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RELIGIOUS BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

Copyright © 2003 Victor Shane, All Rights Reserved

“You can’t fix something that’s broke on the basis of the same set of assumptions that made it broke in the first place¾you will just keep bouncing off the same walls and end up right back where you started.”

But now He has promised, saying, “Yet once more I shake

not the earth only, but also heaven.” And this word,

“Yet once more,” signifies the removing of those

things that are shaken, as of things that are made,

so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.

Hebrews 12:26-27

As every sign would seem to be indicating, the derivative ages (“times of the gentiles”) are now drawing to a close and the Kingdom of God about to displace the kingdoms of the world. The “shaking” promised of old has already started, and all of the institutions that were founded on error are showing signs of imminent collapse. The earth is in convulsions. Kingdoms totter and nations fall. Mankind grapples with his appalling lostness. (It is always darkest before the dawn!)

Meanwhile the one abiding hope that the earth has for direction would also seem to be bouncing off ancient walls, and here we are referring to the churches of God. There is division, disunity and strife among the brethren. All we like foolish sheep chase our own tails, side-tracked in every direction. The light of the Church seems to have been eclipsed by something.

Some Christians have disowned the earth, placing false disclaimers on God’s marvelous creation. Others are idle, waiting to be whisked away from it all. The greater part of the Church would seem to have gone off on a tangent—swerved off from the plain sense of Scripture and turned to the apocalyptic dualism of ancient Persia, or the spiritualizing fatalism of the Ionian Greeks, or some other form of escapism, believing that all future hope consists of floating about in the air, supposing that when they are reading “Kingdom of God” they must understand “mansions in heaven,” or when they are reading “promises of Abraham” they must understand “pie in the sky.”

What exactly are the set of flawed assumptions that have kept the salt of the earth and the light of the world from fulfilling their destinies?

In Book of Life Victor Shane throws fascinating light on the Manichaean component in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Shane argues that the apocalyptic component in the three sister religions is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim—it can be traced all the way back to the ancient dualism of Zoroaster…

Zoroaster’s dualism posits three stages of creation: 1) A beginning stage in which good and evil were completely separate; 2) a middle stage in which they became “all mixed up;” 3) a future stage in which the two will be disentangled and the original duality restored.

It is said that Zoroaster’s dualism has exerted more subtle influence on the history of the world than many other religions combined. Zoroaster’s dualism was the spiritual underpinning of the Persian Empire, which at one time spread all the way to India on the east and Greece on the west. Circa 510 B.C. the Jews of the southern kingdom of Judah were taken captive into Babylon/Persia where some of the assimilated the dualism and later brought it back with them to Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah. In the time of Yeshua (Jesus) the faction known as the Essenes was an extension thereof, mixing the Persian dualism with Hebrew traditions to embrace a fundamentally apocalyptic world view. Such world views, extant even today, deny any possibility of the transformation of the forces of evil by the forces of good, positing the annihilation of the former by the latter in fiery events that bring the world to an end.

(Sidebar: Curiously enough there seems to have been some connection between Zoroaster’s dualism and the holocaust as well. What was Hitler reading when he was in prison composing Mein Kampf? What was the spiritual underpinning of the holocaust? It was a tome written by Friedrich Nietzche, entitled Also Sprach Zarathustra—“Thus Spake Zoroaster.”)

One needs to see the fundamental difference between Rav Shaul’s (St. Paul’s) Gospel and Zoroaster’s dualism to understand why Christianity embodies such “Good News.” There is no earthly hope in dualism—the forces of “good” can only condemn and annihilate the forces of “evil,” which is what Hitler imagined himself doing. If one models the universe after a Zoroastrian/Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the forces of light and the forces of darkness must be segregated as though matter and anti-matter…

The dualism that began with Zoroaster, and was later reified by Mani, preaches an apocalyptic segragation such as this. The Gospel that began with Yeshua, and was reified by Rav Shaul (St. Paul), uses the light of God’s truth to redeem and transform the so-called “forces of evil.” The former preaches dualism, fatalism, prejudice, scapegoating, segregation, doomsday, destruction, apocalypse and death. The latter preaches unity, hope, love, peace, reconciliation, construction and life.

The assumption of a Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and forces of darkness, culminating in the destruction of the earth, has no Biblical basis. It is time for the salt of the earth and light of the world to fulfill their destinies by invoking the Power of the Ruakh ha-Kodesh (Holy Spirit) to TRANSFORM the world, to the glory of God and the comfort of Man’s distress.