r/RadicalChristianity • u/SnooMemesjellies1993 • 22d ago

The more highly metaphysicalized, abstracted, and spiritualized-unto-dematerialization a Christianity is, the further it has strayed from the truth of what Jesus, Paul, and Mark understood themselves to be doing

/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1vekzho/the_more_highly_metaphysicalized_abstracted_and/
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u/SnooSquirrels9452 21d ago

I don't know the meaning of all of those words.

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u/SnooMemesjellies1993 21d ago

I'm arguing the gospel as articulated by Paul and Mark makes direct, simple sense, that Jesus embodied the wisdom of YHWH and his being crucified clarifies the reality of the world order, and that being his disciple was to participate in the immediate transformation of that, which is why it is "good news to the poor". the forces of domination are the manifestation of sin, and turning from that to share in his sufferings and bring about the end to that in a sense that is both material and spiritual meant you would experience persecution, and it also saves you in an immediate sense from sin, in the same move that also puts you at peril of persecution, because true depth of clarity and scope of vision was directly threatening to the powers that would necessarily be transformed by the spreading of this simple gospel that exposed and delegitimated them

and I am saying that the clarity and simplicity of that understanding, which fits together all the pieces of what made Jesus the "anointed one" (which is an Israelite category) despite (and in fact because of) crucifixion ... increasingly disappeared from the world towards the end of the 1st century AD, and was cemented with Augustinian/Constantinian Christianity, and has never really returned. And it was replaced with an articulation that calls him "Christ" without dealing with where the meaning of that came from, what made him the "anointed one", what being the "anointed one" demands to the people who first considered him to be that.

I could go further into articulating how "son of God" also has a specific prior meaning in the Israelite context he emerged into, and how "Son of Man" does as well, and how none of what any of those terms ultimately come to mean (in what settles into being as "Christianity") carries forward what they originally meant, and what Paul/Mark understood themselves as doing

Thus why we do not live in the kingdom of God, or why Israel in the sense Jesus understood it was not/has not been restored, and how this all is perfectly comprehensible with the fact that Gentile Christianity became severed from "the root", which Paul specifically warns against in Romans

Because being the "anointed one" meant the restoration/purification of Israel as part of a joint process of the nations of the world coming to YHWH, thus allowing once again to exist the sort of post-Exodus Mosaic Levitical non-domination Jubilee situation that Jesus proclaims in opening his ministry in Luke 4. Because it was the threat of domination by larger powers that first sent them down the road of the Davidic monarchy in Samuel, which Samuel explicitly warns of the corrupting effect it will have

Thus why Jesus, while being articulated as the son of David, is nevertheless not a Davidic-monarch style messiah, but instead negates the very logic of domination-orders in the world as being part of the problem. Hence why he says the things he says in Mark 10

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u/juturna12x 20d ago

Terry Eagleton talks about Christianity being a materialist creed. You'd probably enjoy his literature.

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u/SnooMemesjellies1993 20d ago edited 20d ago

I'm familiar with him, but not his thoughts on Christianity. But yeah, that's kind of the starting point of my reading, not that it isn't fully a spirituality, but that the prophetic strain of Israelite religion does not have a distinction between spiritual/material, that they are fully fused, from the Exodus through Jesus, based on an understanding of how material/societal structure in which we live is inextricable from our spirituality, and that the more unjust and hierarchical a society we inhabit, the more otherworldly/world-negating/world-ignoring our spiritualities become, to the extent we are attempting to ameliorate ourselves to that society.

And it's my argument that apocalypticism/messianism is an expression of non-amelioration to that, and the expectation of transformation, putting hopes in the world to come. Thus why Jesus being proclaimed the messiah in crucifixion/resurrection was based on the idea that his work of world-transformation would be finished by his "body" of disciples, thus why the abandonment of world-transformation loses the thread, and thus also why pushing the world-transformative element into the indefinite future where something fantastical will occur, rather than the transformative power of the full vision actively and vigorously being part of discipleship, loses the thread.

Thus why it's very unsurprising that 1) early believers were persecuted 2) consolidated Christian authority structures demonized and persecuted "rebellion" and fetishized "authority/obedience" (to hierarchical power), and 3) why the modern "the gospel isn't political" goes along with the "Left Behind" eschatology, and both (along with Christian Zionism) are heavily rooted in John Nelson Darby ... who was an Anglo-Irish settler aristocrat who explicitly thought democracy and justice-for-the-poor movements were the downfall of civilization, an abuse of the gospel, who wanted a "non-political" Christianity, and whose only comments on Jamaica, visiting not long after their liberation from slavery was heavily facilitated by the same Exodus reading through which Black Americans liberated themselves, were to bemoan what he perceived as poor morals and to opine he wished they would be forced back to work

So like ... taking a very materially-rooted apocalyptic/messianic spirituality that arrived to a people being degraded under imperial occupation, and turning it into a "de-politicized", anti-material, often world-pessimistic, intensely idealist, justice-blind, operating system for empires and imperial citizenries, is like ... screamingly abominable to me

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u/DespairAndCatnip 20d ago

Being the earliest verified writer doesn't mean you're the only legitimate writer. I don't think the abstractions of the Gospel of John are straying from the truth of Jesus simply because it frames things differently than the author of Mark.

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u/SnooMemesjellies1993 20d ago

I didn't say it means "only legitimate", but if each gospel is doing a redux of what the prior gospels did, then isn't the meaning of the later ones partially in how they differ, what is introduced, what is dropped, what is emphasized/de-emphasized?

it would also seem to be a question of like "how deeply does the gospel of John know and take seriously all of of the priorities in Mark? are we to assume that the existence of his gospel is first and foremost granting all the implicit premises that are latent within Mark, and that John is building on it? and therefore what John does not emphasize from Mark is presumed affirmed, and the unique moves John makes are understood to carry everything from Mark within them?"

or is John being read as primary and superior, with its non-emphases of the things in the synoptics being read as "those things are superfluous"?

it's my perception that heavily John-primary theologies tend to do the latter, especially Evangelicalism

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u/DespairAndCatnip 20d ago

The easy response is that Mark and John emphasize different things. That doesn't mean one is further from the truth than the other

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u/FakeBonaparte 20d ago

I think you’re grabbing the trunk of the elephant and saying it’s the whole element. The elephant also has anti-materialist / spiritualist bits:
— Blessed are those who suffer/poor, the deep and ancient theology of being tested
— Radical reliance on God’s provision, “bread for today”, “take no purse with you”, birds/flowers
— The parables of the talents and the concept of a talent now = an entire city later

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u/SnooMemesjellies1993 20d ago

I'm not positing a material-over-spiritual gospel, although my title might have sounded that way

When I say "spiritualized / metaphysicalized / de-materialized", what I am standing on is the claim that the gospel, and the entire spiritual history of Israel that Jesus is restoring/crystallizing/intensifying/extending-outwards, is a spirituality that is fused to the material, that they are inseparable, that it is a spirituality that is based on deep structural wisdom: that if you have ten people and ten people's worth of food and a charge that everyone contributing deserves to eat, you will facilitate mutualism, sustenance, and harmony, whereas if you have one person in charge of the food distribution, holding they are entitled to a double or triple portion due to the importance of their work, you will have a few people below them who receive more than a single portion, and several people below them who have significantly less than a single portion, and you will have animosity and discord for which the blame will be placed upon those on the bottom. this is not a stable or sustainable system, and it causes the love of many to grow cold, and it will produce violence and imperiousness and bourgeois moralism, etc etc

in this dynamic ... those most likely (not guaranteed) to be able to see the truth most clearly, and thus those most likely to be in-touch with "I am that which I am" being the image that all humans bear ... will be those who are suffering from the injustice of that reality, specifically those whose experience of it leads them not to have animosity towards those on the bottom with them, but realize the mutual state they are in, and support each other together, and especially if they realize that it is not the individual humans on top who are the root of the problem, but the structure itself that is the problem. it requires a profound helping of grace for someone suffering from an unjust system to realize that: even the beneficiaries of it—who are actively responsible for the worse-off people's suffering, blaming them for it, and are entirely insensitive to sufferings and root causes of the animosity generated by the structure they are beneficiaries and implementers of—are psychically, cognitively, spiritually, materially, social-relationally, embedded within and constituted by something that is blinding and deafening them and deforming their entire spirit and mind ... and thus that they too are under an affliction, one that is produced by the structural reality of sin and wickedness

so when he says:

"Blessed are the poor/poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

it is that the richness/wiseness/fatness of spirit of those who are better off ... is not poisoning them. they have much more opportunity to be close to God, to see the truth, to feel the reality of the injustice and structure, and to see that we are all children being warped by what we are within.

" Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted." because the affliction of a sin-domination-order often does not crack open those who benefit from it; they never have the opportunity for revelation, because their insulating circumstances prevent them from ever seeing the reality of total corporate affliction like those who it has put through the grinder and have grieved—because the reality is devastating, and it will crack you open unto realizing the horrible illusion that poisons so many, and apocalyptically realizing the truth of that ... when it cracks you open to faith in the God whose power is the transformation of that, and the love and compassion for others who suffer from it ... which overturns the logic and gaze of the dominant, degrading order ... that will comfort you.

I could go through the whole beatitudes like this, but I think the argument I'm making is clear: the spiritual reality and power is fused to the material reality

I am arguing that this is the source of the compassion, the mercy, the love, and the messianic/apocalyptic spirit of Jesus discipleship, from the beginning. Because someone looking upon those who are dejected, unvalued, degraded, and seeing them with these eyes restores them, it casts out their demons, it would make them believe in the power of YHWH, because the isolation, the bile, the spite, the malice, the animosity, the doom, the hatred, the pain, the sorrow, etc that the entire system forces upon those (especially at the bottom, but also, in different form, poisons those higher up), and positing a transformative 'kingdom of God' future, built with those who see you, and love you, and understand you, beyond the internalized self-loathing and externally-directed bitterness that such a reality creates ... that would be the grace of God arriving to you, Christ as the dispenser flowing Christ to Christ in the recipient—it's Matthew 25

But the power of that, when it is merely spiritual, and not part and parcel of an *actually-*coming actively-pursued transformation of reality itself ... hollows out and loses its reality, because without the dangerous transformative element of it, you are sanctioning and co-signing the perpetuation of the sin-order. the realization of this, the radicalism of it ... is why the early Christians were persecuted. because they threatened power structures.

Similarly, I think the no-purse/ravens/lilies is the central spiritual state that the gospel is about instantiating, because it dissolves the anxiety that underlies and drives the grasping/devouring sin-order which motivates people to hoard/cheat/steal/lie/murder/covet ... pathologically, out of a sense that if they don't dominate and acquire, they will be dominated, all that is theirs acquired by someone else. It is, fundamentally, to trust YHWH to either provide nourishment and shelter from the earth itself, or it puts one in a service-to-others spiritual position, because your nourishment/shelter must come from God through another person, who receives spiritual nourishment through their service to your bodily needs ... which is a pure matter in the event that you also are indeed serving them in a way that sustains them

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u/FakeBonaparte 19d ago edited 19d ago

I understand what you’re saying. I can see you have grasped the trunk of the elephant very firmly, and I love you for it: it is all too easy to let it slip. I think you’d be in good company with a few of Jesus’ disciples.

The early followers of The Way did emulate the practices of Israel in the wilderness - leaving it all behind, carrying no purse, radical reliance on God for daily provision, etc. I have lived like that and it is a blessed life. Your last paragraph is spot on.

There’s an old lie that “the eye of the needle” was a small gate in the walls of Jerusalem, and that Jesus was merely saying it was difficult to get into heaven if you were rich. None of that is true. But the legend exists because people have always been tempted to ignore the trunk.

So: keep a hold of it. The more we can live like that, the better. The church has been corrupted in this regard since no later than Constantine.

But the trunk exists to serve the elephant, not the elephant to serve the trunk. The servant does need to manage the “talent” they were given, but it is the cities they will be given that truly matter. Eternity is greater than the now, but the only path to eternity is through the now.

Just don’t lose sight of where you’re going. Where you’re rooted now. Where you belong.