The Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair?
Status Confessionis and the Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis
Douglas Blake Olds
September 9, 2025 [updated September 22, 2025]
Status Confessionis: Memoria or Brand?
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 PSA 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 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? It 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.
Make no mistake: God has monitored your heart and repentance in this confessional moment!
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This essay contends 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 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 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 two 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. 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) 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—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 "substantia" to Trinitarian ousia--expression ethical and aesthetic flowing by grace to other hearts from the initiating heart.
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 anti-christ,
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. 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 anti-christ? And related, does such absolution involve a transaction? With what and by whom? Where is the victory, in the heart or through the mind?
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:] When a public “memorial” (Charlie Kirk's on September 21, 2025) turns into brand management and partisan catechesis, it’s necessary to name the current Status Confessionis: a moment when the church must publicly distinguish gospel from counterfeit (2 Thessalonians 2:9-10). The latter instrumentalizes Jesus-talk 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.
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.
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 anti-Christ.
[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.
C.H. Dodd (1884–1973), liberal NT scholar, argued that hilasmos refers to the removal of sin (expiation), not the appeasement of wrath. See: The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (1936).
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.
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