Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

APPENDIX C
creeds and theological understanding necessarily lead
to impotence culturally? Nonsense! It was the
Reformation that made possible modern science and
technology.
On the other side of the field – indeed, right next to the
wheat – self-awareness by unbelievers also increases.
But they do not always become more convinced of their
roots in chaos. The Renaissance was successful in
swallowing up the fruits of the Reformation only to the
extent that it was a pale reflection of the Reformation.
The Renaissance leaders rapidly abandoned the magiccharged,
demonically inspired magicians like Giordano
Bruno. 20 They may have kept the humanism of a
Bruno, but after 1600, the open commitment to the
demonic receded. In its place came rationalism, Deism,
and the logic of an orderly world. They used stolen
premises and gained power. So compelling was this
vision of mathematically autonomous reality that
Christians like Cotton Mather hailed the new science
of Newtonian mechanics as essentially Christian. It was
so close to Christian views of God’s orderly being and
the creation’s reflection of His orderliness, that the
Christians unhesitatingly embraced the new science.
What we see, then, is that the Christians were not fully
self-conscious epistemologically, and neither were the
pagans. In the time of the apostles, there was greater
epistemological awareness among the leaders of both
sides. The church was persecuted, and it won. Then
there was a lapse into muddled thinking on both sides.
The attempt, for example, of Julian the Apostate to
revive paganism late in the fourth century was
ludicrous – it was half-hearted paganism, at best. Two
centuries earlier, Marcus Aurelius, a true philosopherking
in the tradition of Plato, had been a major
persecutor of Christians; Justin Martyr died under his
years as emperor. But his debauched son, Commodus,
was too busy with his 300 female concubines and 300
males 21 to bother about systematic persecutions. Who
was more self-conscious, epistemologically speaking?
Aurelius still had the light of reason before him; his son
was immersed in the religion of revolution – culturally
impotent. He was more willing than his philosopherpersecutor
father to follow the logic of his satanic faith.
He preferred debauchery to power. Commodus was
assassinated 13 years after he became Emperor. The
Senate resolved that his name be execrated. 22
If a modern investigator would like to see as fully
consistent a pagan culture as one might imagine, he
could visit the African tribe, the Ik. Colin TurnbuIl
did, and his book, The Mountain People (1973), is a
classic. He found almost total rebellion against law –
family law, civic law, all law. Yet he also found a totally
impotent, beaten people who were rapidly becoming
extinct. They were harmless to the West because they
were more self-consistent than the West’s satanists.
The Marxist Challenge
Marxists, on the other hand, are a threat. They believe
in linear history (officially, anyway – their system is at
bottom cyclical, however). 23 They believe in law. They
believe in destiny. They believe in historical meaning.
They believe in historical stages, though not ethically
determined stages such as we find in Deuteronomy.
They believe in science. They believe in literature,
propaganda, and the power of the written word. They
believe in higher education. In short, they have a
philosophy which is a kind of perverse mirror image of
Christian orthodoxy. They are dangerous, not because
they are acting consistently with their ultimate
philosophy of chaos, but because they limit the
function of chaos to one area alone: the revolutionary
transformation of bourgeois culture. (I am speaking
here primarily of Soviet Marxists.)
And where are they winning converts? In the
increasingly impotent, increasingly existentialist,
increasingly antinomian West. Until the West
abandoned its remnant of Christian culture, Marxism
could flourish only in the underdeveloped, basically
pagan areas of the world. An essentially Western
philosophy of optimism found converts among the
intellectuals of the Far East, Africa, and Latin America,
who saw the fruitlessness of Confucian stagnation and
relativism, the impotence of demonic ritual, or the
dead-end nature of demon worship. Marxism is
powerful only to the extent that it has the trappings of
Augustinianism, coupled with subsidies, especially
technological subsidies and long-term credit, from
Western industry.
There is irony here. Marx believed that “scientific
socialism” would triumph only in those nations that
had experienced the full development of capitalism. He
believed that in most cases (possibly excepting Russia),
rural areas had to abandon feudalism and develop a
fully capitalist culture before the socialist revolution
would be successful. Yet it was primarily in the rural
regions of the world that Marxist ideas and groups were
first successful. The industrialized West was still too
Christian or too pragmatic (recognizing that “honesty
is the best policy”) to capitulate to the Marxists, except
immediately following a lost war.
Marxists have long dominated the faculties of Latin
American universities, but not U.S. universities. In
1964, for example, there were not half a dozen
outspoken Marxist economists teaching in American
universities (and possibly as few as one, Stanford’s Paul
Baran). Since 1965, however, New Left scholars of a
Marxist persuasion have become a force to be reckoned
with in all the social sciences, including economics. 24
The skepticism, pessimism, relativism, and irrelevance
20. On the magic of the early Renaissance, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and
the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Vintage, [1964] 1969).
21. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Milman edition, 5 Vols. (Philadelphia: Porter& Coates, [1776]), I, p. 144.
22. Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1955), p. 223.
23. Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: The Doctrine of Creative Destruction
(Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1968), pp. 100-1.
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