From the Fords of the Jordan to the Plain of Shinar

By Albert Peter Krueger

The threat of apocalypse is meat for the postmodern world. The possibility that it will happen is a hook for book buyers and moviegoers throughout the Western world. But what is it that happens in "the apocalypse?" The Rev. Albert Krueger challenges the standard view of apocalypse in From the Fords of the Jordan to the Plain of Shinar by seeing the Bible through a different frame of reference, the notion that apocalypse is the leaven, which gives rise to the canon of the Old Testament and the conclusive testimony of the New. He brings the fruit of a lifetime of preaching the Gospel, studying the scriptures, and the practicing the art of philosophical reflection to this radical new approach. Giving credence to both the valid discoveries of modern research and the consistency of the biblical message as a whole, Krueger demonstrates that apocalypse is an idea and an experience as well as an expectation. It is the governing principle of a way of life. Krueger's style of writing is part anecdote, part historical narrative, and part Bible study. During his journey from Ezekiel to Paul, he encourages the reader to ask new and biblically informed questions regarding contemporary Christian assumptions, expectations, and hopes in the world today. These questions emerge through a reformatting of the text, which reveals a fourfold overlay of biblical worlds rather than the standard linear progression from the moment of creation to the advent of doom. While From the Fords of the Jordan to the Plain of Shinar is a stand-alone work, a follow-up work is in the hopper. In this sequel, Krueger intends to consider the apocalyptic idea to be the hidden organizing principle of Western civilization. Just as the question of what "happens" in apocalypse needs to be addressed, so does the question of what "ends" when a world ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781681976570

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From the Fords of the Jordan to the Plain of Shinar

Albert Peter Krueger

ISBN 978-1-68197-656-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68197-657-0 (Digital)

Copyright © 2016 by Albert Peter Krueger

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter One

Apocalypse

He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbor; but a man of understanding holdeth his peace. A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.

—Proverbs 11:12–14 (KJV)

Section 1: The Apocalypse Problem

I read the book The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay when it first came out in 1970. Until then, Old Testament doom was a subject of little interest to middle American mainline Protestants. The ongoing processes of the American dream were maintaining tangible and visible advances, and the prevailing cultural attitude was that our society would continue to progress toward a vision of ultimate liberal perfection. The role of a good citizen was to play a productive part in sustaining the assumed commonweal.

On the other hand, the 1970s were years that felt like a fulfillment of the biblical passage, It is close at hand—a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness (Joel 2:1–2). If the world wasn’t ending, there seemed to be plenty of signs to indicate that it might be getting ready to: Black Sabbath, My Lai, Cambodia, Kent State, Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Khmer Rouge, Symbionese Liberation Army. The Fab Four disbanded in 1970, and John Lennon was murdered at the end of 1980. Completed in 1973, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City symbolized, to many, a world of emerging financial and economic interconnectedness that would extend the dream to all parts of the world. The towers came down in 2001, ten years after President George H. W. Bush gave his New World Order speech, extolling the coming virtues of the post–Cold War world. Hal Lindsay’s thesis had plenty of cultural fertilizer on hand to help the apocalyptic anxieties grow.

Lindsay’s book was the first instance of apocalyptic literature to appeal to the hearts and minds of the general reading audience. It popularized the end-time, bringing Fundamentalism and, by association, Pentecostalism, out of the realm of country bumpkin into the light of literate conversation. No longer was this theology spread chiefly by means of the surrealistic and highly abstract pamphlets handed to you on your doorstep by zealous Jehovah’s Witnesses. You could close your door to that strange religion. You could not play ‘see no evil’ with what the New York Times called the no. 1 nonfiction bestseller of the decade (Amazon). The fact that the New York Times would refer to such a work as nonfiction implied a cataclysm in cultural evolution.

The idea that a literal apocalyptic end of the world could actually take place, revivified by the invention and proliferation of atomic weapons, helped open the modern mind to the tacit acceptance of a Hal Lindsay–style endism. For Jews, Eastern Europeans and, eventually, Germans, WWII provided enough evidence that total destruction could take place, but it would take a lot of gunpowder to wreak the kind of devastation that two heavily armed Cold War camps following a policy of mutually assured destruction could facilitate. Victory in the good war only left the world in a state of permanent unease, burdened by the disconcerting sense that, when the tolls were counted up at the end of the war, a huge price was paid to accomplish nothing. Granted, the nothing that was accomplished still looked better than the something that would have transpired had the war been lost.

The Cold War reached its peak appeal and fascination in the seventies. Like the early fathers of the church (John Newhouse), the brethren of the nuclear priesthood squabbled over positions that might have seemed the stuff of theology had not their implications been so real. The disputants did not just conjure hell; they held the keys to it (The Cold War, A Military History, Robert Cowley, ed. Random House, New York, 2006, pp. 419–420). Nothing could have been more conducive for a return to vivid theological speculation than the fact that by the end of the ’60s, the Soviets could boast 1,487 ICBM’s, over 400 more than the Americans (ibid., p. 422).

Remembering what it felt like to be a young, future-seeking adult in the seventies is difficult. As formative times, they are unmatched. World War II, horror-saturated as its unfolding in time was, at least offered the possibility of fighting evil and potentially defeating it. Beneath the veneer of the belief in progress during the Cold War there lurked a living gloom that gave recurring expression to a universal inner voice, which proclaimed with divine certainty, Before we know what’s happening, we will all be fried within seconds. It was like a reverse postulate to Sir Bertrand Russell’s five-minute-hypothesis. The ultimate epistemological question for that great philosopher was this: How do we know that everything we think, feel, remember, and understand wasn’t created for us whole cloth by some supreme being one second ago? Conversely, this question could be asked: How do we know that everything we think, feel, remember, and understand won’t be utterly destroyed in the next second?

The idea of hope needed to be re-reified; made to come alive again. Its ancient theological status as a value and recent cultural incarnation as eternal progress was being eclipsed by the bomb. It should come as no surprise that religion was rediscovered in secular America. One might disagree with End Times Religion, but it is clearly here to stay, at least for a time. Nine years after the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth, the market for apocalyptic anxiety hit pay dirt with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now. With its focus on the senseless maintenance of a permanent state of war and the culminating scene of pagan ritual mimicking the slaughter of the god-king Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now was not merely a highly charged narrative about the Vietnam conflict but it was also a prophetic vision of a virtually predictable future. The time had come for endism to go mainstream.

The various forms of church endism, which apparently suddenly came into the light in the seventies, were present and thriving all along, but they were not noticed. Adventism, in its various forms, goes back to the nineteenth century, and it includes such denominations as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Modern Pentecostalism dates back to the Welsh Revival of 1904-5, penned so succinctly by Jessie Penn-Lewis as the book War on the Saints (Thomas E. Lowe, New York, 1973) and with the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles led by Pastor William Joseph Seymour, a culturally marginalized black pastor in the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), a holiness church, 1906 (The Azusa Street Revival, Charisma House, Lake Mary, FLA, 1979).

Harvey Cox, Harvard professor of divinity and author of the erudite book The Secular City, published in 1965, summarized the significance of this cultural surprise with this way: It had become obvious that instead of the ‘death of God’ some theologians pronounced some years ago, or the waning of religion that sociologists had extrapolated, something quite different has taken place. Perhaps I was too young and impressionable when the scholars made those sobering projections. In any case I had swallowed them all too easily and had tried to think about what their theological consequences might be. But it had now become clear that the predictions themselves had been wrong (Fire from Heaven, Harvey Cox, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1995, p. 16).

The flip side of church endism is religion’s alleged problem with science in particular and rationality in general; but with some parsing, the two points of view, apocalypse and anti-science, can be separated. The extreme resistance to scientific rationalism that characterizes some forms of Christianity today also dates back to the late nineteenth century. The origins of this resistance can be seen in the statements of Vatican I and in the creation of what we now call Fundamentalism. Vatican I, convened by Pope Pius IX in 1868, addressed problems of the rising influence of rationalism, liberalism, and materialism (Wikipedia, First Vatican Council). The dogma of papal infallibility is the most visible of the decisions of Vatican I. R. A. Torrey’s preface to The Fundamentals, that collection of papers and testimonial from an astonishing variety of denominational sources, begins, In 1909, God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday school superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English-speaking world (Intro to The Fundamentals, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, reprint 2000). Fundamentalism, Protestantism’s version of Vatican I, was thus born.

Generally speaking, Roman Catholic theologians have focused on presenting a more religion-friendly version of the Rational while Fundamentalism has focused on a renewed zeal for the notion of the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture, i.e., the Bible. These two approaches are extensions of the classic Christian friendship with science stemming from the European Renaissance and Reformation and intensified by the Age of Enlightenment. This friendship, steadily morphing into an antagonism verging on antipathy, has been a fluid part of the West’s cultural conversation, and the antagonistic nature of the broken relationship between the two did not really begin ossifying until the last forty years. Perhaps the present pontiff, Francis, will modify the Roman Catholic stance somewhat, but that possibility really will depend on the magisterium’s renewed definition of the term fact, a term which is at the heart of many scientific declarations today.

Of significance is Martin Luther’s famous diatribe, Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore, by nature and manner of being she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed, she and her wisdom . . . Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and ought to be drowned in baptism . . . She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets (Erlangen, Martin Luther). This slur was delivered not against the scientific community, such as it was in those days, but at the Roman Catholic humanists and the Catholic hierarchy’s understanding of reason. On the Bible side, the English church martyr William Tyndale perhaps said it best with his statement before being strangled and burned at the stake under the authority of King Henry VIII (at that time still a Roman Catholic): I defy the Pope and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!

The consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century must be acknowledged as well. The rapid advance of industrial technology is made possible through the discoveries of science. The original saboteurs were not religious fanatics; they were hardworking peasants and craftsmen who were losing their jobs because of the advance of mass production and what was perceived to be the growing tyranny of machines. These issues have not disappeared, either. The modern ideas of liberation theology and wage slavery stem from the original zeal of the saboteurs. Environmentalism even pits science against science, and is a growing favorite of Western liberalism.

Regarding the present growing antipathy between science and religion, it is not so clear how to answer the basic question, Why? It can easily be said that the development and use of the atomic bomb has put the question of the efficacy of science and the sovereignty of reason in a different, less than enticing, light. It is not so easy to determine why Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, Adventism, and Vatican I-ism predate not only the invention of the bomb, but both World Wars and the continuing hi-tech and lo-tech slaughter of the world’s population that continues today. It is as if those who initiated these movements knew, somehow, that—even if there was no weapon of ultimate destruction in their time—it was inevitable that there would be one in the not-too-distant future.

The classicist and the romanticist see in the examples of ancient Greece and Rome factors, which influence and even control the pending demise, or end, of life as we know it, and they seek to find solutions from those examples on how to avoid the pending apocalyptic demise of Western civilization and the world itself. There is much wisdom to be gained through the study of the philosophers and statespersons of past greatness, yet, in a sense, the solutions found tend to be the causes of the problem in the first place. There is a kind of intellectual narcissism that emerges in the study of our studies of the past, and there is a glaring negligence in the contemporary repellence to consider anything biblical to be of any value whatsoever.

There is a democratic quality to Greek philosophy that appeals to contemporary American cultural idealism, but the possibilities of any real manifestation of democracy in our postmodern, gadget-driven culture are far removed from any speculative likelihood derivative of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, or the pre-Socratics. The pragmatic appeal of Roman philosophical thought and policies is strong in America, whose culture has often prided itself on being truly pragmatic in every sense of the word. However, there are two limitations with respect to the source that guarantee a quality of frangibility to the idea of pragmatism in the Roman sense. One, the Roman Empire and culture were, after all, imperial. The idea of claiming imperial prerogatives is not one that appeals to the traditional sense of American freedom and self-reliance. Two, the rapid improvement in the human ability to make real changes in the existential circumstances of human life tends to encourage the metamorphosis of classic pragmatism into the urgency and demand of practical expediency along with a growing uneasiness that we are helpless to stop the flow of unchecked innovation.

A sense of urgency has characterized every major international decision since the summer of 1914. The idea of making decisions and being decisive suffuses all conversation regarding leadership in the postmodern world. Now is already too late. The ideal citizen, parent, corporate leader, or religious believer is one who decides his or her way, moment by moment, through a threatening, complex, and ever-changing world. Being indecisive has replaced the ten cardinal sins as the most unforgivable. Such incursions into the Western lifestyle, such as Buddhism, with its emphasis on the value of contemplation, are iconic of a felt need to change the status quo of the urgent; but even the practice of contemplation is subservient to the real world. Contemplation is understood primarily as a means of dealing with the inexorable urgencies of daily life. Popular Christianity fares no better. One is urged to spend just five minutes of quiet time with the Lord, reading the Bible in the wee hours of the dawn. If one does this, everything it is supposed and promised will unfold in glorious and utterly harmonized purposefulness.

In other words, the felt need for some kind of contemplative interlude is urgent! The dominance of the urgent is evidence of an almost universal feeling that time has run out. The common complaint that there are not enough hours in a day speaks to this existential state of mind. Readiness for war, an urgent necessity, leaks into the state of constant warfare. This is true not only in the military sense, but in every other social sense as well, including interfaith relations. That Sun Tzu’s Art of War became a popular business model should come as no surprise.

These cultural and existential realities speak to the conceptuality and the imperatives of the biblical apocalypse. It is a milieu that encourages, embraces, and almost demands extremism. In an extreme environment, there is really no room for reasoning things out. The very notion of rationality becomes steeped in this sense of urgency. The rational and the decisive become confused and indistinguishable. The slow, smooth, predictable movements of the heavenlies becomes the spontaneous, unpredictable in principle spurts of subatomic blips from within and back into the invisible cosmic soup, which constitutes the fundamental reality of each one of us and everything we absorb through our senses.

Edward Gibbon’s paradigm set the tone for the study of history in his epic work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The idea of a decline and fall is now with us in every examination of political, national, and international schema ever since. Our moral and social thermometers are calibrated to pick up on the minute changes of social custom that might indicate a decline or a way to avoid a decline. It may be that we, in the West, are doomed to experience a decline of some sort, because that is what we are all habituating ourselves to look for! Accompanying the perception of a threatened decline in culture or civilization is the consequent, urgently felt, need to identify a culprit and eliminate that culprit’s influence on the common life. There is a pressure to every political thought, a sense of imperative that can tolerate not even a hint of compromise. No one wants their empire, from the personal to the international, to fall like Rome did. The present world myth is that if we all get on the same moral and cultural wavelength, such a fall can be prevented.

In cosmic terms, ultimately the fall of our culture becomes equated with the universal fall of humankind. The shrinking world is becoming as tiny as a quark, and its vibrating parameters are as difficult to track as the location of a quark at a certain velocity. Nevertheless, the Gibbon paradigm keeps the pundits busy with desperate efforts to do just that. Gibbon, a member of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century, was commenting about affairs in his homeland, the British Empire. He might now say that that empire of which he was a citizen reached its peak of power and influence in the nineteenth century. In other words, in the twentieth century, it declined. It committed the cardinal sin of failing to be decisive anymore in the affairs of the world. There is no recovering from the unforgivable sin. Somehow, it is felt. Somebody must keep the flame of civilization burning. It is an urgent imperative played out even in the special relationship between England and the USA today.

The heart of the contemporary Christian apocalyptic tradition is that the end is an unavoidable given. The ideas of constraining it, encouraging it, avoiding it, tempering it, or otherwise mitigating its effects and consequences are not a part of the apocalyptic message. These causes must be gleaned from a reading of the other component literatures of the Bible. Sadly, it is a message integral to the overall teaching embodied in those literatures, which has been ignored, hyperbolized, explained away, overworked, or otherwise abused in modern hermeneutic and exegetic disciplines. Its subtle use of the broad human concepts of time and place, urgent and eternal, and the imperial versus the spiritual are blended into a tonic that can be refreshing to the soul . . . and safely ignored. This systematic and quite scholarly ignoring misses the point of an apocalyptic interpretation of human existence: that civilizations do not grow, thrive, and decline and that they simply begin . . . and end.

The power behind these beginnings and endings is referred to in the Holy Scriptures as God. From the story of creation to the baptism of Jesus, beginnings and endings are at the center of the biblical ideas about life. These beginnings and endings cannot be truly understood, even less accepted and lived out, without the incorporation of the apocalyptic sense that holds the narratives of scripture together like the stout bindings of a library book. Without the infusion of apocalyptic stories, fragments, and complete writings, the other pages of the Bible fall out and become mixed up on the virtual library floor. The biblos becomes an indistinguishable pile of papyrii.

The following essays are not intended to represent a thorough analysis of the concepts and themes of the specifically apocalyptic writings of the Bible. My intention is to clarify certain apocalyptic patterns in the canon of scripture and in the finalized accounts of different milieus of the Bible, which, when revealed, will add a dimension to the interpretation of these milieus and teachings. I do not believe any interpretation can be said to be thorough or complete. Apocalyptic literature and nuance is intended to be a form of communication that reveals while concealing, and that conceals while revealing.

He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbor; but a man of understanding holdeth his peace. A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety (Prov. 11:12–14, KJV). Hopefully, I will not end up, to coin a phrase, as a talebearer, but I will be of some service in pointing out for the reader at least some of the many apocalyptic counselors there are to be found in the Holy Scriptures. How one chooses to be counseled by these counselors is not mine to exalt or despise.

Section 2: The Mountain Moved

The logo of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a modern Pentecostal denomination, illustrates the four divine roles of Jesus that are at the heart of Foursquare belief: the Savior, the Baptizer, the Healer, and the Coming King. These beliefs constitute a whole, such that the designation of one does not and cannot exclude any of the other three. They are like the four singular directions on a compass or the four directions of indigenous spirituality. Having four central beliefs is analogous as well to the early Christian understanding of why there are four Gospels. Fourness is an ancient sacred concept that conveyed meaning in days of old and in prehistory that it does not convey to the postmodern world in which we live.

The early church father Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, wrote, It is not possible that the Gospels can be greater or fewer in number than they are. Just as there are four regions of the world in which we live, and four universal winds, and since the Church is disseminated over all the earth, and the pillar and mainstay of the Church is the Gospel, the breath of life, it is fitting that she have four pillars, breathing immortality on every side and enkindling life in men anew. From this it is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, who sits upon the Cherubim and embraces all things, and who was manifested to man, has given us a four-fold gospel embracing one spirit (The Faith of the Early Fathers, W. A. Jurgens, ed. /trans., Collegeville, 1970, p. 91). Irenaeus was the second bishop of Lyons, succeeding the martyred bishop St. Pothinus in the year

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177 or

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178" (ibid., p. 84).

Irenaeus’s reliance on the sacred number 4 speaks to the Greco-Roman milieu in which he lived. The bishop came from Syria, the Roman province of which Judaea was a part. Syria was the heart of the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom, one of the most significant successors to the empire of Alexander the Great. Roughly outlined, the Seleucids dominated that region, which included the ancient bridge territories between the Tigris-Euphrates valley and the Nile River valley. It also included the ancient breadbasket of Greek civilization, Asia Minor (now Turkey). The chief rival to the Seleucids was the Ptolemaic kingdom, which embraced the territories of ancient Egypt. This rivalry, in many ways simply an extension of the ancient conflicts between the two agricultural heartlands of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, continued unabated until the Roman conquest.

Rome absorbed and co-opted the Hellenistic blend of the ancient Eastern and Western worldviews, and, by virtue of its permanent conquest of Syria and Palestine, the new border between East and West was drawn between Rome and the re-emerging Persian culture of the Parthians and Sasanians. This reemerging culture also bore a share of the old Hellenistic world of the Greeks. The modern and romantic distinction between East and West—geographically fixed at the boundary formed by the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the vast waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean region—is a notion that obscures the cultural fluidity of the near Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean environs.

Trade and tension between the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and the Nile basin mimicked the historical and cultural situation of Jerusalem and Samaria in biblical times. The ancient Fertile Crescent was not fecund with perishable commodities alone; it was a place of constant warfare between great powers, which rendered life between buffer zone of Palestine an insecure and anxiety-ridden reality. Jerusalem and Samaria were desired cities for conquest, not because of their inherent value as the urban centers of a prosperous realm, but because they stood astride the trade routes connecting prosperous realms. The value of these trade routes did not change with the changes of the names of surrounding empires.

The designation East and West only becomes meaningful after the establishment of Roman domination in the Eastern Mediterranean region, and this designation makes sense only because the internal trade routes of Rome spanned the Mediterranean Sea rather than the deserts of the Middle East. All roads did not lead to Rome in the Middle East; they connected Egypt, Syria, Babylon, and Persia one with another and with the worlds farther east, India and China. All sea routes, however, led to Rome.

The beginnings of the modern and postmodern hiatus between science and religion can be traced to this era. Jerusalem and Samaria, the geographic source of biblical wisdom, became a border region in the Roman era. The geopolitical status of Judaea and Samaria, once an icon of the cultural connective tissue merging Egypt with Babylon/Persia, became an imperial backwater. This cultural and demographic shift in the moral and spiritual status of what we now call the Holy Land is the tectonic upheaval behind the creation of the Tanakh and the Gospel. Like the vast Himalaya mountain range between Tibet and India, a very high spiritual mountain was formed, impressive in its literary scope and in its exalted view of a certain society in space and time, but virtually unclimbable by all but the most dedicated of adventurers. The wisdom of Greece became the justifying intellectual stimulus for Rome; the wisdom of the Bible, now relegated to the status of an annoying insect of past delusions, became a geopolitical problem.

Irenaeus, a descendant of Hellenized Syrians, prophetically anticipated the later proverbial saying, If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain. The early Christian missionaries did indeed move the conglomerate mountain of Ararat/Sinai/Olivet into the far western reaches of the Roman Empire, as far as not only Gaul but Spain and Britannia as well. Rome, as a distinct world and worldview, did not cherish the memories imbedded in the Holy Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. That transformation would come much later and in a seemingly inevitable manner. For the time being, the imperially incoherent conflict between Christians and Jews threatened to become a pestilence capable of shaking the foundations of Pax Romana. The absorption of Greece was a relatively straightforward process. The sizable chunk of spiritual substance that we now refer to as the Judeo-Christian tradition was like an infusion of virtual cosmological plaque, a cultural anomaly that eventually managed to block the hardening imperial arteries of the later Roman Empire.

Rome added a pragmatic vitality to the philosophies of Greece. The Greek trend had already been moving away from speculation about the intentions and character of invisible gods toward a more direct, hands-on approach regarding the presenting realities of empirical space. Had the wisdom of the mountains not been transposed from the scruffy and distant boundary region of empire to its very heartland, what we call history would likely have resulted in a civilization far different than the ones we honor and remember today. What that difference would look like is anybody’s guess. The mountain moved, and since then the heroes and sages of Western civilization have been attempting to climb it. What was coming to an end, the milieu of the ancient and classic worlds, was also what was beginning to become: the milieu of the Hellenistic/Roman world. The change was decisive.

Section 3: Truth in Discontinuity

I was a breech baby. I did not know this until I was in my mid-twenties when my mother told me about it. She said I was turning blue and choking. When she told me this, I connected that birth trauma with a very uncomfortable and restrictive emotional disorder I had suffered from all of my life. When I got excited about something, not even overly excited, I would immediately start to gag. The only way to stop the gagging would be for me to suppress the excitement. Dealing with this problem was always a very private thing for me. I never told anyone, and it had nothing to do with my mother’s revelation to me. Her remark was just a passing motherly thing to share. Connecting the birth trauma with the emotional disorder seemed obvious to me, but being aware of the logic of the connection did not make the disorder go away.

By the time I was made aware of the birth trauma, I had constructed an inner compensatory world that enabled me to deal with the fear of choking. I am sure that my compensatory end runs contributed to what a superior once called my morose Germanic personality. That superior was the priest who was to sponsor me to study for holy orders at an Episcopal seminary! He had his own issues regarding Germans, because his leg was blown off in WW II by the German enemy. Our relationship became so twisted that he eventually withdrew his support, leaving me to fend for my own with that set of inner constraints known as a calling from the Lord. There are always many dimensions to the occasion of a failed relationship, but the invisible interface of damaged memories, I think, is a big part of any relational breakup.

After I was married, finished with seminary, and doing that calling in my first denominational assignment, I was encouraged, for a variety of reasons rising out of unforeseeable professional difficulties, to attend a healing conference. The particulars of my healing belong in another discussion: The fact is that I experienced relief from the trauma in terms of a healing of memories. Since that year, when I was thirty-three years old, I have never experienced the gagging again. On the other hand, I have spent every day since then reworking the compensatory structures I had built up from infancy, indeed from prenatal times. These structures involved my sense of self, personal identity, spirit, value, and everything else that goes into the formation of a healthy, human personality. Of significance also is that the layers of theological training and ecclesiastical experience that had been paved over those structures suddenly became, in practice, wrong. One might say theological potholes formed in my highway of personal destiny, sometimes becoming sinkholes, and every once in a while, a bridge would collapse.

I ran across a Facebook plea the other day for the restoration of a Mississippi River bridge on old U.S. Route 66. The picture of that bridge struck me as being significant to my existence as a person. I was seven years old when my family took a road trip from Michigan to California following Route 66. Ever since then, a fleeting visual, sensate, and emotional memory of the experience of crossing the Mississippi River near St. Louis has stuck with me. I remember the diagonal girders passing by my field of vision, and I remember the gradual rise of the approach over the vegetation along the riverbank. I remember the sudden appearance of water, and the disconcerting knowledge that my family and me were now suspended high above deep, dangerous and very wide waters. It was an almost mystical experience for that seven-year-old who I was.

I have tried to recognize that bridge in pictures of the area, but none of the examples really touched my memory until that Facebook post. That picture fits my memory. I am convinced that it is the bridge involved in that childhood experience since then, a tangible memory which would not leave me. On