“Prior to his resurrection, Christ descended to the underworld — a paradox most churches prefer not to confront.”
That’s a headline in Salon from yesterday. As far as progressive battle cries go, it takes some beating, containing as it does willful ignorance of both faith and reason as well as a full-frontal strawman assault, all in just under twenty words. It’s easy to disprove the headline, and the article that follows, in a single hyperlink, but there is additional merit to be had in the examination of Salon’s reasons for publishing what amounts to libel, if only to satisfy what I think of as the “Winston Smith” aspect — namely “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”
I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting. Amen.
That’s the Apostles’ Creed, and it is widespread in fundamentally similar forms throughout Christianity. Lutherans to Catholics. Virtually every variant of Christianity that bothers with a profession of faith uses the Apostles’ Creed at some point in their catechism or ceremony. I, in my altar-boy days, preferred the dignity of the Nicene Creed, but I was the exception; the fact remains that you’d have to be a pretty fringe-group Christian to have never encountered the above text.
Note the portion that I bolded and italicized. Then, if you like, read the idiocy at Salon. The article refers to “The fourth century Apostle’s Creed…” as if said Apostles’ Creed had entered disuse in the fifth century. Is there not something strange and wonderful about the idea that this piece was probably read multiple times by several different people during its preparation and not a single one of them knew that the Apostles’ Creed was still in use around the world?
The world of Salon is a world where the basic tenets of the Christian faith are as recondite as the Apocrypha or the heresy of Nestorius, which is mentioned in the article, one suspects, for no other reason than it appears early in Wikipedia’s list of heresies.. It is a world where Christianity is an odd, cultish belief to be studied from a great distance.
In this way the positivist and the fundamentalist are strangely unified in their opposition to Tertullian’s infamous aphorism: credo quia absurdum (“I believe it because it is absurd”). The fundamentalist with his embarrassment over paradox denies the weirdness of his faith. The positivist can do no such thing and like Mr. Jefferson takes his razor to the Bible to excise the strangeness. But central to the Christian vision is a profound and undeniable weirdness…
There’s that word, paradox, again. You can search the dictionary definition for the word and not find anything having to do with the idea of Christ going to hell. It is no more or less “paradoxical” to note that St. Louis is between Oklahoma City and Indianapolis. The visit to hell was part of Christ’s redemption of humanity. You don’t have to believe it, but there is nothing inherently paradoxical about the story.
No, what the use of “paradox” displays is not the weakness in the Christian theology, but rather the weakness in the progressive theology. Having learned to use words like “racist”, “sexist”, and “homophobic” in entirely new and fascinating ways, the progressive considers that all words may be used in a context-sensitive manner. “Paradox” here means “stupid and hickish” the way that “racist” means “bad” or “homophobic” means “bad”. The meaning has been carefully stripped from the words. All that matters is their context. If Salon says something is a paradox, it matters not if the actual meaning of “paradox” is satisfied. Consider, if you will, this part of an interview from The Paris Review:
In this book, I feel that you have adopted categories of description, oppositions, that are worse than dubious—the sort of categories relied on by the editors of Causeur, or by Alain Finkielkraut, Éric Zemmour, even Renaud Camus. For example, the “opposition” between antiracism and secularism.
One cannot deny there is a contradiction there.
I don’t see it. On the contrary, the same people are often militant antiracists and fervent defenders of secularism, with both ways of thinking rooted in the Enlightenment.
Look, the Enlightenment is dead, may it rest in peace. A striking example? The left wing candidate on Olivier Besancenot’s ticket who wore the veil, there’s a contradiction for you. But only the Muslims are in an actually schizophrenic situation. On the level of what we customarily call values, Muslims have more in common with the extreme right than with the left. There is a more fundamental opposition between a Muslim and an atheist than between a Muslim and a Catholic. That seems obvious to me.
But I don’t understand the connection with racism …
That’s because there is none. Objectively speaking, there is none. When I was tried for racism and acquitted, a decade ago, the prosecutor remarked, correctly, that the Muslim religion was not a racial trait. This has become even more obvious today. So we have extended the domain of “racism” by inventing the crime of islamophobia.
The word may be badly chosen, but there do exist forms of stigma toward groups or categories of person, which are forms of racism …
No, islamophobia is not a kind of racism. If anything has become obvious, it’s that.
Islamophobia serves as a screen for a kind of racism that can no longer be expressed because it’s against the law.
I think that’s just false. I don’t agree.
You rely on another dubious dichotomy, the opposition between anti-Semitism and racism, when actually we can point to many moments in history when those two things have gone hand in hand.
I think anti-Semitism has nothing to do with racism. I’ve spent time trying to understand anti-Semitism, as it happens. One’s first impulse is to connect it with racism. But what kind of racism is it when a person can’t say whether somebody is Jewish or not Jewish, because the difference can’t be seen? Racism is more elementary than that, it’s a different skin color …
No, because cultural racism has been with us for a long time.
But now you’re asking words to mean something they don’t. Racism is simply when you don’t like somebody because he belongs to another race, because he hasn’t got the same color skin that you do, or the same features, et cetera. You can’t stretch the word to give it some higher meaning. (Italicized by me, because it’s the important part — jb)
But since, from a biological point of view, “races” don’t exist, racism is necessarily cultural.
But racism exists, apparently, all around us. Obviously it has existed from the moment when races first began mixing … Be honest, Sylvain! You know very well that a racist is someone who doesn’t like somebody else because he has black skin or because he has an Arab face. That’s what racism is.
Or because his values or his culture are …
No, that’s a different problem, I’m sorry.
What you see there is the conflict between the disciplined mind of Michel Houellebecq and the disorganized, FeelsWorld-compatible mind of Sylvain Bourmeau, his interviewer. Sylvain very badly wants “racist” to mean “attitudes that I, Sylvain, have been taught to dislike,”, but Michel won’t let him have it.
How many forty-year-olds have the mental discipline to play Houellebecq in a world full of Bourmeaus? How many thirty-year-olds? How many college students?
“Paradox” has a meaning, and that meaning is not satisfied in the Salon piece. It can be well and truly said of the article that it is ignorant. Which is to say that it is uneducated and uninformed and unknowing. Nowadays, “ignorant” means “from a state that voted for Mitt Romney” but the true meaning is unknowing. This Salon article is truly ignorant — both of its subject matter and the word used to characterize the subject matter.
Yet it would be a mistake to consider this ignorance accidental, or anything other than part of a massive and successful plan on the part of the progressive movement. The two pincers here are:
* the “othering” of traditional American and/or religious beliefs, so they may be safely attacked;
* the draining of meaning from words, so that the words become the servant of the people who have the loudest microphone.
Remember that Winston Smith believes that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” and remember, as well, that he is brutalized into giving that freedom up. It is in precisely this way that modern progressives are draining the meaning from words like “racist” and “paradox” — and for the same reason. When “paradox” means whatever the media says it means, you cannot refute a claim that Christianity is paradoxical, or racist, or homophobic, or anything else. You have no grounding in truth or logic, no immovable foundation on which to stand. “Truth” is simply what everybody around you repeats. Two plus two can equal five if everybody on your Facebook wall believes it does.
Thus we see Tim Cook attack Indiana for “homophobia” but then turn around and cheerfully do business with Arabian states where homosexuality is punishable by death. “Homophobia”, always an unsteady neologism in its own right, now simply means “whatever powerful progressive interests dislike.” Indiana is homophobic. Dubai is not. And if you think that has anything to do with Apple’s decision to seek profits, then you, too, are homophobic by association.
What, therefore, can people who believe in truth do about the Salon article, whether they are liberal or conservative, straight or gay, rich or poor? The answer is: very little, unless you want to take up arms. If not, then there is always this, and here’s the irony: there is far more paradox in this poem than in the Apostles’ Creed.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.