One of the dilettante hobbies of the secular liberati is mocking a god who doesn’t exist and who Christians should hate if he did exist. But it is an amusing hobby, and so persists. These cheap thrills take many forms – for example, the atonement, as imagined by those who hate the very idea of law, sin, or rescue. Their idea of atonement would not be good news if it had happened.

The church has fed the scoffers by butchering its own message. Any given Sunday you can hear from Christian pulpits a cartoon of the biblical vision. Some words have meanings so poorly understood by the audience they should not be inflicted on the sleepy crowd. “Sacrifice”, “atonement”. Such words have only a half-life of meaning for the typical congregation. Each generation must refresh them as if they had never been heard.

I’m remembering an anatomy book from my boyhood. I’m not sure they are around anymore, but this one had multiple transparent pages that overlaid one by one deeper and deeper sections of the human body as you flip the pages. The first page shows the skin. Lift the page, and the skin is peeled away to show muscle underneath. Lift another clear plastic page and the muscle is gone, leaving internal organs visible. And so on.

The modern critics of atonement are looking at the top page and insisting the body could never stand erect because there are no bones. The reductionist mind, typically, strips the delicate tissue out of a concept then criticizes the corpse for being dead. They see the crudest satisfaction theory which would represent nothing new in the history of religion and never think to wonder why such a sacrifice would revolutionize an empire.

You see, satisfaction makes no sense if it means Person A, acting on Person B, for the benefit of Persons C. Structured like this, it is a deracinated version of the biblical truth; it is no advance over a hundred ancient myths. But the entire point of the biblical redemption is not that God acts on His Son for the benefit of the world. Rather, it is that God acts on His Son who is, in fact, somehow, Himself, for the sins of the world which have become, somehow, His sins. God does not act on an Other; He is the Other. God does not act to save a world that is Other; He has entered that world and is bearing the sin. There is no action on Others; God saves by assuming the ontological space of the Other and exercising justice and mercy at once, and this coinherent logic of agape is the entire point. If we were not asked to wonder at this new, radically new logic the Bible would be wasting our time rehashing the perennial religion in recycled images.
This unity of Actor, Agent, and Beneficiary doesn’t just drop out of the ceiling wires like a convenient plot device. The theme has already been played and played again in the magnificence of Incarnation and Trinity, those other chapters in the drama with Persons who are at once distinct yet not separate. So that when God in Atoning love both acts and receives on behalf of the world, this union of subject, verb, and object is not new. In Atonement, as the culmination and Grand Reveal, the one God in multiple Persons wills to discharge the burden of His own law by exacting and taking His own penalty.

The Christian drama of redemption hasn’t been pondered by the big thinkers, then rejected; it is typically too profound for them.

“Eternal perspective” as used in evangelical preaching, usually amounts to docetism.  Only what is done for Christ will last, and so on.  The implication — intended or not, people imbibe it — is that only the ghostly souls of men will pass into the next age; spend as little work as possible on things like art, engineering, plumbing, which are Works of Hay and Straw, to be burned up on the last day.

The Old Testament injunction to “Remember God” is the equivalent of the New Testament “faith”.

There is no return from exile unless transgression is undone.  Any attempt to return to the garden without a blood atonement cheapens the transgression.  It’s like a man who turns from a whore to kiss his wife.   The affront is as vile as the infidelity.  His wife should vomit in his mouth.

A sword then – precisely because swords shed blood.   Any return to paradise, the place where God and man were married, requires blood, because their union had been as real as could be.

Some believe souls survive death, and some don’t.   The two premises are nakedly adversarial assertions: “there is life after death”, and “this is all there is”. These two religious positions are so far apart that discussion cannot bridge them.  These are the two camps that make up the human race, and many moral and political disagreements are really these two opposite visions warring with each other from guerilla disguises.

This gulf is hard to overstate. The believers and the deniers can’t finally even talk about the meaning of any particular death.  Despite the millions of words that will be spent today arguing over the meaning of suffering or of untimely death, none of this argument is of any value. The premises are too far apart. It’s like one person barking, then the other responding with a meow. No communication has occurred, though both may leave ruffled.

Of course, what is really happening in these conversations is both parties are arguing cloaked premises, which are impossible to reconcile, and always make conversations painful, even for the good-hearted.

You’d never evaluate the morality of any event while intentionally blinding yourself to the sequelae.   You’d never reach a final conclusion on a scene or character without seeing it all through to the curtain.   The ending colors the beginning and middle.

Yet these debates attempt to stop the play, have one viewer say “nothing comes next” and another say “there is an infinite number of scenes left” and then intelligently discuss the play.  They’re literally talking about two different stories.  Shall we  blind ourselves to the state of a person a minute after death, then try to talk about whether that death was good or bad, fair or unfair?  For believer or skeptic alike, this is stupid logic.

The only hope to make such conversations productive would be to actually talk about life after death. But this is seldom the topic, because there isn’t actually much material.   Christians accept a written report, skeptics do not. That simple.

Of course, even the believer doesn’t know enough about the condition of the individual dead  to talk about it, even to himself, and for the purpose of talking to the unbeliever he knows nothing (though he may believe much.)

In fact, the believer is rendered silent about individual deaths precisely by his belief in an undetermined eternity.   He can repeat what his scripture teaches about eternal states, but since the skeptic doesn’t accept his scripture this is futile, and often insulting to the skeptic.

I say “silent about individual deaths”….what we believers believe is that the dead behold the Creator an instant after death, and that beatific vision subsumes the entire life leading up to it.

I’m not objecting at all to traditional Christian comfort at funerals. “She’s in a better place…her suffering is over…etc.” These are believers talking to each other. Within their common vision their words make sense.

It’s just that non-believers can’t be expected to do other than scoff at assertions of “God’s will” or paradise after death.
But, by the same logic, believers will just never see the same meaning, or lack of meaning, in any moment of suffering. Even when your faith is strained, when suffering is no longer a word in a blog post but is your child in pain – even then you can’t pretend not to see the story continuing after death. It may be no consolation, you may even hate your own dogma, but you’ll still see the play from the balcony seat, while the skeptics are at ground level.

My point here is not about comfort or emotional truths at all. All the emotional days and nights we roll through, all the scenery in the story, is all hung on logical scaffolds, which are usually invisible. Those who believe the stage is infinite and those who believe it is not could save lots if time.
Either argue about the size of the play, or just hush.

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Christmas intensifies the “already / not yet” tension that makes us, at once, at home and restless in this world. More “already”, and more “not yet”. As the Kingdom appears here, we sense more of it that is beyond us. Thirst is slaked, but then the mouth is more dry. This experience comes and goes in normal times, fleeting, hinting, but the approach of Christmas condenses it. With Advent we nearly come apart with longing.

The Christmas symbols we’re given in the gospels are one thing: babe in manger, virgin and angel, choirs in the sky. But the symbols we’ve crafted for ourselves in the centuries since reflect the same increasing tension between Mundanistan and Narnia. They are suggestively but not clearly shaped. They teach us what we almost know.

Lights in trees. Lights in trees! What are lights in trees? Not biblical. But you must imagine seeing them for the first time, like a child, or hearing a stunned cry in the street – “Look, there are lights in the trees!” (We would hear this in angel voices every Advent, if we were not asleep.)
Light in the tree. The supernatural grafted onto the natural. Even half-aware savages, under the pressure of grace, create simple but enduring symbols.
And money! We bemoan the “commercialism of Christmas”, as if the money shooting around is some peripheral add-on, some alien barnacle encrusting our lily-white holiday. But the Magi brought gold! They brought wealth! Lucre! Smack! The separation between what we know as “money” and the stuff of life which it procures is modern and docetic. Money, or currency, is a modern and freeing innovation. It is an abstract, symbolic store of value which makes wealth mobile and standardized, which allows the production of more wealth. Which is all good. But this new distance between our currency and what it symbolizes is the historical accident that allows the pharisees in our pews to want to amputate wealth from celebration, when in fact there is no celebration without the consumption and gifting of wealth. In fact, wealth (in some form) is what is being celebrated, by means of wealth.
So, Christmas, which was started by God making us rich for no reason, cannot be anything, culturally, if people are not giving each other stuff bought by money. When God acts, earthly wealth must move.
But the man-made symbols are derivative. Light in the trees goes dark unless fed from somewhere. Wealth is moved by something. We are living through the death of Christendom, as the long, slow tide of faith recedes. The world has declared its majority and says it can build a civilization without infusions of supernatural. So: can Christmas survive without the Church’s perpetual proclamation of the Incarnation of the Son of God?
A festival of lights and wrapped presents? I don’t think it will survive.

2,000 years ago we were warned about the moment when 3 things come together: technology, participation in the system of commerce, and a test of loyalty to the State. This vision, written when commerce was still barter, and technology was the donkey, is the single most profound stroke of genius in literature.
St. John’s percipience has been drowned beneath stupid speculations about what this symbol or that one “stands for”. Christians have spent millenia labeling each other “the whore of Babylon” and fretting that each new technology is the “the mark of the beast”, to the point that they exhausted themselves and prompted deserved ridicule from the world. And everybody forgot the simple, breathtaking assertion buried under the symbols: when technology, commerce, and politics develop to the point when they can connect with each other, then the world WILL (not might, but will) begin to demand loyalty to a single leader in order to buy and sell, will have the technology to enforce it, and will kill everyone who demures. By the way, the document seems to insist that this end of the race is embedded in the genetic code of the race and is not avoidable. John’s view is not that believers should do something to stop the course of the spirit of antichrist. He simply predicts that the forces inherent in humans will follow a certain course. He is a prophet, not a giver of advice.
I maintain there has been nothing but empirical verification of the Apocalypse ever since it was written, and it matters not whether you believe, like Thomas Jefferson did, that the book of Revelation is the “ravings of a lunatic” – what other ancient writing has seen so far in advance and so accurately?
There are good, even unavoidable reasons that technology will be used to collect all data on all people. The reasons to do it will overwhelm the reasons not to do it, and the resisters will be overcome by moral arguments about how the race must save itself from the evils within us, (I’m not giving advice, just prophecy.) And because the technology, once invented, cannot be not used, the next step will be to require that no commerce can take place off the grid.
Then, the technology which allows commerce will not be available without an act of loyalty to the State. I don’t know what it will be (no man can interpret the symbols actually; they aren’t meant to be interpreted), but I know that it will be somehow offensive to those who believe that Jesus is the king of the universe. These people will not be able to perform the act (interestingly, other religionists of all stripes will be able). And then comes the end.
Think this is crazy talk? I’m not asking you to believe in plagues of frogs or angels with swords. Just track the trends of history and project the lines of technology, economics, and politics, and notice who, of all writers in the world, first trended the same lines and described their intersection. I defy you to deny that these three forces are coming together in unprecedented ways, and that this was described in ominous tones by a writer in about A.D. 90.

Clarke’s Third Law:  

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

My adaptation:

Any sufficiently traced causation is indistinguishable from special creation.

Christopher Hitchens, in his essay “Gods of Our Fathers, says of John Adams:

“…was prepared to be a little more engaged with theological subjects, in which he possessed a huge expertise…”

Christopher goes on to illustrate both Adams’ theological expertise and Adams’ rational enlightenment, thus:

             Human understanding, he [John Adams] wrote…is its own revelation, and:

[H]as made it certain that two and one make three; and that one is not three; nor can three be one…Miracles or Prophecies might frighten us out of our Witts; might scare us to death; might induce Us to lie; to say that We believe 2 and 2 make 5.  But we should not believe it.  We should know the contrary.”

You can find these moments scattered everywhere in the journals of the 18^th century.  “We’ve discovered logic, and its our secret, and nobody before us knew how to use it.  How stupid those earlier generations were.  Those bumpkins didn’t understand that “one” can’t be “three”.  By the way, have you seen these new-fangled rifled muskets?  They’ll kill from a hundred paces.”

You’ll still hear the same voice in the the prattle of most any sixteen year old boy who is intoxicated with the recent discovery of his own neurons.  We all go through that stage and most of us emerge.  I remember with fondness my own pronouncements to my elders of how silly they were to believe this or that.  It takes a decade or two to realize you defeated straw men.

Adams’ comment is a classic instance of mocking a thought you have not troubled to grasp.  Hitchens thinks Adams possesses a “…huge expertise…” in theology.  This is like one schoolchild on the playground appointing another their General in their make-believe battle.  These people are worse than dilettante.

In fact, Christian Trinitarian dogma does not say anything at all about the numbers “one” and “three”, either as discrete quantities or as representatives of the class “integers”.  Nor does it say anything about the relation between the quantity “one” and the quantity “three” (a quite distinct question from the first, as any medieval Schoolman would know).

The dogma of the Trinity says specifically that God is One in essence and Three in Persons.  This is no comment at all on “one” or “three”; it is no comment at all about numbers.  The mathematicians may proceed undisturbed.

A moment’s reflection, and you realize the Trinity generated so much talk, song, and art precisely because the theologians knew perfectly well that one is not three and three is not one.  If they thought, in Adams’ phrase, that one could be three, the Trinity would have been a commonplace observation and would have not become an article of faith at all.  I’ll try to say it in short words for the modern mind:  they said what they said exactly because they knew what Adams thinks they didn’t know.

This reminds me of those critics who point out to us that people don’t rise from the dead, and those rubes in the first century just didn’t understand that.  No, of course not, people don’t rise from the dead, which is the only reason to write and make a hubbub about it.  Again, short words: that they thought like you is exactly why they acted like them, and not like you.  Sigh.

The civilian skeptic might be excused for refuting what orthodoxy has never asserted, since our own pulpits emanate mostly doctrinal confusion, by our own standards.  But the greater lights among them – the Voltaires, the Hitchens’ – might be expected to have a read a book or two .

Light is both particle and wave.  Now, slow down – this is no proof of the Trinity.  It simply indicates the necessity of a stage of thought where two things are asserted simultaneously with no understanding of their relation.  Such a stage of thought is necessary in any advancing discipline.  A is B, and A is C, yet the relation between B and C is not understood.  In simple abstract logic, the conclusion would be that B is C; but we know that B is not C, so we know that though logic is a tool of thought, thought is larger than logic alone.

Light is both particle and wave.  A is B, and A is C.  It’s a simple observation.  If we were an 18^th century rationalist, we’d object, and ridicule the physicist, and send everybody off in another direction for a century or two.

But the proper way to progress is to maintain both assertions – the “what” – together, knowing that further learning will fill in the “how” and the law of non-contradiction will be preserved, in whatever form it ought to be.  Thought leads the way, and logic fills in as more is learned.  Reverse the order, and thought shrivels.

The Trinity is exactly the same.  In the content of revelation we see that God is Father, God is Son, and God is Spirit.  This is a simple observation.  A is B, A is C, A is D.  So we, reasoners but not rationalists, assert all three identities, not knowing all the logical relations.  Logic will clean up later.

Illustrations are not proofs.  Examples from the physical world have been used for centuries by Christian preachers to illustrate or prove the Trinity, and usually they shouldn’t.  The illustrations sometimes work, but such proofs are always false, and just feed the skeptics.  That light is both particle and wave is a useful illustration of the pattern of thought the Cappadocian theologians used to articulate Trinitarian dogma, but the particle / wave phenomenon is not a good illustration of the substance of the Trinitarian relations, because we don’t know that level of detail about the divine Persons.  And such things like particle / wave, drawn from physics, PROVE nothing theological.  As more is learned about the physical properties of light, it will even cease to be a useful illustration.

The analogy breaks down, you see, because we can experiment on light, in order to learn more, but there is no additional knowledge about the Trinity available.  I’ve used the phrase “simple observation” about both, but they are observations about two radically different objects.  The one is an observation of the material world, the other an observation about the content of the New Testament. The epistemological act of observing is the same, and the logic, or suspension of logic in the interest of thought, is the same, even if you think the one object is real but the other is mythic.

There is no additional knowledge available about the Trinity, because we’re simply receiving statements from authority.   There is further knowledge about light, because our authority and source of information is our sense-perception.  The one is finished (by its own claim), while the other is never finished (by its own claim.)  So, as science progresses, the particle / wave duality will probably disappear.  The Three / One duality will not disappear, till the age ends.

Even if you think the New Testament is myth, this tells you nothing about the logic of the process of thought about its contents.  You’d have to prove the historical claim of the NT to be false, which is a discussion from a different day.   That many skeptics confuse the logic of observing with the nature of what is observed tells me we should not make them examples of intellectual rigor.