomb and he now has knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did not have knowledge of good and evil before his resurrection. That’s to pass judgments.
What did Jesus say when they came? The guy says, “Tell my brother to divide his inheritance with me, my inheritance with me.” And Jesus says, “Who made me a judge? I’m not a judge.” Satan comes and tempts him, Jesus just answers back. He doesn’t say, “This is my world, I’m in charge of it.” He’s not in charge of this world. Satan says, “I’ve been traveling up and down the earth. It’s my world. All things have been given to me, and I’ll give it to you if you bow down and worship me.” Jesus doesn’t dispute that.
Now, the secret in that passage is that you might think, well, Jesus is going to get this world as a result of his resurrection. Actually, Jesus doesn’t want this world. 1 Corinthians chapter 1 says he made that world of nothing. You want this world, Satan? Here, you can have it. I’m going for a new, transfigured, resurrected world. So Satan looks around and he says, “Hey, it’s my world. Where is everybody? Where’s gravity?”
Nothing’s left of this world. It’s been made nothing. Now Jesus has this new world. We all move into it by baptism.
In reality, and more consistent with early Patristic witness, God’s Word is and so has the highest authority. The reason this is so is that internally, metaphysically, the Scriptures are the Word of God, the Self-revelation of the uncreated mind and will of the Triune God who condescended to cause these to subsist in the form of recorded or inscripturated human language. They are His living Voice. They, the Scriptures, are therefore not merely inspired human speech, not merely spiritually influenced, but God’s own Word speaking through man. This is what gives Scripture its unique, ultimate authority, because God’s Speech has ultimate authority intrinsically. The Church, by contrast, is Bridal, is a creature, is receptive, existing on the side of created being (though, of course, indwelt by the Holy Spirit). But, as Bride, it is only through God’s creative and maintaining Word that the Church is made to be, to exist, God’s Word being the sole cause of the Church and the Scriptures, and so the sole ground of man’s knowledge. This is how there can be a Berean Principle, which exists to show that recourse to God’s Word is recourse to the more fundamental. EOP, however, makes the Church to be not only the arbiter but also the determiner of God’s truth such that recourse to the Berean principle is rendered moot and impossible. (Joshua Schooping, Disillusioned, 163)
Eastern Orthodox Presuppositionalism (EOP) is an ecclesiological epistemology, i.e. anti-catholic. In other words, according to EOP, the epistemological ground or cause of knowledge is said to be rooted in Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology, for EOP holds that the EOC is a precondition of intelligibility and knowledge. In contrast, Reformed Presuppositionalism (RP) is rooted in the Verbum Dei, with its epistemological ground seen to be God’s Word, and its epistemological consequence being unto and causative of ecclesiology. Put more simply, the RP position is that we can know the Church because of the transcendentally fundamental nature of God’s Word, not vice versa. The EOP position is that we know God’s Word because of the Church, thus causing the Scriptures and epistemology to submit to the Church (i.e. to ecclesiology).
Now, if the Church becomes a precondition for knowledge, then the Church becomes a viciously circular precondition for its own self-knowledge, and hence self-attesting, self-justifying, and finally irreformable, which is just what we see in the EOC. In other words, EOP epistemology ceases to be Bridal, ceases to be receptively and responsively confirmatory of the Bridegroom’s Word but rather determinative. (Joshua Schooping, Disillusioned, 161, emphasis added)
I wrote previously about James Jordan’s reflection on God’s covenant name and the merciful cutting off of wickedness. Jordan says,
The statement “visiting iniquity of fathers to the children of the third and fourth generation” means that if you become involved in image worship and your children and grandchildren don’t repent of it, you just move out of history and you move out of the covenant people. You wind up being like the Serbians. Your children are going to suffer from it. They were misapplying that to say, “Well, we suffer nowadays because our fathers sinned.” And the prophets came along and said, “no, if you repent, God will alleviate.”
That’s not what’s going on [in Exodus 34]. Now, the Sinaitic covenant was made with Israel. That covenant’s broken. There isn’t any covenant with Israel anymore. Now what are we going to do?
But I also discovered that I learned this from Gary North as well. North says,
And then Murray says the third thing you’ve got to have is a doctrine of final sanctification, that is, a final judgment in which God looks at what you’ve done and once again, at the end of the process, declares “not guilty.” And that there’s the final resolution and the final evaluation. There’s final judgment. And he said, you’ve got to have a concept of sanctification which includes definitive, progressive, and final.
Now, how do I use that? How should you use that? Because what we’re taught covenantally is that’s not just limited to people. That’s societies, too. That there is not just personal, definitive, progressive, and final sanctification, but there is also corporate and covenantal. And you have that with the bride of Christ. The bride of Christ, the church of Jesus Christ, is perfect in the eyes of God. It’s received all the perfections of Christ, but she’s not dressed in holy robes yet. That takes time. That’s what progressive sanctification is for the church. And at some final point, the church will receive her perfect robes and the marriage supper of the Lamb will take place. And that’s a corporate element of sanctification. It’s not just individual.
Now, what I’m arguing is that if it’s true of the individual and it’s true of the church of Jesus Christ, then I think I can make an application in terms of the development of societies. That certain societies become rebellious and are cut down because judgment takes place also in the midst of time, and you go to the fourth commandment. Visiting the iniquities under the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing loving kindness unto thousands of those that love me and keep my commandments. There you’ve got the model of history. That’s what that’s about. Because the thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments, in the Deuteronomic passage: it’s thousands of generations.
So you have the short-term development of evil, and then it ends. It’s cut short in the midst of history, and that inheritance is transferred. And we know that because the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just. The compounding process takes place over long periods of time for the church of Jesus Christ and the elect.
Any new language implies a new loyalty. (Rosenstock-Huessy, Time Bettering Days and Other Essays, 29)
Rosenstock-Huessy would equally say that a new loyalty or love is generative of a new self, new language, and new music. For example,
In any life of normal health, grace comes first and the law follows. Any loving couple goes through the acceptable year first and out of this perfect happiness the special law of this marriage is derived and developed. Fluid flesh and blood precedes, and ossification follows. Jesus is free grace and his church is lawful order. Life is a process of crystallization. Free, revolutionary inspiration precedes; evolution, lawful development, is derived from the previous revolution and ecstacy. (Ibid., 49)
The fools of hope only, love only, or faith only, split the trident of our life energy. They pervert the fresh hopes of childhood into the sour milk of eternal moralizing, the great power of enthusiasm into nervous fits of excitement, and the tenacity of a responsive faith into the brutal energy of a “climber”. (Rosenstock-Huessy, Time Bettering Days and Other Essays, 55)
Nobody more than the Puritans murdered the whole church calendar and emasculated it so as to consist of 52 sabbaths; today this austere colorless Judaising has lost its hold on the community more and more. But their negative success is with us. The canonical hours are forgotten. We are the heirs of a great catastrophe (or a rebirth; we call it the Renaissance) which did away with a previous order of time-bettering days. When I hear the Humanists sneer at the downfall of ecclesiasticism, I often wonder how the humanists can overlook our own frailty. . . .
What the pre-Franklin, the pre-pragmatic mind called “time” was not a quantity, but a melody. Any particle of time could be lived as eternity and that it was lived as eternity was expressed by the 7 parts into which it was subdivided . . . .
Since we have lost this immediate power to accept a particle as the representative of a whole, most of the language of Church and Synagogue, of antiquity, is lost on us. It is analogous to modern man’s hesitation in speaking of God’s finger or womb or eye or smile or of the Church as His bride. Modern man calls such expression embarrassedly “similes” or metaphors. But he may rest assured that his own finger only got its name from its quality of there also being God’s finger, and the Day only was observed because it stood for eternity. “Metaphor” so called is the genuine source of all speech and language of our race, and the languages of anatomy and dictionaries are much later layers of language, derived by abstraction from the “Day of Days” and the Back of God. The parts of our body as well as the parts of time have received their names only after and because they proved serviceable to express some divine and eternal meaning. As metaphor for our experience of calendaric times, high and low, our language has been born, and is reborn. Scientific language is rundown, expired, murdered language. If you do not reconcile yourself to this origin of our words in potent speech, you will never understand the order of monastic life or of liturgical living. For the hours in a monastery shifted in their lengths according to the seasons of the year. In other words, on no two days in sequence did the word “hour” signify the same length of time. This, to modern man borders on the insane. Our hour has this one and only merit—that always it is sixty minutes long. This would have been to its disadvantage in antiquity. For the ancients, pious pagans, pious Jews, pious Christians, all were in agreement that man could not abstract time out of the hands of the God who sent each day, each moon, each cycle of the firmament. It would have been blasphemy to teach the times our own minds’ lesson that they had to behave according to our abstract scheming. In the continuation of the unanimous reverence of five thousand years, the monk’s seven canonical hours observed God’s time. Therefore, the hours could not help running from the actual sunrise to the actual sunset as observed “here”, let us say, in Monte Cassino, and “now” on October 1, 529 A.D. Only in this way could prayer enter upon God’s real times as they ringed the eons of eons.
Both aspects of the pre-Renaissance time sense are lost on us. For instance the King James Version mistranslates the organic flow of the eons by its heretical space concept “world without end”. But the Church suggested the organic flow of times after times, epochs of epochs, and nobody today can share the time experience of the apostles unless he casts out the abstract dead time of “world without end”. The genuine formula says the very opposite. It says that the end of the world must be experienced at the end of an epoch as much as the beginning of the next. Only by living through the end of one eon first and the beginnings of the new eon first, and thanks to this experience, the end of the previous eon, later, can we realize the times. Eons are like links in a chain. We have to hold on to the next eon as it shapes up in catastrophe, and let go the previous, a ring completed in a catastrophe. How else can we realize the Lord of the eons of eons? For God survives the end of time, with the revealing words, “And the end of the world was long ago”, which begins a great song. God survives ends as well as beginnings. Now exactly this truth we have lost and so we mock and are mocked by the believers in Armageddon. The end of the world, the monks realized every night. Time died. The day died. And then it rose again. For this great existence of the death and resurrection of Christ in their canonical hours, they joyfully paid the price of shortening and lengthening the twelve hours. These twelve hours themselves after all were there in honor of the twelve months during which the great year of atonement, the great New Year’s Day was brought back over 360 degrees. In other words, the number twelve, in the hours system, was as much an organic reference to the twelve months as in Shakespeare’s play “Twelve Nights”. The Twelve were meaningful with reference not to the single nights but to them as they were reminding us of the twelve months. (Eugen Rostenstock-Huessy, Time Bettering Days and Other Essays, 250-256)
Dear Children John Samuel and Henry Pastorius: Though you are (Gernano sanguine nati) of high Dutch Parents, yet remember that your father was Naturalized, and ye born in an English Colony, Consequently each of you Anglus Natus an Englishman by Birth. Therefore, it would be a shame for you if you should be ignorant of the English Tongue, the Tongue of your Countrymen; but that you may learn the better I have left a Book for you both, and commend the same to your reiterated perusal. If you should not get much of ye Latin, nevertheless read ye the English part oftentimes OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And I assure you that Semperaliquid hœrebit. For the Dripping of the house-eaves in Time maketh a hole in an hard stone. Non vi sed sæpe cadendo, and it is very bad Cloath that by often dipping will take no Colour.
Lectio lecta placet, decies repetita placebit Quod Natura negat vobis Industria præstet. — F. D. P.
Jeroboam famously reinstitutes golden calf worship (1 Kings 12) and names his sons after the sons of Aaron who had offered strange fire (1 Kings 14; Abijah and Nadab). James Jordan hypothesizes that Jeroboam was cleverly inventing a pretext to draw Israel away from worshipping in Jerusalem:
Now, what’s Jeroboam doing? He is returning back to the situation before Moses and Aaron set up the Levites, isn’t he? He says, “No more tabernacle, we’re going to go back to the golden calf. No more Levites, we’re going to go back to the nobility of Israel and make them priests.” What’s he saying? He’s saying basically the kind of thing that Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses say today when they say, “We don’t want this Trinitarian Christianity that was invented in the 4th century at the Council of Chalcedon in Nicaea. We want to go back to the early church before this doctrine of the Trinity was invented because the early church was not Trinitarian.” Of course, that’s wrong, but that’s their myth.
Now, that’s the same kind of thing Jeroboam is doing, I believe. He’s saying, “We want to go back before Moses and Aaron took charge and made themselves dictators and set up this tabernacle stuff and took the priesthood away from the people and gave it to the Levites. And we’re going to go back.” And he says, “Look, you’ve probably heard that Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, were killed by God, but they weren’t. Remember Leviticus says that Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire, and fire came out from God and burned them up. Remember that story?” Now Jeroboam is trying to tell the people, “Well, that’s what your Bible says, but that was written by them Levite priests, and the real historical facts are probably that Moses and Aaron killed them because they wanted to perpetuate the good old true religion of the golden calf.” And so Jeroboam names his sons Nadab and Abihu.
Now what I just said about his theology is something of a guess, but there’s no doubt that he named his sons Nadab and Abihu, and I can’t figure out any other reason why he would. If you look in chapter 14, verse 1, it says, “At that time, Abijah, the son of Jeroboam, became sick.” Now, Abijah is the same as the word Abihu. It’s just a different spelling of the same name. And if you look in verse 20, you’ll find, “And the time that Jeroboam reigned was twenty-two years, and he slept with his fathers, and Nadab his son reigned in his place.” So he names his sons Nadab and Abihu, after the two sons of Aaron that were burned up for blasphemy.
So I think Jeroboam took counsel with people and invented a theology and decided he would go back to supposedly what the true worship had been before it was corrupted by Moses and Aaron. He takes the side of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram who say all the people are holy, not just the Levites. That’s the kind of thing he’s doing. Now, of course, it’s politically expedient to do this. When he rejects the Levites from being priests, it says he appointed other people to be priests. Who do you suppose became the priests? Well, probably not necessarily the firstborn. Let’s say that you were Jeroboam and you were trying to consolidate power. Who would you make as priests? Yeah, your friends, members of the nobility. Because you want to tie them into you, you see. You want to make them vassals, make them indebted to you. You want to centralize authority. Up in this time, you have church and state separate. Levites are over here with their own government. Nobody can be a priest except a Levite, which means they are free from political control. But when you get the golden calf situation, then the Levites and the church officers are all appointed by the king, by the state. And you have one government, centralized authority, centralized control.
One other thing we see here is this feast in the eighth month. It says, like the feast that’s in Judah. What’s the feast that it’s talking about in Judah? Was there a feast in the eighth month in Judah? No. What’s the nearest feast? The feast in the seventh month. Now, what was the feast in the seventh month? It’s the biggie. The biggest of all the feasts. Tabernacles. Tabernacles. That’s where everybody comes and builds a little booth made of palm branches and other branches and lives in Jerusalem and celebrates a festival. And the Feast of Tabernacles became—there’s evidence that indicates this, although it’s never explicitly said—it became a feast that celebrated the kingship of the Lord in Israel. At any rate, Jeroboam puts up a feast that’s just like that, a big eight-day feast, but he does it in the eighth month.
Now, why do you suppose he would do it in the eighth month instead of the seventh? Remember, we’ve got to think like shrewd politicians here. In the first place, you want to have a feast so that your people have an alternative and they’re not attracted to go to Jerusalem. Yeah, you don’t want them to have to choose. And do you want your feast before or after? After. That’s right, so the people come home from Jerusalem and then there’s another feast and what’s left in their mind is the second feast, your feast, the feast of the eighth month.
So that’s all the shrewd kinds of things he’s doing here. He’s counterfeiting the feast of tabernacles, counterfeiting the tabernacle as we’ll see, counterfeiting the cherubim, setting up false gods.
One other thing he does, once the temple was set up, were the people supposed to worship on high places anymore? No, there was only supposed to be one place for festival worship. Now, they had synagogue worship everywhere, in all the towns and cities and everywhere, on Sabbath days and new moons and other occasions. But as far as the festival worship or sacrifices took place, that was only supposed to be one place. Now, Jeroboam, he sets up many places because that’s what the people really wanted. They’d gotten used to having a lot of high places during the hundred years between the tearing down of the tabernacle and the building of the temple. And so he just plays up to them by saying, “Yeah, well, we can. I mean, God is omnipresent, isn’t he? We can worship him anywhere. This is nothing but a priestly innovation made up by Levites that we can only have one place. It’s part of Solomon’s attempt to centralize the nation to have a temple here. Don’t believe them when they tell you that God told them to do this stuff. They just say that. No, in reality, they set up this one temple in order to centralize all the power in themselves.” That’s the way he argued, and of course, he found a lot of people who wanted to believe that. So he sets up two sanctuaries, one in Bethlehem and one in Dan.
Jordan’s take seems compelling to me. What I find especially interesting is that he has Jeroboam resurrecting an old false religion, a sort of zombie religion. This provokes a few thoughts. First, this zombie religion is a new creation, an eclectic smorgasbord rather then a genuine return to an older way. It is an amalgam of high-place worship and firstborn-son priesthood with golden-calf worship and strange fire, as well as a variety of innovations. Second, this zombie religion is brought to life by coming into contact with true worship. If Jeroboam had not needed to draw people away from and to undermine the worship of the living God, he would not have had to invent a false religion. Satan is lazy; he only goes to work when he is at risk of losing ground. Third, this has direct applicability to modern false religions. In reality, they are boutique religions; none of them are old, because none of them have inherent life to perpetuate themselves. The more Christianity spreads, the more false religions draw life from an adversarial and parasitic relationship to Christianity. They must reconstitute themselves every few generations, partly because God judicially tears them down, and partly as a reactive response to the growth and maturation of Christianity. Girard observed, for example, that the more society’s scapegoating mechanisms are exposed, the more society repositions itself as a victim, creating a subtle new form of scapegoating.
Finally, there is no such thing as rewinding the clock, going back. Jeroboam’s false religion does not erase Israel’s obligation to serve the true and living God. The time of the divided kingdom, I think, serves as a prototype for the relation between the nations and the church; you must go up to the new Jerusalem to worship. Decades later, God chastises wicked Ahab for not conducting holy warfare (1 Kings 20:42)! Centuries later, God’s prophets are still dealing with the kings of Israel. And these later prophets often chastise other nations that have also been exposed to faithful worship.
I gotta have my orange juice. 