There are many people I know who were hurt by the modern Christian Churches and so they left. There are many who were hurt by the modern Christian Churches and who did something worse than leave: they stayed. And then there are folks like me, who realized the Church was guarding something good, something wonderful. Something the Church was utterly unworthy of. The more investigation I did the more obvious it became that a great mangling of the truth had happened. Words that meant one thing before a certain point meant exactly the opposite now. Whole concepts had been removed and subsequently forgotten about. The sheer enormity of what happened to Christianity in modern times cannot be understated: we have forgotten almost everything that mattered, that made Christianity The Way. I have attempted, over and over, to communicate the staggering loss we modern Christians live in.
Unfortunately I've been coming off more like someone who just realized they didn't have limbs in a land of paraplegics: I've been screaming about wanting to run when everyone else I know is asking me what the hell legs are. All I've really had to communicate with are experiences outside the pale, along with niche podcasts and books I keep being told are too academic to readily consume. I can't just assemble this stuff into a whole, not yet. Everytime I try I forget something. The picture hasn't been assembled enough by me to do more than point at parts of the missing whole that are so obvious that everyone has seen them, even if they don't know what it is they're looking at.
Fr. Andrew Damick agreed apparently. Cause Arise, O God exists. It is amazing. The amount of work that went into writing this 146 page masterpiece is staggering; it's not quite Michaelangelo drawing a free-hand circle, but it's in the neighborhood, and that can't be claimed by any other English-language book I know of. It's simple, clear, and accurate. You usually get to pick one of those qualities, nevermind all three!
Fr. Damick starts with what the genre evangelia is: the pronouncement of a change of regime. Typically announced after a military conquest, evangalia were an announcement of who the new ruler is, who they conquered, and what one needed to do to be on the side of the new regime.
You'll notice I've been calling the secular version evangelia. This was a genre; nobody presumed to be giving the definitive news. Just news about their particular conqueror.
The Gospel writers call their works Evangelion, THE Good News. This was a definitive political statement. No other regime would work. This was the definitive regime change. Christ had conquered the demons who enslaved us, sin, and death. I'll sum up Fr. Damick's points here, but I highly recommend you read the book for yourself. It would be very difficult to simplify something that the author had gone to such great pains to make simple already.
First off we need to define what Fr. Damick means by demons. Most of us think of humanoidish figures with pitchforks and in fire engine red. Fr. Damick does not even bother to address the caricature, instead painting the picture of a group of non-physical beings who were given charge to watch over certain geographical groups. They all failed in their task, instead enslaving us, their charges. Demons are beings who interact with thoughts the way you and I interact with spades and other tools; they are abstract in the strictest sense of the word. A demon's goal is to make you like it, to mold you to its ideal of a good person, which is themselves of course! If you need something more concrete pay attention to the next time someone starts talking politics. Notice how everyone starts saying pretty much the same things, in the same tones of voice, with the same glazed-over eyes? Christianity teaches that there is something on the other end pushing those buttons. And you have a physical world equivalent: Facebook and Twitter. Essentially imagine if Zuckerburg had a few millennia to learn human behavior and you're pretty much dead on.
For the record I don't think Zuckerberg is a demon. I do think his tactics are quite inspired, however. Nothing like dopamine kicks to ruin a person.
The majority of the Gospels show Jesus Christ exorcising demons everywhere He goes. One cannot read the Gospels without seeing Christ conquering the kingdom of Hell. To ignore this part of the Gospel is to gut about half of it, if not more. If you don't want to believe that Zuckerburg is a cheap copyist that's fine, but understand the existence of demons and angels is an explicit part of the Evangelion.
Sin is not just breaking a rule. That's not really what it means. It means to break things, to be broken. It is addiction to oblivion. It is to love darkness itself over light, isolation to relationship, internal weakness to strength. Humans can't get enough of sin. Being made out of nothing, out of dust (which is chaos), humans can't get enough of our base material. To sin is to toss around the raw material that we are meant to grow beyond as if we were a Congress of Baboons.
Christ conquered sin as well. He refused to give into the addiction, into the dopamine kick of embracing chaos. No one else has ever done what Christ did; enter chaos and not be tempted by it. And by doing this Christ defeated sin.
The last enemy is Death. Death was originally given to us as a means to change. The Medievals were right to call Death by its name of change; without being mortal we cannot become something different. Inherent rot is a blessing, insofar as we then have a choice as to what we change into. But humans are meaning constructing machines; meaning does not play well with Death. By rising from the dead Christ subverts Death itself, changing it from a dead-end to a passage.
There's a lot more going on in these 146 pages. Each page is packed with another nuclear bomb on our pathetic post-19th century worldview, where God is nothing more than a mean old man "saving" us in the same sense a drunken father "saves" his children by refusing to beat them. Or, in the case of Calvinism, taking Satan's theology and dressing it up to look like God's.
It's a quick but great read. For me, personally, it's sorely needed. A nicely laid out and simple introduction to actual apostolic Christianity simply does not exist in English. And that is a worldview I think needs to be spread. Christ has conquered all those who would want you to not be yourself, the addiction that is sin, and has transformed Death. You may accept this truth or reject it.
But it is not going away. What will you do with the Evangelion?
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