Where We Live Now
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12 NASB
The powers – “An idolatrous culture is one that sees reality in terms of impersonal forces. A Jewish culture is one that insists on the ultimate reality of the personal.”[1]
Doesn’t Heschel’s statement perfectly summarize where we live? Maurice Eliade noted that these circumstances are entirely the result of modern man. Not that ancient man wasn’t idolatrous. He was, but he was idolatrous with regard to the sacred. Modern man is idolatrous because he denies the sacred.
The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. . . . in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. . . . desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.[2]
When the Bible rails against idolatry, it does not have modern man in view. Its polemic is aimed at the ancient societies that worshipped other gods, that is, societies that had the wrong objects of worship. These societies still believed in the sacred. They were mistaken about the true God but they had gods. Modern man is unique in the history of the world. He has sent God into exile. He has abdicated the spiritual world.
You might object that religion plays a vital part in modern man’s culture and society. You might remark about the growth of non-denominational churches or the renewal of Catholicism. But this is to miss the point. When it comes to daily practice, modern man lives in a world that operates by forces, not a personal God. We are concerned with the forces of nature that affect climate change, the economic forces that affect trade, the political forces that shape policy, the moral and ethical forces that govern interpersonal relationships. In fact, we spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to control these forces in order to bring some semblance of survivability to our world. We fear that nature itself will extinguish us. For the first time in human history, the world is without gods, any gods, including the God of Israel.
Perhaps Paul was on the cusp of this seismic shift. Rome is the first modern civilization. It is still the most powerful political-social-military-economic model today. This world, the world of the controllers, is but an extension of Rome. And in Rome, belief mattered very little as long as it didn’t interfere with finances. Are we living in virtually the same world despite our religious institutions? Peter Leithart observed that modern Christianity is nothing more than institutionalized worldliness. It is Rome ensconced in the sanctuary. Perhaps Paul isn’t pointing us to that mysterious “spiritual warfare” we are so quick to acknowledge. Perhaps when he exhorts us not to be conformed to the schema of this world he is really writing about the beginnings of modern man—and we are the offspring inheriting the whirlwind.
Let’s face it. Our culture is idolatrous, not because its religious institutions fail to honor the Hebrew God YHVH, but because even its religious institutions operate as if the world is controlled by powers that men must overcome. The world is no longer sacred. It is no longer an exhibition of divine creativity. It is an algorithm waiting to be manipulated, and we are diminished by the loss of the personal.
Topical Index: powers, forces, modern man, sacred, profane, Eliade, Heschel, Leithart, Ephesians 6:12
[1] Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now, p. 102.
[2] Maurice Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 12-13.
Right on the money skip I was looking for good read this was it, where can I get more like this in printed forum
John Offutt sent me a summary of a book that he found on Burning Man free speech forum that made me think I need the book.
Cahill’s Gift
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. By Thomas Cahill.
Reviewed by Dennis Prager
He said the ads are atrocious so I am grateful he waded through them for me, also I would be glad to forward the summary on to anyone who writes me at lauritahayes at g mail. Here are some quotes:
“First and foremost, the Jewish Bible changed history by literally creating history. Every religion in the world saw the world in cyclical terms, as a Great Wheel (see, for example, the flag of India). In describing the cyclical worldview, Cahill cites Henri-Charles Puech, author of Man and Time: “No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once . . . ; every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn of the circle.”
Judaism alone differed. According to the Jews’ way of viewing life, events actually move forward; they do not merely repeat themselves. In their rejection of this universal mode of thought, Cahill writes, “The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle. . . . It may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings had ever had.” The results of this utterly transformative way of understanding life? In Cahill’s words, “Most of our best words, in fact—new, adventure, surprise; unique individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice—are the gifts of the Jews.”
Cahill is right to emphasize this transformative Jewish contribution. If all is a circle, nothing we do matters, none of us matter, life does not matter. It will all happen again. What we do doesn’t matter—for our actions to matter, they must be able to influence the future. But the future cannot be influenced if everything happens over and over.
If, on the other hand, the Jewish view is adopted, everything matters—every act I engage in matters, and therefore I matter—so much so that each one of us changes history by everything we do. Cahill offers two excellent—and, to my knowledge, original—explanations of why the Bible’s genealogies, sections of the Bible that bore most of us, are of vast importance. One is that the listing of these individuals’ names—even the names of women—was the Hebrew Bible’s way of saying that every one of these persons was uniquely significant. No such listing of commoners’ names exists in pre-biblical literature. Cahill’s other explanation of the importance of the genealogical listings is that they are the Bible’s way of telling us that the Bible is history, not mythology—and in a very carefully worded paragraph, Cahill thereby differs with Joseph Campbell, for whom the Jews and their claims to historicity and utter rejection of mythology were an immense nuisance.
The second transformative Jewish contribution was its understanding of God. The Hebrew God, unlike every god before, “cannot be manipulated,” and this God “is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.”
Third, when God defeated the demi-god Pharaoh, “In one fell swoop, this subversive narrative delegitimizes all political structures claiming god as their author—delegitimizes, in fact, all the political structures of the ancient world.” That is why the Ten Plagues were directed against Egyptian gods—blood, the first plague, for example, changed the Nile-god into blood, and the ninth, darkness, blotted out Ra, the sun-god, chief god of the Egyptians.”
And it goes on. I got a whole lot out of it. Thank you, John, for thinking to share in your hard time. Please remember him in his loss of his wife,y’all. We need to all pray for each other.
I think when we made a move to put ourselves in the place of God we lost our humanity and Him, too. This last century has seen more inhuman brutality and murder than, by conservative estimates, all previous recorded history combined.
It is time to quit looking to systems of the world and start crying and praying for Yeshua to come back, like He told us to. That is the only sane response of a human in this world without Him.
Hi sister, I read the book. It is intelectual in nature and side steps a personal relationship and knowledge of YHVH . Titelating it is but not alive nor of a man of faith, the net effect is a cold acedemic godless view . But it does sell books…
Well, I kinda got lost in the synopsis at the end, but the actual list was what grabbed me. What I want to ask you, is, what is your take on that list: what Cahill calls “the Jews’ gift to humanity”: namely, history; a God Who acts within that history; a God Who engages in direct confrontation with false gods and political structures; human freedom – the recognition that we have sovereign free will in common with all other humans, and further, that that free will presupposes a non-cyclical reality within which to exercise our ability to direct reality by our choices; a moral code without justification – a code that presupposes its own goodness; education; the “bias toward the underdog; the concept of unity and universal order; and the spiritual, much of which the Greeks, I have noticed, promptly grabbed and ran with. In fact, I can see so much of this list in what made Babylon and Medo-Persia function (no surprise, for both of them installed a Hebrew thinker at the top of their structure) but the Greeks took so much of this, too, and attempted to get somewhere with it In fact, I think a lot of the credit that the world attributes to those Greeks on these points actually belongs to the Jews.
What I am interested in is not necessarily the rest of the book, but that list at the top, and what it tells us about where we are at today. So, my question is, what is your take on the list itself?
The list seems valid to me. Human reason without divine inspiration is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s ever so resonable but leads to death. It seems to me those two trees of knowledge planted in that ancient garden (“the tree of life” & “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” ) remain available for tastings. The true gift of the Jews is the promise of YHVH to remain engaged with them, nomatter what; “unto the end of their generations”. His knowledge is true life. He inserted Himself into their culture, history and instituitions and still does ; like it or not. Just read HIStory. Cahill un-packs acurratly but academically the ideological impact on the philosophy and theology of man that influence in the thinking and paridimes of man’s reasoning. The personal choice remains ous to decide which of the two trees of knowledge we will choose to feed ourseves from.
To clarify and elaborate on the analogy of the two trees because it is crucial to the discernment of truth. It is my opinion man’s chief rebellion is to judge matters out side of God’s revelation. To eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to judge=decide anything exclusive of YHVH’s inspiration/Spirit , word or way. That leads to death, separation from him and the end of real life=existance without faith. The fruit we are commanded not to eat is reasoning or judgment without the knowledge of God. This is why I say the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this present world system are simultaneously coexisting but mutually exclusive.
PERSPECTIVE:
“As it is written:
For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
No, in all things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
David noted the reality: “For the battle is the Lord’s.”
“For the first time in human history, the world is without gods, any gods, including the God of Israel.” I would tweak this statement to say, “For the first time in human history, the world is without gods, exception one–the individual.” It is the me, the I; the self-sustaining, self-authenticating, self-aggrandizing, self-motivating, self-identifying, self-pitying, self-determining, self-promoting, self-gratifying, self-pontificating, self-medicating, self-worshiping god. I am he (or she) and s/he is us. Certainly this god of secularism is unique in human history, but it is a god nonetheless, creating a wake of emotional, spiritual, and relational destruction in its path. If there is any time in human history that we need a Savior, it is now! May we return to the ancient paths.
For I say that the Messiah became a servant of the circumcised on behalf of God’s truth, to confirm the promises to the fathers, and so that Gentiles may glorify God for His MERCY. As it is written:
Therefore I will praise You among the Gentiles,
and I will sing psalms to Your name.
Again it says:
Rejoice, you Gentiles, with His people!
And again:
Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles;
all the peoples should praise Him!
And again, Isaiah says:
The root of Jesse will appear,
the One who rises to rule the Gentiles;
the Gentiles will hope in Him.
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. -Rom. 15:8-15 (HCSB).
Great discussion full of truth, grace and deapth. Third time for me to read through it. Praying changes things Laurita thanks for that reminder; will do. Reflecting on the circle theme of time , behavior and history mentiond above. Outside of YHVH we circle on our selves, culture etc. Only when we have a transcendent view only when we keep Yahh in mind do we end the circle game and move any where at all. The religiously soul centered paridime ends with the monk contimplateing his navel and starving to death on the mountain top…(see also ” the circle game ” &”ciceling 1″- worksofwords.live)
I loved all the comments, I also read Cahill a few years back. Found him refreshing, even if he is not a believer(?!?) he makes very valid observations. (His other book on “how the Irish saved western civilization ” is quite good too)
But what intrigues me, is perhaps more to the point: Heschel’s(?) quote as an illustration to Ephesians 6:12…
John 3:16-20 has Jesus clearly contrasting 2 kingdoms: his : light, and the other : darkness. Nothing whatsoever has changed!! the awareness of the “sacred” is a smoke screen. Even today in a world where so-called secular humanism pretends to reign : isn’t this by definition not a dark spiritual hold on our western world?
And so-called secularism is shrinking all over. Satanism, new-age, eastern religions of all sorts, Wicca, Islam, paganism, Hindu variations, etc etc are all increasing. But even faster than these : the Church ( mostly charismatic) is growing.
Those who have studied the “Prayer/ Intercession” moves through out the last 2000 years would tell you that without the praying-monastic moves of the 13-14 centuries the reformation might well have never been born…
Subsequently the prolonged travailing prayers of John Knox for Scottland, and the famous continuous prayer meetings of the Moravians, and then the prayer emphasis of the Methodists, followed by the lengthy prayer meetings triggered by the Jonathan Edwards revivals which led to the 1st and then second great awakenings… Charles Finney’s multiple month intercessions with Daniel Nash for those cities where he felt called to go… Jeremiah Lanphier prayer meeting that went “virtual” throughout the north east US. (1857)…
The Azusa and Welsh revivals as well came after years of intercession… and on and on… No!! the powers of darkness that Paul talks about in Ephesians are not some fabrications of the human intellect but are real strongholds that need to be broken by prayer first.
Joshua touched on it at Jericho, the early church witnessed it with Peter being released by angels, Paul and Silas in spite of their horrific wounds, lived it, in the prison rocked by the earthquake. Daniel got his answer after persistence… etc…
The unbelief of our times are a carefully crafted dumb and deaf spirits spread over our generation by systematic ridicule and also detachment from our Christian heritage.
The Lord’s Prayer is nothing but a stupid useless nursery rhyme if we take the intellectual constructs of man to be the measure of what the kingdom of darkness is.
C.S. Lewis is way,way, more accurate in his description of that kingdom, and the delight of the enemy to make us believe that he doesn’t exist… (Screwtape letters)
The gospels’ contexts and the collision of Jesus and the demonic is not mythical, and Paul’s descriptions in Ephesians 6:12 are just as true today as they were then without watering them down with intellectual analogies however comforting those would be.
And yes: …He who is in you is greater than he who is in this world… (Totally!)
Just a few thoughts
Grace
Philippe