That’s just how I would have put it, if I were you. But, I’m not. The scary thing is that I’m starting to understand you.

But, I need further reflection on the 2 Cor and Col 2:9 material you’ve presented. I suppose I’ve not let go of the sacralization thing. GOtta run.

No glossary, but I do have an exhaustive index to the collected works, of which I have read about half.

My point about Voegelin and Paul was not to suggest a kind of biblicism but to observe that eschatology must matter since both men spoke volumes about it. The other aspect of my point was one of self-deprecation since I am a slothful person who should probably spend more time with Voegelin than I have. On the other hand, I wonder if Caleb has a glossary.

I think I have been rebuked! Ah well, it was probably deserved and to be expected as I am the upstart among his bettors.

In any case, I was not trying to make Paul sound like Voegelin. I have hardly mentioned (not at all in fact) Voegelin since the first few quotes, though obviously my thinking is influenced by his work in this area. I am merely trying the grapple with the symbols chosen by Paul (and brought up by Darryl) as he (Paul) grapples with the change wrought by the Gospel and seeks to both use, and depart from or develop, earlier symbolic orders. I find the argument compelling, and I have tried to make it from a variety of sources. Though I am happy to listen to the counter-argument, or be ignored, I suppose, I do not think the self-abasing “it’s too difficult for me” posing can stand in place of a response indefinately, and it is not quite ignoring either.

I must say that the sprint to status of “simple man” can be an entertaining pantomime for a while, but it has to be admitted that it is also a protestantizing rhetorical move developed over centuries to protect various ideas from heavy scrutiny. The simple man with a simple faith and his KJV is a protestant icon tending, it has often been remarked, heavily towards an anti-intellectualism and anti-ecclesialism, no? I have heard Darryl refute this me-and-my-bible-ism on occasion, so it is a bit awkward getting a version of it from him. Especially when I agree with him!

I’m glad Caleb is intrigued by my appeal to 2 Cor. 4. And I can appreciate much of what he says about the pre-Christ logos and the desacralizing that comes with the Messiah. But my reading of Paul in this chapter has less to teach about the noetic or pneumatic and more to say about the ministry of the apostles and by extension the ministry of the church. The church is not outwardly glorious but its ministry is still of eternal significance. It comes in earthen vessels but its effects are lasting. I’d say the reverse is true of the state and that’s why I resist the efforts of Christians to glom their faith on to the affairs of politicians, police and soldiers. It is unbecoming.

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 5
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient …

Here is the test of wisdom;
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools;
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it, to another not having it;
Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, 80
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.

Now I reëxamine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents. 85

Here is realization;
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him;
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes; …

Allons! the road is before us! 220
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well.

Allons! be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! 225
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? 230
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

[Whole thing is here: http://www.bartleby.com/142/82.html

As the Christian content of the Puritan resacralization of the cosmos is stripped away (as it must be—because Christianity is fundamentally at odds with a resacralized world), one is left with the truimphalist optimism of a Whitman which has defined the American character of “fresh starts” on the “open road.”

To use the new term Tony taught me, Whitman wants to “grok” the entire universe, and believes he can.

Now observe the gospel of Whitman in its most accomplished and penetrating latter-day interpreter, Bruce Springsteen.

In his “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” the Boss gives the most poignant, tragic, and moving account of American brokenness, isolation, dislocation, disenchantment, and alienation that I know of. It remains wrapped up in the Whitmanesque language of the road, but it is no longer a triumphal march, but a desperate plea flung into a cosmos that the speaker knows in his heart can no longer hear him and will not answer his prayer.

From Thunder Road:

You can hide `neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets
Well now I’m no hero, that’s understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night’s busting open
This two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks
Oh-oh come take my hand
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land …

… so Mary climb in
It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win.

And Born to Run:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway american dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, its a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run …

Will you walk with me out on the wire
`cause baby Im just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if love is wild, girl I want to know if love is real …

The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybodys out on the run tonight but theres no place left to hide
Together wendy well live with the sadness
Ill love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I dont know when were gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go and well walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run.

[Listen to them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsykNMK11lU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfzov0Cq90o

In a post-cross universe, it is impossible to return to a world “full of gods” in which everything is sacred. The temptation is ever present, especially in the American context, and it calls to us with the romance of Satan in Paradise Lost and soaring songs of Whitman but ends in the despair of broken boys from Jersey (or Levittown).

Thus the connection to the Christian political vision I sited earlier.

I do not think what I am arguing is reducible to “propositions” in the formal sense. Certainly it is reducible to language, which always has a “propositional edge” if you will, due to its representational aspect. If the edge becomes too sharp through reification of the symbol itself, the symbol may lose its ability to anamnetically recapitulate the originary engendering experience and therefore lose its luminosity for the truth that lies behind it. Here my good Covenanter iconoclastic blood is showing.

I agree that it is very foolish to “reduce the Western Tradition to the Classical thinkers, apart from the Christian use of their thought.”

Aw shucks Darryl, us clod-hoppin’ folk may be pure and innocent as the hills, but we ain’t no dummies!

Actually, I find Darryl’s appeal to the Pauline dualism of 2 Cor. 4 intriguing. Because the interplay between these symbols “seen” and “unseen” or “visible” and “invisible” are very important as Paul endeavors to work through the complexities which arrive with the radically transformed noetic core which was received through the Greeks but turned on its head by Jesus. For the noetic experience of the philosophers, the divine nous/mind was fully present in the cosmos. The cosmos is the image (eikon) of the Eternal (see the Timaeus). In Romans 1 Paul uses strikingly similar language saying that the invisible God (theiotes) is knowable (gnoston tou theou) by the mind (nous) through the “things that are made” (cosmos). In some ways, however, this is an unsatisfying resolution of the problem because it may leave in place all kinds of pagan idolatries. The compact Greek symbols require further differentiation because of the irruption of Christ. No longer is the divine most present in the cosmos, but rather is fully present in Christ who is the image (eikon) of the unseen God or “Unknown God” (agnostos theos) of Col. 1:15 and of the Areopagus.

Thus, the later Pauline neologism “theotes” (Col. 2:9) to supplement and differentiate from the more compact “theiotes” of Romans. The theotes is the “whole fullness in flesh” of the divine theiotes which is invisible. Paul works up this whole symbolic language of seen and unseen as a way to deal with the problem. So the 2 Cor. passage is concerned with setting off the pneumatic (spiritual) law which is “seen” as the heart is made luminous by the drawing of God through Christ against the “unseen” or “veiled” law of Moses which exists in a more compact form. This new and yes, uniquely Christian, set of symbols is drawn by Paul out of earlier compact forms he seems to be wrestling through in Romans 1. Colossians and 2 Corinthians extracts a distinction between the invisible divine nous and the visible irruption of Christ.

This gives us the much discussed “desacrilizing” of the Cosmos which the historical impact of Christianity politically. No longer is a “cosmological” polis acceptable. Various aspects of the cosmos can no longer contain the divine invisible (whether they be Caesars or idols). Only Christ is the full image (eikon/theotes) of the divine. Christ is now “seen” through spirit and sacrament. But the old cosmological world of theiotes and gods which gave man a fully sacralized sphere does not easily give up its hold, and thus historically we get a playing out of this radical reformation of the noetic core. The effort of resymbolization begun by Paul takes centuries and centuries of work culminating in Augustine.

All of which is to say that I agree with the sage of Levittown in his conclusion, but I admit to being somewhat troubled by the end of 2 Cor. 4 and the way DH is using it, for it does not seem to accord with the rest of the Pauline symbolism of visible things and invisible things. I would argue that it is those who wish to return to a cosmological/Mosaic world who seek to resacralize the temporal sphere who are returning the “veiled” and “unseen” gods of the older, more compact system of symbols prior to Christ’s irruption. The gospel brings the unseen god into sight, lifts the veil on the Mosaic cosmos, and thus desacrilizes the sphere of the “age that is passing.” Paul seems to reverse this symbolism when he begins to apply it to the Christian life in this political age that is passing at the end of 2 Cor. 4. He encourages those who undergo persecution and seems at least to conflate/confuse the symbolic “seen/unseen” with the historical “temporal/eternal.” I might speculate that this has to do with the way that Paul does not abolish the “unseen” cosmological world of the pagan noetic experience, but merely relocates it through the revealing of the seen Christ out of the temporal and into the eternal, when we shall all become the image (eikon) of God in the age to come, thus positing an eschatological “re-sacrilization” of the cosmos.

This noetic and epistemological stuff sure is complex and I’m not certain either the original settlers of Kansas or the developers of Levittown could have made sense of it. But I would add that my thinking on religion and politics has been motivated by — dare I say to the real and closet Kuyperians — the dualism of the apostle Paul who wrote, “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” The work of the state is provisional, the work of the church much less so. And to try to make Christianity relevant to politics is to go down the road of making the unseen take a back seat to the seen.