I can’t cite a source to say just when the formulation of the Incarnation as an event in history was put forward. I’m just speculating. But if you look at Patristic sources, I don’t find anything close to this kind of formulation. History is really not mentioned at all, except in those special cases like Eusebius. Most theological meditations in that arena are meditations on the meaning of the term ages of ages. St. Maximos goes on at great length on this, as this is the “time” in which the Church and believers exist, ie. not in historical time. This is what I mean by Christ dedivinizing history. The incarnation is not an event in historical time but an event in this in between time. (most protestants of course despise this sort of stuff).

My best guess is that what you had was a reaction to the German higher criticism in which the attempt is made to “demythologize” Scripture. So you peal away the mythical and what you get is the pure Gospel, the Kerygma as one smarty pants theologian put it.

This horrified a lot of people and in reaction to critical method, the result is this effort to historicize Christianity in order to validate its truth as objective historical fact.

Classically the only validation or proof is the illumination of the believer, and the glorification or deification of the intellect. Voegelin was fond of quoting Heb 11:1 to this effect, which is ironic since the Epistle to the Hebrews is virtually dispensed with entirely as a propaganda piece by the higher critical method types.

So fast forward, and unfortunately many people have bought into the historical proof approach, and insist that Christianity is true because it is somehow an “historical” religion, whereas all of the other ones are mythological. I would argue that you have an effacement of the experience of Christ’s parousia behind this, leading both to the critical method school and the reaction to it.

So what does this have to do with politics and culture? Well, all politics is theology by other means. And if we have divinized history and dedivinized Christ, the results are painful to watch. Instead of progress being experienced as a pilgrimage into a realm in between world and kingdom, time and timelessness, imperfection and perfection, it is immanentized, and the erotic experience of communion is no longer experienced in Christ, but in the progressive march of history. Being a part of the progressive movement, being a mover and a shaker, brings with it an ecstatic feeling of meaning, power, purpose. but history gets us nowhere. And so there is just more anger, frustration and alienation because history is not doing what we want and expect it to do.

There is of course this sense of the Spirit of God flowing in and through historical events, and there seem to be movements of history that are inexorable and must be played out to their conclusion. And some movements are clearly demonic. So history is not nothing. But again, there is no history apart from a myth that captures its “spirit.” Then you have Hegel, who more than anyone deifies history (and himself), but Voegelin at the end seemed to be quite taken with the subject of Hegel and history. Vol 5 is very interesting.

The Logos has been in the world since creation so I’m not sure what you mean by “Christ dedivinized history.” But, I recognize I may be slicing the bread too fine!
Dr. Voegelin taught that we, as being, are not obligated to participate in the psycho-pneumopathologies of modernity; e.g. we don’t have to be derailed by the deculturation of society.

And, I do appreciate this quote: “Or, as time goes on, people will question it as having relevance because they have not had the same experience of divine order.”
It seems your saying that one must ‘experience’ the idea of ‘freedom’ that was experienced by the founding generation or it will be lost and eroded, as Voegelin argues Christian orthodoxy was eroded, by a dogmatic presentation/interpretation of the events? This is delightful and I should like you to pursue this!

And, this “It arises out of what Voegelin terms the egophanic experience. It assumes that human beings have “moved forward” to the point that they can now control their historical destinies, either individually or communally. They have either acquired the requisite scientific knowledge or have arrived at some superior spiritual level or both.”
And, our beloved teacher also explicated the idea that, as a culture, we wax and wane in our egophanic revolt, our process of deculturation and recovery e.g. that is we collapse into sin and inevitably begin the process of repentance, forgiveness, and a pneumatic cleansing which define the act of recovery. On a certain level,I do believe that’s what’s going on at FPR, a process of dialectical recovery, we’re seeking to recapture the truth of reality…heavy stuff!

And, I am certainly in agreement with you re: the importance of the myth. We see in Plato’s Epinomis support for your position: “…he earnestly warned against discrediting traditional myth, because people whose faith in the myth is destroyed will not necessarily become philosophers, but rather will become spiritually disoriented and derail into some deficient mode of existence.”

America’s founding myth is problematic on certain pragmatic levels. If you were a loyalist who was strung up after the war, had your property seized or were forced to Canada or to the Bahamas, the myth of America’s founding does not really comport with your personal experience. Likewise if you were a slave. Or, as time goes on, people will question it as having relevance because they have not had the same experience of divine order. When the myth is called into question it creates a crisis for the society. That’s where we are today, where many societies are today whose cultures have been ruined by secularism. The myth of divine origin of their cultures no longer carries any weight.

Christ dedivinized history. But history has been redivinized by the “modern” progressive who believes in some innerworldly fulfilment with the advance of history being the vehicle. And with just a little more political power, we can advance it more quickly. This is the essence of the totalitarian impulse. It is why liberalism and progressivism of all types share the same intellectual roots and psychological impulses as the totalitarians.

There are few Christian attempts to categorize history in the first millennium. Eusebius was essentially in the business of myth making surrounding the virtue of Christian Empire. Augustin on the other hand saw history in terms of a winding down into a state of old age senility, whereas the Kingdom of God is equated with energy and growth. Generally, history is seen by Christians as simply a time of waiting, an in between time, intermediate between the Resurrection and the end of all things.

The redivinization of history is a modernist conceit, beginning perhaps with the myth of the Middle Ages superceded by the Renaissance. This is still the predominant myth that governs “modern” consciousness, and has been exported from Western Europe throughout the world. There is not a scintilla of historical fact that supports the myth. It arises out of what Voegelin terms the egophanic experience. It assumes that human beings have “moved forward” to the point that they can now control their historical destinies, either individually or communally. They have either acquired the requisite scientific knowledge or have arrived at some superior spiritual level or both.

The implication is that God kind of screwed up in the beginning, but now we can set things right and we will prove it, just give it a little more time. The proof is just beyond the historical horizon.

To say that God entered history in Christ gets it just backwards. History submits to Christ, becomes part of Christ. When we give more credence to history than is due, when we begin using terms like “moving forward,” it is because our experience of the presence of Christ has been largely effaced.

I think ‘myth’ is a bit of an overstatement. I would think of the stories surrounding our country’s founding as more akin to tall tales or exaggerations. The facts are there for anyone who wants to find them. Not like King Arthur, for example, who has entered into legend.

The incarnation is the insertion of the divine into the order of time. Christians look back to a specific person in a specific place and time, and forward to another event. Hence there is real progress, or there is no meaning to the incarnation.

Back to the Incarnation. That particular moment in time is meaningless apart from faith in the Resurrected Christ. So it is not an event in history, not an event in time, but an event, as Eric Voegelin put it, in the “metaxy” or intermediate realm. The Gospel accounts of the Incarnation are written and understood only in the context of the bodily Resurrection and Pentecost. They are not facts placed on a time line but a representation of an eschatalogical experience or vision.

As an example, let’s perform a thought experiment on American history. American history involves certain mythic representations of its founding that combine classical Roman, Protestant Christian (Puritan) and modern enlightenment liberal visions, including constitutionalism. The contract theory of government is an outgrowth of the covenant theology of the day, etc. The events of the Founding are conditioned on an eschatalogical vision of America as a Shining City on a Hill. I don’t want to reduce American mythology only to that, but it is a powerful vision that still animates our politics, both on the left and on the right.

But any founding myth is subject to question. And that is what is going on now. What is America? What does it exist for? What is it good for? That is being questioned all around. Just going back to teaching the Constitution to public school children is not the answer (although I favor that of course). We are at a point not unlike the period in Ancient Athens in which the Homeric myths were called into question. So what is piety. To defend the Homeric myths, or to replace them?

When a society’s founding myths break down, what do you do? Do you go back to an earlier beginning? Are you going to dig up some ancient tablets that have been buried for centuries?

These are just some of the problems with looking at history as if it had objective content that we could all agree on.

As to whether the modern world represents “progress,” the answer is, I believe, “yes!” And “no!” The ability to move implies the possibility of moving in either direction. But the modern world undeniably represents movement away from a previous ethos. The fact of movement confirms the possibility of progress, unless one takes a really bleak view and says that all movement can only be downward. But even that would be a kind of progress, albeit a perverse one.

As for the search for the “historical Jesus,” I tend to agree with you. Every attempt to “recover” this historical Jesus apart from the gospels and tradition results not in a recovery of the historical man, but a re-creation of God in the image of man, or rather the image of a certain fashionable man, the fashion changing from generation to generation. That being said, the Jesus really did become the Christ at a particular moment in time. Christ now “hides” as it were in the gospel, in the Church, and in the Eucharist.

The Christian no longer looks to history for guidance or a plan or anything like that, but seeks only the Kingdom of God.

That history will come to an end is both a theological proposition, and something that astrophysicists love to demonstrate. But the Kingdom of God has no end. And that is what a man of faith lives for.

In the Christian realm, history has no meaning. It is simply an in between or intermediate state of existence. And what is history? There is no one history. There are many histories depending on a culture’s myths. How a society derives meaning behind its existence. There are certain constants but they are all different, and they all come to an end. This does not mean that history is an eternal cycle at all. It just has no meaning in and of itself.

Karl Lowith has a pretty good book on this if you’re are interested: Meaning in History. But one does not need a book to get it. One needs to live the principles of the Gospel (I am saying this not as your guide or guru, only stating a proposition).

As for God entering history, the search for the historical Christ has been one of the most fruitless exercises in history. One knows Christ through faith. It is not that Christ has entered into history. That has it just backwards. History, for the believer, exists in Christ. Christ has relativized history, so to speak.

Regarding progress, can we say that the 20th century denotes human progress? I am just being empirical here. As I said, some things get better and some things get worse. If I get rich, I can call that progress, sure. But it is meaningless. If a society gets rich it is just as meaningless. Are many people materially better off? Sure. But it’s meaningless. Prosperity and even political liberty have no meaning. Perhaps they afford an opportunity for people to seek meaning and a higher purpose, because, as Aristotle noted, it takes a certain amount of leisure to philosophize and that requires prosperity. But look at modern philosophers with all that time on their hands!!!!

There is a certain truth to the pagan, cyclic view; patterns tend to repeat themselves. But this repetition is always at a different level. Not always a higher level, but the general trend is upward, or so I believe. We even learn things from disasters like the Enlightenment. As Mark Twain put it, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

And do you really thing that the only choices are the current system or totalitarianism?

If we do absolutely nothing, things will change. Change is a constant. But when politicians promise change, they are implying progress, out of the muck and mire of our present condition. The idea of historical progress is the illusion that all modern mass movements are based on.

Yet, it is unrealistic to expect politicians, businessmen, etc. to just reject it. Because there is a kind of magic to what they do that is very attractive, and at least when it comes to economies, it is hard to dispute that if you believe in economic progress and prosperity when opportunity is there in a free market, that it does not become a self-fulfilling prophesy. And it’s also unrealistic to say to a whole society that wanting to be prosperous is somehow unholy and demonic.

The dream of political progress is a lot harder to nail down. But that’s the dream that still attracts people to vote for people who promise it.

It’s really a spiritual problem at root, because someone who experiences spiritual progress in his own life is going to be cynical about the promises made by politicians that political progress can be fulfilling. The dream of progress is most attractive to those people who are alienated and feel like they are abused and misunderstood and their unhappiness is the fault of others.

With that said, I think there needs to be a philosophic critique of the secular premises behind our modern liberal constitution, and some way of anticipating something different, even if it is only read and appreciated by a very few for now. Some might argue that the premises of our economic relations should be revised as well, but I have yet to see anyone who can pull that off without revealing certain totalitarian sympathies.

I just want to preserve the possibility that “progressive” or even “liberal” responses to social problems can be enacted in such a way as to respect local and traditional understandings.

For me thios is where my own view of ‘progressive’ diverges from the mainstream definition. I tend to think of progressivism as a bi-partisan phenomenon. For me it means a willingness to move forward, embrace change, etc. So in that sense, nearly all liberals are progressive. The trouble is that they are always looking forward. What you are describing sounds to me like my definition of progressive conservatism i.e. a willingness to move forward while still respecting tradition, custom, etc.

Perhaps a better way to say it is that, in the midst of deep tectonic social changes–changes whose seeds were planted in the nation’s responses to the Great Depression and WWII, changes that didn’t find full fruition until the young Baby Boomers, in an arguably admirable honesty, revealed the full extent of the secularism and atomism that had taken root–there was a real desire for retrenchment, and to extend to as many as possible the blessings of that retrenchment.

I think your argument is valid, but maybe it’s just misplaced in the wrong decade. I think the 1960′s, especially the first half, was where the real entrenchment and fondness for the 1950′s-style conservatism was strongest. I’m thinking about movies like Animal House which captured the tension between the conservative establishment and the increasingly rebellious youths. I’m also thinking of my in-laws who were at a small conservative college in Ohio from 1962-1966 and the pictures look like they could have been taken in 1953. One year later they were at Penn State for grad school and a completely different world which was very much on the leading edge of the counter-culture movement in a lot of ways.