Perhaps not; perhaps Job is a fantasy, implying: 1) it did not happen, and 2) it is still true.  If Job is literarily related to reality, the relationship need not approximate the literal.  Once we know it did not happen, that nothing like it could happen, an interpretation must merely explain as much of Job more simply.

If Job's thesis is true of temporal reality (if there is no temporal retribution or reward), we can put the prologue, epilogue, Out, but in place in relation to the test, just before and hereafter.  The epilogue leaps into place (as a final judgment), but when the prologue moves previous to the universe, we lose our hero--Job cannot move with it.  But his story could not happen to a man, so we lose nothing, and will get a new meaning for "Job" among the implications of the casting out.  The challenge (we cut it challenge from test, though part of the test is described in the prologue; the test coincides with temporality) becomes theodicy, the necessary and sufficient reason for God's inaction through not Job's pain, but everyman's, for His creation and abandonment of this malignant universe.  It looks too flimsy for the load, ghastly insufficient for even Job's agony, but in another reality, it is a new scenario.

We are in God's first creation, the one He would create, creatures facing God and in communion with Him.  Communion is with independent wills, which can refuse; some do, and move away from God.  There is no evil in this, and they provoke no Enmity; God seeks not attention, but righteousness, blessing those who achieve it.  They prosper--righteousness coincides with reward.  (No, the righteousness is not "for the reward"; if the motive were a desire for reward, the act would not be righteous, nor rewarded.)  Though righteousness, not communion, is rewarded, a righteous creature communes with a holy God, and his communion is worship; as he becomes righteous, he worships more fully--righteousness coincides with worship.  Therefore, worship coincides with reward (coincidentally).

Righteousness is a quality of consciousness, not apparent to another consciousness, as it is to God; it is spirit, and not evident in a material (creaturely) reality.  Of God's attributes, holiness is primary; it is His spirit, His nature; He is holy.  Power is secondary, His characteristic; He has power--but creation is with power, and the Spirit is present only in the acts of righteous wills.  The objectification of the Spirit is in behavior, and in this creation (God is visible) the behavior is worship.  Worship is the objective evidence of righteousness, the only evidence; spirit is invisible, so righteousness must be assumed to explain both worship and reward.  One who did not do so would see only worship and reward, and could offer another explanation.

Consider, here, the adversary's challenge:  "Have they not good reason to worship?  He rewards them well enough--take the blessing away and they would curse Him to His face.  Those God calls "best" are no better at all, different merely in their eagerness to bow; should they be blessed for that?  It is an unjust God who asks us to humble ourselves, and proclaims those who do more righteous than the rest.  They bow to power, and for pay.  I could do it too (used to) but now I bow to no one, and am more righteous than they, who would, if I had power, and could pay them, bow to me."

It is true that if God buys bows and the "best" bow, bought, there is injustice on all sides, and (since qualities have no empirical consequences) the assertion that He does and they do cannot be disproved.  Satan's thesis is not true (does not correspond to reality), but it is valid (a logically adequate explanation of the appearance).  The flaw in creation, which validates Satan's heresy, is the impotence of the Holy Spirit:  God is holy and omnipotent, but His holiness is impotent, as spirit has no connection with and can have no effect on a material reality.

Satan denies the existence of the Spirit, challenges the givenness of the good, calls God unholy--but punishment he could proclaim as proof:  "Not only does He not bless those who do not bow; He hurts them!"  Extermination (with power) would prove that He hurts them very badly indeed.  Nor can God ignore the challenge; Satan has a following, which grows larger.  If he contends that to validate the good creatures must serve it not just unrewarded but denied comfort (in pain), security (and terror), and assurance (alone)--if he demands a test, God can still produce no sign of virtue beyond His imputation of it in His servants, and theirs of it in Him.  Without other evidence, that is no evidence.

A test would be unspeakably evil, but Satan would be responsible, and earn in it the punishment God cannot damn him to for his demanding it--the test would have purged the creation of evil.  Within the test, the worst would do the evil, and that creation, too, would have been purged.  The separation, in agony, of righteous creatures from God would as well be agony for God, but would pass, and leave no scars, and permit the achievement of a degree of righteousness otherwise unattainable.  And there is no way to resolve the dilemma without the test.

The accused could not stand it--they would hurt gallantly, knowing God would bless them more than ever once it was over; the victim must not know why he suffers--a new creation must be peopled.  The choice must be God or power: God must be separated from power; since creatures cannot see God powerless, they will not see Him.  Having surrendered power, He will be only spirit--impotent and invisible; a material reality will hide Him, and the choice (the axis of conflict) will be power or the good.  The best will suffer, validate the good, invalidate the heresy, by proving the existence of disinterested virtue.  The rest will prosper, will serve power, for reward.  Evil will be in oppression, and righteousness (the implications of the Spirit in the second creation, no less than in the first, will be in behavior, but with God hidden, they will not be worship) in fighting it, at a sacrifice, in service of the good.

The reality which will hide God will present Satan's and God's views of reality as valid interpretations, offer a choice between them.  Satan's thesis will be the assertion that it is the only reality--material reality will represent security, and evil will be characterized by a mania for certainty.  The choice for God will be the assertion that material reality is contingent on a higher, invisible reality--righteousness will be characterized by a tolerance for ambiguity, a bent for wildness and freedom.

Satan will be Prince of the World, but not in the world.  His temptation will be power in a reality which will, with no interference, driven by law, chance, and choices, fulfill the conditions of the test.  To see how this will be achieved, we must follow the implications of the challenge as theodicy.  Assume:

God, holy, omnipotent;

an adversary, evil, impotent;

that evil originates in Satan's contention that creatures serve power, for comfort, security, and assurance.

Objectified in the higherarchy,an imitation hierarchy which thinks it is a hierarchy (claims to select the best in competition, for dominance), but is, in fact, its opposite, along the axis of conflict, with power not the good, as its principle of (unnatural) selection.  Where rising entails gaining dominance over those below in the higherarchy or beneath it, it depends not on competition with peers, but the whims of superiors--the higherarchy selects for subservience.

Subservience is a second submission; the two are identical motions (appearance), a severance of self from will, but with opposite motivation (spirit)--for the good, to power--turning them into opposite actions (reality):  service and subservience.  Subservience is surrender, service submission without surrender, contingent on a refusal to surrender--you cannot demand (or, finally, give) subservience to a righteous end; it is evil, and corrupts, makes malevolent intentions and malicious acts; power perverts the will.  Subservience believes it is in the interests of righteousness, so appearance opposes reality; the act is deceitful, delusional.  The motion, however, with the actual acceptance of the good to guide the will, has opposite consequences:  severe self from will and the incision kills neither self nor will, indeed fulfills them both; we do not become whole, but can begin to become, and there is no limit on our becoming.  Service and subservience are in radical opposition:  loyalty to the good, irrespective of power, and loyalty to power, regardless of the good.

Hierarchy and higherarchy, service and subservience, are lookalikes, opposites; the phenomenon will recur:  the objective equivalence of opposites,a diametric inversion along the axis of conflict.  The inversion is within Satan, so it is between good and evil, but also within evil--the corollary of the equivalence of opposites is the apparent opposition within unities: dominance, the lust for power, and subservience, the will to surrender, which look like opposites, are halves of one trait, authoritarianism. Dean Gruber called Eichmann a "bicycle rider" (head bowed low before his superiors, feet furiously trampling on his subordinates,) as if dominance and subservience could also be separate, but they are linked traits.

The inversion is diametric because Satan's thesis is one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with truth, but valid, as it could not be if it were merely otherwise than true.  This, too, will recur, making falsehood a good guide to truth--truths we would not otherwise imagine will suggest themselves as opposite to asserted untruths.  Once suggested, they correlate previously random data, and are obviously true.

If appearance can war on reality, perception is apprehension, an interaction of the reality apprehended and the apprehending consciousness which depends on the assumptions we bring to reality, not the reality we bring them to.  Physical reality presents two primary apprehensions, world views it reinforces:  1) mechanism--Satan's thesis applied to it, and 2)theism--God's.  Physics, which tests statements against reality, broke through, beyond mechanism, could not find God so found inscrutability, and mechanics is to relativity as mechanism is to theism anywhere.  Physics gives us a mathematical model of appearance and reality.

Newton and Einstein, from opposed assumptions about the nature of reality, describe normal conditions identically, predict, dictate, identical behavior, but if conditions become extreme, Newton abandons reality, more extreme, loses contact more radically.  (Einstein remains accurate.)  If we strapped Newton in a rocket programmed to accelerate to the speed of light, as he neared that velocity, his assumptions would lose touch with reality, dictate action antagonistic to good judgment; he would create, exacerbate a crisis, self-destruct.  We cannot imagine it, because the realm of the critical is so distant in physics, but we do know Newton wouldn't notice; his assumptions would hold him blind to phenomena beyond them.  (Einstein made it in an elevator.)  Einstein is always right; the universe is never like Newton assumes it is, but only in extreme conditions does it become obvious--reality is always relativistic, but under normal conditions it behaves as if it were mechanical, and offers no opportunity to test between the two theories.  This gives mechanics a validity (the appearance of truth), the scope of which is indicated by the success of classical physics in explaining an astonishing range of phenomena from Newton's assumptions.

Reality is two states, normal (konfliktslos)and critical; mechanism and theism are valid in normal conditions.  In a crisis, theism is valid, mechanism contrary to fact, so theism is true, mechanism false.  In the transition from normal to critical conditions theism makes an inversion:  its implications in the critical state are opposite to those for normal conditions.  Mechanism does not make the inversion, so when reality does, and follows theism, it abandons mechanism; the loss of contact is, however, for the mechanist, imperceptible.

We can illustrate the relationship between mechanism and theism with two circles, one inside the other, the space inside the inner circle representing normal conditions, the space between the circles critical conditions.  The inner circle itself represents, for mechanism, the limits of its validity, for theism, the inversion.  Since mechanism and theism describe normal conditions identically, only behavior in critical conditions is useful in judging between them; there theism is apparent (but, again, not to the mechanist).  Under normal conditions, however, since the reality is built to sustain mechanism, but to hide God, mechanism has a greater apparent validity, and if validity is the ruling measure of statements, mechanism will reign.

Mechanism takes many forms, civic, cleric, academic; it is a priori,previous to every endeavor and producing, in many, incompatible conclusions.  Behaviorism, mechapsychology, opposes inquisition, mechatheism, and has little in common with classical, mechanistic physics.  Skinner need not disbelieve relativity.  But all mechanisms have a relationship to the world in common, and a relationship to theism; to clarify them, we will examine three human vocations (logic, learning, language) and three social obligations (justice, mercy, compassion).

Logic:  do we induce,refine observations, shuffle facts, build to generalizations, or deduce,order information with principles?  The issue is false.  Induction and deduction are apparently opposite halves of one act, observation, and inevitable.  We deduce, but we do it with principles got to by intuition.  Discovery (intellectual progress) is the intuition of concepts which correlate and explain information, and point to new facts--which come in as observations, as if they had not been called forth.  Under normal conditions we are conscious only of observation, of seeing, not that without concepts, we could not see, and with them, cannot help it.  We receive only those sense impressions we have concepts for; all others pass over us in a great formless wave, irretrievable.

The scientific method is inductive, using facts to build a tower of information: the more precisely we measure, more accurately we observe, the bigger we will build.  Mechanism sees reality as an upsurge, the present the growing tip of an evolutionary thrust.

The truth is not only otherwise, but opposite.  We build towers--down, from concept to fact.  There is a primacy of concept over observation:  concept precedes observation (you don't know what to look for until you know what to look for) and concept implies observation (once you know what to look for, you see it).  Einstein to Heisenberg, on the eve of uncertainty:   "It is the theory which determines what we can observe."  (Mundane implication:  you see whatever you look for.)  The reality sustains any interpretation, reinforces almost any assumptions brought to it, but it is built to reinforce mechanism and theism.
 

Behavioristic mechateaching builds learning experiences into towers of knowledge--the more skillfully we choose, produce, and order them, the bigger we will build in our pupils.  Learning is by objective, in measurable quantities-- and the stimulus-response model does fit learning under normal conditions.

If a physics teacher wants to teach gravity, he can construct an experiment which will demonstrate the principles.  If he does it well, and if his students are attentive, he will have succeeded in creating learning experiences in them.  But Isaac Newton, who first had that learning experience, did not use the experiment.  He may have experimented later, to test the theory, but the concept was in place before the experiment proved it valid; without the concept, he could not imagine the experiment.

Learning under normal conditions fits the mechanistic model, but discovery, critical learning, the only significant learning, is intuition--beyond behaviorism.  Universal behavioral objectives would eliminate discovery, by definition unpredictable, unexpected.  The teacher by objective who gets unexpected results has failed.

Einstein also said that "physical theories (we can generalize it to "world views") are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."  This looks like a restatement of the previous quotation, and in that sense, it is valid (the fact that two such opposed sets of assumptions as mechanics and relativity describe the same appearance equally well makes it impossible to deny, and science has not a hint of an explanation for the fact that they do), but, in another sense it is not, because it implies that there is nothing given about systems, that physics without Newton and Einstein would have been a wholly different endeavor, that mechanics is Newton's fantasy, relativity Einstein's--and we have seen that this is not so, that the two ways of looking at the world are, in physics as elsewhere, built into reality, appearances it presents.

Discovery is the leaping to simple concepts which correlate and explain a broad range of facts--as we move nearer truth, the number of our assumptions grows smaller and the range of information they correlate grows more general.  The outstanding example is the concept "gravity."  Objects have always fallen as they do now, but until Newton the prevalent explanation was the Aristotelian, that they fall to earth because they belong there, as birds and smoke rise because they belong there; no one saw a force pulling things down.  Then Newton saw it, and built on universal gravitation a system which all but explained the universe--and everyone saw gravity.  But then Einstein proved that there is no force, that gravity is in the nature of space so that objects at one point move to the next not because they are pulled but because--they belong there.  But trh concept of gravity is so powerful, simple, general, that we cannot unsee it.

Newton's system and Einstein's are given, necessary, inevitable.  There are not a large number of sets of assumptions which correlate a broad range of information--just two, the truth and its opposite, theism and mechanism.  It is necessary for the test that reality look mechanistic; mechanism is a built-in inference, an apparition.  Theism and mechanism are appearances the reality presents, there to be leaped to and, given the right conditions, will be.  When the mechanical scaffold began to collapse and Einstein began to wonder, the answer was blowing in the wind; relativity was called forth, as were the mechanistic, theistic approaches to every endeavor.

There is, nevertheless, another sense in which Einstein's statement that theories are "free creations of the human mind" is true--the primary condition of discovery is within the mind of the discoverer.  Intuition is leaping, perception the ability to take an incomplete set of data, much of it apparently unrelated, and infer back to a set of assumptions which will explain and correlate all of it, and point to the facts which will complete it.  F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."  Robert Frost, describing the wildness of poetry, describes as well the nature of discovery:  "for it to be that (for a poem to come as a revelation or for a discovery to happen) there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity."  Perception, as well as righteousness, is characterized by a tolerance for ambiguity, a sense of affinity, a bent for wildness, a disrespect for authority, of the old theory or the old guard.  (If perception is characteristic of the best, the rest are characterized by credulity, the ability to believe anything.)

Mechalinguistics uses words as building blocks to build towers of meaning:  the more logically we analyze, more positively verify our statements, the bigger we will build.  Mechanism sees words as simple symbols of concepts; descriptive language is one-dimensional.  If we could agree on definitions, objectify the relationship between a word and its referent, we could communicate.

Most language (language in normal conditions) is one-dimensional, though there is no hope of attaining the precision the positivists pray for, since we do not learn words from a dictionary, but experience, which is unavoidably particular.  The striving for precision eliminates first of all precisely the language which is most significant--the creative.

If a high school girl has a crush on John, who finally calls, she can tell a friend the next day by saying, "John called me last night," a four-block communication, infinitely adaptable; someone else might have called, John may have stopped by, or called someone else, or called at noon.  But if she does not want to say merely, "John called," and has told her friend that John reminds her of Paul Newman, she can say, "Paul Newman called last night."  She has taken no more time to get her message across, and on one level it is still the same message--her friend still thinks "John," but she also thinks more; the extra thinking is instantaneous, outside of time, and it makes the communication more interesting.

The girl has changed the relationship between what she said and what she meant; the symbolism is multidimensional.  Literary devices are, of course, more subtle, but different only in degree.  They assume a shared experience, intellectual or psychic, a common knowledge or a human condition, and by calling portions of it to mind with words or phrases, add an affective dimension to language (in descriptive language, connotation, a defect).  When they work most swiftly, they produce leaps, instantaneous flashes of insight, building down. Most language is one-dimensional (and it is only against that background that creative language works), but communication critical, multidimensional.

Certain values are generally recognized as characteristic of a good society, among them justice, mercy, righteousness, but implementing them is difficult; values are imprecise and situations never simple, so we build guidelines, towers of rules, which ideally cover every eventuality, and objectify the values.  But people enjoy the certainty of rules, and forget or ignore the fact that they are only means to values.  When they become ends in themselves, the codes get in the way of the very values they were built to facilitate:  law and order obstructs justice, etiquette kills kindness, moralism poisons virtue.  (The opposite of morality is not amorality--though amorality is certainly other than morality--but moralism, its lookalike.)

The righteous notice, and rebel, but if the rebellion is to be righteous, each step beyond the law must be in the interests of justice, or it is mere criminality.  The same motion, performed with opposite actions:  the fleeing from the responsibility of the law; an escape from the law's restrictions or a stepping outside its security.

The most significant implications of the relationship between mechanism and theism are in politics, in those institutions which order our lives, and are managed either well or poorly.  If the higherarchy is opposite to the hierarchy, and the hierarchy is a selection of the best, the higherarchy rejects them:  systems select for subservience, and only secondly for talent, and reject the most talented, who will not surrender.  Management is simplest if the command is absolute, so institutions, which may rise in opposition to authority, turn authoritarian, eliminate the opposition, among them the best, not high on the higherarchy, but crushed beneath it.  The higherarchy eliminates the best, and gets the cleverest of the rest; the higherarchy is inverted.

Since political institutions (and other higherarchies) have often had total and long-term control over the people in their power, the higherarchy's selection process has cultural as well as institutional consequences:  to the degree that excellence is hereditary, the best in a people can be cut off by a selection for subservience.  Authoritarian institutions and cultures eliminate those who will not surrender, thus eliminating the best.  Otto Sieck suggested that Rome fell because its best were eliminated, and looked for evidence that its elite became less reproductive; the thesis is correct, but not the assumption that the best were among the elite.  Rome eliminated its best by selecting for subservience--but not all of the best were forced out; as Rome turned authoritarian and entered its crisis, mechanism lost touch with reality and theism became apparent, to the best, who left, leaving the higherarchy a ship without a rudder.  It floundered in the storm and sank.

If the mechanistic will runs the higherarchy (and it does), it will manage under normal conditions; there, mechanism is predictive, in touch with reality.  But, having selected for subservience, the higherarchy has selected for mechanism, men out of touch with the real forces shaping any situation, blind guides.  In a crisis they will bungle, all-but-purposefully react wrongly to every event.  When something goes rotten in the state, and mechanism loses touch, theism becomes apparent, but only to the best, who are perceptive.  The best see it, and if they say it, the rest might see it, but if they don't, the rest will not, so if you off the best, the rest can't tell, can't tell the best are gone and once they're gone, can't tell at all.  They have surrendered the right to judge and lost (who had one) the ability.  They will believe anything (want nothing more than something to believe) and will not question any authority (the Grand Inquisitor was right).  Once the best are gone, there is no deterrent, and no one notices as the (space)ship of state loses touch with reality.

A newly erected higherarchy is a power vacuum, opportunities for dominance unused.  The authoritarians gravitate toward it; it does not resist.  The purge is built into it as a temptation and, since the best are always down on a higherarchy, focusing the opposition (not just in the opposition, but creating it), they are vulnerable, and purged.

Upon a higherarchy looks like a blessing, downa curse, but the reality is opposite; up, with its temptations of dominance, of oppression, is the curse, and down the blessing.  Since theism is apparent in a crisis and, in a mechanistic order, down is the point of crisis, and since up leads falsely to the inference that it is proof of excellence, it is only from below that a higherarchy can be seen clearly, only there that appearance reflects reality.  In a mechanistic order, down is the only place to be; success should be frightening.

Since institutions usually rise in opposition to authority, or at least with high hopes of doing good, and turn authoritarian as they acquire power, the political spectrum is also a temporal process, the darkening of an institution:  liberalism to conservatism to authoritarianism, optimism to pessimism to cynicism, hope to power to purge, Greece to Rome to ROME.  The political choice is not a moral choice; left and right are mirror images (might at both poles), apparently opposite halves of the mechanistic phenomenon, politics--but the moral choice, between security and freedom, has its lookalike in the political choice, between authoritarianism (symmetry is beauty) and relativism (formlessness is freedom).  Both positions are mistaken, but there seems to be no other choice; you leave the right by going left, and the advantage gained in seeing the right clearly is negated by the disadvantage of being blinded to the left's inanities.  Galbraith and Buckley, when they criticize each other, are both right, when they defend their own positions, both wrong.  Their criticisms add up to a critique of politics, their defenses are evidence of its sterility; there are no politics.

Having outlined the mechanism by which the righteous suffer, we can return to Job and move through creation to the test, where we must identify the protagonist.  Job accused is God's best servant(s), suffering, the same.  Specifically the righteous suffer and extremely (righteous and suffering) the Jews, God's best (blessed, then, apparently, rejected), His chosenservant, Israel, given a God Who chose her and then went away, leaving the impression she had deserted Him and scattering her among the nations as a resolutely exclusive minority calling itself chosen of God in the midst of peoples who thought they were chosen, newfound favorites of her God with a new image (and with a newer, truer Israel), a God of love Who blesses who please Him and helps out in this world of woe who will obey.  The catalogue of Job's pain fades from hyperbole to understatement as we realize that "touch all that he has" is the Dispersion and "touch bone and flesh" is Auschwitz.

Challenges crowd in like demons, demanding first chance at the thesis.  Was Auschwitz, after all, God's will?  How could Job foresee it; how does the interpretation relate to the author's intent?  If Job is Israel, what of Christianity?  Enigmas and paradoxes knotty in themselves and encrusted with millennia of thought do not suddenly resolve themselves when confronted with assumptions which, when fully elaborated and clearly understood, denecessitate them.  We must move delicately, taking them one at a time.

Is God's will done on earth?  How, and by whom?  God's will is in His Spirit; having surrendered power, He is impotent--where His will is done, it is by spirit, not power, by the righteous serving the good, against the odds.  Not all else, however, is unrelated to His will; the test, greatly evil, was against His will, but necessary, so He created (precisely) the conditions under which the evil would be committed--it happened according to His design.  God did not act in history, but He was its author--His purposes were served even in the evil, and by agents in defiance of His will; He called them forth, raised them up without lifting a finger and as effortlessly cast them down.

The distinction between God's will and His purpose (against His will) allows us to assume a givenness in the historical process which was not a fulfillment of His will:  history reflected His will, inversely.  The comforters had to see Job's agony not as unfortunate, but divinely ordained; when they did so, they served His purposes, against His will.  The comforters are the churches, Israel's daughters, none of whom have respected her, or called her blessed, who have, when not among the agents of her terror, assented to it, and believed in God's rule of the world which afflicted her.  They played their parts verbatim from the script, though the script is in their holy book, with God's repudiation of their advocacy.  And it will come:  "No, that's not it, at all.  That's not what I meant, at all."

It is dangerous to view the comforters' assertions as primitive, though the mechanical reward and retribution they see makes it seem so.  No one now asserts as rigidly as Bildad that prosperity proves virtue, but the churches just as certainly see God working in the world.  Job's thesis and the comforters', Judaism and Christianity, are contrary theisms, identical (proclaiming an omnipotent, holy God), but opposite--the comforters counsel submission to a God of power; Job's submission is to a God of holiness, and contingent on his contempt for their counsel.  Christianity sees God in the world (He is Godonearth), the only redemption necessary, available.  Judaism sees the world unredeemed (He is God Gone), given into the hands of the wicked.

There is no Judeo-Christian tradition, but two traditions, in diametric opposition.  There is no Judeo-Christian ethic, but a Judaic, which Christianity has distorted.  There is no Judeo-Christian revelation, but a revelation to Israel.  "Judeo Christian" may be properly applied to western history, a Judeo-Christian opposition, and to Christianity itself, where it is useful, allowing us to separate (Judaic) wheat from (Christian) chaff.

The separation is best begun by a discussion of the Torah, central to Judaism, from which Christianity claims to liberate:  churches say they serve God free of the stifling law, and call Judaism legalistic, but the issue is not legalism versus freedom, the God of wrath versus the God of love, or (as Ms. Luce put it to Bill Buckley) the sexist Old Testament versus Christ as first feminist.  The issue is authoritarianism versus antiauthoritarianism, and we encounter a phenomenon which we will call the inversion of effect in Christian doctrine:  lacking a law from God (a law thus antiauthoritarian), Christianity, cut off from reality, took as its ethic the status quo, consensus, protected the political higherarchy and erected a clerical one, and reversed the supposed polarity of legalism (the fruit of authoritarianism, not law) and freedom.  Christianity is inherently authoritarian--churches are authoritarian and relativistic, in inverse proportions.  Having discarded the Torah, the church replaced it with dogmas and sacraments and produced the inquisition, a selection for subservience in an obsession with certainty, seeing sin as misbelief and man's relationship to God as magical.

Christianity makes belief primary--characterizing adherents as "believers"--in a set of doctrines which put God on earth, in power.  Central among them is original sin, Adam's fall (for all of us) into a sea of evil.  Its effect is, as well, inverted:  the Fall supposedly left a taint of evil on creation which should move the righteous to withdraw into a contemplation of God.  Withdrawal is, however, except in unusual cases, impossible, and for someone who must remain in the world the view that there is a pall of evil over all of it becomes a refusal to make distinctions between good and evil (or lesser and greater evil) in the world, and a doctrine which claims to help us flee from evil keeps us from recognizing it, much less avoiding it or fighting it.  Faith (a term Judaism and Christianity share, giving us, between them, the inversion of identical doctrines) becomes inaction in the certainty that God has everything in hand, the opposite of true faith, which is action in uncertainty, the leap into the darkness in the (internal) assurance that there is a Light beyond it.  Moses to Pharaoh:  "We will not know how to worship the Lord until we arrive."

The fall necessitates an atoning rescue, a vicarious, sinless suffering possible only for God as man--thus the Incarnation (God is two).  Acceptance of the atonement is necessary and sufficient for salvation; the believer is converted, magically transformed by an indwelling Holy Spirit (God is three).  If the suffering is a test there is no need of a Fall to explain it or an incarnation to expiate it, and if God is Gone, there is no magic, and no separate, active Spirit--the Trinity is all but depopulated (hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One).

Mechatheism gives (external) assurance to those in a position to see themselves as blessed, thus best, but it is a certainty dearly bought, necessitating beliefs antithetical to truth--and credulity is the Christian strong suit (Tim LaHaye, evangelical false prophet:  "It doesn't tax my credulity to believe that the day will soon come when Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, apostate Protestantism, and who knows what else will combine.")  You see what you look for, and Christians look for God's guidance everywhere.

The assertion that the Spirit does not guide, that God's will is not done on earth, looks, to those who believe in power, like dualistic blasphemy.  The truth is opposite:  blasphemy is not against God's power, but against His holiness, precisely the assertion that His will isdone on earth, that if He had His way, this is the world He would create--the blasphemy of forgiving a deity these evils and primarily the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit in His people, Israel.  The churches accuse the Jews of misinterpreting the revelation and refusing the messiah, nay, crucifying him or turning him over to be killed, and not recognizing him when he rose from the dead, or since.  The truth, again, is opposite:  it is true, none of it, of Israel, but it is true, all of it, of Christianity.

How are we to understand this?  We must first understand the nature of the revelation.  Fundamechanistic Christianity calls the Bible (plus the "New Testament") God's revelation, His inspired, infallible Word, and sees as blasphemy the assertion that it is not; sees it as a suggestion that He could not do it infallibly.  This is, again, blasphemy seen as an attack on power, and an attempt to put God on earth in the certainty of an authoritative document, literally true.  But God, unlike the fundamentalists, takes no pride in His power, and His authority is not implemented but supplanted by another authority, even if that authority, seen correctly, is holy scripture.  The Bible is not the revelation, but the record of the revelation and the responses of Israel's holy men, evaluated and reevaluated by her chroniclers, who heightened the story paradigmatically, making it more true, less like it happened, forsaking a literal truth for a literary.  The Bible was, yes, "inspired," but by Spirit, not power.

What, then, was the revelation?  Creatures in a reality hiding God could not infer from that reality to God's existence, much less His nature; even if they used a God hypothesis to explain their world, they would know nothing of the God Who is.  But if they were to serve Him, they must know Him, so someone must see Him--there must be a revelation, particular in time, space, and audience; if it were general, it would abort the test.  It must include suspensions of natural law (as against His general impotence) as evidence of His power, and verbal revelations of His nature (as against His general silence), evidence of His holiness.  The revelation was to Israel, and as well as introducing the knowledge of God into the world, it established the chosenness from which Job must fall and was, necessarily, incomplete, had to leave the problem of pain open and providence a live option--Job must suffer under the assumption that all things come from God, though nothing comes but horror.  (Providence, the notion that God does rule the world, leads, because of the relative positions of Judaism and Christianity, to opposite attitudes:  in Christianity, to self-righteousness, in Judaism, to penitence.)

The assertion that history never repeats itself is true only in the most obvious sense.  Any sequence of events is a unique set of acts and choices by a unique set of wills and, thus, a unique sequence, but the choices are the same choices in the same human condition and, once we see that condition clearly it becomes obvious that it is truer to say that history always repeats itself.  Given the revelation, the response and, less precisely, the record, were inevitable, predictable, not because of a mechanical determinism, but its opposite--the reality of the Spirit and the certainty that the best will see it, and choose it:  given a choice between good and evil (which, as we have seen, are not two among many options, but the two options, and on an axis of conflict), the best will perceive the righteous choice, and make it, however difficult, the rest only if it is easiest.  Theism is apparent, and can be introduced into the world with an economy of motion:  the acts and utterances of the revelation were fewer than we would imagine.

Israel's history has been an evolving conception of God and the good--not originally primitive and superseded, but originally complete, and maturing, becoming more fully elaborated and precise.  Most of the evolution was without divine guidance, God staking the fate of creation on the actions, choices, and perceptions of men whose freedom He respected:  given the reality of the Spirit and the perception and righteousness of the best, merely these moves will call forth theism.  Only at critical points was it necessary to intervene.  Seen as a human response to a revelation, the Bible has a wonder about it that the automatic writing of verbal inspiration lacks absolutely, but seeing it that way requires a tolerance for ambiguity which the fundamentalists lack, also absolutely.

The Bible is the early history of the chosen people who, since theism is apparent in a crisis, had to live through a series of crises, leap to theism, and record the experience in a form which would turn the particular experience (of archetypal situations, conflicts, oppressions, liberations) into a universal experience, teach the lessons after the crises (and the apparency) had passed.  The primary theme is the exodus from mechanistic civilization, the "going out" in faith which is characteristic of each of the crucial revelatory, events.  The human condition is an exile from God in which the righteous are strangers, aliens.  The psychic choice between security and freedom is, physically, a choice between the center and the frontier, and the best are to be found, either psychically or physically, on the fringes of society.

We can use the terms to differentiate between two types of literature: classicalliterature, in which the moral and physical centers of the society are coincidental, and romantic(or, more precisely, frontierliterature, in which the moral center is out from the physical center, and outlaws are often heroes.  The Bible is, preeminently, a frontier literature; it made possible the realization that righteousness involves a going out, a leap of faith.  God called Abraham from civilization into the wild, and, later, Israel as well, from Egypt (from the security of bondage to the liberation of the wilderness) and Babylon, but perhaps the crucial exodus was that of the prophets, from Israel itself.

Israel, after the conquest, had demanded a king like the goyim,and institutional Israel had become, as institutional anything becomes, higherarchical, authoritarian.  Appearance displaced reality, and the religion became externalized, "a precept of men, learnt by rote"; the ritual for penitence and law for righteousness became merely ritual and law, mere obligation.  The best saw that it was so, and they rebelled--the prophetic revolt, the prophetic stance, is a critique of authoritarianism in the interests of justice, mercy, and righteousness.  The prophets saw it, but not many others; when it became obvious that pragmatic, political Israel would not survive, the prophets interpreted the coming destruction as a judgment of God, and were given the difficult task of reevaluating a chosenness that could no longer apply to the nation as a whole.  Isaiah simultaneously restricted the chosenness to a righteous remnant and his message to his disciples; he sealed the oracle, and the revelation became enigmatic (as the movement, originally normative, turned increasingly eschatological, and then apocalyptic), with a meaning which would become apparent only at the end of days.  The meaning of Daniel,written near the end of the revelation, is almost completely sealed.

When the judgment came and the unthinkable had happened, the exiles, bewildered, could not see the destruction as merely retribution for Israel's sins; such a punishment would be out of all proportion with the evil . Deutero-Isaiah's solution to the riddle of the exile is the Book of Consolation: the suffering was redemptive, and Israel's redemption would be miraculous.  The return was natural, but Deutero-Isaiah is canonical, because the exile prefigured the Dispersion and the expectation (unfulfilled) prefigured fulfillment at the end of days.  The Book of Consolation,in other words, has a meaning its author did not intend as he wrote it, a givenness beyond his ken; called forth as a solution to the riddle of the exile, it is a solution to the riddle of the universe.

Jobis the other half of the solution to both riddles:  for Deutero-Isaiah, Israel suffered as the Servant, in atonement; for the author of Job,Israel suffered as a test, demanded by the Adversary, in validation of righteousness, a test which would be followed by God's vindication.  From the poet's point of view, during the exile or shortly after, Israel's former state had been the exception to the rule that there is no temporal correlation of prosperity with virtue (as the revelation to Israel was the exception to God's temporal impotence and silence), though even there, it was collective, and not active as a continuous, magic correlation, but a series of natural events which were interpreted by the prophets as judgments of God.  If Job is Israel, the contradiction between his history and his thesis is resolved.

The disparity between the Job of the prologue and the Job of the argument is also reconciled, since both are characteristic of Israel:  her faith is holy, and her rebellion as well, since the rebellion is only apparent a demand for justice in a world of injustice, and thus on behalf of the God of justice.  Job sins in the argument only in doing what the prologue says he has not done so far:  in charging God with unreason.  This is, comparatively, no sin at all, but sin enough to explain Job's final submission, which, we have seen, is the opposite of the submission his friends had recommended.  It is nothing in God's speeches that causes Job to submit, because God explains nothing, but Job sees something we do not--he sees God, and righteousness before holiness is worship, a submission:  "I knew of Thee then only by report but now I see Thee with my own eyes.  Therefore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes."  Job's righteousness makes him refuse to surrender to the comforters' Godonearth, and his righteousness makes him submit to the God of holiness.  He does not bow in terror, is not beaten into submission (if he could be, he would long before have been); the abject attitude of his submission is an indication of God's greatness, not Job's worthlessness.  Job can call himself insignificant--we cannot agree.

The contradictions in God's behavior are, as well, resolved.  After describing Job's righteousness He says merely, "So be it" to Satan's proposal, and that has always looked like callous acquiescence to torture.  But once we realize that the prologue describes not an idle wager, but the cosmic challenge, the "So be it" is an acknowledgment that the challenge is valid, and the absence of any other statement by God is not a sign of approval, but that the "So be it" is not indication at all of how God views Job's tribulation (for that, we can turn to Deutero Isaiah).  In His speeches from the whirlwind, God does not boast of His power, but His Spirit, not the magnitude of the universe, but the wonder of it all.  God's presence is unavoidably aweful; the speeches are to Job not to rebuke him for his rebellion, but because God has nothing to say to the comforters, except in pronouncing His judgment against them:  they must beg forgiveness of Job, and then God will accept Job's intercession for his friends.  The judgment is one sided; the comforters are repudiated absolutely.

Which brings us back to Judaism, Christianity, and the misinterpretation of the revelation.  If the comforters were called forth and western history has served God's purposes, we must focus on Jesus.  Who was he?  Why did he die?  What happened then?

He was a Jew who grew naturally, but became convinced he was the Messiah, that the time was fulfilled, the Kingdom of God at hand and he must proclaim it, because only the penitent were righteous, and only the righteous would be saved.  Israel was again institutional; the higherarchy, run by Rome, had attracted the authoritarians.  Jesus, taking the prophetic stance, that of a righteous man in a mechanistic order, placed himself in opposition to it.

In opposition to the authoritarians.  The nature of the opposition is more clearly explained by an analysis of the word "Pharisee."  The Gospels describe the opposition as to the Pharisees (where they do not generalize it to "Jews"), but they are polemical, written after it had become obvious that very few Jews would become Christians, and many Romans would.  "P(p)harisee" is two words, with opposite meanings.  The "pharisee," first of all, is the type, the religious hypocrite, obsessed with appearances and position--the authoritarian.  These, Jesus (and all righteous Jews) opposed. The "Pharisee," on the other hand, is Pharisaic Judaism, which has been characterized, throughout its history, by antiauthoritarianism; the Pharisees have been remarkably unpharisaic.  Now, nearly all of the pharisees are Christians, and, when Jesus spoke, nearly all of them were Sadducees.  Jesus, if he could be characterized more precisely than "Jew," was himself a Pharisee, and it was only after the Sadducees, and the rest of the higherarchy, were destroyed in 70 C.E., and Pharisaic Judaism was all of Judaism, that the opposition was inverted in the Gospels to make the Pharisees its target.

We can also understand the stance Jesus took more easily if we remember that the revelation is to Israel--Jesus' audience (then and since) is all Jews.  As with the prophets, the unrighteous and the righteous, the condemnations and the promise of redemption, are within Israel; this disallows many long-held interpretations of words attributed to Jesus, especially in the parables--there is no reprobate (or new) Israel, just one (true) Israel.  He did not attack Judaism, but the higherarchy, and his scathing tone is justified by his conviction that the Kingdom was at hand.  His expectations were not fulfilled, and he realized he would have to die (led to this conclusion, certainly, by his reading of Deutero-Isaiah, and dying deliberately by provoking the Romans and their running dogs), thinking, perhaps, that the Kingdom would appear as he did so.  It did not, and he died, apparently, for nothing, greatly mistaken.  Greatly mistaken he was, but he did not die for nothing, because his death called forth Christianity.

He had taken the prophetic stance, but had gone further, and had proclaimed himself Israel's Messiah, a claim the Jews (those who heard it) rightly rejected.  They had been prepared to expect a Messiah who would redeem Israel and usher in the messianic age.  Jesus played to the expectation, proclaimed himself the Messiah--and then refused to establish the Kingdom.  The claim, in the face of the refusal, the Jews could not take as other than blasphemy or delusion.  Jesus added no new content to Judaism, which, in the tension between halakhah and kavvanah, form and freedom, ritual act and righteous intent, had long been complete; Torah as obligation had been, and would be, recognized as unrighteousness.

Christianity, however, inverted this tension and described it as a polarity between the church (freedom) and the synagogue (mere form).  In order to see the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, we must remember that the polarity between security and freedom has a lookalike within mechanism, in the polarity between authoritarianism and relativism, and within theism, in the tension between form and freedom.  The theistic opposite of the Galbraith-Buckley apparent opposition is the apparent opposition between Richard Rubenstein and Arthur Cohen.  The liberal-conservative spectrum whose poles the theologians represent looks like the political spectrum, but it is theistic, and inverted:  Galbraith and Buckley are correct in their criticisms, mistaken in their defenses; Rubenstein and Cohen are correct in their defenses, mistaken in their criticisms.  The apparent opposition within politics is misleading, since it seems to imply that one position is the right one. The apparent opposition within theism is misleading as well, since it seems to imply that one position is the wrong one.  Galbraith and Buckley are both wrong; Rubenstein and Cohen are both right. The ability to encompass contradictions (the cultural counterpart of the tolerance for ambiguity) is characteristic of Judaism, and implies that it is difficult, without forsaking and turning on Judaism, for a Jew to be unrighteous, and that it is possible to serve God greatly as a nonobserving Jew, as a theoretical physicist or on a rock guitar, by bringing excellence and righteousness to any endeavor.

We can use the tension between form and freedom to explain the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and the means by which Christianity was called forth.  Theism (like relativity) explains both normal and critical conditions, but in the transition from one to the other, makes an inversion, so that its implications in the two states are opposite.  Mechanism does not make the inversion, so in a crisis reality abandons it.  Normal conditions for theism are the world as unredeemed, critical conditions the times of the Messiah, when the world has been redeemed and God is on earth.  Under normal conditions (for the same reasons that there must be a revelation) the implications of theism must be objectified.  The implications of righteousness are justice and mercy, but these are interhuman virtues; theism is man before God (Israel, as Job, has seen God), and righteousness before holiness expresses itself as worship.  Worship, with God gone, must be externalized, or it will be formless; the form of theism is Torah.  In the times of the Messiah, however, theism will be internalized (and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free), and the restrictions will no longer be necessary.

Jesus, convinced that the Kingdom was at hand, made the inversion.  He was wrong--the time was far from fulfilled--but right, given his conviction that it was fulfilled.  When the Kingdom did not appear, however, Paul and the other early Christians took the inversion to opposite conclusions:  God was on earth, and the Torah was abrogated.  In so doing, Christianity severed itself from reality, because the world was still unredeemed, and when the church returned to normal conditions without remaking the inversion, the inevitable externalization took the form of dogmas and sacraments and a lust for power, and mechatheism was born.

Paul was, in other words, driven to conclusions, drawn by a validity opposite to truth, and Christianity, with no guidance from God, took precisely the form He intended it to take, serving His purposes, against His will; Christianity is a misapprehension created by God.  It may look like God lied, led people to false premises, but there was no deception and (since Christianity makes belief primary, and the truth must be opposite) it matters not a whit what Christians have believed--salvation is in justice, mercy, and righteousness, not belief, and sin is in oppression, not unbelief or misbelief.

It is likely that God called forth Christianity with three moves, three visions--visions not to deny their objective reality, but their generality; each had a specific purpose, and was limited to the people necessary to fulfill that purpose.  First, a vision to Jesus that he was the Messiah; this, given the political and religious conditions in Palestine, would drive him to the conclusions he came to, and to his death.  Second, a vision to his circle of friends and disciples (a shared vision whose reality they could not deny, and only to them, because no one else was meant, immediately, to believe) of a risen Jesus.  This served two purposes:  it triggered Christianity, produced the fanaticism which supported the new faith through its first, difficult days; and it prefigured the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century, crucified and, three days later, resurrected.  Third, a vision to Paul of a kingly Jesus; this transformed him, made him into the tireless missionary, and drove him to the conclusions that he came to, and to his death.

From then on Christianity evolved on its own, but according to plan, and the unintentional (for the participants) givenness in its progress, a predictable response to a revelation, produced, as well, a givenness in the record:  even the "New Testament" (its descriptions of events distorted to support the conclusions the Church had come to) is literarily true.  Its givenness is apparent once we know how to read it, and the clue is that the historicalgivenness is an inversion of God's will:  the New Testament is an inversion of the truth.  Those things asserted of Jesus, are true of Israel.

Jesus is not the Son of God, but the terminology was necessary, because Israel is God's firstborn son (and because Job's agony, the Servant's suffering, would be inflicted only as revenge for an apparent deicide):  God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved; behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world; no man cometh unto the Father, but by the Son.  Even the passion becomes perfectly clear once we reverse the roles:  the "Jews" are the Germans; Pilate is the Christian nations (and especially the United States), but without Pilate's ignorance of the implications of his washing his hands; Israel is the Christ.

We have described Jesus' (unintended) givenness, but there remains the more difficult question of his actual role:  who was he, really; what is left of his mission, once Christianity is revealed as a misapprehension?  Action, certainly, can only be measured by how closely intention correlates with effect.  Deutero Isaiah, however, was also wrong; Jesus, too, is vindicated in prefiguration--his fate prefigured Israel's, and his expectation prefigured fulfillment at the end of days.  The unintentional givenness of his mission sealed the oracle, and made possible the test.

Christianity sees atonement as a substitutionary punishment.  The Messiah's mission is suffering and redemption, the suffering not punishment, but necessary as a test, and if righteous, redemptive.  A suffering for the sanctification of the Name sanctifies, as well as the Name, the sufferer, who earns an intercession (ala Job), his suffering having atoned for comforter sins.  Jesus is Messiah (ben Joseph, as it were, who suffers, but redeems nothing) to Israel, and Israel is Messiah (ben David, the King) to the nations.  Jesus suffers righteously, and intercedes for Israel, who suffers, then, sinlessly, her prayers an intercession for the nations.  Israel is a nation of priests and a holy people.  Six million sanctified.

Deutero-Isaiah quotes God as saying, "Mark this, I have spoken, and I will bring it about; I have a plan to carry out, and carry it out I will."  God's ability to call forth Christianity, and the suggestion that even the Holocaust served His purposes, implies that western history may have been divinely ordained; the agreement to allow the test may have been God asserting:  "If I form a world. so that it brings forth mechanism, and if, while Babel is being built, I give this revelation to my Servant, when the revelation ends, theism will be introduced into mechanism, and the process, if I interfere no further, will play itself out thusly."  History may have been God's movie, His fantasy, imposed upon the nations, a literary sequence which, at every crucial point, had to turn God's way or be derailed.  God had to win every crucial test; Satan needed but one.  God bet on the best; His victory would be not by power, but spirit.  Having achieved the victory, God would have earned the right to redeem His Servant, and the world.

There is a plan, and its outline is in the apocalypses, in Daniel and, since the New Testament, too, is given, in the Revelation.  The visions of beasts and seals angels and dragons, are not literal predictions since, given the nature of the process, there is no foreseeing:  the "man of sin," whom Antiochus prefigures, is not a person, but a role, which at the appointed time someone will step forward to fill, drawn by a validity opposite to truth, which will, for him, correlate and explain all the facts; much about him can be foretold (the nature of his insecurities, the inversions in his vision) but those are elements of the role.  We cannot know in advance his name, nor the shape of his mark, nor the color of the shirts his slaves will wear.  But if history was called forth, if even evil has its appointed bounds (in space and time, and this is the fundamental meaning of God's reply to Job, the immediate implication of His speeches which does answer Job's objections), the apocalypses could be literarily related to the Plan, the numbers literal.

Since the vision is sealed, the sense of the passages is inaccurate--they are meant to be misleading.  In order to unmask the final givenness of the apocalypses, we must fragment and reorder them.  Explaining each passage separately would be tortuous, so we will take merely those which include the numbers (and those few others which are absolutely necessary), and use them as an outline for western history.  The givenness of the rest of the visions will then become apparent; they will order themselves around the crucial historical events.  The Plan's the thing wherein we catch the conscience of the King, blessed be His Name.
 

Revelation 12:1-6  Next appeared a portent in heaven, a woman robed with the sun, beneath her feet the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.  She was pregnant, and in the anguish of her labour she cried out to be delivered.  Then a second portent appeared in heaven:  a great dragon with seven heads and ten horns; on his head were seven diadems, and with his tail he swept down a third of the stars in the sky and flung them to the earth.  The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when her child was born he might devour it.  She gave birth to a male child, who is destined to rule all nations with an iron rod.  But her child was snatched up to God and His throne; and the woman herself fled into the wilds, there to be sustained for twelve hundred and sixty days.

The dragon is Satan, in his earthly manifestation as Rome.  The woman is Israel; the child is Jesus, so the passage refers (taking a day to be a year) to a test, dated from the crucifixion, in 30 G.E., of 1260 years, three and one half years of years.  Israel is, for the test, put in her place, down among the nations, not because she deserves that place (the connection between the Jews' due and the dues they paid is an inverse proportion), but because, in a mechanistic order, that is the best place to be.

Hitler said that "a state which in the epoch of race poisoning dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must someday be master of the world."  He meant by "race poisoning" the "mongrelization" of the races through the introduction of inferior (and especially Jewish) blood; by "the cherishing of (the) best racial elements" he meant the unrestricted competition in which the best (the dominant) rise to power.  We have seen that there is no selection for dominance, but one for subservience, and that the selection can eliminate the best in a people--that it is, in fact, "race poisoning," and characteristic of Germany (and especially the Nazis) as authoritarians.

If the inversion of Hitler's statement is to be complete, there must be a selection for excellence, characteristic of the Jews.  That selection for excellence was possible only because the Jews, everywhere beneath the higherarchies, had a down, right reasonable loyalty.  Remaining Jewish was a difficult choice, and righteous as well, so the best made it, and the rest left, and the percentage of the best among the Jews gradually increased.  The Jews are in yet another sense God's chosen (His selected) people, selected for excellence, refined, purified, for a final, critical test.  The test over, Israel will be "master of the world."  Having been uninterested in (and unintimidated by) power, she will be given authority.  Having been righteous unrewarded, she will be greatly blessed.

Christianity is also introduced into Rome after the crucifixion to become, eventually, mechatheism in opposition to Judaic theism, but initially parallel to Judaism, theism in opposition to Roman mechanism.  In the transition from theism to mechatheism, the church will create the terms for antisemitism (an authoritarian fantasy, with no foundation in Jewish behavior), making possible the final test.  The Church thus serves both God's will and His purposes, radically against His will.

In sketching a validity for Christianity which is not offensive to Judaism, we must first separate the issue of its relationship to Judaism, not to belittle it, but to recognize its overwhelming significance--if we did not make it a special case, there could be no gentile righteousness.  Anti-Judaism is an inversion built into the Christian world view, an inversion which may affect only that issue.  It is a sign of the final invalidity of Christianity, and the violence with which it is held is a measure of a particular church's distance from God, but no church has been free of it, and some have been righteous.

If we examine the Middle Ages, for instance, without making the incision, the persecutions which filled them make it difficult to see any righteousness anywhere.  If, on the other hand, we evaluate them as Henry Adams does in Mont Saint -Michel and Chartres(as if they were Judenrein),we can see that they were, for a while, the one time the church imperial approximated the Judaic ability to encompass contradictions, and we can identify the literary sequence in the rise of dogmatic medievalism, as the Church darkened (implying that it once was light).  For the Jews, the Middle Ages were one long nightmare; within Christianity, there was Chartres, the Grail, The Canterbury Tales,and The Divine Comedybefore the darkness fell.

Christianity is not one church but two (however many there are, there are only two), high and low; God's church is a low church.  Those who have found God in Christianity have most often done so antagonistically, heretically, in opposition to the higherarchy, from. inside or outside the church.  Better Mencken than a Presbyterian.
 

Revelation 13:1-4, 11-12 Then out of the sea I saw a beast rising.  It had ten horns and seven heads.  On its horns were ten diadems, and on each head a blasphemous name.  The beast I saw was like a leopard, but its feet were like a bear's and its mouth like a lion's mouth.  The dragon conferred upon it his power and rule, and great authority.  One of its heads appeared to have received a death blow; but the mortal wound was healed.  The whole earth went after the beast in wondering admiration.  Men worshipped the dragon because he had conferred his authority upon the beast; they worshipped the beast also, and chanted, "Who is like the Beast?  Who can fight against it?"

Then I saw another beast, which came up out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb's, but spoke like a dragon.  It wielded all the authority of the first beast, whose mortal wound had been healed.

Mechanism, in a material reality hiding God, takes two primary forms, for the answers to the first question:  1) no, there is no God--Babel, universal empire, utopia; and 2) yes, there is--Inquisition, Pope Godonearth, the temptations seized.  We will take the beast whose mortal wound is healed to be Babel, disappearing in the fall of Rome, rising again in the Renaissance.  We will take the beast with "horns like a lamb's, but (speaking) like a dragon" to be Inquisition, mechatheism.  The beast with seven heads and ten horns (whose number is 666) is mechanism.  Taking each six times the seven and the ten, we get 420 three times for 1260.  The test is three tests of 420 years each, theism tested once against Babel, once against Inquisition, once against both.
 

Revelation 20:1-3  Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hands.  He seized the dragon, that serpent of old, the Devil or Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years; he threw him into the abyss, shutting and sealing it over him, so that he might seduce the nations no more till the thousand years were over.

Satan's seduction is mechanism; we will take the 1000 years to mean merely that, among the consequences of the crucifixion will be the removal, quite naturally, for 1000 years each, of Babel and Inquisition as temptations, to make possible the test of theism against each of them individually, then together!
 

Daniel 12:6-7  And I said to the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the river, "How long will it be before these portents cease?"  The man clothed in linen above the waters lifted to heaven his right hand and his left, and I heard him swear by Him Who lives for ever:  "It shall be for a time, times, and a half.  When the power of the holy people ceases to be dispersed, all these things shall come to an end."

We will take the three and one half times to be three and one half months (of thirty days) of years, beyond the 1260, putting the end of days, in this reckoning of time, at 1365.
 

Daniel 12:11 From the time when the regular offering is abolished and "the abomination of desolation" is set up, there shall be an interval of one thousand two hundred and ninety days.

We will take the interval to be between the abolition of the offering (in 70 C.E.) and the abomination that brings desolation.  In order to put the abomination into our scheme for the counting of the days, we must add forty years, for the interval between the crucifixion (30), the beginning of the test, and the destruction of the temple (70), putting the abomination at 1330.
 

Daniel 12:12  Happy the man who waits and lives to see the completion of one thousand three hundred and thirty-five days.

Revelation 10:1-3 Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven.  He was wrapped in cloud, with the rainbow round his head; his face shown like the sun and his legs were like pillars of fire.  In his hand he held a little scroll unrolled.  His right foot he planted on the sea, and his left on the land. Then he gave a great shout, like the roar of a lion; and when he shouted, the seven thunders spoke.

A thunder is a turn of events which God has called forth, and whose consequences are of crucial importance in the times following.
 

Revelation 8:13 Then I looked, and I heard an eagle calling with a loud cry as it flew in mid-heaven:  "Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth when the trumpets sound which the last three angels must blow!"

Among the seven thunders are three woes.