Michael Bolerjack The Four Last Things
1 Christology 2 Happiness 3 Freedom 4 Convergence
1 Christology
Jesus of Nazareth was not God – yet. Jesus became God after the ascension. The hypostatic union is not incorrect. But it is not an historical event, rather an eternal one. By moving it from the incarnation until after the ascension, many points are saved. God did not die. God does not make mistakes. God does not create Himself. Jesus, post-resurrection, said to Mary Magdalene; do not touch me for I have not yet ascended to my Father. Why does He say this? He was still a man and could be tempted. God cannot be tempted. Jesus said to Thomas touch me. That’s ok, that’s not a temptation, but Mary Magdalene was. If something in scripture is in error, then something else can be, too. Jesus made a mistake in Matthew when He said this generation will not pass away until all these things are fulfilled. God cannot make a mistake, therefore Jesus was not God yet. Jesus said only the Father knows. If Jesus was God, He’d know. John’s and Paul’s Christologies are in error. If Jesus could make a mistake, a fortiori they could. John’s chronology is suspect, disregarding fundamentally all of the timeline of the synoptics. Paul says do not judge, but then violates the spirit of the Gospel, by his condemnations. God cannot forsake Himself. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani. This was said by a man forsaken. God speaks analogically or figuratively in scripture, of Jesus, or eternally, with the end in view. Vain repetition is inimical to God, but Catholic theology is vain repetition, therefore Catholic theology is inimical to God. God hates closure. The Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic canons are all closed. Philosophical inquiry is open. God loves truth in its openness. Therefore, God loves philosophy. The canons were closed in order to fetter people’s minds, shackle the truth and put God in a box. This closure cannot be effracted from within, only from without. We are placed outside, in order to effract it. The second coming will be different than the first. First, Jesus was a man. In the second He will be in hypostatic union with the Son of God. Jesus of Nazareth was not identical with the Second Person of the
Trinity, but was joined to Him, as all who are saved will be. Jesus is the first fruits. God does not pray to God. If Jesus had been God, he would have had no need to pray. God is free, but Jesus depended on the faith of others to work miracles, the faith of the recipient of the miracle, first of all. At the creation, God had no need of faith. At Nazareth, Jesus could work no great miracle. Therefore, Jesus was not God yet. Jesus grew in wisdom, but God cannot. Jesus was perfected, but God is already perfect. The scriptures contradict one another on such points as the identities of those crucified with Jesus. Are they thieves or revolutionaries? Both bad, or one good? God allowed error in scripture. He did not dictate it. For God cannot make a mistake. The true Torah is not written in a book of paper, but is in Heaven. If Jesus could be wrong, and John and Paul, how much more so fathers, doctors, councils and popes? Let God be true and every man a liar. All have fallen short. The Father is greater than I. The Bible is a literary object.
2 Happiness
I think we should care for God’s happiness. Everyone naturally wants to be happy. God is a person. Therefore, He wants to be happy. In the Hebrew Scriptures at times God was unhappy, being angry, wrathful, and jealous. Many times His Bride ran away and left Him at the altar. But God loves her, and gives her more chances. What is God’s righteousness? Is righteousness in God’s life the same or even analogically similar to the righteousness of men, that is, with justice and morality? My ways are not your ways, nor are my thoughts your thoughts. Jesus said, put first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. They say God does not need us. That He is self-sufficient. When I put my wife first, it is to make her happy. And so with God. How can I make God happy? If you love me (want me to be happy) keep my commandments. Love one another. Forgive your enemies. Why are we told to love God? I think it is just, and to our benefit, but also, this will make God happy. Partly because He will see that we are learning and trying, by putting His happiness ahead of ours. Jesus died, not so much in obedience, but to make His Father happy. In the war of life, Jesus had a special, monumental battle to fight. He rejoiced, though he died in pain, forsaken by the Father. It is not because He had the beatific vision and consolation of it, but because it made God happy for a man to lay down His life this way, to save His friends, win the war, and make God happy. It may be said that God’s righteousness is His happiness. Righteous is a slang term meaning genuine and good. It makes God happy to be genuine and good. When we are in our right minds, it does for us as well.
To say we are saved not by our righteousness but by God’s, is to say we are not saved by our own happiness, but by God’s. Put God first. Think of what will make Him happy. If He is happy, you will be, too. But if God is angry or unhappy, you will be even more so. God may be very unhappy with us today. He may be very angry. He loves us, but is unhappy we do not return His love. He will not force us to love Him, and He has already persuaded us so many times in so many ways. We must not love Him out of fear, or for our own good. He is deserving. He is not the cause of our problems. He wants us to win the victory over evil. Evil is not loving other persons, including God. So, we must love. He has given us so many ways to find out how to love, lessons in love, so that we may come to the altar first, where He will join us. The altar of marriage with God is the Promised Land. He wants to go there confidently, with trust, believing that although we have disappointed Him before, this time, if we get it right, He will forgive us. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Promised Land, the Wedding all mean the same thing. Do not fear the word righteousness, but substitute the word happiness for it. Morals and justice or mercy are how theologians speak. God would have love and happiness. God is more human than we think.
3 Freedom
The twenty-two pages of this section were boiled down to the gist of the argument concerning the freedom of God and as “Salted With Fire” have appeared previously in the works End of the Church, An Icon from an Evening in Glas, and The Catholic Apocalypse. I omit them here.
4 Convergence
Some people see the great contradiction of life and conclude that nothing is true, therefore everything is permitted. Others look on it and joyfully say, it’s all true, it’s all true. So it was for me on the day of my conversion, and so it is for me today. The philosopher Adorno said that the whole is the untrue, contrary to Hegel. How can this be? Because if the truth is a contradiction, then the whole is both true and false at the same time, and is not simply true or altogether false. In the pages on logic I published with the apocalyptic writings earlier this year, I asserted the truth of contradiction, which is not to say the contradiction of truth. The Lord has said let your left hand not know what your right hand is doing, and
the Lord has prophesied, look on, you scoffers, and be amazed, for I am doing a work you cannot comprehend. The work of the apocalypse is the full declaration of the divine totality and I see it like this:
As I have said elsewhere, the key to the interpretation of revelation is understanding the enigmatic number 666. And as I have said, 6+6+6=18, which is John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It is also via multiplication 6x6x6=216, which is John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But that is not the whole truth, nor the end of the matter. Vatican Council II can also bear the application of the number of the antichrist, for it is 2 and produced 16 documents, the constitutions, declarations and decrees. I think the supporters of the Pope will happily lay hold on this news and say, we knew it all along, it is as Paul VI said of the Council, that a wind of evil had gotten into the Church, and that the trouble in it had to be repaired by those holy men Wojtyla and Ratzinger. But it is not as simple as that. I have said elsewhere that the Church was to be stopped by God. I believe He condemned the Church before it was created. This, chiefly because of the simony, not limited to a few, but extending all the way back to the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter gladly took the money laid at his feet by persons desiring the power of the Spirit, and saw those struck dead who did not give all their money to Peter. It was not the Spirit of God who struck them dead. From this beginning, to the Pope becoming a temporal ruler in 754 was not a big step, and the career of the Church is not surprising, in that Christ said you cannot serve both God and mammon. The Church was destined to be torn down, either in deconstructing, as Vatican Council II set out to do, or through deconsecration, which is the path chosen by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In other words, antichrist is both the Council and the Popes, the current one and his predecessor, at least, if not the last six. The periodicity of events in the recent church, worked out to a distance of 144 years, from the declaration of Papal Infallibility to the coming end in 2014, which will be 1260 years since 754, the number 1260 from Biblical prophecy, and used by Newton in his calculations, with the 144 years marked by divisions of 36, and as a whole applying to the 144,000 in Revelation, and to the 12x12 of the Two Israels, old and new, the totality of the Church, marked at the pivotal year of 1942 by the creation of the Vatican Bank, the deposit not of faith but money, is a kind of machine running inexorably to the apocalypse, when the evil of the Church will be revealed, when the truth is told, and many will repent and be saved, as Newton said. I must add that as for myself, my own name of Michael Bolerjack is composed of two words having sixteen total letters. I love Christ and do this work for Him, but seem implicated in the apocalyptic in an acute way, and no doubt will be or will have been vilified as antichrist myself. I am not, but being aware of this, of my journey as a Catholic, of how I once loved the Popes, and still think highly of the Council, I look on this great contradiction as being the truth. The fifty years of the Council and its aftermath in the reign of John Paul II and Benedict XVI can be seen as a matter of politics, of progressives and traditionalists. But it was a matter not of politics, but of prophecy. Who hath known the mind of the Lord or who has been His counselor? In the East there is an image of God in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna discloses all his terrible sublimity to Arjuna, as both
creator and destroyer. As is said in Isaiah, I make good and create evil. As He says to Job, where were you when I created the world and made leviathan and behemoth? If God could require the death of his Son Jesus, or create Adam only to see him fall, condemn him, but later forgive him, or in all the complexity of His relationship with Israel show his freedom, as when he says I break my promise, to the people of God who refused to enter the Promised Land, ripe for the taking, as described by Joshua and Caleb, and as is said, God loved Jacob but hated Esau, then we might say God is Absolute, not to be comprehended. I think the Church in the definitions of the Trinity and the person of Christ tried to do what cannot be done. I will not speculate on the politics of the early Church that led to these dogmatic assertions, but suggest that the Church in these matters set itself up as defining God, or placing itself above Him in a sense, a role carried out ever more ardently by the Popes in particular, especially after 1870. In this the Church I feel is culpable of lese majesty, offense against the sovereignty of God. It may be that the institution cannot be saved, but that individuals may be. God has mercy on Whom He will. If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts. That there is still a Promised Land and that some will make it in, I believe. The gate is strait and the path narrow and few there be that find it. In the apocalypse, perhaps the gate is unique for each of us, being the call to do the one thing that Christ in particular requires of each of us individually, which may not be the same as anyone else’s task. Remember the case of Abraham our father in faith. The personal nature of your own apocalypse is between you and God and must be lived out fully. As Christ said to the rich young man, no one is good but God alone. I believe God is good, and His Heaven is good, where Mary and the angels and saints are. The world in some sense is still good as a vestige of His creation, and the Church too, still has some good in it, and still does some good. Those who say “it’s all good” are not completely wrong. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. To have become aware of this in my daily life was the great fruit of my personal apocalypse. It fostered in me an awareness of love I did not have before, of love’s responsibility. This responsibility for me is surrender to Christ. For me there is no other way.