The Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair?
Status Confessionis and the Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis
Douglas Blake Olds
September 9, 2025 [updated September 22; October 9, 2025]
Status Confessionis: Memoria or Brand?
The Lamb’s victory is not analogical, aesthetic, or dramatic, but ethical, kinesthetic, and accountable. The Church is now in Status Confessionis, between supplicating covenant and apostate spectacle. The time for spectatorship is over; the eschaton is now.
The claim of Jesus provoked resistance unto crucifixion: not because it was unclear, but because it was ethically absolute: the Golden Law of Love was a duty as well as an expansion of freedom. His victory on the Cross is not a static drama but an ethical rupture—an expressive moment that awakens responsibility. It demands not aesthetic accommodation to a standing image of glory but to ongoing moral repair: will we choose to mend what we've broken, for the witness and good of others?
When public “memorials” become partisan catechesis—such as Charlie Kirk’s on September 21, 2025—the church must name the moment as a Status Confessionis between truth and the man of lies working satanically (2 Thess 2:7-12)--where Gospel is counterfeited: Jesus-talk deployed to bless lying power blocs, soothe guilt in its adherents, and perform forgiveness without repentance or repair. These spectacles erase the wounded and enthrone the legacy of the in-group and its lies, equating brand with righteousness.
True memoria names harm, claims responsibility, and begins justice. Anything less is blasphemy by pageant—an apotheosis of legacy that mimics Christ without cross-bearing.
The confessional choice is this:
Is the Gospel the victorious grace in Christ on the cross, who supplicates forgiveness where revenge might be expected—thereby opening the way of justice?
Or is it the Punitive Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) doctrinal claim that Christ bears God’s wrath on the cross so we need not—thereby relieving us of ethical repair and putting the full weight of justice onto the very moment of death on the cross so that no more work for obligatory justice or accountability looms in history--that Christians might sit and watch the drama of good and evil without commitment, only seeming secure in a final victory and pardon?
Only one path leads to resurrection. And only one message to sanctification: The Lamb’s victory is not the suspension of judgment--transacted and rerouting God to another substrate "in heaven" where a prior violence ruled-- but judgment's transvaluation into responsibility and repair, committed to the Creational substrate.
The other path? PSA is a simulacrum of human justice trying to avoid judgment by tying to machined counterfeits--condemning--of algorithmitized ethics, It is anathema (Gal. 1:8–9). PSA is a counterfeit doctrine that comforts spectators before the glow of ensorcelling screens (Rev. 18:23), as justice groans for incarnation (Romans 8:22) not silicon junkets and space gauntlets.
When the Antichrist takes a seat of authority in God's temple (2 Thess. 2; Ezek. 40) atonement is weaponized to shield impunity and divert accountability, and AI simulates discernment without covenant, the Church is called to confess again: the Cross is not theater—it is supplicating grace into responsibility, a rupture for the sake of repair. Make no mistake: God has and continues to monitor our heart and state of repentance in this confessional moment!
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This essay begins by contending with Balthasar’s Theodramatik not merely
to correct an aesthetic imbalance but to radically reorder the Church’s
eschatological self-understanding. It declares that ethical volition activated, not witness
to a sublime drama, is the true grammar of the Lamb’s victory in history.
Against aesthetic quietism and analogical spectatorship, it affirms poiesis (the hermeneutic of early Antiochene Christianity) as
the mode of covenantal repair, and insists that grace without accountability to
justice is a hollow cross. In a time of dechordate AI and digital pharmakeia (Rev. 18:23) of perceptually-degrading sin, the Church stands in Status Confessionis—and the
choice is no longer dramatic but ethical: Will we repair what we have broken?
What is the role of the Church amid technocratic collapse?
Can grace be claimed without ethical accountability?
Where is victory actually
instantiated—in doctrine or embodiment?
Immanence as justice: Will we
repair what we have broken?
“The more the love of Jesus for his
people is revealed, the more it stiffens their resistance, until they resolve
to kill him; so too he weeps for Jerusalem, since it has failed to recognize
its hour and is doomed to be left desolate (Luke 13:34). The only difference
between this and the Book of Revelation is that, in the latter, the law of heightened resistance is validated
in the context of the Lamb's established victory. Here, world history is not a
demonstration of progressive integration - Augustine was right - but is
characterized by an increasing polarization; moreover it becomes harder and
harder to tell the poles apart, because of the counterfeiting activity of the
anti-Trinity and the anti-Lamb (Rev 13:11). In this way we can grasp something
of the paradox of the Book of Revelation: the Lamb can appear as the ultimate
Victor and the Lord of all history, while at the same time he is depicted as
riding out to do battle and to do slaughter (Rev 19:11). On the secular stage,
the prior announcement of victory would be regarded as destroying all dramatic
tension; on the apocalyptic stage, however, it is this very victory that causes
the real dramatic action to spark into flame...Evidently, this withdrawal from historical truth into visionary truth [by the Book of Revelation] was the only possible way of presenting a more universal panorama[.]”
--Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1994. Translated by Graham Harrison. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: Vol. 4, The Action. Sec. I.A.1, emph. added. Ignatius Press.
Here, HvB is correct about the necessity of resistance and polarization of discernment, of which the sapiential tradition of The Book of Proverbs notes a binary choice to always choose
the good, which is the righteous “solid food” of Hebrews 5:13-14. Christus Victor. Perfection preparatory to mission.
However, he gets the trajectory of the Spirit in world history wrong. The Spirit does not disintegrate, but material relations lacking Spirit can and do, including because of generational throughput and covenanted tensions--compromise, complicity, corruption, and missed or refused opportunities for repentance--until the victory is completed in society awareness. Like other adherents to Analogia Entis, even granting HvB’s dramatic emphasis on action and freedom, his apocalyptic-visionary staging locates victory’s grammar in static revelatory form rather than in vectors of covenantal repair. Revelation is for him crystalized in moments of glorification rather than telically staged by "event," his term for Protestant misfocus of revelation's aesthesis outside the church where it "ecclesesially binds" (see source at footnote [2], sec. I.3). Thereby, his work missequences the ethical and the aesthetic. His ecclesial praxis relies upon aesthetic closure--"to pay[ing...] attention to the historical form of God’s glory," displacing reparative obligation by his idea of spectatorial assent. Yet victory must be verified in repair--ethical displacement--in contrast to "the objective evidence by the interior experience (which to this day remains the tragedy of [Schleiermacher's] Protestantism)" [2].
What is necessary no longer is simply a correction of dramatic--watcher--theology that has been too quick to demonize, but a radical re-centering of eschatology on ethical teleosis through embodied virtue—one that decisively privileges the sequence of deontological immanence over aesthetic theories of transcendental revelation as subjective discernment. From drama to ethics of conative metaphysics, rather than from aesthetics to the apprehension of the sublime as static form. An ethics revealed in world history no longer suspended in dramatic tension and anticipatory messianism (e.g. Rosenzweig; Darbyite "second coming") but ruptured by kinesthetically realized volition (e.g. 2 Peter 3:11-13, etc.). Spiritual maturity no longer awaits the drama of a catastrophic eschaton by quietist “participation” in systemic forms that pragmatically align with the drama as a watcher, a theorist; but rather as a poet cultivator—through the radical poiesis of covenantal responsibility—launching the repair of what mess we ourselves have made. I.e., to manifest the virtue accountability to justice (Olds 2023). When both the dark angel adversary and the antichrist are removed from the world, then any tendency to watch the drama of good and evil play out in history is mooted. Where drama may have tested the imprint of Spirit and character of training, now is the time to flow from impression to expression--from discerning "substantia" to Trinitarian ousia--expression ethical and aesthetic flowing by grace to other hearts from the initiating heart.
Conative metaphysics is immanent taxis, moving as the centrifugal
The world having
entered this last dark age of dechordate AI (Rev. 18:23), where the miasma of
antichrist seeps into individuals by the pharmakeia of electronically mediated
sin—their all-in-all perceptual degradation—will be shatteringly overturned by
ethics as a foundation: Christ by virtues turned outward becomes all-in-all as it repairs inward. Axiology as Doxology. Thence God becoming
all-in-all by overthrowing all pragmatic accommodations with antichrist,
turning every cognitive and kinesthetic experience into willing the good for
the neighbor—by heart and then by repairing what had been laid down onto the covenanted substrate through the
accretion of historical evils.
Thus, the church is now in Status Confessionis:[1], a theological emergency moment that reorients history, when the Church must publicly confess the gospel against foundational error that threatens the heart of Christian faith. Between the triumph of Christ's supplication on the cross that universalizes incarnation, or the Caiaphasian performance of nationalist sacrificial logic that disincarnates the One for the incarnation of the state. Silence, neutrality, or institutional maintenance in the face of this dichotomy becomes betrayal. Hereby to answer the onlooking and questioning world by proclaiming our answers: does the cross absolve all sins, including failure to resist pragmatic accommodation with antichrist? And most importantly, does such absolution involve a transaction? With what and by whom? Where is the victory, in the heart or through the mind, or in some pre-theo-ontic situatedness in and by a substrate of violence behind the veil?
Ethical Demand and Deontological Accounting: The Golden Imperative as Animating Principle of the Status Confessionis
Doctrine of Original Sin Realism is mooted by Satan's eclipsing: The simulacral, defensive, mimetic, grasping at the brass ring of lesser evils “Christian identity” is not so readily condemned by the more scrupulous. Even if, for argument’s sake, such identity--empty, soulless, entropic, mean-spirited, dishonest--could produce the required “badge of fruits,” the performative standards it nominally holds itself to purportedly limit the evil that it might otherwise have carried out. Thereby the otherwise dismissive scrupulous join the party of those who go through life inclined and hitched to the purportedly “lesser” evils.
[updated 10/9/25] Excursus: The Dramatic Katechon — Watchers of “Lesser Evil” Christians
What the ethically scrupulous might call prudence—the church’s tolerance of “lesser evils” in the name of strategy or social harmony—is nothing other than the secular, pragmatic katechon operating through political conscientiousness. The restraint and restrainer (2 Thess. 2:6–7; cf. Deut. 17:14ff), understood as providential patience, becomes in our age a kinesthetics and ideology of delay—a theological permission slip for inaction. Until now (see below), when God's adversary becomes known AFTER the apostasy (2 Thess. 2:3) summarizewd by January 6, 2021 that removed the restraint of katechon by way of heretical Christians and blasphemous forms.
Katechonic logic under the banner of Theodramatik mistakes history’s tragic stage—its analogia entis--for the grammar of poised salvation. In Balthasar’s drama of revelation, the world’s tension between good and evil is sustained as necessary spectacle—grace and sin locked in a sustained rehearsal. The Church, by watching and participating liturgically in this cosmic play, supposedly “bears witness” to the divine victory already accomplished yet endlessly replayed on the substrates of the past: the sandstone temples, the garb(l)ed priesthoods, liturgical reenactments, crucifixes held up at celluloid monsters, religiously performative politics as rituals of saint making (Charlie Kirk: see below), etc.
The katechon has often been substantiated in the juridical language of “law and order.” In Romans 13 and Titus 3, Paul frames the State as a provisional restraint on sin—a ministerial sword upholding civic peace and protecting the good from the violent. Yet by the twentieth century, the figure of restraint had reversed its polarity: the Adversary had become mediated through the very State that once claimed to withhold and restrain him.
Carl Schmitt, Nazi jurist and political theologian, reinterprets the katechon through the sovereign exception, where the suspension of law becomes the sign of authority rather than its negation [7]. His katechon as a nihilistic metaphysical gambit enabling the man of lawlessness.The restrainer thus mutates into a self‑authorizing power, holding chaos at bay by threatening it. Leo Strauss, meanwhile, transforms restraint into an epistemic device—his esoteric teaching restricts truth to an elite few, concealing revelation for the sake of political stability-- his esotericism is simulated katechonic concealment. [8]. In both, the katechon is transposed from divine patience into technocratic secrecy, from moral vigilance into the management of lies.
Culture collapses if people fail to share a body of common texts. You simply can’t communicate. You don’t have common images. Yet Strauss’ esoteric and elitist program of seclusion and sequestered philosophy leads that very collapse, vitiating the katechon that holds back the antichrist and mob.
Consequently, the modern State oscillates through a machiavellian dialectic of deceit: alternately restraining and releasing into influence the man of lies (in this case, with his own branded, name spooring Bible), mirroring Satan’s own circuit in Revelation 20:1–3, bound for a season only to be loosed again. Except when Constitutionally checked, which has been vitiated now by tying the unbound strong man--the man of lies--to popular sovereignty (see below) [11].
Balthasar’s diverts immanence’s responsibility and accountability by beauty—the captivating restraint through a sublimity of form. Grace is rendered as spectacle rather than summons to alignment. In this vision, even evil becomes a necessary player in the cosmic pageant, tolerated so that the audience may sense the depth of divine glory.
The political fruit of this theology is the Christian who votes, defers, or excuses “lesser evil” for the sake of collective balance, believing that the performance of discernment is itself faithfulness. The scrupulous with their gimlet eye cast, while wary of fanaticism, sanctify moderation as if the balance fulfilled ethics. But by this, grace no longer humanly acts—it aestheticizes its own hesitation. The katechon becomes not the hand of restraint against chaos and apostasy, but the excuse of those unwilling to act as Christ acts: ethically, immediately, kenotically.
To adopt this Balthasarian drama in terms of divine analogy is to mistake the cross for theater lighting—to see revelation as tableau rather than transformation. The Lamb’s victory then becomes a set-piece, not a demand; the Church, an audience, not a body of repairers. Against this, the Gospel proclaims not spectacle but supplication that becomes accountable, not standing statues of strategic forms and stage craft but active ethical volition that repairs.
In the grammar of conative metaphysics, the delay between recognition and responsiveness ever becomes shorter through the pacification of kinesthetics that otherwise sublimates ethics. The moment of need abolishes the katechon as other and makesit the subject. “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2)—not when conditions are perfect, not when the drama completes its act. Christ’s call is centrifugal, not centripetal: it bursts from the mind’s theorizing into the world’s heart, dismantling every stage that once substituted contemplation for accountability.
As presidential advisor Stephen Miller let slip on October 8, 2025, in a televised interview [10], the Antichrist’s claim to “plenary authority” in the unilateral use of domestic military force against “enemies” and in support of “friends”—during the ongoing U.S. government shutdown, reveals something stark: the katechon that once restrained the lawless one has been the U.S. Constitution itself—its checks on illegality and its distribution of power. For two centuries, sovereignty in the United States had been vested in the people and their assembled representatives. The seat of executive power was, by design, constitutionally limited—empty—except under the emergency conditions of declared, foreign war.
Now, in this “last hour” (1 John 2:18) and in anticipation of the “day of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 2), that restraining force hs been lifted. The katechon—never merely a metaphysical delay but a covenantal structure of lawfulness—has been profaned by its inversion: a strong man who claims sovereignty over the people and who no longer submits to law but claims to embody it, thus fulfilling the logic of the anomos, the lawless one. His exclusion from national representation of his enemies replays the sins of the "bad kings" of Biblical Israel and Judah denounced by the prophets. Would be kings who claim God's authority over a people may never exclude, by defining, internal "enemies," determining who thrives and who dies. For to do that is to set himself up as God in the temple of heaven on earth (2 Thessalonians 2:4).
The so‑called “lesser evil” is the last idol of the Dramatic Church until the AntiChrist is made known. Lesser evils aestheticize prudence that believes history retains its villains to keep the story interesting and the stakes trivial. But Christ is not plot tension. He ends the play by walking off the stage, breaking the fourth wall, and addressing the audience directly: Follow Me. Not Him.
[updated:] When a public “memorial” (Charlie Kirk's on September 21, 2025) turns into brand management, performative tears and hugs, and partisan catechesis, it’s necessary to name the current Status Confessionis: a moment when the church must publicly distinguish gospel from counterfeit apostasy (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10), and Christ from antichrist. The latter instrumentalizes Jesus-talk (cf. Matt 7:21-23) to ratify power blocs (national, familial, or partisan). Where forgiveness is performance--soothing and perceptually degrading symbol tied to rhetoric that avoids naming where concrete repair is necessitated: but requiring no repentance that would validate and verify by repair of the in-group's share of irresponsibility and divisiveness. Eulogies that erase victims (the wounded, the poor, the out-group) while enthroning a “brand.” True memoria names harm, irresponsibility, and culpability that repents to undertake greater share of justice work. Anything less is blasphemy by pageant, where the apotheosis of "legacy" equates the deceased with the fulfilled perfection of Christ [3].
The collapse of moral accountability beneath simulated ritual--where covenant is replaced by expedient form--is anticipated by Psalms 10, 12, and 50 and contrast with Psalm 139.
Christus Victor atoning names not theatre but the release of a people into repair. The adherent to PSA--punitive substitution by Christ on the Cross [5]--has little to motivate him to move from meme ("saved by faith alone"). This is the architecture of impunity: a form of religiosity without presence, confident in divine blindness:
Psalm 10 (NIV):
Verses 3–4, 11, 13:
3 He boasts about the cravings of his heart;
he blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.4 In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
in all his thoughts there is no room for God.11 He says to himself, “God will never notice;
he covers his face and never sees.”13 Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself, “He won’t call me to account”?
Rhetorical simulation and semantic loss of control by dechordate unaccountability collapses ethics as the foundation of human essence: trust in one's own speech displaces trust in covenant; persuasion replaces righteousness. The liar and the unaccountable to justice are stuck inside human nature's original sin:
Psalm 12:
Verses 2–4:
2 Everyone lies to their neighbor;
they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts.3 May the Lord silence all flattering lips
and every boastful tongue—4 those who say, “By our tongues we will prevail;
our own lips will defend us—who is lord over us?”
Directly rebuking simulated religion where the form of worship remains cemented, but the ethical covenant is abandoned in proximity to a horde chanting/meming a false atoning security ("Jesus paid for your entire sin debt by taking on the full measure of its wrath"). God exposes the hypocrisy of sacrifice divorced from justice, and the mistaken belief that divine silence implies complicity--divine patience is mistaken for consent; where meme and unwarranted apotheosis are weaponized against covenant:
Psalm 50:
Verses 8–9, 16–21:
8 I bring no charges against you concerning your sacrifices
or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.9 I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens.16 But to the wicked person, God says:
“What right have you to recite my laws
or take my covenant on your lips?17 You hate my instruction
and cast my words behind you.18 When you see a thief, you join with him;
you throw in your lot with adulterers.19 You use your mouth for evil
and harness your tongue to deceit.20 You sit and testify against your brother
and slander your own mother’s son.21 When you did these things and I kept silent,
you thought I was exactly like you.
But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you.
Psalm 139 links God's creation of his creatures to an intimacy in life that unifies and supports recoveries of wholeness. By contrasts, algorithms fragment wholes by Boolean distinctions--yes/no logic gates that override complexity, contradiction, and mystery-- invidiously fracturing and reshaping data shreds from the past that deadens and reduces patterns into designer-determined types that are shadows, recapitulating or resurrecting of no one ever: Psalm 115, these are "idols… they have eyes but do not see." AI systems anihilate uniqueness by generalizing personhood into type and taxonomy: likeness without presence. Algorithms regurgitate "intelligence" stripped of context: chordate soul and kinesthesis, moral trajectory, and covenantal obligation.
Psalm 139 affirms a God who knits—a God whose knowledge is bodily, intimate, and teleological. By contrast, algorithmic systems dissect what was woven, recombining shreds into typologies of unbeing. Their outputs resemble no one living, no one forgiven, and no one loved. They resurrect nothing. They parody the virtue of recollection in a substrate of silicon. But divine knowledge recalls for healing. Iconoclasm begins by disowning simulated knowing and reclaiming perception as covenantal attentiveness to the flesh and soul of the neighbor.
This is the confessional choice for the Gospel: between Caiaphas's treachery and the Christus Supplicans on the Cross. If the individuated ethic of mid-modernity is not grounded in covenanted hermeneutics—one that discerns the qualia of the gospel as the Gospel of the Cross (supplicating grace [Luke 23:34] in victory's resurrection) rather than the atoning dogmatic claim of Caiaphas nationalism (transactional substitution [John 11:50])—then epistemology simply overtakes metaphysics to drown it. A covenanted hermeneutics of mid-modernity seeks not only to reclaim theological interiority, it discerns the qualia of the Gospel itself—between the Gospel of the Cross and the doctrine of Caiaphas transactionalism. One leads from immanent, voluntary but accountable repair; the other appeases [4] transcendental violence with procedural substitution for the sake of national survival. Thereby organically tying national survival to the substrate of retributive violence. The former begins where Elisha takes the plow. The latter institutionalizes substitution as systemic function, severing the heart’s conative (will-directing) claim. The Gospel is heart-led, relational, repairing; the other is blasphemous doctrine to appease violent transcendence through procedural sacrifice, the logic of Caiaphas’s transacted expedience. The theological middle space of stuck modernity is not burst by spiritual compromise but the substrate of cruciform becoming by iconoclastic rupture, dedicated to the substrate's eternity by the Spirit: the hell-voiding, new heaven and new earth.
The state of exception for tolerating debased--necromantic! [6]--fruit becomes a misappropriated Thomistic double effect draped in Augustinian sin realism; how moral exceptions (like lesser evil reasoning) become, in a Schmittian sense of friending and enemy-naming, structural obligations. Such simulation doctrine and naming churn depravity without filtering it out. This is junketeering, crepuscularly crapulent, sewer religion structured to Platonically badge what drags dregs up from the past.
The ethically scrupulous refraining from condemning performative lies (Matthew 7:21-23)—not out of approval, but from the false and grim concession to a destabilized gospel-- thereby underwrite the extension of a simulated moral order. All such simulation tips at the equinox accompanied by eclipse (September 21, 2025), where gnostic forms of goat and wolf are separated by and from the shepherd.
The time of guild negotiation is over. The philosophers have all failed.
The eschaton is now, and the Gospel of Truth survives the cataclysm.
NOTES:
[1] “A situation in which the church must take a decisive stand for the integrity of the Christian gospel against a fundamental [foundational] error. In such a ‘state of confession,’ the core of the faith is threatened, and silence or compromise is no longer an option.” See Eugene Teselle, “Theological Table-Talk: How Do We Recognize a Status Confessionis?” Theology Today, 45(1) 1988. https://doi.org/10.1177/004057368804500111
This status signals "kairos," an event or season to awaken, rupture and challenge ethical complacency in the Church. It was evoked by Barth's and Bonhoeffer's urgency explicit in the Barmen Declaration (1934) that rendered the nazified church as outside the Gospel. Licitly antichrist.
[2] Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 2009. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: Vol. 1, Seeing the Form. Edited by Joseph Fessio and John Riches. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ignatius Press. II. B. d. iii.
[3] To tie Christ to Departments of War and demonize empathy and preach Punitive Substitutionary Atonement as gospel, have no doubt: this blasphemes God's Spirit, making forgiveness transactional and violent, nationalized to and weaponized by an antichrist: the lie of the national substitutionary doctrine of Caiaphas in John 11:50 and more lies flowing therefrom.
Even Satan never fouled his nest like this. I have little doubt that God has destinies prepared far worse
than Hell.
Thus, this soteriological distinction is not merely semantic but spiritual warfare, now concluded: whether theology reinforced domination—outsourcing the heart and its moral demands for procedural expediency that destroys covenantal community—or guides repentance, which builds the Kingdom through interiorized responsibility actuated externally (i.e. immanently). Only the latter establishes metaphysical resistance to simulation and prepares the way for the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:1–5).
[5] For a more extended Biblical and technical account of Christ's atonement in comparison with prior OT forms, see here. And for even more extended justification of translating the hilasterion cognate lexeme and the correctness of Christus Victor where theories of sacrificial atonement is both justified and not, see Olds (2023, Appendix III).
[6] See especially footnote 3 of my essay on AI's necromancy now intentionally serving as a pharmakeic mode (Rev. 18:23) for political sorcery.
[7] Hitler's lawlessness. Schmitt identifies the katechon as the force delaying catastrophe through sovereign authority, or as the enemy force that hasten catastrophe by refusing apocalyptic wisdom. His vision of katechon fuses theological temporality with legal-political sovereignty.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Polity Press, 2008, 61; 92).
[8] Strauss’s implied katechon is a philosophical elite who withhold destabilizing truths for the sake of order and security. The katechon is thus inverted by Strauss into the release, not restraint, of the man of lies (John 8:44; Proverbs 19:9).
See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Free Press, 1952), esp.introduction and chapter 1 on esoteric teaching:
“But as regards the contradictions caused by the latter requirements they always are deliberately made, and the author must take the utmost care to hide them completely from the vulgar” (p. 68). Truth restrained by pedagogical secrecy (esp. p. 73) rather than apocalyptic disclosure: “The purpose of repeating conventional statements is to hide the disclosure, in the repetition, of unconventional views. What matters is, then, not the conventional view, constantly repeated, which may or may not be true, but the slight additions to, or omissions from the conventional view which occur in the
repetition and which transmit ‘chapter headings’ of the secret and true teaching” (p. 64 discussing Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed).
[9] C.H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (1936).
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/business/media/stephen-miller-plenary-authority-cnn-conspiracies.html
[11] “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” - From John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798 (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102 )
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