Asterix and Obelix are 50 years old; but Asterisk and Obelos are 2,300 years old

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Alexandria, Aristarchus, Aristophanes, asterisk, asterix, hexapla, obelix, obelos, Origen, Zenodotus

The indomitable Gauls, Asterix and Obelix turned 50 years old on 29 October 2009. But did you know that their names pun on the asterisk and obelos symbols used in historical textual criticism?

This is Asterix and Obelix

This is asterisk and obelos (not quite so fun, eh?)

In biblical textual criticism, these text critical marks are associated most famously with Origen, who employed them in his 6-column work called the Hexapla. Although the Hexapla no longer survives as a whole, it was immensely influential on later Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. The columns of Origen’s Hexapla contained an unpointed Hebrew text (column 1), a vocalised Hebrew text in the Greek script (column 2), three earlier Greek translations or versions (Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotian; columns 3, 4, and 6), and Origen’s own “fifth column” which was based on the Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Hebrew text. It was in this fifth column that Origen employed the asterisk and obelos, amongst other text critical marks, in order to reconcile the LXX with the Hebrew text.

Due to the fact that Origen assumed (probably wrongly) that the Hebrew text was older and more original than the Hebrew Vorlage (original) reflected in the LXX, he treated the Hebrew text as the correct text. As a result:

1. Words in the the ‘original’ Hebrew text which were lacking in the LXX were inserted in Origen’s fifth column, and marked with an asterisk (*). The asterisk was placed before the first inserted word, and a metobelos was placed at the end of the last inserted word. For example (from Ernst Würthwein):

Because Origen considered the Hebrew text to be original, the asterisk indicated a correction to the LXX.

2. Words in the Greek versions which did not appear in the ‘original’ Hebrew text were considered spurious or corrupt additions to the Greek, and marked with an obelos (÷ or † or variations). The obelos was placed before the first word considered to be spurious, and a metobelos was placed at the end of the spurious section. For example (again, from Ernst Würthwein):

Because Origen considered the Hebrew text to be original, the obelos indicated a corruption in the LXX.

In addition, Origen added some of his own additions to the fifth column. And just to complicate matters further, sometimes he didn’t bother to mark his additions with an asterisk.

Origen’s employment of the obelos and asterisk was itself based on the classical texual criticism carried out at Alexandria. These and other text critical marks are often referred to as ‘Aristarchian’, named after Aristarchus of Byzantium the chief librarian at Alexandria (ca. 180 BCE). In fact the obelos was used a century earlier by the first chief librarian, Zenodotus (ca. 284 BCE), known as the father of textual criticism, who had earlier marked what he considered to be Homeric corruptions with the obelos. However, Zenodotus was often quite subjective when he determined Homeric corruptions. Often he would mark the text as corrupt when it seemed to him to be too vulgar or inappropriate, which is hardly a sound basis for textual criticism. At a later time, the chief librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 200 BCE) added the asterisk to the list of critical markers, to denote the insertion of text from another context. So Origen’s method of critically marking the LXX is dependent on the system earlier worked out at Alexandria.

As a last observation, the Greek word obelos means a ‘pointed pillar’. Much of the time, Obelix is depicted carrying a pointed pillar, or menhir. The Greek asterískos means a ‘little star’, which seems to apply well to the diminutive hero, Asterix. Or is there an asterisk formed on his gourd of magic potion? Those funny old Gauls!

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A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism

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Atheism and Agnosticism, Christopher Hitchens, History, John Milbank, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, The Monstrosity of Christ, Theism

The Monstrosity of Christ, by Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis

Some half-formed thoughts on the contemporary debate about atheism, sparked in large part by a recent reading of Slavoj Žižek’s and John Milbank’s new book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009 [a review copy courtesy of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]):

The Monstrosity of Christ documents a debate between Milbank (a highly influential Catholic theologian and a founding member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement) and Žižek (a philosopher, intellectual celebrity and professional madman) about the nature of Christianity, or at least about Hegel’s interpretation of the nature of Christianity, largely as mediated through the central figure of Jesus as Incarnation.  There is a good deal of interest in the book and both authors make some pointed criticisms of the other – Milbank accuses Žižek of being little more than a heterodox Christian, while Žižek claims that ‘it is Milbank who is guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank’ (248 – all page numbers in this post refer to Monstrosity).  If for nothing more than watching two brilliant if equally flawed minds at work against one another, Monstrosity makes for very good, very fun reading.

However, what stuck me as the most intriguing point of all of this was Žižek’s simultaneous defence of an essentially materialist (and thus atheistic) view of the world and his continuing interest in Christian intellectual history.  In doing these two things at the same time, which might seem to be wildly counterintuitive, Žižek makes some tentative first steps towards establishing a viable and historically responsible contemporary atheism.  He by no means settles the matter and by no means even thinks out his own argument through to the end (always a problem for Žižek), but what he does do is present a potential means of arguing for an atheistic worldview that properly acknowledges that such a stance occurs against a deeply-rooted religious milieu dominated by Abrahamic understandings of God.  In Žižek’s view – and here I am extrapolating on his work here – atheism in traditionally theistic cultures is always already a matter of religion, but atheism is in itself not necessarily a religious position (though in some cases it must be).

Žižek here pushes us towards a different and more substantive version of atheism than that being offered in the populist work of Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  Regardless of what one thinks of these arguments from a philosophical or logical standpoint, the overarching point of much of this work, that religion in all of its forms – though they all, as a rule, focus on theistic traditions – is illogical, destructive, and misguided and should, therefore be discarded, or at least ignored, is eminently impractical.  Firstly, people are rarely swayed by rational arguments in such matters.  It is very difficult to imagine a new-earth creationist being swayed by Dawkins’ recent book defending evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth, particularly in a cultural climate where the teaching of evolution has again – and bafflingly – become a matter of controversy, in American schools at least.  In such a highly emotional and frankly juvenile sphere of debate, Dawkins is going to be dismissed before his arguments are ever even voiced.  Given this, such attempts at the reasonable assertion of atheism are preaching largely to the choir. If modernity has taught us anything, it should be that people will persist in all manner of irrational and illogical behaviour, no matter how rational our picture of the world may be.  Secondly, and ever more so since the late 1960s,  many froms of religion have shown that they can co-exist quite happily with the modern.  Religion in its many guises is not going anywhere – though it will very certainly mutate into new and at times surprising forms – and to argue that it should (no matter how valid the reasons for making such a suggestion might be) is to argue in essence nothing at all, at least nothing with any social utility whatsoever.

An incidental point should be made here as well: if we are to discard anything that is illogical, irrational, or responsible for violence and oppression, what would we be left with?  To carry this logic through to the end, if we are to begin by discarding those religions that do not hold up under logical scrutiny, we must continue by discarding the mythology of the nation-state and finally rid the world of any and all financial systems based on illusory, artificial conceptions such as ‘money’.  Any system that has the requisite complexity to exist in a modern society is going to be, to at least some extent, rooted in the selective application of reason and truth.  To put this another way: are the central tenets of the Christian Trinity (to take a notorious example of convoluted religious nonsense) really any more nonsensical than Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ or the belief that it is possible to have a financial system that requires infinite growth in a system of finite resources, two ideas upon which the contemporary world balances ever more precariously?  If there is going to be a revolution of the rational, it will have to be total.

Creston Davis, the facilitator and editor of the debate in The Monstrosity of Christ, like so many scholars of religion (myself included), is almost entirely dismissive of the philosophical weight of the theism vs. atheism debate as it appears in the Alister McGrath vs. Richard Dawkins title card:

But for all the pomp and circumstance of this ‘debate’, in the end, it only manages to recapitulate the same premises with which each side begins.  Consequently, the debate over the truth of either stance can never be resolved through the arbitration of speculative reason – and this because each side appears to be different, but, on a deeper level, they share the exact same version of that which underlies their very thinking, viz. secular reason.  Reason functions in this atheistic/theistic debate in a very limited, even reductionist way as it becomes the final arbiter of all truth forced into propositional form and thus sundered from everyday life … In short, although this Dawkins/McGrath debate looks genuine, and is certainly successful in terms of selling a great many books, it nevertheless is only a limited and not very intellectually significant debate.  It is more an exercise in ideological (mis)interpretation of the same premises than a real debate, because is fails to risk forgoing the very existence of what both sides presuppose. (8-10)

What Žižek argues for in Monstrosity is something else from the dismissive and reductionist arguments for atheism that are taking up so much space bookshelf space these days.  What he argues for here seems on the surface to be counterintuitive or simply nonsensical: he is making an atheistic plea for the absolute singularity and necessity of the monstrous figure of Jesus – though Žižek regularly uses the theological title of ‘Christ’, his argument is still thoroughly materialistic in a Hegelian sense and thus at least formally atheistic.  He makes this point in no uncertain terms, something which in itself isa rarity in Žižek’s work:

It is only in this monstrosity of Christ that human freedom is grounded; and, at its most fundamental, it is neither as payment for our sins nor as legalistic ransom, but by enacting this openness that Christ’s sacrifice sets us free … This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting him, we become aware of our own freedom.  The ultimate question is thus: in what kind of universe is freedom possible?  What ontology does freedom imply? (82)

All praise to Žižek aside for the moment, there is in all of this an unresolved and very troubling tension between Žižek’s evident hopes for liberation from the excesses of contemporary capitalism and what appears to be – and this is not putting it too strongly – a refigured Christian universalism.  In all of this, when he uses the word ‘religion’, what Žižek is talking about is Christianity, the only religion he really considers in these essays.  Even when he addresses Judaism, he does so obliquely and only as it pertains to Christianity.  In doing this, Žižek is (oddly enough, given his track record) repeating a mistake made by a great many theologians, one arguably rooted in a long history of anti-Semitism in European intellectual history, and in Christian theology in particular.  There is something odd, even disturbing, in Žižek’s reaffirmation of Christian universalism in an atheist guise, though such an idea does have a fairly long history, reaching its apex in the ‘death of God’ movement in theology, which briefly caught the public imagination in the 1960s to such an extent that it made the cover of Time magazine.

Time magazine, 8 April 1966

Is this really a step away from the harm that such universalism has wrought in history, or merely a restatement of this central tenet of European superiority?  Though he makes a compelling argument later in the book that seems to address this precise point head-on, one can’t help be beset by lingering doubts at taking such a tack in a work that purports to be advocating a new and less violent world order based on a new kind of balance between the secular (whatever that might mean) and the religious (whatever that might mean).

In this book, there is a closer agreement between Milbank and Žižek than might be expected, and one of the things that they agree on is that that naïve, de-historicised atheism is of little value.  Bringing us back to my unease with Žižek’s restatement of Christian universalism, this is a position that is fiercely relevant to the contemporary study of religion, but one that no one – at least in this reporter’s opinion – has managed to convincingly lay out the reasons for, until now:

The incompleteness of reality also provides an answer to the question I am often asked by materialists: is it even worth spending time on religion, flogging a dead horse?  Why this eternal replaying of the death of God?  Why not simply start from the positive materialist premise and develop it?  The only appropriate answer to this is the Hegelian one – but not in the sense of the cheap ‘dialectics’ according to which a thesis can deploy itself only through overcoming its opposite.  The necessity of religion is an inner one – again not in the sense of a kind of Kantian ‘transcendental illusion’, an eternal temptation of the human mind, but more radically.  A truly logical materialism accepts the basic insights of religion, its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one: what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, ‘higher’, suprasensible reality.  Commonsense realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a Hegelian triad. (240)

Žižek argues that our position is thus a precarious one that our religious inheritance can help us to understand, regardless of whether or not we are willing or able to make the leap to theistic belief: ‘we created our world, but it overwhelms us, we cannot grasp and control it.  This position is like that of God when he confronts Job toward the end of the book of Job: a God who is himself overwhelmed by his own creation.  This is what dialectics is about: what eludes the subject’s grasp is not the complexity of transcendent reality, but the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed into reality’ (244). He repeats this all-important gesture a few pages later in answering the slightly different question ‘but why God at all?’: ‘The true formula of atheism is not “I don’t believe”, but “I no longer have to rely on a big Other who believes for me” – the true formula of atheism is, “there is no big Other”’ (297).

We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things from an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity.  Here he also offers at least a partial answer to my own charge of universalism, despite the fact that he never bothers to articulate this explicitly.  Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.  Given this, Žižek is quite correct when he argues that he is moving into new territory with this particular argument: ‘A new field is emerging to which the well-known designations “poststructuralism”, “postmodernism”, or “deconstuctionism” no longer apply; even more radically, this field renders problematic the very feature shared by Derrida and his great opponent, Habermas: that of respect for Otherness’ (254).  This is a hybrid (or, to use Hegelian language, synthesis) of modern and postmodern (to use two very loaded, very inadequate terms) territory that many others – Terry Eagleton, for one, in his After Theory (2003) – are also trying with varying degrees of success to define and understand.

What Žižek does here is to make atheism respectable again, after the onslaught of what Eagleton quite rightly calls ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as (slightly) better-informed critics of religion like Dawkins.  In Žižek’s arguments, we find the deeper meaning to Milbank’s assertion that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181).  One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, philosophically justifiable as any such an assertion may be, at least not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again – about all of this.

This might not be an argument that will ever be resolved, and The Monstrosity of Christ, may not document a proper argument in the strictest sense of the word – Žižek and Milbank might, as Dawkins and McGrath seem to, be simply talking past or at rather than to each other.  However, Žižek, in dialogue with Milbank, gives us a way to argue – or to at least to begin to argue – for an intellectually respectable and historically responsible atheism that both avoids the abuses of an overly prescriptive ‘secular’ rationalism that seeks to discard the past and transcends this ironic laughter by searching to explicate the present though a respectful and critical re-examination of the past.  For what has modernity taught us about history?  The past haunts the present and there can be no exorcising the spirits of History.

 

Peter Lineham comments on Destiny Church

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Brian Tamaki, Destiny Church, Peter Lineham

Thanks to Erica for noting this. In this TVNZ interview, Dr Peter Lineham attempts to make nuanced comments about the precise sectarian nature of Destiny Church, while the interviewer keeps repeating words such as “dangerous” and “cult” to keep the ratings up.

“I don’t feel very comfortable about this word cult, because we use ‘cult’ as a sort of slang word to mean something really over the top. The fact is, there is no precise point at which you move to a total rejection of other connections.”

(Peter Lineham, TVNZ News at 8, 29 October 2009)

Is Destiny Church Becoming a Cult? Nope.

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Brian Tamaki, Catholic Church, Destiny Church, Garth George

Bishop Brian Tamaki: Member of a Cult?

New Zealand’s most American-styled Evangelical Christian faction, Destiny Church, held their annual conference last Labour weekend. In a “covenant oath” ceremony, 700 male members swore “a solemn oath of commitment that is binding, enduring and unbreakable… irrevocable [and] undissolvable,” and were required to pledge allegiance to Bishop Brian Tamaki. The retired editor of Challenge Weekly, Garth George, has attempted to argue that this is evidence of Destiny becoming a “cult”, which he defines not by examining any of the extensive academic studies of so-called “cults”, but by opening up his little old dictionary, which defines a “cult” – reflecting the popular usage of the word – as “a system of religious devotion directed towards a particular figure or object” and “a relatively small religious group regarded by others as strange or as imposing excessive control over members.”

But if we use Garth George’s definition then – apart from the largely irrelevant aspect of the size of the group – doesn’t this description of a “cult” apply to just about any religion?

Garth George: Member of a Cult?

As an example, let’s think about that potential cult, the Roman Catholic Church. Is there any religious devotion directed towards a particular figure or object in the Catholic Church? Well, this is just a little too easy. If memory serves, even the most wacky and out-of-touch of the Pope’s statements are considered to be infallible (when issued as a solemn promulgation of dogma). Furthermore, the Holy Father regularly attracts thousands of faithful adherents, who strain to hear his every (infallible) verbal ejaculation. So that’s a big tick on this part of the popular definition of “cult”. But how about “regarded by others as strange”? Oooh, this is just getting easier and easier. I won’t even comment on the life-long prohibition of sex for its priests and the alternatives that they end up exploring. Because Catholics believe that  bread and wine turns into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus (transubstantiation), that a virgin gave birth to God, and that earthly sins will be purged out of them over the period of many years following their deaths in a place called Purgatory. That’s some freaky shit. And how about “imposing excessive control over members”? Talking about “members”, if a man covers his Catholic member with a prophylactic, or attempts to procure an abortion for his raped daughter, he is automatically deemed a non-Catholic, excommunicated, and thus confined to the fires of Hell. Now that’s some pretty clear “cultish” excessive control. And although the size of the Catholic Church is relatively large, does it display that all-too “cultish” trait of offering exclusive salvation? You betchya. Even if you’re a baptized, born-again, and utterly devoted Protestant Christian – if you refuse to acknowledge the authority of the Pope, then the Catholic Church’s doctrine is clear: there is no possibility of salvation for you.

From an outsider’s point of view, and employing the populist definition to be found in the Oxford Concise Dictionary, it is impossible to distinguish a “cult” from a “religion” – without special pleading. It is sometimes said that ‘a cult is an unpopular religion, and a religion is a popular cult.’ And that has it about right.

But all this makes Garth George’s use of the term “cult” highly suspect. Massimo Introvigne points out that members of long-established religions often employ the term “cult” as a “stereotype-loaded term” with the intention of polemicizing against newer religions – as opposed to any objective attempt to define the nature of such religions. (In this regard, it is no coincidence that Garth George himself is a Catholic.) But as the above analysis shows, an outsider’s superficial polarization of Catholicism could equally conclude that it displays all of the main traits polemically associated with so-called “cults”. So the use of the term “cult” is largely meaningless and rhetorically loaded.

From his track history, I’m guessing that Garth George will continue to employ the popular prejudices and vacuous rhetorical blather encapsulated in throwaway terms such as “cult”. But he should consider the following comments by Benjamin David Zablocki and Thomas Robbins in Misunderstanding cults: searching for objectivity in a controversial field (2001:5):

“Historically the word cult has been used in sociology to refer to any religion held together by devotion to a living charismatic leader who actively participates in the group’s decision-making than by adherence to a body of doctrine or prescribed set of rituals. By such a definition, many religions would be accurately described as cults during certain phases of their history, and as sects, denominations, or churches at other times. The mass media sometimes make a distinction between ‘genuine religion’ and cults, implying there is something non-genuine about the latter by definition. We do not share the implicit bias that seems to be embedded in this usage.”

It is time for the mass media, Garth George included, to reach beyond their dictionaries and raise their analysis above the superficial and populist misunderstanding of so-called “cults”. Destiny Church is a religious manifestation that should be examined alongside other religious manifestations (such as the Catholic Church), and in light of its own particularities, without forcing it into any polemical box.

Historical Critical Interpretation Reveals Christian Distortion of the Old Testament

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christological interpretation, Gerd Lüdemann, historical-critical method, pooh-poohing

Gerd Lüdemann has an op-ed at The Bible and Interpretation website pointing out one of the obvious benefits of the historical critical method. That is, the historical critical method exposed a quite prevalent claim of New Testament and other early Christian writers – that the Old Testament predicted or prophesied or otherwise pointed to Jesus of Nazareth – to be a false claim.

It struck me that, in the current trend to dismiss the historical critical method, which often amounts to little more than a pooh-poohing, sometimes the dramatic ways in which hist-crit in fact increased knowledge have been swept under the carpet by the mystifying broom of theological obscurantism.

Sure, the historical critical method doesn’t do everything; but what it does do, it does well.

“… it must be clear that the christological interpretation of scripture practiced by the churches for two millennia is as anachronistic as the Ptolemaic model of the universe, and that early Christians distorted many Old Testament texts to make them point to Christ. Yet more troubling is the fact that while their over-zealousness may be excused on the grounds of ignorance, many today similarly misuse the scriptures to perpetuate an ancient hoax.

Having eaten from the tree of historical knowledge, we are no longer able to take seriously an interpretation of the Old Testament that leads to Christ. All glory, laud, and honor to the founders of historical criticism for liberating us from the christological madhouse.”

(Gerd Lüdemann, ‘Liberated from the Christological Madhouse’, The Bible and Interpretation)

Public Lecture: Heidi Campbell on ‘When Religion Meets New Media: Considering the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology’

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Communication, Heidi Campbell, Public Lectures, Technology

The Dunedin School would like to invite all of you to a public lecture sponsored by the University of Otago’s Department of Theology and Religion:

Dr. Heidi Campbell, Texas A&M University, will deliver an Open Lecture entitled ‘When Religion Meets New Media: Considering the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology’ on Monday 16th November at 5.10pm. The lecture will be held in Burns 7 St David Seminar Room 2.

Dr. Campbell has a PhD in Practical Theology and Computer-mediated Communication from the University of Edinburgh-Scotland and is been an active researcher studying religion and the internet. She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online (Peter Lang, 2005) which explores the relationship between online and offline Christian communities and implications online religion has for offline faith communities and religious institutions. She is also co-editor of A Science and Religion Primer (Baker Academic, 2009) an introductory resource to the study of science, technology and religion and author of the forthcoming book When Religion Meets New Media (Routledge, forthcoming 2010) on how religious communities negotiate their use of new media. Dr. Campbell writes about her research interests also in her blog: When Religion Meets New Media.

1967: When the Historical Critical Method Overcame Church Creeds

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Dei Verbum, Divino afflante spiritu, historical-critical method, Pius XII, Westminster Confession

If I had to pinpoint the high point of the historical critical method, it would probably be 1967, I think. That was the year that even those stalwarts of Protestantism, the Presbyterians, accepted the claims of the historical critical method: that you just couldn’t read or understand the Bible without it. They gave in, capitulated, and surrendered, in reluctant recognition of the method’s triumphant march to supremacy which had occurred during the preceding two centuries.

The Catholics had already done the same in 1965, in Dei Verbum, at Vatican II. And earlier than this, Pius XII had opened his arms to the historical critical method in Divino afflante spiritu (1943). Yet, despite admitting the methodological success of hist-crit, Pius XII couldn’t actually bring himself to so much as mention the method by name. It doesn’t appear anywhere in his proclamation. He only describes it, unable to bear to utter the name of what had soundly defeated his Holy Mother Church.

So in 1967, it was the turn of the Presbyterians to accept defeat in the face of an all-conquering opponent. Bent and broken, the one-time reformers surrendered, hung their heads, and humbly admitted:

“The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God’s work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding.”

(Presbyterian Confession, 1967)

By contrast, back in the Seventeenth Century Westminster Confession, the Presbyterians could boldly state, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.” How the Prezzies had fallen! In 1967, understanding of the Bible had shifted to the testimony of men rejected in the Westminster Confession. The historical critical method reigned supreme and had even defeated the creeds of the Church – in both its Catholic and Protestant factions.

As the following year was, of course, 1968, this new credal submission to the supremacy of the historical critical method reveals a spectacular lack of prophetic insight.

The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!!

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Antichrist, Barack Obama, Chinese, David Letterman, End Times, John Key, Merchant Bankers, National Party, New Zealand, Prophesisation

The Word of God, the Bible, provides many descriptions of the Antichrist. The Bible tells us that, in the End Times, the Antichrist will ascend to dominion over the coming New World Order. He will then begin his reign of terror, in which he will persecute the Church of the Saints. 

It has become clear to some of us in recent months that this person has now revealed himself. So he must now be named and, although we believe he will do all in his power to suppress or discredit this information, we must bear a stong witness.

The Antichrist is John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Scriptures are clear. He who has ears, let him hear!

The Bible’s description of the Antichrist are in agreement with the facts of John Key’s life – on every point! This cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence!!

See for yourself:

1. It is prophesised: He will be a little man, but grow exceedingly great toward the south, east, and the beautiful land (Daniel 8:9-12).

John Key stands at only a little over five-and-a-half feet. After being born in Auckland, he moved to the South Island as a project manager at Christchurch-based clothing manufacturer Lane Walker Rudkin, before moving to the East as head of Merill Lynch’s Asian foreign exchange in Singapore. He has now become Prime Minister of Godzone, the beautiful country, New Zealand.

2. It is prophesised: He will speak arrogant words (Daniel 7.11).

When actress Keisha Castle-Hughes campaigned against global warming, John Key arrogantly dismissed her with the following words of harsh (and satanic) invective, “My advice to Keisha is this: Stick to acting.” In addition, as a sign of his march towards absolute dictatorship, John Key now refuses to speak with the media. Instead, he tells them, in what was hip late-1990s teenage slang, to “speak to the hand.” Oh, the arrogance!

3. It is prophesised: He will become very strong… but not by his own power… in his quick rise to fame (Daniel 8.24).

Barack Obama, John Key - A Secret Covenant Between Muslims and Jews? Note the unidentified man in foreign-looking hat in foreground.

Although he was only made leader of the opposition in November 2006, he rose to become leader of the powerful South Pacific nation of New Zealand just under two years later – backed by the shadowy organisation known as The National Party. On 25 July 2008, Key was added to the New Zealand National Business Review (NBR) Rich List, with an estimated wealth of NZ$50 million. John Key has become so famous that he now appears on the Late Show with David Letterman. Barack Obama has also appeared on Letterman.

4. It is prophesised: He will be blasphemous, and speak against God and his Word (Revelation 13:6).

John Key opposed the Biblical right to smack children, instead throwing his support behind the ‘Whore of Babylon,’ Sue Bradford. Sometimes when he speaks, the words are so unintelligible that he could well be speaking the most blatant and vile blasphemies against Jesus, and nobody would ever know. Except Jesus, who knows everything.

5. It is prophesised: The “merchants of the earth” will grow rich by supporting the New World Order (Revelation 18:3).

John Key was a Merchant Banker, who grew rich by playing with Kings and Rulers. But he has never revealed the exact means by which he amassed his curious wealth.

6. It is prophesised: His number will be 666 (Revelation 13:18).

John Key joined the National Party in 1998. The number 1998 is exactly 3 times 666.

7. It is prophesised: He will be a king ‘different’ from those who preceded him (Daniel 7.24).

The election campaign portrayed John Key as ‘different’ from your average politician, more an average man in the street. Sure, a man in the street with $50m in his back pocket, but it was a very average $50m.

8. It is prophesised: He will be called the Messiah (Matthew 24:5).

John Key supporter with John Key himself. John Key has cunningly arranged a picture of himself with the messianic image of a cross over his left shoulder.

To be heralded as ‘King of the Jews,’ the Messiah must have Jewish descent. John Key is descended from Jews! John Key is also followed everywhere he goes by sect members wearing cultish blue garb, proclaiming their adherence.

9. It is prophesised: He will be miraculously healed, the whole world astonished (Revelation 13:3).

In January 2009 Key slipped on some stairs at a Chinese New Year celebration, breaking his right arm in two places. This has since healed, miraculously, as noted by The Chinese Community. There are more than 1 billion Chinese on the planet today, most of them pagans. In addition, 2009 is the year of the ox in this pagan (and so demonic) system of thought. The ox is a horned creature. In Daniel 7:7, the Antichrist is portrayed as a horned creature.

10. It is prophesised: A false prophet will arise to be his right-hand man, causing all to take a mark, erecting a “living image of him” (Revelation 13.12-15).

John Key’s office has erected a website with his own “video journals” – displaying a “living image of him”. This would not have been possible before the arrival of the internet. The Bible knew about the internet, proving it was inspired by God!

All of this has been fulfilled to the letter. The odds of this are, approximately 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!!

The conclusion is clear: John Key is the Antichrist.
You have been warned.

Darwin: The Bible no more trustworthy than books of the Hindoos

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Darwin, Hindoos

“I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.”

(from The Autobiography of Charles Darwin)

The Bible is “no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos”? That’s dealing the low blow, Chuck! Surely not!!

The Minds Which Seduce Us: On First Reading E. M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist

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America, Confession, E. M. Cioran, Exile, Job, Judaism, The Temptation to Exist

One of the most palpable pleasures of the academic life is to find a new thinker, a new author who challenges, excites, infuriates, or simply makes one prick up one’s ears.  So much the better to stumble upon a thinker who has a long list of books just waiting to be explored, deconstructed, and enjoyed.  My recent encounter with Emil Cioran’s collection of essays, The Temptation to Exist[1], is the intellectual equivalent to my first listen to Tom Wait’s Closing Time as an undergraduate, where the joy of discovery is only deepened with the knowledge that there are – in the case of Waits – albums like Rain Dogs and Bone Machine waiting in the wings.  Unlike Waits, Cioran is no longer living and working among us, so his body of work is bounded in time, but there is still a lifetime of writing to anticipate reading.  I’ve got two more of his books waiting for me at home already.  I’ve come to Cioran by recommendation of Deane, who is, according to one commenter, The Dunedin School’s ‘archblogger’, who has yet to recommend to me a bad book, which is in itself rather remarkable.

E. M. Cioran

Cioran, born in Romania in 1911 with a Romanian Orthodox priest for a father, took to philosophy early in life, travelling to Berlin in 1933, where he developed a certain sympathy for the Nazis and for the Romanian nationalistic organisation The Iron Guard, despite the fact that violence of any kind made him uncomfortable.  Cioran spent much of his adult life working and living largely as a hermit in France and he would eventually repudiate all of his ties to the political right, expressing his regret clearly in later interviews.  He died in 2005, leaving a mass of unpublished work that is still tied up in the French courts.   Reading Cioran is maddening, joyous, and difficult.  Understanding him is, if anything, even worse.  Writing in the aphoristic philosophical tradition that includes such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Wittgenstein, Cioran is one to read and to ponder in mad, great lumps or in discrete bites.  I can’t pretend to have mined any of this with any thoroughness, but I’ve included some highlights, some things that caught my attention, that pricked up my ears.

Cioran, in ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, betraying his history of sympathy to fascism (which, though this is a troubling thought, does not mean that he is wrong):

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability.  Even God, insofar as He [sic] interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us (33).

In the same essay, on Christianity:

But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.  Is religion declining?  We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equalling that of the monasteries in their heyday.  If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair … No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue (34-35).

Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous (39).

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning (45).

From ‘On a Winded Civilisation’ on the intellectual life (and this hits very close to home):

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices or a world adrift.  He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.  Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.  If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him.  To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.  ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge.  Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke (57-58).

The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe (64).

In ‘A Little Theory of Destiny’ and ‘Advantages of Exile’, Cioran explores the idea of exile and living as an expatriate, which is very much on my mind on as I am on a short trip back to my American hometown of Boulder, Colorado (the New Age capital of the universe), a place I love and hate in equal measure – and his writing captures some of the essence of my experience so well that is almost chilling:

The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth (66).

Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, the geologic reverie.  No use scanning their features for their fidgets, the grimaces of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in them.  In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock?  Unable to rouse them, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an extermination.  One does not massacre stones.  The spectacle they offered me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria.  And I never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among them (70).

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state.  On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence.  The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become (74).

On poetry, an analysis that fits New Zealand, a decidedly minor nation that is very fond of poetry, like a glove:

Consider the production of any ‘minor’ nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic.  Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center.  Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbaric genius and a formless language (76).

In ‘A People of Solitaries’, which on occasion strays dangerously close to an unformed, casual anti-Semitism, Cioran offers as astute, troubling look at Judaism in European history:

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another.  Hence, the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over.  He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other (80).

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.  If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cynicism, the sole precaution they have taken against the future (85).

On Job, a frequent guest here at The Dunedin School (turn the pages and stop here and here):

The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees.  He will perish, then, he and his.  But a Job harasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us.  These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations – how can we remain insensitive to such a thing?  The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us.  Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault.  ‘My bones are pierced in me in the night season’, he laments.  His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of Heaven and makes God tremble.  Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendents of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan.  But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia.  Indeed, he has the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to.  But we – against whom are we to cry out?  Our own kind?  That seems to us absurd.  No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire on our lips … Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world.  Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they would struggle with men (99-100).

There is so much more that could be said about The Temptation to Exist, but it is late and I will leave you with a final note, from ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, in which Cioran, writing decades before the rise of the now dominant therapeutic ethos and the repellent spectacle of reality television, sees into the future with a striking clarity:

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven.  And that other rape, psychological analysis!  Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul (109).

Never have I wanted more to be a criminal, and more ashamed to be working – with these very words – towards a public soul.

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[1] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated by Richard Howard, with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet Encounters, 1987).  All page numbers cited in parenthesis refer to this version of the text.

(Incidentally, The Dunedin School has been ranked #35 on the Biblioblog Top 50 list this month, which is kind of funny, as some of us aren’t even Biblical scholars, though we are constantly running into that damned thing.)

Don’t theorise: First Academic U2 Conference a Magnificent Success

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Agnes Nyamayarwo, Anthony DeCurtis, Christopher Endrinal, Dan Pinkston, Danielle Rhéaume, Greg Clarke, Hey! Nietzsche! leave them kids alone, Matt McGee, Neil McCormick, U2, U2 conference, U23D

I’ve had an exhilarating 5 days, which includes a total of 10 flights, 45 hours in the air, 1 academic conference on U2, 1 U2 stadium concert, and only 13 hours sleep. The first academic conference on U2 included some really impressive papers from theologians, musicologists, anthropologists, and more – interweaved with keynote speakers Anthony DeCurtis, Neil McCormick, Matt McGee, and Agnes Nyamayarwo. It went off.

The audience was a great mix of academics and U2 fanatics – and these categories were not necessarily, or even often, exclusive. It was all U2 geeky goodness. When for instance, during one question-time, Danielle Rhéaume noted that she was the person who found and returned the long-lost original October lyrics, one could feel a palpable chill come over the entire room.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, and after a few Guinesses, I attempted some ‘Numb-style’ photographs at the Durham Irish pub with a few of the conference attendees. Here are some: my Alaskan co-presenter (Dan), the Discoverer of Bono’s October Journal (Danielle), an Aussie U2 fan who hasn’t missed a concert in quite a while (Gary), and an Aussie film-maker (hmmm… I can’t quite remember her name anymore; I must be sleep-deprived; but you watch: some avid U2 fan will tell me soon; they’re good like that Natalie):

As an indication of some of the papers on offer: Sydneysider Greg Clarke compared Bono’s and Nick Cave’s conceptions of Jesus, and he reckons that while Cave has a lot in common with nineteenth century liberal scholars such as D.F. Strauss, Bono has a lot in common with someone like C.S. Lewis. That wording is more mine than his, though. He also mentioned a new Aussie book by Craig Schuftan and Brad Cook, with an outrageously punny title: Hey! Nietzsche! leave them kids alone (2009). Christopher Endrinal very clearly explained the mechanics of vocal layering in U2 songs such as ‘The Fly.’ The layering of the fly voice and the angelic falsetto was something which I had looked at in my own paper on fallen angels, so it was good to see how we came at this from different angles (and with different conclusions, but hey!). Dan Pinkston’s comparisons between U2 and Stravinsky, in the paper which followed, issued a challenge all those musical snobs who refuse to acknowledge where classical and pop music share important techniques in common.

There were two Kiwis present; Steve Taylor was the other one. I hear there may well be a book following, containing some of the papers.

– Deane Galbraith

Here are some other conference blog reports:

@U2 – Matt McGee
Occasio
Interference
Holy Heteroclite – Dave Wainscott
Discover – Sheril Kirshenbaum
Emerging Kiwi – Steve Taylor
U2 Sermons – Beth Maynard