That Blessed Apocalypse

On new beginnings and the will to the end

Not too long ago, I stumbled across I Don’t Care About the Issues, a short article by notable contemporary philosophy Michael Huemer. A fellow anarchist, I was intrigued to find out how Huemer saw the American election (when we were still in that tense state prior to Trump’s election and the rest of us elsewhere in the world had to wait with “bated breath” over the “most important election” of someone else’s lifetime playing out again for the third time in 12 years, blasted into our minds in technicolour over and over again—again) from his right-anarchist position and how the potential discord could be seen as an opportunity for whatever particular empowerment of the private sector he sees as liberatory for the common man. Instead, I found a rather surprisingly sincere concern that seemed to betray the anarchist ideals that Huemer had espoused in the past:

I hear that maybe Trump (/Harris) is better on some of these issues. But I don’t care about any of that.* Even if Trump was better than Harris on all of those issues, I don’t think that matters. I think that what matters is the broader conduct by one of the candidates threatening central norms of American democracy.

[*Of course I care in the sense that I prefer better policies over worse. But I don’t think one should decide how to vote in this election on that basis.]

I’m sure to the vast majority of people, this position is relatively uncontroversial and possibly even tautological: it is better for things to be better than for things to be worse, dressed up to suit the political situation at hand. However, the paradox here, my reader, is in an anarchist—no less an anarchist capitalist—prioritising the defence of American democracy over the possibility of social change in the emerging “state of exception”. Classically, anarchists of all walks have viewed liberal democracy as something to be resisted or, at the very least, viewed with contemptuous indifference. Yet, here we have an anarchist coming to the defence of the process by which the majority wields power over the minority and “the media” gains a disproportional power over society.¹

Finding ourselves uncomfortably shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Max Stirner and Lysander Spooner, the Kierkegaardian anarchist might question exactly how basic these anarchist principles are to Huemer’s view of the world: is this not an opportunity, in the supposed madness to come, for a genuine lunge forward towards a world where his anarchist-capitalist political philosophy could be implemented? In this “state of emergency”, where the individual and collectives of individuals find themselves out from under the omniscience of the state in its own position of uncertainty, is this not where the agent of possibility stretches out and makes changes to the world around them? What constitutes a caesura², if not this?

A more extensive engagement with Huemer and, at the same time, this particularly bold and potentially idealist anarchist approach will have to wait for another time. I am sure that Huemer would be unimpressed with the typical “what if?” attitudes that plagued the anarchist thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, where a kind of “inevitabilist” attitude to social change was always in the background of those who yoked themselves to the idea of anarchist organisation—regardless of whether the “state of emergency”³ at hand seems to be an opportunity for genuine positive social change, the overspilling optimism of those humble lovers of freedom always saw all opportunities for change as opportunities for anarchist change. A “hope against hope”, we might say. However, this exposes a deeper problem in Huemer's attitude: if all radical change in society requires some kind of “state of emergency”, with which “state of emergency” will we get off the fence? Does this kind of consequentialism and “hedge-betting” lead us to wonder whether radical political philosophy or possibly even modest discussion around social change is all sabre-rattling?

---

Apocalypse, the Worldly Delight

Christians will for the end of the world. This, despite its apparent uncontroversial nature for those who have spent their youth with one eye on scripture and another on scriptural commentary⁴, often raises a concerned eyebrow from those in earshot of such an utterance—how can we possibly love anything when we look forward to its absolute destruction?

Thinking of Micah and his Idol in Judges 18, it is possible this critic wonders how we could possibly love this world when we have taken his worldliness from him. Despite the clear importance of eschatological thinking in all Christian approaches, we can sometimes overlook the importance of understanding the centrality of the world’s end for Christianity to make any sense at all. This world will end and it is necessarily heading towards its end; the Lord does not deal in contingencies, but necessities that cut across the best-laid plans in the vice of men. Therefore, we should accept that the world in totality will end and that end is out of our power⁵. Of course, this will for eschaton is not a will for destruction—instead, it is a will for salvation, a unification with our Creator in which, in redemption, everything is made good again. For S. K., in his iconic The Sickness Unto Death, this was the τέλος of all human life: “there was no human suffering so dreadful that he wished to remain ignorant of it lest it disturb his joy or increase his sorrow, because his only joy was to provide the suffering one with rest for his soul, and his greatest sorrow was when the suffering one would not let himself be helped.”⁶ To turn to eschaton is the mode for understanding the importance of one’s life qua an individual loved by God and capable of loving God as well as the promise of the rest that is both possible now and will be possible in the end.

Maybe, these people hold the right sentiment in a way we’re not recognising.

The fanaticism of our sandwich-board-wearing, microphone-wielding opposite, united in the will to follow the Christian faith, might only be theologically incorrect in their expectations on the matter of a time frame; a demand for a “show of power” that is prior to something more immediate.

Self-Overcoming in Becoming Overcome

Apocalypse, then, is something that is in the blood that was shed for Christians and something that must be emphasised—ends themselves are not evil, therefore we should prepare for the good that will emerge in the end promised to us through God. This curious problem, untouchable by the secular thinker, sits at the heart of the political theology: that this life is not all that there is and, as such, the notion of death remains at once fearsome in the maximal degree but also the foothold by which we learn faith. As has been commonly done by many of the great theologians, we join soteriology and eschatology to discover that not only are we saved from the necessary fate of the human race in the escape from death and destruction, but we are also drawn into the promise that this shall, like all things, pass into salvation. As opposed to our contingent human lives which “might not have been”, there is a necessary connection between the very beginning and the very end that God shall bring about; regardless of whether we turn to think about Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Samson, Christ, Anna, Peter, Mary—what their lives and their stories tell us must always be situated within the story of God’s majesty, or, rather, the eventual end of that story. There is no weight so great that it cannot be lifted, even if it appears that nothing can possibly lift it; there is no suffering so great that it cannot be assuaged, even if it appears that nothing can possibly end it. A promise that, at once, seems almost callously flippant and deadly serious for the individual in that state of emergency.

“What is decisive is that with God everything is possible. This is eternally true and consequently true at every moment. This is indeed a generally recognized truth, which is commonly expressed in this way, but the critical decision does not come until a person is brought to his extremity, when, humanly speaking, there is no possibility. Then the question is whether he will believe that for God everything is possible, that is, whether he will believe. But this is the very formula for losing the understanding; to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God.”⁷

Even in moments of absolute collapse, where the individual stands immobile before the world and—like the Eleatic philosophers who saw all motion as impossible⁸—can’t bring himself to change his life, there is always a possibility of doing otherwise. Towards these ends, we are aware that there will be an end where we overcome this despair, where we find our rest in God. If absolutely nothing else, the Lord God reaches into creation and lifts the Hebrews out of Egypt; the Lord God becomes flesh to lift humanity out of its damnation; the Lord God shows us that all things are possible, even when there appears no way out—and they shall be possible, even when there appears no way out.

Echoing the pseudo-Kierkegaardian concept of “the exception”, Schmitt’s infamous call for the sovereign to seize power over the state in the “state of emergency” might seem like an approach we could endorse. However, for S. K., it risks the worst kind of slavish idol-worship in crying out for eschaton and granting that devotion to a person; the state and the sovereign take on the “God-function” of the society plunged into panic by the “state of emergency”, seizing the power at hand and guiding the unwashed masses through the challenges of modernity. As with Micah, they see the return of their favoured politician or insurgency group to be evidence of divine intercession, a portent that justifies their wishes and desires for the juridical power of the state to match their particular outlook on life—essentially, paganism in that “what is good and God-given is what benefits me”.⁹ By suspending one’s own God-given possibility to become themselves in their free expression of their natural capabilities and their subjective choices, they give themselves over to “the Crowd” that pleases them most and allows them to disappear from under the burning light of God; that light which demands that only one, the self, appears before the Lord. No, we reject Schmitt here: it is not a matter of finding the sovereign who can guide us through the “state of emergency”, but rather the identification of the exact opposite—making the caesurae of the state’s power the mode by which Christians become existentially Christian.

“Life is a succession of repetitions, but such repetitions create something new. Such a position raises the possibility that the very act of repetition opens up to a new sphere of living, a sphere that for Kierkegaard must be embraced.”¹⁰

Self-Overcoming in Becoming

However, apocalypse is not then simply a matter of the end of all things—it is also the end of particular things. Indeed, scripture is not only concerned with apocalyptic imagery in the universal sense, but the apocalypse in the immediate, individual sense; where the necessity of eschaton’s march rips up the social order before us and allows it to be created anew. Again, the Hebrews in Egypt found apocalypse over and over again as their world was ripped up before them in order to lead them to something greater—to the Promised Land. And yet, throughout this liberation at the hand of the Lord, they attempted to turn away from him (e.g., Numbers 14:4). The choice is clear: either we are like those who wish to elect their own captains from amongst them and venture back towards our destruction, turning our back on the Lord and refusing salvation by biting the hand that freely offers it to us or we venture onwards like Moses, in our imperfection and misunderstanding, accepting that which comes and attempting to hold fast to the “gift” handed to us necessarily. The choice is clearer still: either hold fast to the world in recollection, attempting to fit our new world, unique and never before seen, into an older image that gives us comfort in its familiarity, or turn towards the freedom of Christ in repetition, wielding our pasts as the soil from which the flower of faith emerges, as homo viator¹¹ that sojourners out into the desert, out into apocalypse eschewing the comfort of received wisdom or intellectualised complacency. Like Abraham and Christ, we shall ask: will we allow “the Good” to become fossilized in ritual and stagnancy, slavishly handed over to some messianic figure we have appointed for ourselves?¹²

As with so many Kierkegaardian themes, we find that the tension which time provides us in relation to particular events leads us into bizarre contradictions and epistemological challenges that expose at first an irony before revealing humour; a revealed truth that only becomes known to humanity in the end times¹³, where our comfort—genuine comfort—can only come through discomfort pushed through until the paradox is alleviated¹⁴. As God’s continuous revelation reverberates through reality, we should expect this divine pulse to remind us of that early essay in the Kierkegaardian opus: the edifying in the thought that against God, we are always in the wrong.¹⁵ In this sense, apocalypse takes on a very different meaning: while the end of the world is often seen as an unaccountable and untenable evil that looms over us like some kind of “the Big Other”, we might instead view this “breakdown of intelligibility”¹⁶ as the impetus which provides us with the grounds for growth; to abuse the work of a Russian anarchist, we might say that destruction is the mode for creation.

The End is Nigh—in Repetition

In a sense, the crescendo of the Kierkegaardian spheres is not found in the idea of a “perfect life” that is found in the unity of the aesthetic and the ethical. Indeed, this error, alludes S. K., is one that has been found throughout the Christian history and leads to a kind of either assimilation or apostasy. The point is not that Christians are perfect—we might even suggest that the faith presupposes that Christians are no better than anyone else, but they are, at the very least, aware of that fact—but rather that: i) perfection in Christian love is possible in this world, this horrible world of suffering, pain, anguish, and observational comedy, and ii) that our duty, as Christians, is not to become “perfect” in opposition to the imperfect and fallen world, but rather to act as the light to the world in our exemplifying corrective and to sink as salt into the very fabric of the world around us—as ourselves, as Christians.

Job’s example, an example to all men of all kinds, plays an important role in S. K.’s Repetition—itself, the source for Schmitt’s Political Theology

This is a difficult position to broach, but such are the perspectives that come from the single possible viewpoint sub specie aeternitatis. We are aware of what has come before us and recognise that the high point of Christianity now sits thousands of years away from us¹⁷, so what good could possibly come from declaring ourselves the contemporary high point of Christian life? We fall so short that any positive comparison would be a false assessment of ourselves and a failure to understand God’s otherness. In that sense, our critique of society is not where we show ourselves as “the Good” unrecognised by the unwashed masses, but one where we draw upon the “negative concepts” of God¹⁸ to present a critique which is totalising.

We have not selected our “favourite oppressed”¹⁹ to defend against a chosen “enemy” as doing such a thing is just another blasphemy, just another strike out at God’s majesty, when we declare that it is us that will decide who constitutes “the elect”; no, the idea that we could ever justify ourselves in declaring ourselves judge, jury, and executioner of those who God no longer loves is a claim from beyond the pale. Rather, we are aware that our place in the world is impermanent, prone to error, and open to the future. “God be merciful to me a sinner”, simul justus et peccator, may just protect us from ideology in showing us that those who have attempted to walk in Christ’s footprints in the sand²⁰, each one prepared to utter those words or primed to learn how to utter them, were all loved by God, were in error before God, and were met with their apocalypse in time. Their stories can be drawn upon, but to recreate them would be idolatry; we must repeat them in the present, which, paradoxically, makes the repeated anew in its uniqueness, not simply attempt to recollect what they are as it was. Again, as a strange mirror image of assuming the election-function, to hold those great thinkers who came before us as the certain highest high of Christianity would be to assume God’s position in deciding who is deserving of salvation.

“They are embarrassed by obeying God because he is God; and so they obey him—because he is a very great genius, perhaps almost the greatest, greater even than Hegel.”²¹

A Life in Repetition

Through his book Kierkegaard and the Climate Catastrophe, Holm makes frequent use of a story about the Crow tribe—in particular, the breakdown in the intelligibility of the way of life for a warrior community. When colonial might brings indigenous life to a halt, rips up the very foundations that ground it and turns it towards the new and imposed, apocalypse reigns; what was once understood still remains seemingly valid, yet the question that was being answered has somehow changed:

“[T]he truly courageous warrior who could face anything in battle might be utterly unequipped to face a reality in which battle becomes irrelevant.”²²

As Revelation 3:15, we might consider the breakdown here not being in the conscious decisions of the Crow people (or any other individual or collection of individuals), but rather that we are forced from the heat or frigidity which gives our beliefs and practices purpose in this world; reality itself makes us irrelevant by forcing us into lukewarmness, forcing us into irrelevance and indifference. Here, the political radical should stand to attention: if their faith in their chosen radicalism is in this position, as they so often come to be, their radicalism is consumed into the all-consuming maw of mass society and “common sense”; they are robbed of the heat, the salt, that they attempt to provide the world with and are forced into an eccentric rambling on the edge of the status quo. As the Crow, forced from their mutual intelligibility which gave their life structure, the individual in modernity may discover that their apocalypse has come due to the “crisis ordinariness”²³ which cycles our lives over and over through apocalypses which destabilises any ground for social change and then either incorporates it into its function or dismisses those loud sounds from the empty glasses into lukewarm indifference. In regards to Huemer, we might consider this meek response to the cycle of our societal “vortex” as akin to a kind of pessimism about the possibility for change—indeed, a retreat from the terrible situation which opens up the earth for new seeds seems by making perfect the enemy of the good. We might wonder how one ever learns to swim without first getting into the water.

“...[w]hen the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is more or less absurd to him”.²⁴

S. K. found himself in a Danish society that stood at a crossroads—as a society of “the ethical order” with its state church and post-monarchial bourgeois culture of the prim and proper, he found himself running up against the “spiritlessness” of the “Mass Man” in both the church and the wider society. Even the supposed radicalism of Bishop Mynster, as much as a bishop can be a radical at all²⁵, was merely an expression of the received order that allowed seemingly contradictory parties to coinhabit the echelons of power. As such, he could not really be understood to present any kind of radical “pulling” that would take this nation through its apocalypse into the new or towards “the good”. In the oppressive system of received morality, cultural stagnation, international precarity, and the first signs of the waning power of the church, S. K. assumed the role of the criminal²⁶ that sneaks into the spaces that society accidentally creates and frees up the reality underneath “the System”; the suspicion of the “state of emergency” is a choice we make, whether we flee like rats into the safety of recollection or leap wholeheartedly into what may come because we can always do otherwise and this life might always be other than it is²⁷.

Here, we find the aesthetic-like elements of the Christian faith forcing itself into the inconvenient blindspots of the state and making freedom its goal—it is always possible to live as a Christian and to become a moral Christian in the sanctification of faith, even if the law of the state drives one towards sin and immorality. We might gleefully flee from risk and whip up sentimentality amongst “the Crowd” through our self-congratulation that our idols and our priests have been returned to us, blissfully unaware that our complicity in viewing “the good” as a temptation²⁸ when evil arises places us against the very thing we call out for. In that sense, the freedom of faith gives breathing space to the believer under the cosh of the established order—even if one’s social standing is at stake, there is always the divine “no” to reject the forces of conformity in favour of the divine expression; even if one’s legal freedom is at stake, there is always the divine “no” to reject legal dicta in favour of the divine mercy; even if one’s life is at stake, there is always the divine “no” to reject legal dicta in favour of the divine call to something greater than the “paper money” of legal squabbles, up to an including outright martyrdom.

The notoriously difficult and simultaneously simple concept of repetition here comes about again: we always have the possibility of reliving, reinvigorating, our values in the present moment when that present moment should arise. While Christianity offers us no philosophical or sociological framework, it does provide us with the grounds for creating values that we hold as “negative concepts” for evaluating the situation, i.e., we understand that omnipotence negates the idea that any other thing could be all-powerful over us or that omniscience negates the idea that any other individual could be correct to the point of certainty in relation to our ideas, or as τέλος which “draws all unto” action that can’t be confined to an ideology (John 12:32). By taking up the Christian faith in the very moment that calls for pacifism, peace, and love for the neighbour seem impossible, we reinvent God’s plan as was received into a new formulation where we can rise up, over, and against das Sittlichkeit in order to pursue “the good”; the apocalypse, like all apocalypses, becomes a promise of the good that is yet to come.

Political Theology under the Shadow of the End

This leaves us in a curious position: what does it mean to live as if we will for the end of the world? We have some historical accounts and philosophical musings to lean upon, but neither of these actually help us a great deal in the uniqueness of our historical moment: it is not until we existentially engage with repetition do we find that the Christian teaching will unfold before us as we unfold through time as creatures made in God’s image, as subjects with the capacity for possibility. Someone who heavy-handedly rejects this basic notion of the joyous acceptable of eschaton on the grounds of some thinly theorised notion of Christian “nihilism”²⁹ might do well to remember the difficulty—the essential difficulty!—that comes with accepting that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17); if we can accept that even the end of everything, the total and final full stop to existence itself, the mode by which we understand all values and the dirt from which the flower blooms, is an act of love from the Lord God, then we are fundamentally capable of recognising that “every good gift and perfect gift” may not be something which we are terribly pleased about on initial receipt.

Therefore, we must think, my reader: what does it mean to become Abraham and to accept the apocalypse opening up before us joyously?

From a Babylonian to a Nazi

As Jeremiah, we stand on the precipice and know that destruction bears down upon us; although the children of God are a concrete community on this earth, scattered to the corners of the earth, “the world” itself still acts according to its own nihilist desires. As a sickening perversion of the aesthetic sphere, “the world” turns the aesthetic desire to reach out into the world into a demand for a show of power³⁰, a sign of victory in this world, regardless of what this desire is—and the Lord, hiding His face in sorrow, the weeping God who cries out to humanity, allows the march of the nations to overcome Israel. If this shall be your choice, may you live with your choice when eternity nails itself to you. Blessed is he whosoever believes Him when the suffering comes—and when the suffering comes, it is the Christian who has the hands to do God’s work.

As Kierkegaard, we stand on the precipice and see the church fail to become what it might be; this is not to cast judgment against church-goers, but rather the recognition that our “negative concept” of the body of Christ, wherein we are blessed with the comfort and the vigour of His freedom, is not realised in this world; not only is every individual tasked with becoming himself, that he ought to become who he is already, every church is tasked with becoming itself, that it ought to become what it is already. Standing on the precipice and ready to see the fall of an empire, like all other empires, the Eternal cries out in time; the individual rises up, over, and against the established order to escape the quiet subjectivism of the despairing conservative, who mourns the loss of his idols and his priests, and the noisy collectivism of the liberal “Public Sphere”, which suffers not one individual to oppose it in a meaningful way³¹ and attempts to unyoke itself from the very earth of material reality that gives it life. The caesurae are exposed into which the Christian slips—it is possible again to become an agent of the faith, as it always is.

As Barth, we stand on the precipice and see the Nazis take office; here, in this terrible moment, when all hope is lost and the world as we know it is coming to an end, the Christian can emerge. His imploring that theological students maintain what they are doing became the realisation of the Christian ideal in reality: do not be thrown against the rocks or into revolution by the world, no matter how evil; “...the theological task of preserving the biblical gospel from ideological take-over is much more important to the course of history than is the political effort to destroy Hitler's regime.”³² “The world”, no doubt, views Barth’s words here as alarming: how could we possibly deprioritise the resistance to Hitler? Of course, “the world” can’t see that the political resistance to Hitler is subsumed within the religious commitment to the gospel, strengthened and emboldened by the scriptural grounding of Christ’s love; it is the offence to say that God’s love is prior to and paramount over any call to violence, even the call which allows us the praise and congratulation of “the world”—but nevertheless, our grounding is found in grounding ourselves.

If Christianity is a matter of realising one’s God-given potentiality through a love of God and a love of the neighbour, held up by the miraculous resurrection of the spiritually dead through the blood of Christ, i.e., the coming-together of the justified and sanctified in “the caravan” that sojourns onwards towards eschaton, then the realisation and intensification of “the world” is a fact of the matter that we must contend with; suffering exists and, against suffering, the Christian becomes the faithful healing touch for the other; evil exists and, against evil, the Christian becomes the agent of God’s redemption in reality. To be clear, it would be remiss to imply that the Lord God elects a Hitler or a Stalin from amongst the masses in order to bring about evil in accordance with His plan to punish the innocent; sometimes, discussions on the problem of evil descend into this kind of “God-blaming” from both apologists and critics, which is to say that the faithful lose their footing and allow the interlocutor to set the terms of the debate. Instead, where God allows evil to bubble up and rise to the surface, knowing that “ot only is the ability to inflict harm necessary for moral freedom, but the degree of freedom is proportionate to the degree of harm one can inflict.”

Imagine beings X, Y, and Z with powers to inflict varying types of harm. If the worst harm that X can inflict on others is to cause them mild embarrassment, the worst harm Y can inflict on others is to cause them to experience moderately severe physical pain, and the worst harm Z can inflict on others is to bring about their complete psychological disintegration and death, it seems that, other things being equal, Y has greater moral freedom than X, and Z has greater moral freedom than either.³³

If God is to grant us freedom, this fearsome capacity involves allowing us to go beyond the merely unpleasant and, instead, to allow the freedom to do all which realises our possibility in relation to God and to the other. To echo the harrowing meditations of a Holocaust survivor, we might suggest that the potentiality to kill the other is the very freedom we must contend with in order to have the freedom to save the other in any meaningful sense.³⁴ The great emergent evil is the stage that is allowed to be set for us: will the Christian answer the call?

We emerge from the dust, still alive. That alone is the truth that we have unearthed in the ashen waste of the world that has been, having passed through apocalypse: that all things shall end, that humanity shall be saved by the Lord God, and that the end of the world shall bring about our judgement. In a sense, yet again, we find the shockingly simple gospel message.³⁵ Regardless of whatever happens, we are promised by God that eschaton weighs on us and we are responsible for ourselves and to the other qua neighbour, the other individual with which we are in “contact” but not a relation—and this responsibility to the self, to the other, and to God is realised in all apocalypses, not just the final judgement. Although God does indeed control all things, forming both light and darkness in the world (Isaiah 45:7), it is not a matter of us slavishly suspending ourselves to the divine will as a resignation that God is the one who controls all things, but the powerful affirmation that He will restrain the enemy in times of trouble and make victory possibly for us—the victory that Christianity shall emerge from the other side and God’s salvation will be delivered to us; it is also not the case that we are unable to affect the world through our direct actions, much to the chagrin of those who would like to think of these things in totalising and objective terms, even though propaganda and rootlessness—we can be expected to take socio-political actions on things we can affect and accept that evil will always exist beyond the periphery of our capabilities until the divine intercedes on our part, understanding that our passionate action in this world is more important than the correct theorising that hangs over reality in the ideality of abstraction.

Understanding the Call of Apocalypse

In short, my reader, I offer you solace—a reminder of the peace in the body of Christ that you already know. While S. K. protested and worked tooth and nail (often in his own idiosyncratic, gadflyish manner) when he saw that the church had lost its salt, he nevertheless remained directed towards his τέλος through the ballast of the ethical-religious and the reality of possibility when treading water over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”³⁶. While Barth protested and worked tooth and nail when faced with the reality of Hitler in office, he nonetheless remembered his footing and remained steadfast throughout, ensuring his composure and vitality when the time presented itself for the establishment of the Confessing Church and the need to scramble Jewish citizens out from under the maw of fascism. While our present age may feel like a terrifying reminder of the “hot and cold” nature of the world, either callously indifferent or voraciously violent, nevertheless shall you and I remain on surer footing and look for those caesurae of existence, the cracks in the ideological sparring of the stirrers and muddlers of society³⁷, where the Christian finds that their faith is no longer an identity of any kind whatsoever—right, left, liberal, or otherwise—but an existential pulse that courses through the veins and finds realisation in the moment where the neighbour appears to us.

How will we react, my reader? Will we embrace the freedom in the body of Christ, that faithful and terrifying step forward into the unknowable risk of the future, or will we rejoice that our idols and priests have been returned to us? To the Huemer position, which is a perfectly acceptable position for “the world” to hold, we might ask: where are the Christians?

---

A Eulogy in Postscript

These things, concerned with beginnings and ends, come in strange forms at strange times. Having almost brought this essay to a close, I discovered that a former student of mine had been killed in a tragic accident only the day after Christmas. For at least five people, this was an apocalypse where meaning collapsed around them—even if only for them. The evil of the world slips through, even in these times when we remember eschaton itself emerged in history, when the eternal played in time, when the limitless and unconditioned adopted a limit and a condition on our behalf; in these moments, when evil so clearly rears up before us, solace feels further away than anyone has ever wandered—like treading water out on the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”³⁸, without land in sight. It would be self-indulgently sentimental to share many details of the death here, so let me outline this seemingly senseless loss in the abstract.

Father in heaven! Lend us strength in these times where apocalypse takes us through from what we were to what we are to become, stripping away the contingencies of our lives to reveal the necessary core underneath—that you dwell within us, guide us, teach us, and press us forwards when all temptation from the world and the other draws us back, draws us to a halt, when we are aware that our task lies in front of us still. Father in heaven, hear our prayers! To know that we shall die is a promise You have given us, as we shall learn that all contingencies of our lives, including our very lives themselves, are a mode for us to learn Your will and Your strength in holding fast to necessity when the temptation to fall away is too great, too much of a burden, too much to bear; You shall show us that it is not so. To know that we shall die is a promise You have given us, that we shall know good and evil in order that we might become more than we are, that we might rise out from contingency into line with the necessary that stretches beyond our reach, aware that the bloody marks of fingernails are the sign of the one who suffered for truth in his pursuit for the One who gave His life so freely to show us truth and love in this life and the next. Father in heaven, move in us! Grant us the ears to hear the wailing of mothers, softened by festive carols and the good cheer of gift-giving, and the eyes to see the suffering one in their suffering, as they are in actuality and not as a caricature in our mind. Grant us the strength to look at death as it is—a promise that will not be broken; grant us the strength to understand death as it is—a promise for life eternal in the hereafter, free from suffering and despair, turning the anxiety of contingency into our realisation of the contingency of anxiety. Father in heaven, hear our prayers.

Lord Almighty God, be our strength, our sword, and our shield against the temptation of contingency and despair; even in our moments where “that which might not have been” screams in our ears and rings “the kettle the coppersmith is hammering on”³⁹, be our strength as You move in us. Grant us the love for the neighbour, that one who weeps in the silence, that One Who weeps before “the crowd”, that holds us fast when all else falls through; teach us the good news that love has overcome death and hold us with two hands high when we love the other as they are, when we love the other in death as they were in life. Grant us strength to overcome the weakness of ideality and the weakness of reality at once; grant us strenght and move in us to help us see Your goodness when the world itself sinks below what we understood as evil, what we thought of as evil, and becomes unfathomable in the lives of Your children.

Father in heaven! Hear our prayer.

Amen.

1. “Kierkegaard, Lippmann, and the Phantom Public in a Digital Age”, J. P. Haman, from Journal of Religious Ethics, p. 15

2. “Kierkegaard and the Figure of Form-of-Life”, T. Frost, from Agamben and the Existentialists, p. 73, ed. M. A. Norris & C. Dickinson

3. Political Theology, p. 9, C. Schmitt

4. That is to say, my reader, a youth well-spent.

5. “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 128, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright

6. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 231

7. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 38, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

8. “Repetition (in the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term)”, A. Melberg, from Diacritics, Autumn, 1990, Vol. 20, No. 3, p. 72

9. “We are all Christians - without having so much as a suspicion what Christianity is”, from The Instant, no. 5, July 27th 1855, from Attack upon “Christendom”, p. 158, S. Kierkegaard

10. “Kierkegaard and the Figure of Form-of-Life”, T. Frost, from Agamben and the Existentialists, p. 70, ed. M. A. Norris & C. Dickinson

11. “Gabriel Marcel: The Silence of Truth”, J. B. L. Knox, from Kierkegaard and Existentialism, p. 208, ed. J. Stewart

12. Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility, p. 133, M. Dooley

13. Kierkegaard and the Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet, p. 18, I. W. Holm

14. Sickness Unto Death, p. 63, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

15. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 596, ed. [V. Eremita]

16. Kierkegaard and the Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet, p. 26, I. W. Holm

17. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 6, Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard

18. Comment on “Kierkegaard's Attack on Hegel”, M. Weston, from Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel, p. 140, ed. J. Walker

19. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 30, J. Ellul

20. JP II, 1866

21. JP I 1847

22. Kierkegaard and the Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet, p. 26, I. W. Holm

23. Ibid., p. 27

24. JP I

25. "The point at issue with Bishop Martensen as conclusive, Christianly, for the hitherto dubious state of the Established Church, Christianly considered" in Articles in The Fatherland, from Attack on "Christendom", p. 18, S. Kierkegaard

26. What Christ's Judgement Is About Official Christianity, 16th June 1855, from Attack on "Christendom", p. 117, S. Kierkegaard

27. Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, p. 131, [C. Constantius]

28. “‘Eternity will nail him to himself’: the logic of damnation in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death”, R. Z. Manis, from Religious Studies (2016) 52, p. 289

29. An oxymoron—to be a nihilist is to fail to establish values in one’s life; to be a Christian is to affirm one’s personal value in light of Christ. Accusations of Christian nihilism rarely get off the ground for the simple fact that they are theological bludgeons wielded against the one who values something other than the interlocutor does.

30. Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, p. 88, J. K. Hyde

31. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 91, Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard

32. Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, V. Eller

33. “‘Eternity will nail him to himself’: the logic of damnation in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death”, R. Z. Manis, from Religious Studies (2016) 52, p. 307

34. Autrement, pp. 185-186, E. Levinas; “Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida: The Death of the Other”, L. Llevadot, from Kierkegaard and Death, p. 206-216, ed. P. Stokes and A. J. Buben

35. At this point, there is no doubt some figure who is ready to step in to explain, actually, just how complex the subject of eschatology is. They are, of course, correct and we applaud them for their truism that an academic pursuit should be difficult—however, the point on simplicity here is something altogether far broader and, at once, far narrower. That there shall be an end, that there shall be salvation for those who turn towards the Light, and that this end shall be good. Beyond that, I have no interest in strong claims.

36. Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard

37. The Religious Confusion of the Present Age Illustrated by Magister Adler as a Phenomenon: A Mimical Monograph, p. 45, P. Minor, ed. S. Kierkegaard

38. Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard

39. Ibid., p. 78