Yesterday’s Reformation's Day Eschaton and Today’s for All-Saints: Awakens Our Apocatastatic Jubilee
Covenantal Repair as First Imperative
In the tremors of our late-modern unraveling of hand and
mind, repair becomes the first role of human trusteeship. Not repair as
nostalgia’s retrieval, nor repair as institutional continuance by pieties of
triumph, but repair as the trajectory of covenantal fulfillment—a turning of
volition toward the neighbor, the earth, and the derailed histories whose
trajectories are now collapsing under the weight of simulated ends. This repair
is not deferred to a future date; it is demanded by judgment now, under the
light of an eschaton already arriving. As human reason frays beneath
neuromantic hallucinations and infotainment's Lethean drift, we approach not merely advanced and too-early
senescence but float in its Stygian passage into unbeing masked as seamless,
technocratic progress.
I. Judeo-Christian Reconciliation and the Apocalyptic Ethic
Paul prophesied it (Romans 11); the algorithm botches it. Judeo-Christian reconciliation is
not an optional exercise in tolerance but the primary sign of cosmic repair. It
is not only theological alignment but anthropological recognition—the same
Shema-Christological anthropology, differently punctuated. Tikkun olam and the
Golden Rule are not visions placed in divine opposition (“law v. grace” as per
Rosenzweig et al.) with differentiated agencies and goals but functionally and
globally equal obligations to envision repair and care. Their convergence
resists ethnic abstraction and challenges the Church to reckon with its own
desacralized particularism. No new Jewish messiah will appear to override this
obligation; the unfolding of salvation history has named Christ as fulfillment,
not to erase but to launch us all to the apocatastatic renewal that vectors a detergent into the pleroma, that brings God-all-in-all (1 Cor 15:28).
II. Anthropological Unity in Christo-Shemaic Terms
There has never been an anthropological divergence between
Jew and Christian except that forged by conceited biology--miscentering
metaphysics in Theoria and cognition rather than kardia and care. Christ
fulfills the covenantal anthropology embedded and sequenced in the Shema: a
heart-led, conative orientation toward God and neighbor. In this, the eschatological moment is not
abstract but proprioceptive. The human essence is called not to overcome by
transcendentalizing conceits but to embody this anthropology in expressions and
practices of apocataphatic centrifugal relation and centripetal repair.
III. Virtue as Harmonized Sequence
The eschatological horizon does not abolish Old Testament
virtue but sequences it within Christic meekness. The harmonizing of ethical
codes is not supersession but fulfillment. The virtues of meekness—long abraded
by imperial theologies of thymic wrath and institutionalizing
domination—returns as the golden ligament binding covenants old and new in a
body poised for restorative action. This re-sequencing undoes analogical
hierarchy and its ghosts of Roman and Natural Law and replaces them with
proprioceptive consilience--an awareness of communal rebalancing--tethering somatic awareness to eschatological ethics
of deontological virtues spreading the Golden Rule. The Kingdom of God’s
mission and spread by trustees imaging the divine’s eternalization on the
regenerating Earth and its covenantal, peripatetic, circumincessive Spirit.
IV. Washington's Invitation and the Constitutional Katechon
In the arc of providence, even constitutional polities bear witness. George Washington's invitation to the Jewish people to the new
Constitutional nation is not merely toleration but a katechontic signal: a
withholding of collapse through recognition of shared covenantal bearing. The
American experiment, flawed though it is, contained within it an eschatological
thread—a remnant aware of grace and the necessity to structure moral
legislation against ever-lurking tyranny, executed by katechonic sovereignty that restrains it [1]. An experiment however thinly veiled beneath
Enlightenment clothing—a reconciliation of covenantal diasporae of Jew and Christian involves a
critical rereading of American covenantal potential in its constitutional poiesis—not
triumphalist but remnant-aware. The present eschatological test is whether such threads will
be cut or rewoven.
V. Spectacle or Repair: The Theological Crisis of the Eschaton
As ecclesial bodies follow society’s drift toward simulated
spectacle—aestheticized liturgies, punitive atonement, performative procedure
masquerading as social justice—they risk aligning with the counterfeit lamb of
Revelation. The spectacle simulates repentance and peace making but demands no
transformation. Anti-christ comforts the spectator while perpetuating systems of
impunity. The true eschatological rupture is not visual triumph but ethical
restabilization: a call to embodied poiesis and kinesthetic grace aligned with
Golden Rule accountability.
The Church's status confessionis [2] is not about doctrinal purity but about
rejecting the blasphemic notes about God’s “nature” that abandons the work of kinesthetic
pacification that preludes repair of the earth. Instead, blasphemies
dress as doctrine for the continuance of the old orders of hierarchy and violence. The crisis is both of belief
and action. The solution reverses these [3].
Will the Church receive the Lamb's victory as dramatic closure by
sabbath of toleration alone or as the beginning of covenantal reorientation and progress?
The eschatological question, then, is not whether the Church
will confess correct propositions, but whether it will participate in the
Lamb’s victory as an inaugurative event—a call to covenantal reorientation,
ecological and social repair, and conative praxis. It frames this as an urgent
moral choice, pressing the Church to embody the Logos not in spectacle but in
poietic justice that courses by renewal.
Conclusion: Toward an Apocatastatic Poiesis
The most profound exploration of human eschatologies (Dante,
GM Hopkins) are proprioceptive, embodied, covenantally
accountable, and repair‑oriented — not
despairing (Rosenzweig, Adorno), entropically hermetic and withdrawing (Simone Weil, Celan, TS Eliot),
universalizing (DB Hart), nor primarily aesthetic and quietistic (Balthasar,
Benjamin). A suitable poiesis is called for and named here: Christopoiesis as
reconstructive and repairing, where God becomes all-in-all. Not only in cognition,
or even launched therefrom, but in autonomic and kinesthetic inner imaging that
processes to outward imaging the divine eternal essence--by the human trustee bridging
toward the covenantally recharging cosmos.
Apocatastasis is not a deterministic or universalist telos,
but as a covenantal, ethical, and ontogenetically proprioceptive unfolding of
divine repair in history’s continuance. It resists gnostic or aestheticized
closures of salvation and instead affirms the restoration of all things through
relational participation in the Christic Logos. This restoration is not imposed
from above or orchestrated through spectacle, but emerges through accountable
conation—through re-embodying acts of grace, memory, and responsive love that
realign creaturely perception to divine presence. History itself turns to
become the field of apocatastatic possibility—not the resolution by borders the
agonistic victors. Ethical awakening reorders time, reverses alienation, and
reattunes the broken human sensorium to the vibratory grammar of creation's
intended peace. This is an eschatology of renewal through kenotic
participation, not coercive or mechanic theodicy. The apocatastatic future is
not an endpoint but an ethos—a commitment to justice beyond spectacle, a
poetics of kinesthesia over systems of delay, enclosure, or formalist freeze.
It begins with the recognition that the eschaton is not merely approaching but
is already unfolding wherever repair interrupts entropy. All Saints stand not
as icons of perfection but as motile reminders of accountable immanence. Reformation
Day, then, is not memory but charge: to tear veils, to reconcile, to repair.
This Jubilee year’s harmonization of Reforming Saints has come like a thief in
the night to bring a forgiving dawn: iconoclasts of reconciling light and covenant renewing dropped into the
false lure of systems and debt framings of entropy promising continuing orders
of eternal night.
For Lands Disgorging Death
On this templed tercet and turnstile bone
we should find revivifying flesh,
texturized and text-tiled
into high-yield cultivar,
fertilized for a briefest season by:
slopulacrature’s—
intersubjective a-greed arrivals,
only to unintended celebrity,
weeds rooted in a Kantian-led wizardry
watered by the moon,
inflected by Nietzsche’s loudenings
that blows out the windows—
and both in joint partnership
marketing metaphysics of ungated obligation,
that experimented with dogs and pigs to fly,
but settled with their virtuals loosed and slickened,
chased into slop’s farthering.
Linking autonomy with divine dignity
was Satan’s offer in the garden,
where nihilism—as negative identity—
submerges by Ador-no’s-ation.
Philosophers write to console
by abstracting, reducing weight loss,
and novelists to system epic—
sourcing lucky-dipping:
stochastic page-turners
seeking destiny’s thumbprint.
But poets write not to disinform
but to transform,
by verse diagnostic the first sword—
torqued by a held-high angel sword
leading to another land—the cool eschaton in two swords piercing,
like staved hands spread apart, twisting swords as palmed greeting,
shouldering nets thrown alee and not weather's beam--
through settling mist pithed and pythic by ruptured language
toward a better land that disgorges its redtented, repented dead (Ezekiel 37)
easing into account unchained and unblocked, direct, directed and directing.
Their heirs Adam and Eve’s have to leave
their decreated beetle diggin-nity
through dependence in death’s shell
they mistake for humanity’s essence—
senescence bound to:
entrancing children,
Torah exits,
repentance
that awakens covenantal throughput
in the better day
already sunshining its re-ga[l/t]ed styles.
NOTES:
[1] See the excursus on “Katechon”
[2] See other parts of the essay linked in note 1.
[3] Douglas B. Olds, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology Beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023., esp. Introduction on Episteme v. techne.
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