As we have seen, there are no genealogies recorded in the New Testament after Christ’s. This means that genealogies have no religious significance in the new world. As we have noted, Paul warns against “endless genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:4; Titus 3:9). Their purpose was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. (Jeffrey J. Meyers, What Did God Promise the Jews, 27)
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.
I gotta have my orange juice. 