“Division rules in the childish world of the old covenant (cf. Galatians 4), the world split in two by the cut of circumcision, a world of tribes and tongues and nations and peoples. To be content with division is to revert to that old world. Division is a form of Judaizing.”
Peter Liethart
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2014/09/maturing-into-one
1.) What I’m hearing here is that
a.) The Old Testament God wanted distinctions and proper divisions but the New Testament God has changed and He doesn’t want distinctions and divisions of tribes, tongues, nations and peoples. Marcionism anyone?
b.) The death of Jesus was to the end of creating a Monistic God and egalitarian world where, in the words of the famous Band, U2, “all colors bleed into one.”
2.) Is it too terribly haughty of me to prefer the epistemologically self conscious Jacobin theologians over the ones who are merely ignorantly Jacobin?
3.) Is the comment, “Division is a form of Judaizing,” an egghead academic way of translating Rodney King’s, “Can’t we all just get along”?
4.) Wasn’t it the Radical Reformation that insisted that the division between clergy and laity was a sinful division? “Peter the Anabaptist” has a certain ring to it.
5.) If “Peter the Anabaptist” is correct then we must conclude the following,
a.) the Protestant insistence on translation into all the vulgar tongues of the nations was a Judaizing tendency. The Reformation was compromised from the beginning.
b.) If division is Judaizing then the Protestant Reformation was sin as it divided from Rome.
c.) If division is Judaizing, the distinct historic creeds as they have been embraced by distinct Reformed denominations have been sin.
d.) God involved Himself in a Judaizing tendency on the plains of Shinar.
6.) Dr. Leithart is here ruling exactly opposite the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. The position there advocated by the Judaizers was an absolute and uncompromising unity that demanded that the Gentiles become cultural Jews in order to be Christian. The apostles repudiated that idea. Which is to say that Dr. Leithart is actually siding with the Judaizers but calling the Jerusalem Divines the Judaizers. This is worst then Jacobinism. This is devilry.
7.) One wonders if this is a kind of Hindu Christianity where all divisions and distinctions are Maya (illusion).
8.) Unity without diversity is Uniformity and Unitarianism. In Unitarianism all must become as one as the one god that is served. This Leithartian Unitarianism seems to be trying to immanentize the eschaton so that the idea of “the other” is lost in a sea of oneness. It is Van Till’s illustration of the man of water, seeking to climb out of a ocean of water, on a ladder of water, into a heavens of water come to life.
“Unity without diversity is Uniformity and Unitarianism”
And as many Christian thinkers have observed, from Unitarian monotheism there is a slippery slope to all-out Pantheism. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch1_07.htm
“The idea of unity so possesses man and is sought by him so generally that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself to repose in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”
And Manley Palmer Hall, a high-ranking Freemason and Luciferian philosopher, also taught that
“Plato’s philosophy surrounds the principle of unity. To him the concept of unity was all-pervading, everywhere present and evident. Division was illusion. To accept a philosophy of division was ignorance. Ignorance sees many separate things in the world; wisdom sees only the many parts of one thing. God, man, and the universe are related fragments of a common unity. This concept is true monotheism [i.e., Unitarian, pantheistic Monism], for monotheism is more than admitting the existence of one God — it is the realization of the existence of one life of which all things are part.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Unity, or oneness, is the evidence of truth. . . .
Whatever truth does must be unity or oneness, for truth cannot be the parent of division. (Hall 1986, 1ff)”
Murray Rothbard on the same subject:
[Rothbard’s 1991 introduction to “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor,” which was written in 1970.]
Turning from the topic of the oppressed, my own view of the Romantics, certainly jaundiced twenty years ago, is far more hostile today. For I have learned from such sources as Leszek Kolakowski and particularly the great literary critic M.H. Abrams, of the devotion of the Romantics, Hegelians, and of Marxism to what might be called “reabsorption theology.” This view stemmed from the third-century Egyptian Platonist, Plotinus, seeping into Christian Platonism and from then on constituting a heretical and mystical underground in Western thought.
Briefly, these thinkers saw Creation not as a wonderfully benevolent overflow of God’s goodness, but as an essentially evil act that sundered the blessed pre-Creation unity of the collective entities God, Man, and Nature, bringing about tragic and inevitable “alienation” in Man. However, Creation, the outgrowth of God’s deficiencies, is redeemable in one sense: History is an inevitable “dialectical” process by which pre-Creation gives rise to its opposite, the current world. But eventually history is destined to end in a mighty “reabsorption” of these three collective entities, though at a much higher level of development for both God and Man.
In addition to other problems with this view, the contrast with orthodox Christianity should be clear. Whereas in Christianity, the individual person is made in God’s image and the salvation of each individual is of supreme importance, the allegedly benevolent reabsorptionist escape from metaphysical alienation occurs only at the end of history and only for the collective species Man, each individual disappearing into the species-organism.
The ancient Carpocratians, one of the most poisonous Gnostic sects (who dabbled with communism and sacred homosexuality, just the sort of people that the second chapter of 2 Peter warns about) had this kind of Unitarian-monistic worldview:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wace/biodict.html?term=Carpocrates,%20philosopher
“According to Neander, the Carpocratian system sees in the world’s history one struggle between the principles of unity and of multiplicity. From one eternal Monad all existence has flowed, and to this it strives to return. But the finite spirits who rule over several portions of the world counteract this universal striving after unity. From them the different popular religions, and in particular the Jewish, have proceeded. Perfection is attained by those souls who, led on by reminiscences of their former condition, soar above all limitation and diversity to the contemplation of the higher unity. They despise the restrictions imposed by the mundane spirits; they regard externals as of no importance, and faith and love as the only essentials; meaning by faith, mystical brooding of the mind absorbed in the original unity. In this way they escape the dominion of the finite mundane spirits; their souls are freed from imprisonment in matter, and they obtain a state of perfect repose (corresponding to the Buddhist Nirwana) when they have completely ascended above the world of appearance.
…
The Christians thought it likely that the stories current among the heathen of scenes of shameless debauchery in the Christian lovefeasts had a real foundation in what took place among the Carpocratians. Philaster, who, apparently through oversight, enumerates the Carpocratians twice, the second time (57) giving them the alternative names of Floriani and Milites, directly asserts this. His predecessors had suggested it as probable (Clem. Alex. Strom. iii. 2; cf. Justin Martyr, Apol. 26). Irenaeus counts Carpocratian doctrines and practices as means employed by Satan to discredit the Christian name among the heathen. (See also Eus. H. E. iv. 7.) “