Pro Veritas: Religio et Fide

A Critical Discussion of Religion, Christology, Supersessionism, Judaism, Divinity, and Redemption

By     Joseph Andrew Settanni

From the exospheric environs of outer space, human beings look like microbial life forms circulating vagrantly upon the surface.   One would think, incorrectly, that this should logically induce a proper sense of humility or, at least, some basic intellectual sobriety, on a scale ranging from the universe and beyond that; however, human hubris has proven, time and again, to know no such bounds whatsoever.  

Both reverence and humility, among other very needed virtues, is lacking to an extreme degree.  The supposed quest for “human dignity” and “human rights” are code words for untrammelled and guiltless fornication; also, predominantly contemporary belief systems are supposed, moreover, to be so much better, due to their inherent flexibility and adaptability as per circumstances, occasions, and situations in phenomenological, existential, or pragmatic terms of overall credibility; consequently, both religion and faith have been made, rather conveniently, subject to much ongoing definitional reductionism.

And yet, the tremendously grandiose presumptuousness of such terrestrial and tiny mortal beings is, in turn, matched to an increasing ignorance of the important essentials of metaphysical order, within the context of an often unrecognized contingent reality pertaining to being, to all of beingness.  And, this is why precision of thought and not semantic obfuscation is needed so greatly.

These matters necessarily include, e. g., vital facts and necessary interrelationships about just what genuine Divinity consists of, how to accurately find and define a true religion versus all odd falsity as such, and, more importantly, what can and ought to be quite prominently known about the correct understanding and meaning of actual salvation/Redemption itself.

In the vast majority of colleges and universities having religion courses and even, sadly, in the majority of seminaries, there are fundamentally imperative facts no longer being taught, as to the requisite fine points of categorical theology.  Lack of teaching such critical things, however, necessarily eviscerates and negates totally any real inherent value to the serious teaching of theology meant as a viable branch of learning, of true erudition; there is largely a vacuous regard for theological truth or attainment thereof, inclusive of the truth of lex orandi, lex credendi. 

It should be no surprise, therefore, that a lot of sheer nonsense and polemical garbage has been written about the subjects of Christology, Judaism, Divinity, and Redemption, even in certain various supposedly learned theological/religious journals and many “scholarly” tomes of dubious degrees of often alleged learning. 

Too often, primitive and, thus, deficient notions about theology, religion, and God have been given supposedly sophisticated names by which such bold sophistry poses as genuine intelligence, in the expounding of seemingly many abstruse matters, further obfuscated by vilely trite or senile semantic nonsense.

Religion versus Theo-Fictions

In prehistoric times, it may be suggested that a consciousness of one’s self, meaning the greatly grasped reality of death, had first produced the earliest or most primitive thoughts leading to religion; the only animal having a future knowledge of inevitable death is man.  Ceremonies surrounding that fact were created; even the, e. g., Neanderthals are now known to have definitely made such provisions for the terminal reality of life.   G. K. Chesterton had, in fact, achieved remarkable precognition and prescience of such things in his impressive volume titled: The Everlasting Man.

But, religious primitivism, though life is more than what can be known, did not completely survive the advancements of culture, society, and civilization, century by century, into modern times, of course.  However, subjectivity has crescively replaced objectivity within the large basic scope of human cognition and, thus, what gets thought of as being proper rationality, no matter how logically false.

Nominalism in philosophy and most general thought (a rather severe fracturing of the human mind) has, increasingly, characterized the anti-holistic thinking of modernity and most of what goes by the name of postmodernity; what had been subjectivity and objectivity have been then substantially reversed; mere opinions then get transmuted into becoming assumed facts.  All of pragmatism, positivism, materialism, naturalism, and much else have taken the place of traditional reasoned, logical, and analytical cognition, usually once simply called common sense or Cicero’s right reason.  Thus, precise parameters of useful knowledge are vitally needed in this day and age so filled with romanticized nonsense about religion.

Such is the unfortunate background and context of what really needs to be critically discussed here because, e. g., such books as Frank Sheed’s Society and Sanity or his Knowing God are not popularly read.  Most of what used to be thought of as clearly being insane thinking, for instance, has replaced once normal thought on many subjects, as with, e. g., the nihilistic and radical redefinition of marriage to include all sodomite “marriage” (aka the rather obvious oxymoron of same-sex marriage).  

As Chesterton would have so agreed, abnormality, as the obviously debased society, culture, and civilization further decays, is aggressively demanding to be ideologically accepted as contemporary normality, routine normalcy; and, the latter is, of course, then to increasingly appear as supposedly being plainly abnormal, not PC certainly.   Insanity, by whatever euphemism, will soon become the new “moral” norm for 21^st century man, often a stranger to sustained reasoning.

Since the classical (read: normal) mind is cavalierly dismissed as being merely antiquarian or stupidly atavistic, the nominalist point of view, a noetically radical way of looking at the world, has become so very pandemic to then appear to people being as natural as breathing.   Thus, as a sad result, fictional notions have become too often substituted for theological facts in that both the academic and common understanding, e. g., of religion and God is simply wrong, though this important realization never occurs to almost all people.  

This article attempts to critically elucidate, therefore, what ought to be, thus, properly known by trying to overcome the vile spread of theological neo-primitivism, reified efforts at the simplification (read: desacramentalization) of all orthodox spiritual beliefs, through use of many epistemic reinterpretive reductionisms, which Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman would have completely abhorred.  

A generalized religiosity is, nonetheless, not actual religion; mere religion, in turn, is not to be simply equated with the true profundity of substantive-transcendent faith that absolutely includes necessary moral concern for properly avoiding both sins of commission (evil done) as well as sins of omission (evil permitted or, at the least, a neglect at doing good); and, completely contrary to various kinds of merely “spiritual” people, there is to be no true cosmic convergence just this side of Hell.

Consequently, certain clarifying principles need to be firmly asserted to clear the epistemological ground before ever getting at those four aforementioned particular issues (Christology, Judaism, Divinity, and Redemption).  This must transactionally include the heuristic fact that not all beliefs, creeds, convictions, spiritualisms, persuasions, or faiths are religions, though always incorrectly called such these days; also, a cult (e. g. Mormonism) is not a real religion, no matter how seemingly long established or even how generally respectable it may become; rather, a healthy catholicity of faith insures better a requisite regard for a wanted paradigmatic orthodoxy of belief, of the need to verify religious truth as such. 

What now passes as “religion” these days has been subsumed by such matters as situational ethics and consequentialism whereby ideological preferences and perspectives easily trump any notion of (archaic) morality; e. g., mores and morality are, instead, confused and confounded with each other, especially within the realm of modernity, a synonym of which is ingratitude.

But, it is so contended here that a blind faith so called is really just a form of superstition, not serious religion; and, religion is not a (higher) form of superstition, contrary to various positivists, rationalists, pragmatists, and assorted atheists.  One can, thus, get at theological reality from reading, e. g., Peter Kreeft’s Jacob’s Ladder: 10 Steps to Truth and his Because God is Real.  

Advanced readers are free to preferentially choose St. Thomas Aquinas, of course, especially for the sake of avoiding the plainly enervating existentialism, phenomenology, and gestaltism broadly prevalent within the degenerate intellectualism of modernist discourse, as well as what is widely seen in too many college and university courses.

In line with the subject at hand, a faith that is truly blind, moreover, lacks any solid translative depth of positive substance and, hence, is so highly dependent upon variable emotionalism and the seductive production of psychological highs, as with all charismatic beliefs in search of many incessant signs and wonders, again, without depth, so bereft of reason; it is what may, appropriately, be called a mere theo-fiction, a fictional construction giving the assumed appearance and certain simulated attributes of what seemingly appears to be a valid kind of belief but is yet really, upon theologically-oriented examination, definitely not. 

Theo-fictions, especially since the rise of Protestantism (a sure product of nominalism), have been wildly proliferating, such that true faith, genuine religion, gets so epistemologically obscured and, eventually, denied by many people.  Superstitions have also multiplied, ironically, as supposed Enlightenment and its secularization have, in addition, spread out into what gets called Western civilization and its culture, the crescive Culture of Death.1 [see: Notes]  

It is opposed to the thinking in James Monti’s A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages and such commendatory works as Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

True religion is, in fact, the direct opposite of superstition, which is ever unworthy of all rational and intelligent human beings.  A false or untruthful religion, moreover, is then no better than a superstition or, worse still, spiritualism, a parody of Deism (which is itself an odd spoof of religion).  Reason and faith, one ought to add, are both instructively needed and are to be properly united in useful support of each other toward the logical object of affirming belief in God, not belief in the mere practice of belief itself; this is because faith and practice are not necessarily the same thing, which may seem too subtle a point for most people to easily grasp.  Whenever faith and reason are set in opposition, superstition arises.

The worship done, however, must never become greater than the God being worshipped, which is then idolatry, with its often attendant fanaticisms.   All such practices are, thus, morally evil since they divert attention from the actual worship of the Supreme Being.   And, there are many forms of idolatry.  There must be, therefore, a proper system of reasoned belief and thought, meaning a theological foundation possessed of a certain profundity and a recognized canon of religious writing in firm support of the faith expostulated. 

Theological exposition and extrapolation, furthermore, must be soundly clear and not esoteric; it is to be oriented, as one may then suspect, toward the only logical and spiritual goal of true religion in observed terms of affirming the Deity and all aspects of the related worship.  One must love God greater than one’s self, within the context of a sacramental religious life, which is increasingly difficult for the vast majority of contemporary people who prefer a reduced image of the devalued Deity, while exalting the deified Man.  

Equally, when faith gets pitted against reason, as with the case of Protestantism, it is not surprising that atheism, in one form or another, can later result, and secularization, in general, thrives. And, sola Scriptura exists as a reified doctrine that truncates religion, as it skews theology axiomatically in service to a subjectivist tautology, yielding ever multiplying interpretations to satisfy an endless number of competing sects, directly contrary to Christ’s desire for having only one shepherd and one flock.  The absolutization of Scripture qua faith, therefore, readily becomes a form of idolatry easily encouraged by Protestantism.

Affirmation of accurate theological knowledge, nonetheless, helps to fight against the presentism and historicism, positivism and naturalism, found in too many pedestrian and academic beliefs about the Supreme Being; good reading would include William Kilpatrick’s Christianity, Islam, and Atheism, for most of what is both popularly and academically known about religion is really false, in that substantive theology ought not to be neglected, since all forms of idolatry are to be properly condemned.

Theology is, thus, translationally necessary to any real religion in inherent terms of seriousness and its proper understanding and comprehension as such, though not needed for a cult or mere superstition.  Religion is, therefore, the acknowledgement and worship of God when rightly understood; theology, a system of religious thought, provides the then cognate reasons and reasoning for the seriously asserted belief, which is, of course, very different from any theo-fiction, for what is called the modern mind is largely indifferent toward any desire to make sure that the true faith is obtained for fear of avoiding a terrible penalty, namely, Hell. 

However, it must imperatively be said that correct belief in God is not, contrary to the (crypto-atheist) Immanuel Kant, a mere anthropomorphic projection of human creation and (self-sufficient) will; in terms of needed epistemological seriousness, it is the requisite acknowledgement by human beings of the greatest ontological reality within and beyond the entire universe, as when Moses, on Mount Sinai, was, thus, unqualifiedly and authoritatively told: “I am.”   

And, Jesus is, significantly, recorded as directly saying with authority, “Before Abraham was, I am.”   The true ontic essence of Godhead is manifestly affirmed, though it can only really be done so by the actual Deity, for the Christ is the Son of God.

Thus, to get at the fundamental centrality of Christianity, which had once dominated the basic mind of Western man, it is profoundly essential to still study the reality and meaning of Jesus Christ; this then, appropriately, includes the veracity and determination of what it is that ought to be believed for the vital sake of the holy goal of a Christian life, of a life dedicated to holiness, meaning for salvation.  

But, that supposedly well-desired goal is far from being easy, in this day and age, as witnessed by Russell Shaw’s American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.  What has truly occurred is the bizarre product, the results, of domestic assimilationism and extreme acculturation beyond belief.   

This present age, as ought to be suspected, is quite licentiously dominated by the wholesale regard for multiplicitous theo-fictions, not saintliness or saintly endeavors to say the least.  One can easily get at the critical idea from reading Fr. George William Rutler’s A Crisis of Saints, for without the eternal light of Christ there is only moral darkness in this world filled with sin and depravity. 

As a direct consequence, holiness itself has become a much tortured notion, especially so in how, unlike Islam today, no one is forced to believe in Christianity or, for that matter, in Catholicism; all of genuine religious faith, however, cannot be coerced nor should it be; furthermore, the important issue of free will is ever at stake; and, there is here no advocacy whatsoever for religious persecution; only free belief matters in terms of theological truth; unsurprisingly, however, there is a great deal of real ingratitude toward God for the existence of free will, in a world dedicated to the compartmentalization of human life qua utilitarian functionality, as sacredness is scoffed at unendingly.

Christology: Noted and Needed

Regarding, e. g., the urgently salvation-significant matter of Christology (Greek Χριστός Khristós and -λογία, -logia), if Jesus is not the Christ, the actual and one and only Messiah, then portraying Him as just an interesting, perhaps, historical figure becomes so simply ludicrous and, eventually, meaningless to the nth degree.    But, God’s holy love is such that He allowed His own Son to be sacrificed to atone for the sins, past, present, and future, of all of mankind, inclusive of the Fall of Adam and Eve, of course.

With the exception of the minority of atheists and other such crackpots, most people, the predominant majority in the world, do seek their salvation from this world.   If, however, the Holy Child of Bethlehem, the Righteous Man of Nazareth, is not indeed the true Messiah, the one and only absolutely needed Redeemer of all mankind, then all bets are off.   Thus, seriously, among other monumental questions of perennial spiritual importance: Who is Jesus and is He really the Christ?

If religion and its associated theology is to be taken seriously, then it is highly necessary and prescriptive, moreover, that a person try as hard as possible to correctly perceive and accept the best interpretation and comprehension of the clearest reality, definitive nature, and truest character assessment of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh; any and all substitutes would all be invalid, impious, and a contradiction, by definition, as to the salvific purpose of religion, not for any utilitarian end.  

A Christocentric life, the pursuit of holiness, rightly devoted to the cultivation of holiness and humility is, of course, needed and to be wanted by the serious and sincere believer.   One might, nonetheless, ask why since true faith, the deep love of God, is not meant to encourage ignorance about the true Deity, for, in general, claiming to love someone without truly knowing the person would seem to be absurd; it would be an strangely asserted “love” of an unknown being, as to a lack of certain (wanted) knowledge that then would provide the reason and basis of such an emotion.

It is, as to the salvation of one’s soul, absolutely imperative, critically essential, to be justly confident that the supremely best way of knowing Jesus qua Savior is actually possessed by the believer.   One then must, therefore, logically have the true Faith, not any ersatz kind of belief that should then be rejected and disvalued completely as just worthless.   None of this is a merely “academic” matter of only passing importance or certainly not at all tangential to the lives of Christians, which simply ought to be regarded as an objective and obvious fact; otherwise, all substantial and substantive Christology is, consequently, being rejected, as is the always precious love of God Himself and His righteousness.  

Although there are, literally, thousands upon thousands of denominations all claiming to be the true church, a Christian is, nonetheless, seriously mandated by the best understanding of a necessarily Christocentric religion (being that one’s immortal soul is held at stake) to absolutely want to have the one true Faith, to belong to the true Church, not any, by definition, solely inadequate substitute.   Just, perhaps, being “spiritual” is then always totally meaningless; it has nothing to do, for instance, with a rigorous theology nor, in general, could it ever be a valid path toward salvation.   

As has been pointed out many times, there are only three basic conclusions (when all is said and done), realistically tenable and reasonably possible, as to what one can, in essence, reasonably conclude about the Redeemer, which will be later more explicitly covered, in this article.  This relates, of course, to the main explanatory feature of theological epistemology.   Since the really proper focus of (Athanasian) Christianity is set upon Christ, the believer must have a clear understanding of His person and work, inclusive of the nature, character, and actions, as a good means of knowing why such belief has definite religious value; thus, Christological analysis is important and, actually speaking, essential for right interpretation, for orthodox belief.

Some food is given here for thought.   Both Socrates and Jesus never wrote a single word, as far as is known; and yet, the impact of the latter’s life has been and will be at least a million times more dramatic and important than was the entire life and death and meaning of Socrates.  There must be a reason.  While Socrates’ death was his way of vindicating philosophy, faith in Christ minus the Resurrection2 achieved would be, as St. Paul reminds people, in vain.  Death upon a cross would be surely emotionally compelling to a great degree, though not theologically important at all if that was all that had occurred, in definitive terms of why one imperatively ought to know, love, and adore Jesus, as an escape from moral darkness in this world.

Equally, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life of Christ explores magnificently how that one life made the Messiah unlike any other person in all of recorded history, especially in its being widely and seriously heralded by diverse sources.   Many peoples, not just the Jews, had awaited the coming, which point should not be ever neglected regarding the needed theological interpretation of the Savior.

Of course, certain knowledge of Jesus, among other extremely verified sources, comes from the four canonical Gospels, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as to their inherent religious authority, the Epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles.   A usually neglected aspect, however, of theological epistemology pertaining to the full reality of the Christ, the Word, the true Incarnation, concerns, significantly, His well-known and greatly interesting indifference, backed by holy righteousness.   What is meant by “indifference,” one might curiously ask.

Entire leagues of liars, charlatans and frauds, fakers and con artists, though some may feign a sort of pseudo-indifference, are never really indifferent to whether or not their victims believe them; they have a naturally and logically vested real interest in such belief, so as to fool the suckers, the gullible.  Because of God’s respect for man’s free will, Jesus did not, therefore, force or compel the people of Nazareth (or anyone else) to believe in Him.  He was studiously indifferent, though a prophet is never recognized in his own home, of course. 

Moreover, e. g., Jesus had never tried to convert all His relatives in Nazareth; it seems, as far as can be known, that most or almost everyone there had totally or at least mostly rejected Him.   This attitude of indifference became magnified and not minimized, moreover, during the sojourn of the Christ on earth, by which He proved thoroughly the exact and enduring nature and meaning of His Divinity, the Godhood of the Son of David, the Son of Man, which is not, however, ever related to the modern oxymoron of religious ideology.   It should not be needed to add that serious people were not indifferent to Him nor, in another sense, did even His worst enemies think Him to be insane or crazy.

When thousands literally had swiftly walked away after he enunciated the need to eat His flesh and drink His blood, the Christ did not, let it be correctly noted, run quickly after them for the supposed need to willingly seek to then modify or change the doctrine for their satisfaction.  Such was then a hard teaching for them.  Yet, He just let them go, for in matters of Divinity, it is true charity, true love, to tell the truth to human beings because they are really in need of truth, regardless of what many may think otherwise, for He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, of course.  

Moreover, as a cognate part of this grand or, rather, magnanimous indifference, the Apostles were told to just throw off the dust from their shoes from those inhospitable places/persons who had rejected the Gospel, and simply go elsewhere.  One could, therefore, write up many fascinating, thought-provoking volumes covering the rather very interesting and so highly intriguing subject of Christ’s rather obvious indifference, of His honest and righteous magnanimity.  But, this is not meant, of course, in supposed contradiction of any Christian missionary spirit that can and ought to exist.  Many are called, few are chosen.

The Lord was seriously interested only in those people, according to their free will, who would hear the truth and keep it.   In general, the religiousness of the inhabitants of the classical and medieval worlds found it easier to accept metaphysical order as a natural part of reality, not a supposed manmade superstructure added artificially on top of the social and cultural order, as with blatant modernity and its morally rancid beliefs, meaning, in effect, superstitions. 

Religion used to be an integrated aspect of each person’s holistic life, meaning just as natural as breathing.  For the Western world, it was the Protestant Revolt, starting in the 16^th century, which has helped to further and further compartmentalize human life by encouraging an expanding secular orientation through narrowing the range of religious expression.  For Protestants, sooner or later, the Protestant Bible has all things revolving in and around it, for a sterile circularity in thinking.   Modernity in thought, truly, has had its baleful consequences, where every old heresy, sooner or later, seeks to become a new orthodoxy.

The three logical pillars of the continuing old Faith, Roman Catholicism, cover the continual richness and seriousness of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium; Protestantism, in sharp contrast, is usually solely confined, in pointed reiteration, to the (heretical) Protestant version of the Bible, which is ever variously interpreted, narrowly or broadly, by a still multiplying number of ever competing and conflicting sects and sub-sects.   Each necessarily ends up with, sooner or later, its own too often competing sectarian interpretations or oddly mismatched versions of Christology that causes just needless and unfortunate Scriptural conflicts and obfuscations galore; the very definition, in fact, of sectarianism.

There are, for instance, increasing numbers of sects that insist that the Bible allows for sodomite so-called marriages, while traditionalist churches, nonetheless, would seem to reject such a bizarre notion; however, it must be honestly said that every man, with his own Bible in hand, now can be his own pope since at least the early 16^th century, due to the so-called Reformers, the noted leaders of the theo-sociopolitical and economic-cultural revolution collectively known as the Protestant Reformation; it was and remains an aggressive inspiration for religious individualism and, with the passage of time, helped significantly to lead to the ever spreading moral, social, economic, and cultural individualism known as secularism, the true basis and sure foundation of the Culture of Death and its so correlated nihilism.  

The modern age, therefore, had revolted quite strongly against traditional, especially Catholic, religion; secularization, rationalization, urbanization, industrialization, and modernization in general detested the very notion of there being any metaphysical order.  God, in effect, became an annoying inconvenience. Routinization, standardization, institutionalization, feminization, and bureaucratization all came to redefine human life, further and further, in squalid terms of reductionism.  For the rather sophisticated atheism of Darwinism/evolutionism, moreover, the entire universe and everything/anything in it exists just by pure chance, meaning a fully and finally naturalist-materialist cosmos: a dystopia, in short, fit only for nihilists. 

Unsurprisingly, the absolutization of (total) relativism, an inherent contradiction not recognized by the modernists, results from the then necessary nihilism, coming at last, from the ever ultimately aberrant speculations of many various and assorted positivists, pragmatists, relativists, and subjectivists.   All this feeds neatly into the increasingly regnant Culture of Death, by which the truly genuine nihilism, e. g., of the PETA fanatics urges them to deliberately kill the animals that they purportedly rescue. 

The love and knowledge of Jesus the Christ, the Savior, is, consequently, unknown to these people oriented, as they are, toward hatred and negation, extermination and death.  Regardless of all that, nonetheless, by what absolute philosophical principle can one, thus, deny the absolute metaphysical principle of there actually being metaphysical order (aka God)?   During a radio debate on the subject of belief, generations ago, between the prominent agnostic-cum-atheist Bertrand Russell and Fr. Ronald Knox, Russell cleverly did not dare, knowing full well Knox’s debating prowess, to then say he was an atheist.  Q. E. D. 

And, Russell was then known as one of the most self-confident and truly supreme modernists of his era.  Falsehood collapses, nevertheless, when so greatly faced by the prospect of being confronted (read: exposed) boldly by overwhelming truth.   Metaphysical order, thus, can be so known and defended.

If anyone is, therefore, genuinely serious about religion qua religious truth, then the God-Man, Jesus Christ, must be confronted, sooner or later, because, among other important reasons, contemporary man’s chronological understanding of history is still critically focused upon that central fact.  Calling the split between BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), for the sake of de-Christianization, only begs the question of using BC and AD.  Yet, although numerous other examples could be given if needed, let the foreplay cease and get to the action. 

Stated here in fundamental terms, either Jesus was 1.) a grand megalomaniac or madman who definitely had a delusional psychosis leading him toward the fanatical result of an insanely courted crucifixion, set so absolutely beyond all humanly acceptable reason and, thus, fairly normal rationality, 2.) the greatest prevaricator (aka liar) or false prophet that has ever been noted, in all of recorded history, whose entire excessive life ministry was an in-built exaggeration, beyond all rational belief, leading toward a forever limitless and validated incredulity, or (the unthinkable for modernists) 3.) the Son of God Incarnate, the true Messiah.  There is only, ultimately speaking, just one of three legitimate choices, none others.   As C. S. Lewis commented: Was/is He, in short, a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord?

The first two options, upon the aforementioned analysis contained in this article, are so surely negated completely by the last.  How so?  Over one billion people worshipping a dead megalomaniac or a long-deceased prevaricator only makes sense to the relatively tiny minority of militant atheists in this world, not to any intelligent and serious human beings.  It may need to be pointedly said, however, that the Christ was and is not, contrary to much modern thought, some supposed meek and mild ethicist.  But, how could that logically and rationally be for the Righteous Man of Nazareth?

He was really truly hated enough, after all, to be crucified.  This then had definite theological results concerning Christology.   His crucifixion, moreover, broke forever God’s previous Covenant with the Hebrew people; ever after, according to traditional Christian, especially Roman Catholic, teachings, the Jews and the Christians did not any longer worship the same Divinity.  This is, thus, theologically why conversion of the Jews and all unbelievers remains a missionary goal, regardless of many efforts at (often false) ecumenism, as with the doings, most recently, of Pope Francis and his warped theology.

Let the matter be clearly asseverated here, in reiteration, as to the fundamental theological truths involved.  The God of Christianity is not the same, e. g., as that of either Islam or (post-crucifixion) Judaism.  There are related consequences that must always be properly considered, which ought never to be avoided for the wanted sake of serious honesty, if for nothing else.  

The clear and continual rejection of the Son of the Father, meaning the Messiah, was and is, in effect, the same as the absolute rejection of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, according to the explicit cognate theological demands of Christian supersessionism and its serious meaning.   There are certainly, therefore, metaphysical (supernatural) and other cognate consequences, implications, and ramifications to what gets believed or not, though many, e. g., prefer syncretism for avoiding having to choose.  The denial, the abjuration, of Jesus is, then, the same as a total and unrighteous repudiation of the Father.

Any Christology that does not clearly teach this highly important truth is, moreover, a false Christology because it is not then consistent with the fullness of the truth of the love of God; and, regardless of the fact that various forces (Arianism, Protestantism, Freemasonry, Communism, etc.)  had been trying, for over 2,000 years by now, to destroy forever the Roman Catholic Church, the Athanasian Ark of the Faith.  

Supersessionism: Judaism as a False Religion

After the crucifixion, therefore, Judaism became totally meaningless because the coming, mission, and fulfillment of the promise of the Messiah had all been theologically accomplished; the New Testament had then rightly replaced the Old Testament, the Old Covenant.   Furthermore, by way of historical illustration, Judaism today is very different from what it was over 2,000 years ago; it is highly interesting to note that the Falasha, the Ethiopian Jews, allowed to come to Israel had retained Hebraic practices consistent with the time of Solomon, which can be used here to illustrate, illuminate, a valuable point of valid historical and theological argumentation.

The Falasha call themselves House of Israel (Beta Israel) and claim descent from Menilek I, traditionally the son of the Queen of Sheba; they were made to conform, however, to those of the present Jewish religious practices (in Israel in the late 20^th century), though the logical theological presumption is that the older prescriptions were actually more authentic, more trustworthy, in being, in fact, much closer to obviously earlier Hebraic origins as such.  

Therefore, it can be said with more force and logic that Christianity was not simply, as is often falsely said, the universalization of  (a relativized) Judaism; it then so outstandingly represents always the actual fulfillment of all the highest aspirations of Judaism, which, thus, became obsolete and regressive, due to the known Messianic reality of Jesus Christ.   It necessarily and logically became a theo-fiction.  How so? 

The Jewish leadership, quite conveniently, had declared that any citations from Scripture that were used to affirm Jesus Christ were to be axiomatically and automatically held as illegitimate; they were to be all, without question, rejected prima facie; one sees that Judaism, early on, then became transformationist.

For instance, the Septuagint (also referred to as the LXX), an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible and some related texts into Koine (popular tongue) Greek significantly done long before the Christian era, was staunchly declared to be theologically invalid as being scriptural text.  It was begun at least 200 before the birth of Jesus and is historically held to be an effort at translation, by some 70 or 72 Jewish scholars, done at the request of Ptolemy II.   Nonetheless, sustained rabbinical rationalization achieved quite a theo-fictional progeny, which the former self-righteous persecutor Saul who became Paul would probably have had a good laugh at, as to the absurdity involved.

Obviously, in terms of what today gets called (crackpot) conspiracy theory, it can be believed that the future Christians, somehow or other, “knew” that the Septuagint had been, centuries ago, composed specifically to contain those particular citations that would be useful for vindicating/proving that Jesus is the Christ.   Ergo, by this amazingly convenient retroactive or, perhaps, ex post facto reasoning, it can be then [idiotically] deduced and surmised that such scripture can, thus, be quite simply rejected as to its assumed authenticity, meaning by the quantum leap in logic needed for this [absurd] justification, as to, also, the here revealed origins of still existent, contemporary, Judaism.

The inherent and integral logic of original Hebraicism, however, is the necessary fulfillment of its known messianic mission toward the salvation (ultimately) of all of mankind, nothing else truly makes sense; consequently, post-Messianic Judaism exists, therefore, only as a false religion given over to much empty posturing and its related idolatry.  Thus, all true Christian charity compels the believer to speak the honest truth to all unbelievers, the truth of the Christ who so energetically condemned idolatrous practices and attitudes, who openly whipped the money changers out of the Temple of Jerusalem.

In point of fact, Jesus came to be hated because He vigorously denounced all forms of idolatry, which talk offended the bulk of the Jewish people and especially, of course, the religious establishment of the Roman-occupied land of Israel called Palestine; the latter, the Sanhedrin, had become bound up with and dedicated to the fostering of idolatry, which matter is not often properly nor easily understood and known as a plain and obvious fact.   The Law of Moses, the hoary rituals and customs, had, in the minds of the majority, become of much greater religious value than the worship of God, meaning the proper object of all that was being done and observed by the Jews of that era.  

The monumental and greatly pivotal choice was either to just remain as idolaters dedicated to idolatry, which evil all the prophets of Israel had rightly denounced, or to believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of all people, not just the Israelites, meaning, though, the minority who had believed.   One can, therefore, perceive that (post-Messianic) Judaism is representative of decadence because as, e. g., the philosopher C.E.M. Joad had long ago correctly pointed out, decadence is the loss of the object.   And, such a point needs to be kept clearly in mind for proper elucidation and interpretation of what has been and must be said always unequivocally for useful and honest clarification, for the sake of true seriousness.

Thus, Judaism became and remains a decadent belief system, a form of idolatry, unworthy of anyone who is truly serious about religion and an allied meaningful theology; it can no longer deliver on its ancient sacred promise and has, as a direct consequence, become totally empty of genuine religious significance and integral value; it is a kind of religious fossil clinging to a false hope because the God of Israel was, therefore, totally betrayed when His Son was rejected in favor of a remaining idolatry.    

The whole redemptive religious purpose of (messianic) Judaism, the essential meaning of the entire Old Testament, was the continuing retention and proclamation and faith in the promise of the Messiah.  It was not for the glorification of the people of Israel, though they were glorified because of those who had maintained their rigid fidelity to an uncompromising monotheism, not just theism per se.  It was not for dramatically helping with the cohesion of the people of Israel, though their faith remained coherent and the followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph had, thus, attained their faith-filled cohesion for the past sake of the Messiah, the Deliverer.3   

Conflict in understanding and comprehension readily and necessarily occurs, it must be said strongly, when traditional Hebraism is ignored in favor of modern Judaism, as, e. g., the latter has adopted the Bar and even the Bat Mitzvah.  Judaism and its history, especially after the fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, exists to celebrate the continuing existence and survival of the people of Israel; the centrality of its former and primary messianic function was and is bizarrely sidelined to keep with the celebration and glorification of the Jewishness of a religion seeking its own continual self-justification as such.  

The original and actually sole purpose of Judaism was, thus, theologically and historically replaced by Christianity and, in particular, by the Roman Catholic Faith, consistent with the cognate teachings of supersessionism.  Furthermore, among other sources, converts to Christianity have testified that the Truth involved is not a fantasy thought up by anti-Semites, considering also the fact, of course, that Jesus was Himself a ritually circumcised and righteous Jew, not a Gentile.

Christianity and, moreover, Roman Catholicism is the true fulfillment of the Old Testament; the New Covenant had replaced forever the Old Covenant, which then became fully permanently obsolete and also meaningless, unless seen and interpreted in light of the New Testament.  This is the doctrine and dogma of supersessionism, for the veil of the Temple was then physically torn from the top down and the High Priest’s sacred and consecrated vestments were blasphemously torn, a deliberate and known sacrilege, from the bottom up in an unrighteous response to the Christ.  

The heavily potent symbolism involved, in both cases, was and ought to be completely unmistakable and without question.   This is why, in addition, almost everything that has and will be done in the name of ecumenism represents only a false ecumenism, as with, e. g., the efforts of Pope Francis, because there can be no real compromise of right versus wrong.  Caiaphas, after all, was hardly being ecumenical in his overtly contemptuous attitude.   

Judaism, based upon all the above reasoning that was given, exists, therefore, as an observably false religion due to its own inherent contradiction of the aforementioned original nature and mission of Hebraicism, meaning the properly needed religious preparation for and acceptance of the Messiah within historical time.   Although it is not often importantly mentioned these days, however, both the destruction of the Second Temple and the connected Diaspora were punishments predicted by Jesus because of the faithlessness and unbelief of the bulk of the Jewish people. 

The, e. g., Ten Lost Tribes got lost/destroyed also because of such failures to worship the Lord God Almighty.   Historically, whenever the Jewish people strayed from God or remained adamant against proper belief, they were punished, including the wandering in the desert for 40 years with Moses.   There are and ever will be real consequences to disobedience and sinfulness.  The Almighty allows things to happen, contrary to what may be human opinion against seeing, e. g., the Holocaust as a punishment, as both World War I and II were, of course, also punishments for evil doing and blatant disobedience.

The Old Testament manifestly explains how God’s ways are not man’s ways.  Thus, the only being truly capable of understanding and comprehending the Lord exactly and definitively is the Lord Himself; humans can only analogously try to grasp such thinking.   The great blasphemous error of the Jewish people, during the time of Christ (and after), is that they thought their religion had allowed them a sole and permanent monopoly on interpreting the mind of God.  Such hubris calls forth punishment; and, this is ever regardless of the blatant nonsense behind any spurious ecumenism granting an equality of salvation to Judaism.

Their prejudices and preconceived notions, as to the obvious wanting of a militant warrior-king for then destroying the Romans, showed the inherent falsity of such a belief.  God, rather, determines what people actually or truly need, not what they think they may supposedly deserve; it is no surprise at all that such distorted thinking ends up producing a warped reading of theology that, in turns, necessarily corrupts the resulting (supposed) religion, which exists as a theo-fiction.   There are simply too many misreadings, miscalculations, of the actual qualities of metaphysical order and its associated rights.

As witnessed today, in general, modernists hubristically assume that, for instance, if suffering exists in the world, then God must be to that extent imperfect, but not themselves, not human beings.   Sinful men judge the Lord God Almighty – and find Him wanting.  It is a failing or failure of the Deity.  [Penance and suffering are then thought to be intrinsically unnatural and, hence, evil.]  So, Judaism, consequently, exists now as a blasphemous and entirely unrighteous judgment against God for His assumed failure to have sent a messiah, meaning not the one they had rejected as being simply inadequate to their human needs, wants, and desires.

But, if someone truly seeks the Truth with an open mind, it can be rightly found.  Mortimer J. Adler (1902 – 2001), who surely had possessed a great intellect, began as an agnostic Jew and later ended, after some decades of intense contemplation, by becoming a Roman Catholic.  The love of God still reaches out, therefore, to the people of Israel, as with all of the Lord’s children.

Israel (Eugenio) Zolli (1881 – 1956), from 1939 to 1945 Chief Rabbi of Rome, was inspired by His Holiness Pope Pius XII to become a convert as did, under different circumstances, Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne (1813-1884) who had built two convents in Jerusalem, after, years earlier, being a publicly declared great enemy of Catholicism who had once wished the complete destruction of the Church.  Interesting reading would, moreover, include Why Jews Become Catholic by David Goldstein and, also, related books by Rhonda Chervin.

Nature of Divinity Expostulated

Logically speaking, the god known, e. g., as Allah and that worshiped by the Jewish people cannot both be the same Deity worshiped by Catholics.  The Christian Divinity (one God simultaneously in three separate and still actually Divine Persons), the Supreme Being, is, in fact, when correctly analyzed in appropriate ontological terms of beingness, totally and significantly unlike any other real or even imaginable Godhead, which remains, of course, a true mystery; this is, e. g., because the Trinity is not, however, polymorphous in nature, though it remains a mind-bending concept to mere mortals.

The one certain theological thing about true monotheistic Divinity, though Trinitarian, is its exclusive nature in that there can be only one real God, all others are false, all others are demons, meaning deceitful rivals of the, by definition, one true Supreme Being, as is only represented by Catholicism. 

In particular, the best understanding of the Faith, of the Church established by Christ, is from the traditional Latin (Tridentine) Mass Community4, not the Novus Ordo Community coming out of the theological and religious catastrophe known as Vatican II.   In any event, monotheism is the key, while the disproportionate, definitely incommensurate, gap between Creator and created is today often not kept correctly in mind as it really ought to be, in fact, truly needs to be; this is for better having a correct and accurate understanding of the transcendent, absolutely unequalled, nature of the Supreme Being, which should induce humbling thoughts among mere human beings.

Polytheism, in contrast, necessarily begs the question of and, moreover, resultantly mocks all assertion of true Divinity, with its unmistakably polymorphous appeal, through an odd hodgepodge of assorted and sundry gods and goddesses, which often appear to be endless and somewhat redundant as well.   Even such ancient pagans as Aristotle, for instance, were able to use natural reason for logically and rationally discerning correctly that there ought to be only one Unmoved Mover, meaning a perception gained without any special (or monotheistic) revelation.  Monotheism, in short, can be deduced from first principles and the serious and righteous consequences involved.

A great problem, however, is that the truly vast majority of people, especially as is supremely true of the predominant numbers of academics and intellectuals, reason from secondary and tertiary principles, at best, about God.   Such nominalism, moreover, encourages defective thinking. First, it must be clearly realized that all of being, all of the universe and beyond, is totally contingent being, only the Unmoved Mover, by definition, possesses the unqualified and uncreated fullness of absolute and unquestioned beingness, of ontological primacy.  Intelligence arises when it is realized that the entire universe is a contingent reality.

The fact of contingency negates all human thought, as to the importance of human cognition, contrary to the forever ultimate ontological reality of the Supreme Being.  It must, thus, be definitely said that one needs to get the always disproportionate perspective that, anthropomorphically speaking, the entire universe is at most a tiny speck of sand in one hand of God.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has to exist by necessity in the entire universe.  Contingency is the rule, not the exception.  The First Being, namely Divinity, preceded, by definition, everything/anything else anywhere in the universe and beyond such a limit.   Matter, beingness in the material world, possesses no necessity.  Haecceity or quiddity cannot will itself.    Only God, by definition, is the purity of ultimate and absolute Being, (aka the Supreme Being).   It needs to be perceived, moreover, how metaphysical order necessarily precedes all human perceptions of ontological reality because no mere creature and no created order, even in its entirety, can be greater, by definition, than the Creator.

On the contrary, whenever the Lord Almighty is (falsely) interpreted as a sort  or type of translational, suppositional, or relational being, incorrect and contradictory conclusions are then called forth and get believed in that distort and corrupt the proper conception of the divine nature.  God as a construct or projection, a product of intellectual or emotional vice, can only end up as a diminished deity suitable, e. g., for deracinated intellectuals and many religious academics but not for all those who wish to pursue genuine holiness and allied sincere and serious devotion to God, to the Lord Almighty.

The Deity is not contingent upon belief in the existence of metaphysical order; God is metaphysical order, any lesser consideration ought to be relegated to the realm of pure jocularity.  As a result, the limitlessness of the Supreme Being dictates that mere human beings cannot encompass such hyper-universal comprehensiveness that defines the ontological reality of Divinity, which can only conditionally be known in an analogous manner, not directly comprehended.  To then actually know God, one must, by definition, be God, as St. Thomas Aquinas and others have correctly taught for many centuries now. 

Materiality, as but one significant consequence among many, cannot ever contain at all the tremendous context and absolute veracity of the Supreme Being.  Divinity, by definition, is then ever transcendent in nature.

Any consideration or discussion of the interpretation and understanding of Divinity that does not take fully into account these realities is more than just deficient, it would be absurd to the nth degree, as is all of agnosticism and atheism, militant or otherwise.  The asinine assumption of the materialists, positivists, naturalists, rationalists, etc. is that materiality has a necessity to its nature, which is an absurd and illogical presumptiveness set beyond all reason and rationality.

The idea that imperfection, materiality, contains the attributes of perfection is one of the most regnant fallacies operative within the feeble limits of the pedestrian human mind.  It means, among other things, that the vast implications and ramifications of contingency go willfully unrecognized and appreciated for their definitive meanings and consequences.  In other words, the tremendous, yes, monumental chasm between God and the universe, between the Lord and man, between the Supreme Being and all of materiality, is then incredibly entirely unperceived. 

Equally, it needs to be intellectually and morally recognized that God hates all evil because it opposes His will; all those who advocate or commit evil are not pleasing to the Supreme Being.

And, all this relates so intimately to the proper understanding and comprehension of basic Divinity, Godhead teachings, substantially always missing from the modernist and postmodernist contemplations of reality and beingness, of ontological order itself.   Truth may be ignored or denied, of course; but, only fools think it does not, therefore, exist.   The Deity, the Supreme Mind, is fully incomprehensible, totally unfathomable, to the always limited human mind; God, as a cognate consequence, cannot exist on human terms of comprehension because the Almighty is, by definition, absolutely uncreated being and, therefore, not subject to any physical or natural laws whatsoever, for this is the truth.

Religion as well as beliefs (and lives) need to be conformed to the truth, not vice versa.  Modernists, on the contrary, end up with religions of mere convenience by which their beliefs, quite serendipitously, find confirmation, not confrontation, with religious reality, with metaphysical order.  The whole purpose of valid theology, however, as the required pursuit of actual religious truth, gets wildly turned upside down and inside out in modern man’s effort, however disguised or denied, to worship himself, not God.  

Any created “deity” that exists, whether recognized as such or not, to (absurdly) satisfy man’s desires, lusts, vanities, predilections, etc. evilly mocks the true Deity and resultantly dishonors, whether known or not, human beings as a related consequence.   Due to the feminization of most of contemporary Western thought, furthermore, Divinity has become too often depicted as an all-loving/all-forgiving kind of harmless Grandmotherly-Grandfatherly being free of making value judgments; it is nonjudgmental toward human beings and, one suspects, infinitely tolerant in a celebration of diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism to the nth degree (of absurdity).  

For as St. Thomas Aquinas and others properly understood, God, as to the right nature of the Supreme Being, demands correct acknowledgement of the requisite singularity of the reality of the one true Deity, no substitutes are ever really acceptable; substitutes are, therefore, so many false gods qua demons that befuddle and confuse and confound human beings by helping to terribly deny them the needed knowledge of and resort to the one true God, not fake idols. 

Unsurprisingly, such things as religious dogmas do help to appropriately define the requisite knowledge of the Supreme Being, though true divine mysteries cannot be eliminated; their often attempted rationalization or application of reductionism is really the desacralization of religion and, thence, its allied necessary debasement and cognate abuse.

Thus, the Trinitarian Dogma, an essential belief and affirmation, teaches that there are three persons in the Blessed Trinity, not three different gods.   While it is a mystery not fully comprehensible by mortal man, however, not all religious truths can be simple, especially when considering limited human brains.  In contrast, however, human beings, meaning fallen creatures in a fallen world, tend to prefer their own ways of imperfect thinking based upon allied defective reasoning ability. 

Imperfection, e. g., such as Albert Camus came to think that there must be no God, no Perfect Being, because Camus said so, since God would not allow the suffering of little children, which means that imperfection judged perfection and — what a surprise!— found it wanting.  The thought never occurred to this atheist (and many others before and since) that something might be (read: is) wrong with human nature or human beings, not the Lord Almighty; and, one sees here that reason and logic can, in fact, be correctly applied to faith, to the proper understanding of true religion, not superstition or blind faith.

Only God, however, could be wrong, of course, so such a being could not then exist, according to Camus, the (unquestioned?) authority on this subject.  Such warped (read: nominalist) cognition proves why, therefore, it is so highly important to have the proper concept of Divinity, for avoiding many fallacies in reasoning.  Of course, it must be admitted that folks can create their own gods of money, power, sex, etc.; often, one easily sees that sex, power, and money get combined, intertwined, or become simply interchangeable in the (vacuous) minds of the believers. 

It is, also, highly important to intelligently remember, thus, that what gets notably invested with genuine passion is really one’s true religion, such as, e. g., sports or gambling, not what gets merely professed as a (supposed) faith.  How so?   The thoroughly profound ardor and very great enthusiasm of, say, truly dedicated and passionate sports fans [incidentally, fan is a shortened version for the word fanatic] is, surely, religious in nature, as is so remarkably witnessed by the heightened degrees of real and intense exaltation experienced and, quite often, easily observed. 

Many people who would normally sleep through what ought to be a greatly inspiring religious sermon are the same people who do shout at the top of their lungs with genuine excitement, for their team, at a sports stadium, meaning their house of worship; the fans’ rather notably overt religiousness is certainly impressive, though they are, in fact, still worshipping, through their debased asininity, a false god.

Redemption

Any purportedly useful study of Christology, Judaism, and Divinity that does not correctly recognize supersessionism against the false deity asserted by either Judaism or Mohammedanism (the religion founded by Mohammed, as, e. g., Lutheranism was the religion founded by the bold heresiarch and theologaster Martin Luther), is inadequate and does an injustice to the reality of the Christ, meaning Jesus as the true Christ. 

There ought to be no equivocation or dissembling concerning the Truth, meaning that only Catholicism possesses the fullness of the divine Truth5, which is not ever available in any other form of belief, persuasion, religion, or conviction; all other faiths are, therefore, mere theo-fictions, when seriously analyzed.  They are not, by definition, Athanasian in inspiration.

There can, consequently, only be true and ultimate Salvation and Redemption in and through the Catholic Church, since there is acknowledged the need for the atonement for human sin; there is deliverance from the sins of humanity by the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross, for those who are baptized, including, e. g., the Baptism of desire.  Such a sacrament is of absolutely pivotal importance and is the always requisite entrance, in fact, afforded for all the others.  

Fr. Gabriel Vasquez, S. J., a neo-Scholastic writer, and a few other theologians taught that children dying without Baptism, meaning still possessed of Original Sin, were consequently set forever outside the glorious pale of Redemption, in strict terms of teleological understanding. One perceives that those not baptized and incapable, for whatever reasons, of meriting God’s grace can only go to the Netherworld.

And, this is why all abortion-on-demand and acts of infanticide, meaning vile murders, are absolutely pernicious and inherently evil, malevolent, practices that ought to be made totally illegal, contrary to the satanic demands of the Culture of Death, the forces of utter moral and spiritual darkness.  Because God’s mercy is, by definition, exactly the same as His justice, this properly represents the appropriate seriousness and intelligent consideration of metaphysical truth, not a seemingly merciless Deity given to spiteful or, perhaps, insincere behavior; there is, therefore, no capriciousness ever involved. 

For as St. Thomas Aquinas has rightly and astutely taught, God (as the very foundation and definition of all justice itself) does not, in fact, owe man justice; one so correctly perceives that it is, therefore, no cruelty, assumed vindictiveness, whatsoever for unbaptized babies to go to the Abyss.  At a minimum, it is both the Lord’s great mercy and supreme justice simultaneously that not a single soul is ever to be annihilated; the two destinations possible are either Heaven or Hell, not any supposed nirvana.

To be completely sinless was only true of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, even “innocent” babies are, therefore, still fully subject to Original Sin, the inherited guilt of Adam and Eve; their souls are tainted with guilt at conception; the personal opinion, e. g., of Mother Angelica, of EWTN fame, to the contrary, holds no substantial theological weight whatsoever, as to her sincere belief that they go to Heaven.6

They, the babies and fetuses in question, could be, e. g., sent to only the merest periphery of Hell in their being simply denied the Beatific Vision, with no further punishment; all the darker regions of real torment are, therefore, reserved especially for all those with worse and extremely worse unrepented mortal sins connected to their souls and, eventually, to their damned, permanent, resurrected bodies as well, for this is all, ulimately, within the realm of metateleology. 

Perhaps, sensitive souls would, at a minimum, find the Infernal Regions worse enough by being denied the Beatific Vision; spiritual dullards, however, do require useful physical punishments to make sure that they, at last, understand fully the grave magnitude of (unrepented) mortal sin, as to the consequences.  One sees here clearly the forever monumental importance of the Redemption made possible by Christ, and the most serious need, moreover, for then having overwhelming human gratitude to be forever given for that tremendous fact.

The crucial key to understanding is that no one is ever sent to Hell against his will, especially if the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are acquired and seriously practiced by the believer during his lifetime; one’s expected suffering and pain in this life, which is a privilege, is to be offered up in reparation for sin.   It is a privilege because people are permitted to share in the salvific Passion of the Christ, beyond just adherence, e. g., to the four cardinal virtues; in addition, all the lower animals have no consciousness of any higher meaning within the context of fallen creatures in a fallen world; the human condition is the agony and ecstasy involved with the banishment from the Garden of Eden.

The Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Christ all come to reinforce how Jesus, the Light of this world, came to insure that Redemption was at last made possible and, in fact, achievable, meaning the opening of the doors of Heaven to the saints and martyrs was accomplished by His crucifixion, an act of free will and absolute love.   But, this means, nonetheless, that there is to be no universal salvation, which is a manifestly heretical notion held by many ignorant people and confirmed heretics as well, for faith alone, among other reasons, is not enough.  

The murdering of the Son of God was the requisite sacrifice deemed worthy of full acceptance as the ransom to be paid, the expiation, for the commission of Original Sin, which had then brought about the already noted existence of fallen creatures, especially the human condition, in a fallen world.  What does this mean?   The ethical and moral and spiritual imperfection of humans (aka human nature) is theologically called sin, and transcendence, contrary to the teachings of sinful men, is gained by faith in Christ and good works, not through politics or ideology, for the reification of truth is demonic, is not serious theology.

Of course, admittedly, modernists and (secularist) postmodernists teach that there is no need for any metaphysical salvation because only material reality exists.  If that were truly so, however, then the amazing phenomenon of the human mind could be explained quite easily, meaning only in materialist terms of formal exposition.   In hard point of fact, it is well known that matter, including the gray matter of the human brain incidentally, cannot generate any will; there is surely something extra that cannot be materially detected within the living brain that, in fact, escapes after death.   

Only the corpse, the mere cadaver, remains.  The human mind appears always connected intimately with what also remains undetected (by all of naturalistic science), namely, the immortal soul.  The fallacy of spontaneous generation illustrates why that which is, by definition, inorganic cannot then give life to organic reality.  The aforementioned gray matter is, moreover, thoroughly unable to provide any clues about the epiphenomenon of mind, which embarrasses atheists and agnostics to the nth degree.   

If human beings were only or solely material creatures fully explicable within just material terms of reference, as atheists insist, there would be then no need to consider any such thing as salvation.  Since the time immemorial even with Neanderthals, there were special provisions made to commemorate the burying of bodies, meaning that there were metaphysical beliefs, no matter how seemingly primitive, though not really so “primitive” after all.   Even the atheist historian of religion Mircea Eliade recognized the importance of stressing and documenting how man’s earliest perceptions and knowledge could not avoid recognizing the sacred versus the profane in human life.

There has been and is still the universal recognition through funeral and other beliefs and practices that an afterlife exists.  The, e. g., ancient Egyptians, one might say, were positively obsessed with this ever awesome realization in explicit terms of often highly elaborate rituals.   But, more than that is really involved when thought is further put to this important matter, as to metaphysical order and its cognate implications and ramifications, which are many.

Argumentation, substantively and substantially understood, exists that is not just theoretical but, rather, overwhelmingly empirical that almost all peoples worldwide and, moreover, for untold ages had been and still are mightily concerned about religion of whatever kind, type, or nature; atheism, especially the militant or hardcore type, has been and will always be a distinctly minority perspective of a relatively tiny number of dissenters, never the majority opinion of mankind at large.   This is purely a fact of human reality, of course, though affected by gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. 

And, those thoughts are simply among the many times confirmed facts evident from history, both recorded and unrecorded as such, meaning at least as far back in time as the (usually disparaged) Neanderthals.  It is so unquestionably, undoubtedly, part of man’s integral and universal humanity, though that too has often been redefined out of existence, for re-sacramentalization is so needed.

Nonetheless, life has ever been divided, moreover, into the sacred and the profane, as had been above noted.  Concern for salvation, even among the ancient Egyptians, must be noted and accounted for in terms of what is, thus, this quite too human consideration and preoccupation with the anticipation of an afterlife.  Consequently, mankind has sought out, therefore, ways and means of procuring Redemption under various and sundry names for it.  Monotheism has, moreover, narrowed the scope of the means of the redeeming to a more definitive and detailed understanding, contrary to nominalism, as to its baleful influence on religion and theology, directing toward secularization.7  

And, the often rejected and reviled Christocentric point of view, thus, needs to completely replace the modernist anthropocentric one, devoted to utopianism (by various euphemisms), basically dominating the contemporary Western world, for the course of history is important. God chose a particular time and place for entrance into history, which, if for that fact alone, ought not to be forgotten.

The Hebrew people affirmed the coming of the Messiah, and Christianity celebrates and more so affirms that the Christ, the Savior, had truly come; furthermore, He had, rather successfully, achieved the Resurrection that, in turn, allowed for Redemption, for there was no chance at salvation before the Redeemer, the Savior, and His establishment of the Catholic Church.  So, it is properly said that Jesus is the Christ; and, history, as a direct consequence, has gotten intelligently divided between BC and AD, regardless of the vilely attempted de-Christianization and modernity’s self-confident denial of the existence of the reality of Hell and allied damnation.

Also, Heaven actually exists as a physical place because, at an absolute minimum, at least two people are there: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary in their glorified physical bodies; thus, the imperative need for the attaining of salvation, on the part of human beings, had to be achieved on earth by an act of immense reparation, terrific recompense, fully acceptable to God the Father, namely, the sacrificial crucifixion of the Son of the Supreme Being, meaning, of course, the necessarily salvific Redemption.

This is then the explicit and unqualified rejection, of course, of metaphysical immanentization, of the ideological pursuit of the millennium, the New Eden (aka Utopia) on earth.  Terrene attempts at such immanentist redemption of various kinds, e. g., Nazism, Fascism, Communism, had led to nightmares costing tens upon tens of millions of lives. The milder dystopia of the welfare State destroys lives more slowly and insidiously, on average, except for abortion-on-demand and other such practices.  Every attempt, by fallen man, of creating a supposed heaven on earth only always results in a version of hell.

Salvation, by whatever ideological euphemism, sought (so vainly) in this fallen world is a real horror just waiting to happen.   Needed and actual Redemption is, therefore, only through, by, and from Jesus Christ, none other is possible and must be, as had be earlier noted, set always within the context of the Roman Catholic Faith, the Church of St. Peter and the Apostles; for the rudiments of the ancient Church, so-called primitive Christianity, were, in fact, Catholicism in that, also, the medieval and all later realities were the same and will ever always be so, until the consummation of the world: the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church qua the Faith, Athanasianism.

Conclusion

From all that has been said above, one can see the interrelationships that exists by which it is necessary to discuss such matters as Christology, Judaism, Divinity, and Redemption for the critical sake of better attempting to get at a more rigorous religious understanding and comprehension linked intimately to proper theology.  And, this is since without a truly clear knowledge of correct theology, the discernment of the one true Faith can become difficult, though not necessarily impossible.

There needs to be, therefore, the so solid rejection and abhorrence of all manner or types of spiritually distractive theo-fictions, meaning negations of true religion; this is for the better and informed embrace of Christology, as an extension of the heightened awareness of the attributes of Divinity, for the cognate sake of correctly embracing the important requirement of affirming the Redemption, the result of God’s love. 

Furthermore, what is surely required today is someone to act and speak forcefully with the authority and power of an apostolic descendant of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ on earth, in always adamant defense of Catholic orthodoxy in both theology and religious practices.

Athanasius contra mundum!

Notes

1. What is occurring will lead to the collapse of contemporary civilization in the sense that the culture and society of the era, the basics of civil life, will become essentially dysfunctional to an extreme degree beyond recovery, meaning as the old order.   Alternative sociocultural patterns, with different politico-economic norms, are expected to emerge, as has always been the historical case, by which the new order replaces the old one, as, e. g., the medieval world replaced the ancient world.  It was an era of transition, not a Big Bang event.

Thus, no real recovery of the old order, due to its inherent and integral dysfunctionality, can ever be expected.  In the USA, as a ready empirical case-in-point, all and every effort or attempt to try to stop the now decisive Weimarian transformation of this nation, Weimarization, into a very discreditable collectivist/social-democratic, European-style State cannot ever really succeed.   All such efforts are, therefore, total wastes of time, money, effort, etc. 

The quite horrendously remarkable scale of what is happening needs to be properly kept in mind: what would have once seemed absolutely impossible and incredible, about, say, one hundred years ago, is today merely yesterday’s old news, as with, e. g., the now many privileged socioeconomic and political favoritisms being actually given to homosexuals, illegal aliens, Moslems, the homeless population, and (fashionable) minority groups in general.   As an apt line from Euripedes goes, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Such a debased national condition, meaning a dying country (a lost society, a lost culture) functionally set upon its own fatal course, by the acts of tens of millions of human wills, cannot actually be reversed.  This is not, however, any supposed fatalism; it is, in fact, just reality itself occurring.  Inevitability results, therefore, or develops when people, either actively or passively, will it to be so.  Theologically put, this necessarily covers, of course, both sins of commission and sins of omission.

Whatever could be tried to oppose the obvious trend is to be correctly seen as just being too little and too late; this is surely concerning the ongoing process of notable decay and degeneration, decline and degradation, as America spirals ever downward into the hoary cesspool of history; some actions may tend, from time to time, to then seemingly halt the fundamental process by, thus, slightly delaying the inevitable; but, such manifestly false optimism is only for those ignorant of the historical cycle that has now engulfed this country toward its justifiable destruction; it has, quite willingly, embraced the Culture of Death and must, therefore, pay the real and resulting nihilistic penalty.

Of course, third rate minds, such as, e. g., Rush Limbaugh, had too belatedly discovered, in the year 2013, what others have known for (at least) the past several generations of time, that America is a dying country.  But, then again, there are many dying countries.  Demographics show that fewer and fewer nations have the absolute minimum birth-replacement ratio to just sustain their domestic populations; the gross evil of such self-extermination is the increasing reality empirically observed and documented.  America, as many observers have long ago remarked, is now destined for the trash heap of history.

What is creatively and intelligently needed, however, is to embrace strongly an alternative culture, as is properly represented, e. g., by the Latin Mass Community; all efforts and activities for spiritual, moral, and ethical renewal ought, therefore, to be more and more logically directed toward such a different and opposed culture versus the old corrupt order that, eventually, is to be seen passing away.  This will help to lead to the new social, economic, political, and cultural order, as Christopher Dawson would have recognized, as the Culture of Death slowly and painfully fades from view, over the next several centuries.  A Christian culture ought to take its place.

2. The subject of the Resurrection, a pivotal concern to Christian culture, ought never to be neglected or underestimated, as to its very great importance, especially within the scope of salvation history.  Christ had achieved first what is promised to all those who make it to Heaven; eventually, the soul and body will be fully reunited in Heaven because the latter will be a thoroughly glorified body, as is also totally possessed by the Blessed Virgin Mary. This belief is held de fide by proclaimed Roman Catholic dogma since 1854, which simply means that the Church had made explicit forever what had been known always implicitly, since the time her body had been physically taken up for the reuniting with Jesus.

3. Many followers within the Lubavitch movement of Chassidic Judaism, in the late 20^th century, had actually idiotically expected, meaning seriously, that their beloved rabbi, a certain Menachem Mendel Schneerson, would then rise from the dead as the Messiah!   While the “belief” in the Messiah on the part of these Jewish believers was, obviously, affirmed by them, explicitly so, nonetheless, the absurd hope was, of course, held entirely in vain without question.  The earthly remains of the revered Rebbe Schneerson are still quite cold and, moreover, not that likely to be reanimated any time soon.

But, this helps to most vividly illustrate, empirically so, the religiously destructive problem yet inherent within all of Judaism, even concerning the most theologically orthodox kind that might exist.  Any messianic Judaism is, furthermore, a total contradiction and an oxymoron because it must only always lead logically to a dead end, never a fulfillment, for the Messiah had arrived over 2,000 years ago.  The 20^th century movement called Jews for Jesus, however, at least recognizes such an important fact.

4. Although it is also referred to as the Tridentine Mass because of the historical reality of the Council of Trent, Concilium Tridentinum; however, it is actually the Latin Mass that has been, in fact, around for over 1500 years.  It is, thus, inappropriate to just limit the correct or proper understanding of it to only the notion of it being Tridentine; however, many people associate the old Latin Mass as being such. The 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church had opened at Trent, Italy on December 13, 1545, and closed there on December 4, 1563.  Good reading, on this subject, includes Pope Leo XIII’s Quo Primum & De Defectibus.

5. There can be no salvation achieved outside of the Roman Catholic Church, meaning that its needed existence as the intended Redemption vehicle, as created by Christ Himself, enables people, therefore, to be saved by the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus the Lord.  There can be, e. g., the Baptism of desire of martyrs. 

Equally, those who die without any unconfessed mortal sin, inclusive of having done the will of God during their earthly lives, are saved by the aforementioned redemptive reality of the Church as Christ’s only established instrument for salvation.  Thus, St. Peter was explicitly given the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven by Jesus.   This matter is quite validly witnessed to, furthermore, by Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium.

The Latin phrase extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation) should, therefore, be only properly understood within the precise, above-cited context.  By rabid enemies of the Catholic Church, it is usually entirely misinterpreted, misconstrued, as supposedly meaning that all non-Catholics must axiomatically and automatically go to Hell after they die, which is simply untrue.  And, ultimately speaking, of course, the final decision rests always with God, though the present Western world, as was keenly recognized by Malcolm Muggeridge, wishes to do what no previous historical era had attempted to do: live with the overt assumption that there is no Divinity at all.

6.  If I supposedly were God concerning such a decision, I would let all the dead embryos, fetuses and babies go straight to Heaven; but, I’m not the Deity nor would I ever wish to be so.  Unlike so many politicians and world leaders, past and present and those to surely come, I do not wish to really play God.  There is here an admitted lack of the necessary qualifications, among other reasons.

The human mind, having its many imperfections and limitations, thinks that it is simply not equitable, just, or fair that babies be made innocent victims of circumstances.  Below every crucifix or painting of the crucifixion, there should be a mandatory sign that revealingly reads: life is not fair.   If the innocent Christ can be nailed to death on a cross (oh, what a circumstance), who are we mortals to demand or, perhaps, expect (axiomatic?) fairness to be wondrously operative for fallen creatures in a fallen world?   Real logic is harsh because it deals with reality, not wishful or childish thinking.

7. Most of the modern world has been basically saturated with nominalism in cognition; the modern mind can, moreover, be properly defined by its quite ardent devotion to it.  An instance can be given concerning education and religion.  For instance, a (supposed?) Catholic institution in Tyler, Texas known as Bishop Thomas K. Gorman Regional Catholic School, absolutely satiated in rabid nominalism, publicly advertises itself as “a faith based school for students of all faiths.” 

This is, of course, a total contradiction of having any true faith whatsoever, though fully consistent with the kind of very warped thinking that had willfully developed after the Second Vatican Council and its increasing absurdities.  It is ethically, morally, and spiritually, moreover, a monumental horror to the nth degree, which is the least that could be said; its originator for that institution, besides those who had then approved its use, is mentally and morally dead, one may guess, to any unconcealed consideration of effective thought processes. 

However, noetically-impacted nominalism prevents people from ever knowing when they have, in fact, lost a debate, which is also a real part of the problem.  The completely incorrect reasoning, integrally so, used in “a faith based school for students of all faiths” does not register within the deficient cognitive thought processes of the nominalist-inspired cranium. 

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