Vol 2. No. 3: Decolonization, Incarnation, and Liberation

2/9/2022 2 Comments

Theses Toward an Imminent Apocalypse

by: Apostle

A person dies. The world shatters. Life and Death reach out toward one another, hoping to reunite. We are told that, at this point in the story, the Christ descends into Hell to throw open the Gates of Death, thus saving Creation. But if we take this to be true, then what are we to make of our present condition?

All across Christendom, the dead are absent. Their mouths have been shoveled full of dirt; their hearts have been bound beneath gravestones. Everywhere, there are shrouds which hide the capitalist circulation of Life and Death—hospital curtains soak up the spatter of bodies bursting under economic pressure, antiseptic rooms are scrubbed for the sterile languishing of our strip-mined elders, news outlets never show where the bombs fall, politicians and activists blather at us about how the police can be restrained from lynching while the nooses are still in view.

If we think that Death was overcome, we are mistaken. To live in this world is to be dead.2

II.

It is inexcusable today to attend a mainline, white Christian church, for to do so is to reap the rewards of an ongoing procession of brutalities. As the prophet says, There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.3 Indeed, the Bible that many of us hold dear functions, chiefly, as a mythic justification for the ruthless expansion of control. From the pages of this one book have flowed continuing campaigns of genocide and domination, and those exterminated by the many despots legitimized by the Bible now cry for revenge. In life, they were placated with mirages of Heaven, but, in death, they find themselves firmly in the Deceiver’s trap, and they rattle the chains of time and raise a vulture’s cry for freedom. They demand that we take up our swords, man against his father and daughter against her mother,4 for the houses in which we are living must be divided against themselves. They must fall. The only church that illuminates anything is a burning church.5

III.

It was said that the Temple would be destroyed and, in three days, rebuilt.6 But we all know the Nazarene was not speaking of a literal temple, so why has it been the obsession of so many Christians to build endless churches? They have built churches with crosses and churches with cannons, churches with bank vaults and churches with missile bays. The Temple was not a temple, the Kingdom is not a kingdom, and the Church has never been a church. When Church and Empire merged under Roman rule, the two never separated, and every subsequent Leviathan born of that union has taken up and further perfected its parents’ instruments of control, put to use for its own pestilential growth.

We have long forgotten that the Nazarene lived and taught destitution. In the same moment that the death of God was completed on the Cross, the Christ was revealed to have already suffused every inch of Creation. The Deceiver’s crucifixion myth carries the germ of its own annihilation. Let us devote ourselves to its reversal, as the Nazarene did. In life, the Trickster Jesus sought to turn the Deceiver’s technologies against themselves; in death, he shows us how.

IV.

The Prophets’ work is to obliterate the current understandings, to reveal the brutality of the day’s sovereign lies. The Prophets know the Catastrophe maintains itself by stealing its enemies’ faces, and so the Prophets hone their sharpest blades to cut away so many masks. Just so, the Bible must now be read against itself; Jesus must be fractured and the pieces of him scattered on the wind. For, though the Deceiver has deigned to imprison the Christ in a faraway Heaven—a Heaven figured as an outside to this Hellish inside—splinters always appear within linear time, within our subjectivated bodies, within our reproduced relations; and these splinters find quantum resonance with that which was exiled beyond the stars. From the time of our birth, our soul is shot through with remnants of that which was promised, the excess which the Deceiver must always work to cover over; and yet we hear it, even now, echoing from the hollow spaces within our bones--the last shall be first and the first shall be last.7

A question confronts us: What are we to make of so many Jesuses? The wanderer from the wilderness calling fishers to quit their work,8 the vagabond sharing bread with multitudes,9 the rabbi excoriating Pharisaic law,10 the herald of a cosmic war,11 the sacred clown leading the cortège de tête,12 the fugitive escaping being thrown from a cliff,13 the revolutionary flogging the moneychangers14—and still other Jesuses we have yet to meet. Who are these strangers who confront the great Lord and Master? Jesus is divided against himself; a thousand possible worlds mounting their destituent assault upon the throne of the perfect, blue-eyed Son of God, against that so-called Prince of Peace who blasts the world bare beneath an ashen Pax Romana. This Jesus is a mask of the Deceiver. And he must be destroyed.

VI.

We speak against the early church fathers who took control of the Word by transcribing and authorizing it. We speak against all who have wielded, in order to raise themselves up, that falsely named Good Book. We speak against white Christians most of all, but also against anyone who would, with a corpse-filled mouth,15 implore the oppressed to bide their time until the Coming.

It is time to speak a new creed, same as the old: Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?16, or, No one is coming to save us!17

VII.

Just as the Christ escaped into All Creation at that moment of imperial violence upon the Cross; just as the Christ was recognized after death in the tone of a gardener’s consolation,18 in the gesture of a roadside stranger,19 in the territory established between friends20—just so, we must be attuned to the proliferation of messianic knowledges. Knowledges which put us askance with the world—in it, but not of it—which marks us as fugitives. We run looking for a weapon and keep running looking to drop it,21 not because we flee in hope of finding some tool with which to fight and win, but because every attempt at our capture sends us rushing away like water, and every skirmish ignites within us the fires of the unarmed joy we have in one another. What first appears as retreat, in truth, harbors the messianic shards which are fused together unexpected and new in every age. That which is thought to have been vanquished stares back at the supposed victors from the faces of each newcome generation. What survives, what transcends the Deceiver’s domination over Life and Death, is the wordless understanding of the necessity of escape and attack. This burning possibility is freely available to all who muster the courage to enter, without distinguishing between them, both Egypt’s wilderness and Babylon’s furnace.

VIII.

In the “authorized” Gospels, the Nazarene speaks often of fire, and this is taken as the hellfire of damnation. But fire, like water, is as much a purifying force as it is a destructive one. A wildfire burns away that which has lived too long just as a flood sweeps away that which is not sturdily built.

It is worth studying such uneasy conflations, which occur again and again: a god in a human body, a teacher defying the law, a king on a stolen donkey, a death that makes life possible. In crossing boundaries, the Nazarene gestured toward the infinite collapsing of Creation in which each thing is revealed to be both itself and its others; incontrovertibly one, yet irreducibly many.

What use is it, then, to speak of the sacred and the mundane? After all, have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?22

IX.

If Christ Jesus was the Word Made Flesh, which announced the coming of the Kingdom of God; and if the Word was also God, that is, the King; and if Jesus of Nazareth died on the Cross with King of the Jews fixed mockingly over his head—then the announcement of the Kingdom was also the announcement of the King’s death. Which is to say: The King is dead! Long live the Kingdom!

There is no Heaven beyond the sky and no Hell underfoot. There was no First Coming that would be followed in linear sequence by a Second Coming. These spatiotemporal sleights-of-hand are intended to obfuscate an eternal now in which we are both breaking our chains within the bowels of the Roman fort and battering down its gates from without during our nighttime raid. One must always be suspicious of windows, walls, doors, borders, identities, taxonomies, and temple curtains—for these are the conjurations by which the Deceiver wishes to damn the inflowing and outrushing of Creation. There are no separations. There are no limits. For we must ask: If in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,23 and the Word became flesh and lived among us24—what does that mean about us?

XI.

When what has been separated is brought back together in the space of our shared lives, when the joys of Heaven are realized amid this Hell-on-Earth, then we become dangerous. But--no place to lay our heads, no time to bury our dead25—we must first be willing to leave this world behind.

To hold no power over others as those in the churches do, calling one another father and pastor.26 To build no churches at all within which to enslave the Christ to Money and Morality, which are nothing more than the names of Mammon.27 To raise every valley high and lay every mountain low,28 and to finally heed the destituent proclamation: Everything for everyone and nothing for ourselves!29

XII.

We are not doomed to repeat Gethsemane forever. Not so long as there survives the memory of the promised reversal (for the Nazarene was not certain that the cup could be taken, but he was not uncertain), and this promise must always be honed against the memories of all those who have been crucified for their belief in it. For memory imbues our lives with the messianic potential of now; the now of the Resurrection, which can be revealed at any/every moment in a singular motion of total self-destitution30: Now, the Disciples’ exhaustion is so complete that they remain awake. Now, Judas moves to betray Jesus only to find there is no Jesus there to betray. Now, the Pharisees and the governors are issuing their commands and spreading their lies, but their words are meaningless beneath the Jubilee music, so long awaited.

Now, which is always, potentially, today, the Kingdom of God strikes like lightning arcing between us, the living and the dead are reunited in the ebb and flow of Creation, and our history is finally starting because, at last, this history is coming to an end.

The secret is to begin.

Notes:

This work is, in ways, a sidelong affirmation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” If Christians are, as Nietzsche argues, the true nihilists who worship a deity they themselves have murdered, then the above theses aim, in part, to renew exploration of this nihilism and its potential for the transformation of our lives.
Mary Nardini Gang. “Criminal Intimacy.” 2009. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-criminal-intimacy.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, transl. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt, Mariner Books, 2019. Marxists.org, transl. by Dennis Redmond, 2005, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.
Matt. 10:35
A quote attributed to the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Duruti.
John 2:19
Matt. 20:16, Mark 10:31, Luke 13:30
Jesus Calls the First Disciples (Matt. 4:18-22; Mark 1:16-20)
Feeding the Five Thousand (Matt. 14:13-21, Mark 6:32-44, Luke 9:12-17; John 6:5-15); Feeding the Four Thousand (Matt. 15:32-38, Mark 8:1-10)
The Question about Fasting (Matt. 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5:33-39); Plucking Grain on the Sabbath (Matt. 12:1-8, Mark 2:23-28, Luke 6:1-5); The Man with a Withered Hand (Matt. 12:9-14, Mark 3:1-6, Luke 6:6-11)
The Desolating Sacrilege (Matt. 24:15-22, Mark 13:14-20, Luke 21:20-24)
Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1-9, Mark 11:1-10, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-19)
Luke 4:24-30
Jesus Cleanses the Temple (Matt. 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46)
The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. MIT Press, 2007. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection.
Mark 15:34
Inhabit. readinhabit.com.
John 20:14-18
Mark 16:12-13, Luke 24:13-35
Jesus Commissions the Disciples (Mark 16:14); Jesus Appears to His Disciples (Luke 24:36-43, John 20:19-20); Jesus and Thomas (John 20:24-29)
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2014, www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf.
Matt. 12:1-5, Mark 2:23-26, Luke 6:1-4
John 1:1
John 1:14
Matt. 8:18-22, Luke 9:57-62
Matt. 23:8-11
Serving Two Masters (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13); Jesus Denounces Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:11-36, Mark 12:38-40); Jesus Denounces the Scribes (Luke 20:45-47)
Isa. 40:4
A saying shared among the Zapatistas.
The present work is indebted in many ways to Marcello Tarì’s There Is No Unhappy Revolution. Through the biblical Gospels, the above theses have arrived at a similar notion as that which Tarì expresses while contemplating 2 Corinthians 6:8-10. Says Tarì: “In any case, if that negation—‘we are nothing’—contains the refusal of every incidental identity, every socially attributed valorization of the subjects, its positivity—‘and yet we are everything’—contains the claim of the potential to become a revolutionary. They are not two different stages, there is no before and after. It is a single motion. Destitution always opens up a becoming. What remains of the militant is the practice of a form of life that lives life as incompatible with the world as it is. The work of their existence is to render our present reality impossible.” (Tarì, Marcello. There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution. Transl. by Richard Braude, Common Notions, 2021. Ill Will Editions, transl. by Derive Approdi, 2017, illwill.com/print/the-communism-of-destitution.)

Apostle

“Apostle” from the Greek apóstolos, meaning “one sent forth.” Issued into the world with the echo of the Christ beating in their hearts, the Apostles journey toward Kingdom Come in every eon. Their only hope is that the prayers aching in their chests might be encountered in the world outside their flesh. They keep faith in the hour when the Angel of History will make whole what has been broken; an hour which is always within reach.

2 Comments

Stephen Mikesell

9/6/2026 07:36:02 am

The anthropologist Stanley Diamond starts his book "In Search of the Primitive" with the words "Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Each is an aspect of the other. Anthropologists who use, or misuse, words such as "acculturation" beg this basic question. For the major mode of acculturation, the direct shaping of one culture by another through which civilization develops, has been conquest."

All peoples and the landscapes of the world they lived in have become subject to this planetary catastrophe called civilization. The Torah is record of one people's experience and response to, and sometimes participation in, these events at the dawn of civilization. Much of the Torah and its New Testament is a record of the resulting trauma which has kept alive as a defining cultural memory of Jewish peoples — what must be an unconscious sense for all peoples in civilized societies, as described by Stanley Diamond in his chapter on psychiatric consequences of civilization. All of the world's civilized religions, which stem from this great transition brought by the rise of civilization, called "The Axial Age" by philosopher Karl Jaspers, arose to address this alienation brought by Civilization. It tends to be framed in terms of human separation from God, in one way or another. Even modern science with its positing of humans separated from a nature which humans have make into an object is not immune. Instead of prophets and priests, scientists and experts mediate, instead of ecclesiastical bureaucracy, rational state bureaucracy.

The ecologist Wes Jackson of the Land Institute describes the stories of Genesis -- which actually were a Hebrew acquisition of much earlier Babylonian stories recorded on cuneiform tablets that survived the burning of Babylonian libraries -- as allegorical for the rise of agriculture, cities and states. He sees the story of Adam and Eve as referring to the invention of agriculture whereby humans separated themselves from nature, and thereby from God, by domesticating and founding civilization on annual cultivars of wheat grass and other plants. The role of annual cultivars in nature of recolonizing disturbed ecosystems required keeping agricultural lands in a constant, unnatural state of disturbance and barrenness, thereby bringing destruction of ecosystems and constant loss of soil by weathering and erosion with the spread of agriculture. Thus deserts have tended to follow agriculture wherever it went, a process accelerated multi-fold under industrialization, leading Jackson to predict the loss of all the planet's topsoil within the coming half century. For this reason Jackson refers to the advent of agriculture as humanity's "original sin." The last stanza of the Genesis story in the Torah pretty well describes the consequences of agriculture as condemning humans to live by the sweat of their brow, poor health, violence and other curses that accompanied agriculture. It is why the Hebrew pastoralists subsequently continually pined for a land of "milk and honey" which would yield its fruit without back-breaking labor and enslavement.

We known that this condition of hanging fruits and honey characterized the last outposts of primitive peoples who required four to five hours a week on hunting and gathering their sustenance as opposed to the 50, 60, 70 or more hour work-weeks of agricultural and industrial civilization, both of which furthermore tends to push people into a never-ending spiral of debt. Among the Babylonians I might add, Eve and the Snake were portrayed as Promethean-like heroes for having brought knowledge to humans; the perspective no doubt from the standpoint of civilized not primitive society. Among the Hebrews and characteristically patrilineal herding societies, women as usual get the blame, although the snake could be seen as symbolic of the male appendage. The women could report back to their natal families that their in-laws did it. Perhaps that's the real story of the snake. For pastoral Semites and primitive peoples, and particularly for women, agriculture must have seemed more of a curse than a blessing. No primitive society switches to agriculture and civilization out of its own volition. We can see in Native peoples among us that the trauma of having been forced into into civilization is multi-generational.

Similarly, the earlier Babylonian version of the Flood story was due not to the sins of humans, but because the racket that accompanied the rise of the first cities which had been established by human beings after the chief god created them, kept the chief god from getting proper sleep. It is likely that for peoples entering into cities with memories of pre-urban living, the noise of human activity in cities might have seemed rather discomforting, making it logical to think that Gods accustomed to quiet might be inclined to correct their mistake by flooding humans out. Sometimes that is the way I feel when traffic noise pe

Stephen Mikesell

9/6/2026 07:45:12 am

Completion of my previous comment

Sometimes that is the way I feel when traffic noise persists into the night nowadays in the streets of Kathmandu, a city that I first came upon in 1980 as a very quiet place. The floods of the Tigress and Euphrates rivers which sometimes inundated the early cities were a logical agent for this destruction. In the Babylonian story, a lesser God who had befriended Noah and his family warned Noah about the plans of the chief God and helped him to prepare to save his family and the rest of life on the earth.

Early Jewish followers of Christ are recorded as having believed in reincarnation. Until the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans after the Jewish uprising, Jewish followers saw salvation mainly in terms overthrow of the Roman Empire, the latest in the line of civilizations which had conquered and immiserated the Jews. But particularly following the spread of Christianity to gentiles under the Roman Empire by Paul of Tarsus, the Adam and Eve story provided a salvation from not empire, but an eternal damnation blamed on Eve and the Snake that could be said to be responsible for the woes of imperial conquest. Getting rid of reincarnation took away possibility of second chance outside of Christ. The empire with its suffering and sense of alienation became a given for the church and relief from its oppression the felt purpose for other-worldly salvation. Later the empire took over Christianity as its official religion because belief in salvation mediated by the Roman Church could discipline increasingly diverse and restless peoples under empire -- think of the co-optation of indigenous institutions by the British in the form of indirect rule in their colonies in the 19th century (a cushy job for British anthropologists). Protestantism has taken over this role under capitalism in terms of its own particular form of alienation and suffering in which the individual establishes a personal relationship with god in the same way that he engages the market as an isolated seller of his labor and purchaser of commodities.

Instead of relying on prophets mediating with God, Wes Jackson as an ecologist and farmer sees the way out in remaking our relationship with the world by replacing the annual cultivars, whose domestication rather than the snake was the true agent of humanity's original sin. They would be replaced by perennial cultivars of current food crops, that establish deep roots, grow amidst increasingly complex agro-ecosystems, and enable all life on the planet to thrive. Thus, in the manner of the St. Benedict, who began in 529 AD to found his original 12 monasteries each with 12 monks and set them about salvaging the works of classical literature which other Christians were burning, Wes Jackson founded a research institute sixty-five years ago to learn about and domesticate the perennial versions of current annual food-plant cultivars with perennials grown in perennial agroecosystems -- the first time in the 10,000 year history of agriculture. Until the development of modern genetics and ecology, the genetic and ecological complexity of perennial plants made it impossible to domesticate them.
Benedict's effort of saving and reproducing classical knowledge led to the rebirth of Western Civilization; Jackson sees the replacement of annual with perennial cultivars with their totally different relationship to the planet as the only means of salvation of humanity and our planet. Not plowing up the land yeart to year, but a permanent presence on the land — like a grassland or forest — that continually builds the soil rather than extracting all the fertility out of it.
Where the efforts of Benedict required a thousand years to bear fruit, Jackson is projecting 500 years. Deeply rooted perennials growing within increasingly diverse and resillient agro-ecosystems modeled on natural ecosystems will be the only way to survive the spreading fires and perturbations of climate. As Jackson puts it, let nature be the measure. And like Benedict, he sees it as a major cultural project encompassing all the academic disciplines and all humanity. Unlike Benedict not to subject people to a uniform belief. To re-adapt ourselves to a complex and diverse world, or in the words of the Canadian ecologist J. Stan Rowe, "ecosphere," can only be done in terms of the infinitely diverse forms and relationships of nature. (Note that I got this comparison with Benedict not from the Land Institute but in my reading about Benedict in Alfred North Whitehead's book.)

Diamond, Stanley, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. (Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 1974)
Greenblatt Stephen, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017)
Laudermilk, W. C., Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years. USDA Bulletin No. 99. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Jaspers, Karl, The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael

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Theses Toward an Imminent Apocalypse

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Theses Toward an Imminent Apocalypse

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