Theses Toward an Imminent Apocalypse

1

by: Apostle

I.

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

V.

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!

X.

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:

1. 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.
   
2. Mary Nardini Gang. “Criminal Intimacy.” 2009. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-criminal-intimacy.
   
3. 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.
   
4. Matt. 10:35
5. A quote attributed to the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Duruti.
   
6.  John 2:19
   
7. Matt. 20:16, Mark 10:31, Luke 13:30
   
8. Jesus Calls the First Disciples (Matt. 4:18-22; Mark 1:16-20)
   
9. 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)
   
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)
    
11. The Desolating Sacrilege (Matt. 24:15-22, Mark 13:14-20, Luke 21:20-24)
    
12. Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1-9, Mark 11:1-10, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-19)
    
13. Luke 4:24-30
    
14. Jesus Cleanses the Temple (Matt. 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46)
    
15. The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. MIT Press, 2007. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection.
    
16. Mark 15:34
    
17. Inhabit. readinhabit.com.
    
18. John 20:14-18
    
19. Mark 16:12-13, Luke 24:13-35
    
20. 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)
    
21. 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.
    
22. Matt. 12:1-5, Mark 2:23-26, Luke 6:1-4
    
23. John 1:1
    
24. John 1:14
    
25. Matt. 8:18-22, Luke 9:57-62
    
26. Matt. 23:8-11
    
27. 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)
    
28. Isa. 40:4
    
29. A saying shared among the Zapatistas.
    
30. 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.)​

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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.