Ancient Alien

In 1976 Zechariah Sitchin's book The Twelfth Planet  was released, with its thesis that the Gods of Mesopotamia are actually aliens from the planet Nibiru who genetically engineered the human race and were fundamental to the development of our culture.  This is the moment when the "Ancient Alien" or "Ancient Astronaut" theories began to enter the popular consciousness.  This theory is often used to explain the construction of the Pyramids of Egypt and other instances where ancient peoples seem to have possessed knowledge or skill which we think should be beyond them.  The book of Job contains much of this kind of information.  It speaks of the Earth being "hung on nothing" in contrast to ancient mythologies which imagine the world sitting on a tree or the back of an animal.  It speaks of the "springs of the deep" which unmistakably refers to vents on the bottom of the ocean through which water enters the ocean from deep within the earth.

I think the Ancient Alien theory is an interesting replacement for mythology, because they both disappoint in the same way.  The problem with ancient aliens is that they aren't really all that alien.  And the ancient gods aren't especially divine.  They are both just bigger, better versions of ourselves.  There is nothing transcendent or ineffable about them.  They are subject to the same petty jealousies, lusts, and betrayals as we are.  But maybe there really is an Ancient Alien.

This morning my good friend Al was preaching on Job.  Now in chapter one Satan appears before God and says that he has been "going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.”  And God asks him a strange question.  He says, "Have you considered my servant Job?"  This seems to suggest that Satan must have been "considering" men for some reason.  He was looking for something or someone.  Al suggested that he was looking for the Second Adam, that is the child of Eve who was promised to break his head, in other words the Saviour.  As I began to think about it I was reminded of a sermon series that another friend, Ray, preached some years ago.  Ray's sermons were from the Gospel of Mark, if I remember correctly, and they dealt with the fact that although the Jews were looking for a Messiah they failed to recognize Jesus because He wasn't the TYPE of Messiah that they were, or we are, expecting.  And I began to wonder if the same might be true of Satan.

Job would have been a pretty good candidate for Saviour.  He was blameless and upright, he feared God and shunned evil, was the greatest of all of the people of the East, he acted as a priest sacrificing for his children to justify them before God.  This is what we expect from a Saviour and I think what Satan expected too.  Job later talks about all of the people he has helped and how everyone knows they can come to him to defend the weak against the strong and the poor against the rich.  Job is well able to fend off Satan's attacks against him with the legendary "patience of Job" and he has deep and satisfying theological answers to every attack against him.  He refuses to say anything against God throughout his whole ordeal and in the end God seems to acquit him, just as verse one chapter one does, implying that he was right from the beginning and his greatness, previously the greatest in the East, is doubled which must make him the greatest man in the world.  He even obtains forgiveness for his friends for their sins.  In short, everything we look for in a Saviour, Job had in spades.

I think that there must have come a day when God said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Jesus?"  And Satan must have laughed.  Job had had everything a Saviour should have.  Satan had seen lots of supposedly righteous men fall.  The ridiculous carpenter from Nazareth really ought to be passed on to an underling tempter, a sort of Wormwood.  Satan must have thought God was joking.  The Messiah could not have been born in a barn.  This boy was hiding from the law(or Law) his whole childhood.  He had nothing.  No possessions.  No knowledge or training.  No leadership experience.  In fact He didn't even appear to have righteousness of any sort.  He didn't shun evil like Job, in fact He spent most of His time at bars and parties.  Despite His fondness for hookers, He doesn't even appear to have been much of a success with the ladies.  He lived and died alone.

Jesus didn't have the debating skill of Job.  His responses to the temptations, which Satan must have thrown at Him like a professional tennis player forced to serve to me, seem like non sequiturs.  Just this blind, seemingly uncomprehending, attachment to the Word of God.  When He had chances to become someone great, and more than one came His way, He fumbled the ball.  His brothers couldn't understand why He didn't act like a public personality at the festivals.  When He finally had a following He disgusted most, maybe all, of them with bizarre comments about cannibalism.  All of the people who were so eager for a Messiah and so ready to be His loyal followers, He deliberately pissed off leading directly to His definitively unMessianic end.  To die as a criminal is not the way a Saviours life is supposed to end.

In other words, Jesus is the one who is really Alien.  He reacts in completely unexpected ways.  His salvation could not seem more foolish to us.  He resembles nothing so much as the lowest members of human society except for incomprehensible moments when He is clearly above and beyond any human being.  He died friendless and yet two thousand years later a third of the human race claims Him for their Lord.  His poor pitiful church has crushed the invincible Rome under its sandal twice.

Jesus Christ is truly the Ancient Alien, our incomprehensible benefactor, our transcendant teacher, the Lord Our Righteousness, in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and righteousness.  But they are hid.  Hid under a poverty, foolishness, and offensiveness which defies all of our presuppositions.   It is time that we stop trying to shoehorn this Jesus into our concept of wisdom and righteousness and begin to define our concept of wisdom and righteousness by the Alienness of Christ.

Christians are Nazis

When we look back at the history of Christianity, we see many men who have devoted their brilliance, their energy, in fact their whole lives to defending Christianity.  There are many men doing the same thing today whether from pulpits or classrooms or just from their own perch as a private Christian.  And all of us owe these men something and I think it is time that we gave it to them- a big fat kick in the pants.

Any reader of my blog has probably noticed by now that I never defend Christianity, in fact I often attack it.  It is very seldom that I support anything that I say.  No evidence, no explanations.  Just believe it or don't.  Now, I don't want to hide that this is partly because I am too lazy to form a sensible argument.  I am too lazy to do any research to back up the things that I say.  I prefer to pontificate extemporaneously and I am not trying to motivate anyone to any response.  If I have a goal when I speak and write it is simply to cause others to think NEW thoughts, consider new possibilities, look at life and especially Christ in a way that they never have before.  But there is more to my choice than laziness.

Christianity has nothing to do with reason.  That the Messiah died, especially a Messiah who is in fact God Himself, especially the death of a criminal, is the absolute least likely idea anyone ever had.  Peter was actually willing to rebuke the teacher he adored for suggesting such a thing.  And that is probably as sensible a reaction as anyone has ever had to that news.  And if He did die, if God lost, which is unmistakably the message of the Cross "God took a dive.", then it is only a very LOW view of God that would suggest something as ridiculously ad hoc as a do-over, a resurrection.  To believe any of this is clearly a species of insanity.  And any attempts to make such a thought reasonable, or likely, or probable are horribly misguided.  Now, I believe that the message of the Cross is true, but my mental problems are a sufficiently likely explanation for that.

Descartes spoke what is as near an axiom, a self-evident truth, as anyone ever will when he said, "I think therefore I am."  I think that we would capture his meaning almost completely if we inferred from our own thinking that we are in fact alive.  All of my senses and all of my mental faculties concur with the utmost certainty.  There is nothing more sure than that I am now alive.  If I were to try and imagine something more unlikely than that Christ died, it would have to be that I am presently dead.  Curiously these two things constitute the whole of Christianity.  All Christian apologists, despite their no doubt great brilliance, wind up looking like idiots.  Because they are trying to defend the indefensible.

Jesus never defended anything that He said.  Rather He spoke with authority- expecting the things He said to be believed simply because they came from His mouth.  His descriptions of God go against all religious views whatsoever.  He describes God as an unjust judge who dispenses judgments not based on any consideration of the facts of the case but simply because He doesn't want to be bothered.(Luke 18:1-8)  He describes God(this time probably the Son Himself rather than the Father), as letting all of the crooks go just to make friends.(Luke 16:1-13)  Once anyone has gotten a good taste of the Gospel as preached by Christ, the immediate conclusion is that it is only "Good News" to the criminal class.  That the judge should abandon justice, should be in cohoots with the crooks, is terrible news to the righteous, to the contributing members of society.  But for the scum of the earth it is unfathomably Good News, which is probably why I like it so much.

But God, in a hilarious display of His good nature and desire to be reconciled to all men, has made us all members of the criminal class.  Christians are Nazis convinced that we are better than everyone else and bent on our "Final Solution" to everyone who doesn't meet our standards.  We are illegal immigrants with felony records, sneaked under the fence of the Law by a God who descended beneath it and the entire earth.  We don't have a job and we are on God's welfare system, which is even funnier when you realize that most of us just keep having babies.  Christians are zombies and the stink of our death is only made more offensive by our incredible stupidity in thinking we are still alive.  We are such complete losers that we are in fact dead.  Our "lives" are so pathetic that death is really the only word to describe them.  Why is this Good News?  Because it means that God isn't looking for a return on His investment in us.  We are the punchline of the Gospel.  He has already written us off as a complete loss.  His whole plan is to judge us not on the basis of anything we have done or haven't done but based on the pity He feels for us, which is greater the more pathetic we are.  He has judged us all as sinners, in other words as completely lost causes, utterly hopeless, so that there would be no question of giving us what we deserve but only of having mercy on all of us.

This is the death that Christ declares we live in.  The death of a traitor, the death Rome and Jerusalem and all of the good people of the world gave Him.  And the one ridiculous requirement of Christianity is to look at your life and believe it is death.  To defy everything that seems true to the human mind, to cast Reason out and let Faith in.  And that is why no one should ever defend Christianity, because it is indefensible.  As Chesterton said of the sceptics, they mildly declare the improbability of a virgin giving birth or a dead man rising as if all of the Christians who proclaimed these things hadn't been saying for millenia that they are far too good to be believed.

Some Kind of Zombie 

When Christianity came into the world, it did not need to call attention (even though it did so) to the fact that it was contrary to human nature and human understanding, for the world discovered that easily enough. But now that we are on intimate terms with Christianity, we must awaken the collision. The possibility of offense must again be preached to life. Only the possibility of offense (the antidote to the apologists’ sleeping potion) is able to waken those who have fallen asleep, is able to break the spell so that Christianity is itself again. Woe to him, therefore, who preaches Christianity without the possibility of offense. Woe to the person who smoothly, flirtatiously, commendingly, convincingly preaches some soft, sweet something which is supposed to be Christianity! Woe to the person who makes miracles reasonable. Woe to the person who betrays and breaks the mystery of faith, distorts it into public wisdom, because he takes away the possibility of offense! Woe to the person who speaks of the mystery of the Atonement without detecting in it anything of the possibility of offense. Woe again to him who thinks God and Christianity are something for study and discussion. Woe to every unfaithful steward who sits down and writes false proofs, winning friends for themselves and for Christianity by writing off the possibility of offense. Oh, the learning and acumen tragically wasted. Oh, the time wasted in this enormous work of making Christianity so reasonable, and in trying to make it so relevant! Only when Christianity rises up again, powerful in the possibility of offense, only then will it need no artful defenders. The more skillful, the more articulate, the more excellent the defense, however, the more Christianity is disfigured, abolished, exhausted like an emasculated man. Christianity ought not to be defended, at least not on the world’s terms. It is we who should see whether we can justify ourselves. It is we who must choose: either to be offended or to accept Christianity. Therefore, take away from Christianity the possibility of offense or take away from the forgiveness of sin the battle of an anguished conscience. Then lock the churches, the sooner the better, or turn them into places of amusement which stand open all day long! S. Kierkegaard

Hell and Damnation

I have said before(here) that my story of grace begins with the realization that Hell is where I belong. And ever since that day, I have been uncomfortable with the typical Christian teachings on Hell and Heaven.  We teach about God's judgment of us as a terrible tragedy, something to be avoided at all costs, and we call that faith in God.  We try and make vulnerable people so afraid of God that they will walk any aisle, say any prayer, just to get Him to shut up and leave them alone and we call that Good News.  We are a satire on New Testament Christianity.

I have wanted for a long time to tell everybody that God is reconciled to them by the blood of the Cross, but standing in my face is the fact of Hell with all that that seems to imply.  But maybe that is where the problem comes in, with the implications and inferences we have drawn.  Our conviction is that Salvation equals Heaven, and that everyone who doesn't win has lost.  But what about Our Lord's teachings about saving the least, the lost, the last, the losers of the world?  Heaven, as we have pictured it is the ultimate way to become a winner, thus disqualifying you completely for the Gospel that is preached to the poor.  We seek to follow the Man of Sorrows into bliss and happiness.  If we are ever going to see the world any differently I think we are going to have to go further back.  We need to revisit that very Old Testament concept of Wrath, and perhaps discover that it is simply the strangest disguise that Grace ever wore.

Wrath is best pictured by thinking of the book of Judges.  Here we have the repeated cycle of Wrath.  It begins with Sin, then Wrath comes and brings Repentance, then we find ourselves right back in Sin only it is worse this time, and the Wrath is consequently greater to produce, sadly, a lesser Repentance.  This seems like the descending spiral of a whirlpool.  We are simply circling the toilet bowl until the flush is complete.  But when we look at this cycle, I think we gloss too quickly over the Repentance.  We think because it is impermanent and inconstant that it isn't real.  But this is the key point that I want to make: The Wrath of God ALWAYS produces Repentance as its fruit.

What does any of this have to do with Heaven and Hell?  Well, interestingly(to me at least), two such different characters as John Baptist and Paul refer to Hell as "the wrath to come".  So, one important way to understand Hell is as Wrath.  Which seems obvious, but if we believe in a God who doesn't change it brings with it an important but easily overlooked feature.  The "wrath to come" must be essentially the same as the Wrath we are familiar with.  It may be different in form but it has the same purpose and the same power.  And like everything that God does both the present wrath and the eschatological wrath must succeed in the purpose for which He employs them.

We have said that the effect of Wrath is to produce Repentance, in other words to separate us from our sin, at least temporarily.  And I want to suggest that that is its purpose, both here and in the hereafter.  Perhaps I can write this without inviting the wrath of all of my readers, that the people, and demons, in Hell are not as bad of sinners as you and I, in fact I think that on the other side of being in Our Lord's Presence(parousia- the Greek word for the "Second Coming"), in the Resurrection which unambiguously comes to all men, there are no more sinners.  We know that the lucky winners in Heaven are kept from sin by Grace, but it seems that the poor losers in Hell are kept from sin by Wrath.

But back to Paul and John.  There are at least six references to God's judgment as "wrath" in the Epistle to the Romans and approximately that many unambiguous references in the rest of Paul's epistles.  The "wrath to come" is one of the Baptist's major themes but I want to look at the words that the Evangelist John puts into his mouth (or possibly the Evangelist's own commentary on the Baptist's words but either way) in his third chapter.

35 The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand. 36 He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.

I want to consider this word "abides".  Our only experience of wrath is very transitory.  It comes, we cry, we repent.  But we have already looked at the diminishing returns of Wrath so now I add that both Grace and Wrath are perfected in the Resurrection (which again comes to all men indiscriminately as is obvious in Revelation 20).  If it takes more and more wrath to produce less and less repentance then a God who is determined to give us the infinitely valuable gift of separating us from our sins, must eventually employ wrath in its fullest form continuously.  For anyone who thinks this is a Pyrrhic victory, that the price exceeds the reward, I have two answers.  First, happiness is a small thing next to holiness(separation from sin) and if you don't think so then you don't have enough experience with sin to know anything about it.  Perhaps as Luther suggested you should go out and "Sin boldly." so that you may mourn and be blessed by being comforted.  Where sin abounds grace abounds much more.  Secondly, if we believe that love is an essential attribute of God then it seems that we can trust Him to make that choice for us.

The Judgment really is God's total victory over sin,  Each of us is forever after separated from our sin.  Now I don't want to downplay the hellishness of Hell.  It only works because it is the absolute misery and horror of God's wrath.  But it does work.  And I would like to suggest that those in Hell are able to perceive what we are not, the graciousness of their sentence.  Maybe I am wrong, but maybe the damned are the ultimate losers who receive the Gospel.  Maybe they(or we) for the joy that is set before them endure Hell, despising the shame, and find in Hell the rest of Christ's Presence.

Whether you agree with any of that or not, can we at least recognize that attempting to avoid and subvert God's judgment of us, is not the precondition of faith, they are opposites?