Stumbled upon your article I am still a relatively new believer and learning and sorting through a lot of theological perspectives still. Is this linked with dominion theology and the 7 mountain mandate which from what I’ve read gets a pretty bad wrap and doesn’t produce very good fruit or your speaking to something different?
It's my opinion that this idea of Christians being evacuated from earth, is part of the reason why you have a country like Nigeria that is basically half christian and half muslim, yet the muslim population pretty much runs their government.
As a consequence of this (christian) attitude, the government, which is predominantly comprised of muslims has turned a blind eye to the christian genocide that has been taking place there.
The church, for the 1st 4 centuries, was to a man Premill. They believed in a new heavens and new earth where God's people will dwell forever. Never believed in inhabiting heaven with clouds and harps, etc. Not until Augustine did Amil rear it's ugly head, transferring the literal Covenants and prophecies concerning Israel and the end ages, into a "spiritualized" heresy transferred to the church. Amill became the basis of the catholic church and it's church-state union....more heresy. Premill maintained dominance until the 1600s when Presbyterians adopted amil. Still a non dispensational premill remained healthy and vibrant, even in the current day. Unfortunately, dispensationalism picked up premill, distorted, twisted and added too it to produce a completely different system. Premill now gets a knee jerk reaction against it because the word is associated with dispensationalism.
Just so you know, I am a convinced Baptist, of the 1644 1st London Confession. I am decidedly NOT orthadox, nor believe in praying to "saints" or icons, or works salvation. Many other differences, but this is enough for now
Rocka, you are right to rebuke the cheap, sentimental “floating in the clouds” imagery that many Christians absorb from pop piety. You are also right that Scripture culminates in the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation, not in a disembodied eternity where the material order is discarded. Catholic Christianity has taught that from the beginning. The Creed every Catholic confesses is not “I believe in escape.” It is “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” If a Christian hates the body, hates matter, or treats creation as disposable, that is not biblical, and it is not Catholic.
But the argument you build on that corrective repeatedly blurs crucial distinctions and then blames “Western Christianity” for errors that are, in fact, modern and sectarian.
The Church has always held two truths together without contradiction. First, that the body is good, created by God, and destined for resurrection and glory. Second, that the fallen “flesh,” meaning disordered desire and rebellion against God, must be crucified in repentance. Scripture’s critique of “the flesh” is not a hatred of the body. It is a hatred of sin. When you collapse that distinction, you set yourself up to treat asceticism and discipline as if they are inherently gnostic, when in fact Christian asceticism is precisely the opposite of gnosticism. Gnostics despised the body because they thought matter was evil. Christians discipline the body because they think it matters, because the body is the arena where virtue is trained, where self-mastery is learned, and where love becomes concrete.
Your handling of Augustine is another example of the same pattern. Yes, Augustine used philosophical vocabulary from his era. Every major Christian thinker has done the same, because the Church evangelizes real cultures, not imaginary ones. But Augustine did not teach that the body is evil, nor that salvation is escape from matter. He affirmed creation’s goodness, the Incarnation’s reality, and the bodily resurrection. His battle against Manichaeism was a sustained rejection of a dualistic hatred of matter. He did emphasize the soul’s primacy in moral agency, but that is not gnostic. It is ordinary Christian anthropology: the soul is the form of the body, the principle of life, and the seat of intellect and will, while the body is not a disposable shell but part of the human person. Calling Augustine the “DNA” of body-hatred in the West is not analysis; it is an accusation that doesn’t survive reading Augustine.
Then there is monasticism. You describe it as if it “ritualized” body-despising. Historically and theologically, that is backwards. Catholic monasticism preserved agriculture, literacy, medicine, music, architecture, and a sane rhythm of work and prayer. The Benedictine vision is not “matter is bad.” It is “matter is good enough to be ordered toward God through discipline.” Monks did not deny the world because they thought creation was evil; they renounced certain goods to seek the highest Good, and precisely through that renunciation they served the world. If anything, monasticism is one of the clearest witnesses that Catholic Christianity never adopted gnostic contempt for the body, because it treated the body as trainable, meaningful, and integral to sanctity.
Where your critique is strongest is when you target dispensationalism and the pre-trib rapture complex. On that point, Catholics can agree with much of your diagnosis. Those systems are recent, largely Anglo-American, and they often foster a posture of withdrawal, panic, and cultural unseriousness. But that is not “Western Christianity for two thousand years.” That is a particular modern strain of Protestantism that Catholics and many other Christians do not share.
The deeper problem is that you keep turning legitimate theological corrections into a civilizational war narrative. You repeatedly suggest that “Babylon” needed Christians to despise matter so they would surrender “territory,” and you frame your alternative as dominion, occupation, and “taking territory.” Here is where Catholic tradition will insist on sobriety.
Christ’s Kingdom is real, public, and destined to fill the earth, yes. But it does not advance by the Church becoming an empire, nor by baptizing a program of conquest, nor by measuring faithfulness primarily in cultural capture. The Church’s primary vocation is worship, sanctification, and the salvation of souls, which then overflows into works of mercy, just laws, genuine culture, and patient institution-building. The Church can build hospitals and universities and cathedrals without confusing her mission with the world’s methods. When you speak as though “dominion” is the essential proof of eschatological sanity, you risk smuggling in a different error: the reduction of the Kingdom of God to a strategy for influence.
The Catholic synthesis is simpler and more exact. Creation is good. The body is good. Work is good. Culture can be good. Sin corrupts them. Grace heals and elevates them. The Incarnation and bodily Resurrection of Christ are the guarantee that matter is not discarded but redeemed. The final state is not evacuation but transfiguration: a new heaven and a new earth, the communion of saints, and God dwelling with man. That is why Catholics care about bodies, burial, sacraments, beauty, land, bread, wine, water, oil, and the physical works of mercy. We do not need a “rearmament” against gnosticism by adopting a militant “take territory” frame. We need to return to the ordinary fullness of the apostolic faith already possessed by the Church: sacramental, incarnational, disciplined, hopeful, and realistic about suffering.
So, yes, correct the cartoons. Correct the escapism. Correct the rapture industry and the consumer Christianity that treats the earth as disposable.
But also correct your own overreach. The answer to gnosticism is not a new counter-system powered by suspicion of the entire Western tradition. The answer is the Church’s ancient confession: the Word became flesh, and that flesh is risen, and because of that, creation is not a prison to flee, but a gift to steward on the way to its final renewal in Christ.
The text part is 687 pages, Noel. I asked (politely) a very simple question and you answer with a copout. You are not persuading me from thinking that there's nothing in the Bible about human rights, i.e., privilege without obligation.
This is a great analysis. Escape theology (Gnosticism) is terrible for many reasons. I talk about the same thing on my substack. Not only does it keep us from actually doing anything here on earth, but many people intuitively know it's false and it drives them away from Christ.
See the “western esoteric tradition” teaches that the true Christianity, ‘mystical’, ‘esoteric’ Christianity, is the gnostics…that’s where you get all this Jesus was an essene and the Church stamped out all the competitors so they went underground to protect the Truth…it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense. Dangerous, incoherent nonsense, that feeds people’s ego and prevents them from making any real, lasting progress but leads to prelest.
You call us death-worshippers because we trust the pattern of the seed. But you are the one who hates its God-ordained death, the very mechanism Jesus called essential for bearing fruit. (John 12:24)
Your “divinity within” rejects the structure of the creation it's embedded in.
Also, how the hell did you mix rasta with Gnosticism?? Yikes.
Gnostic Rasta makes no sense. Ethiopian Christianity (Rasta's root) explicitly rejected Gnosticism. Gnostics say matter is evil. Rastas affirm material creation (ital diet, dreadlocks, earth as Zion) you're combining incompatible worldviews. Pick one.
Stumbled upon your article I am still a relatively new believer and learning and sorting through a lot of theological perspectives still. Is this linked with dominion theology and the 7 mountain mandate which from what I’ve read gets a pretty bad wrap and doesn’t produce very good fruit or your speaking to something different?
Great question, I'm glad you're asking instead of assuming.
Short answer: No, this isn't 7 Mountain Mandate theology, though I understand why the surface resemblance might raise that concern.
It's my opinion that this idea of Christians being evacuated from earth, is part of the reason why you have a country like Nigeria that is basically half christian and half muslim, yet the muslim population pretty much runs their government.
As a consequence of this (christian) attitude, the government, which is predominantly comprised of muslims has turned a blind eye to the christian genocide that has been taking place there.
Brilliant! You rock, Rocka!
The church, for the 1st 4 centuries, was to a man Premill. They believed in a new heavens and new earth where God's people will dwell forever. Never believed in inhabiting heaven with clouds and harps, etc. Not until Augustine did Amil rear it's ugly head, transferring the literal Covenants and prophecies concerning Israel and the end ages, into a "spiritualized" heresy transferred to the church. Amill became the basis of the catholic church and it's church-state union....more heresy. Premill maintained dominance until the 1600s when Presbyterians adopted amil. Still a non dispensational premill remained healthy and vibrant, even in the current day. Unfortunately, dispensationalism picked up premill, distorted, twisted and added too it to produce a completely different system. Premill now gets a knee jerk reaction against it because the word is associated with dispensationalism.
Just so you know, I am a convinced Baptist, of the 1644 1st London Confession. I am decidedly NOT orthadox, nor believe in praying to "saints" or icons, or works salvation. Many other differences, but this is enough for now
Rocka, you are right to rebuke the cheap, sentimental “floating in the clouds” imagery that many Christians absorb from pop piety. You are also right that Scripture culminates in the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation, not in a disembodied eternity where the material order is discarded. Catholic Christianity has taught that from the beginning. The Creed every Catholic confesses is not “I believe in escape.” It is “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” If a Christian hates the body, hates matter, or treats creation as disposable, that is not biblical, and it is not Catholic.
But the argument you build on that corrective repeatedly blurs crucial distinctions and then blames “Western Christianity” for errors that are, in fact, modern and sectarian.
The Church has always held two truths together without contradiction. First, that the body is good, created by God, and destined for resurrection and glory. Second, that the fallen “flesh,” meaning disordered desire and rebellion against God, must be crucified in repentance. Scripture’s critique of “the flesh” is not a hatred of the body. It is a hatred of sin. When you collapse that distinction, you set yourself up to treat asceticism and discipline as if they are inherently gnostic, when in fact Christian asceticism is precisely the opposite of gnosticism. Gnostics despised the body because they thought matter was evil. Christians discipline the body because they think it matters, because the body is the arena where virtue is trained, where self-mastery is learned, and where love becomes concrete.
Your handling of Augustine is another example of the same pattern. Yes, Augustine used philosophical vocabulary from his era. Every major Christian thinker has done the same, because the Church evangelizes real cultures, not imaginary ones. But Augustine did not teach that the body is evil, nor that salvation is escape from matter. He affirmed creation’s goodness, the Incarnation’s reality, and the bodily resurrection. His battle against Manichaeism was a sustained rejection of a dualistic hatred of matter. He did emphasize the soul’s primacy in moral agency, but that is not gnostic. It is ordinary Christian anthropology: the soul is the form of the body, the principle of life, and the seat of intellect and will, while the body is not a disposable shell but part of the human person. Calling Augustine the “DNA” of body-hatred in the West is not analysis; it is an accusation that doesn’t survive reading Augustine.
Then there is monasticism. You describe it as if it “ritualized” body-despising. Historically and theologically, that is backwards. Catholic monasticism preserved agriculture, literacy, medicine, music, architecture, and a sane rhythm of work and prayer. The Benedictine vision is not “matter is bad.” It is “matter is good enough to be ordered toward God through discipline.” Monks did not deny the world because they thought creation was evil; they renounced certain goods to seek the highest Good, and precisely through that renunciation they served the world. If anything, monasticism is one of the clearest witnesses that Catholic Christianity never adopted gnostic contempt for the body, because it treated the body as trainable, meaningful, and integral to sanctity.
Where your critique is strongest is when you target dispensationalism and the pre-trib rapture complex. On that point, Catholics can agree with much of your diagnosis. Those systems are recent, largely Anglo-American, and they often foster a posture of withdrawal, panic, and cultural unseriousness. But that is not “Western Christianity for two thousand years.” That is a particular modern strain of Protestantism that Catholics and many other Christians do not share.
The deeper problem is that you keep turning legitimate theological corrections into a civilizational war narrative. You repeatedly suggest that “Babylon” needed Christians to despise matter so they would surrender “territory,” and you frame your alternative as dominion, occupation, and “taking territory.” Here is where Catholic tradition will insist on sobriety.
Christ’s Kingdom is real, public, and destined to fill the earth, yes. But it does not advance by the Church becoming an empire, nor by baptizing a program of conquest, nor by measuring faithfulness primarily in cultural capture. The Church’s primary vocation is worship, sanctification, and the salvation of souls, which then overflows into works of mercy, just laws, genuine culture, and patient institution-building. The Church can build hospitals and universities and cathedrals without confusing her mission with the world’s methods. When you speak as though “dominion” is the essential proof of eschatological sanity, you risk smuggling in a different error: the reduction of the Kingdom of God to a strategy for influence.
The Catholic synthesis is simpler and more exact. Creation is good. The body is good. Work is good. Culture can be good. Sin corrupts them. Grace heals and elevates them. The Incarnation and bodily Resurrection of Christ are the guarantee that matter is not discarded but redeemed. The final state is not evacuation but transfiguration: a new heaven and a new earth, the communion of saints, and God dwelling with man. That is why Catholics care about bodies, burial, sacraments, beauty, land, bread, wine, water, oil, and the physical works of mercy. We do not need a “rearmament” against gnosticism by adopting a militant “take territory” frame. We need to return to the ordinary fullness of the apostolic faith already possessed by the Church: sacramental, incarnational, disciplined, hopeful, and realistic about suffering.
So, yes, correct the cartoons. Correct the escapism. Correct the rapture industry and the consumer Christianity that treats the earth as disposable.
But also correct your own overreach. The answer to gnosticism is not a new counter-system powered by suspicion of the entire Western tradition. The answer is the Church’s ancient confession: the Word became flesh, and that flesh is risen, and because of that, creation is not a prison to flee, but a gift to steward on the way to its final renewal in Christ.
Thanks for your comment.
Are Christians supposed to believe in human rights? Privilege without obligation?
Here’s what Christians are supposed to believe: https://igit.me/Catechism
The text part is 687 pages, Noel. I asked (politely) a very simple question and you answer with a copout. You are not persuading me from thinking that there's nothing in the Bible about human rights, i.e., privilege without obligation.
This is a great analysis. Escape theology (Gnosticism) is terrible for many reasons. I talk about the same thing on my substack. Not only does it keep us from actually doing anything here on earth, but many people intuitively know it's false and it drives them away from Christ.
I like it!
See the “western esoteric tradition” teaches that the true Christianity, ‘mystical’, ‘esoteric’ Christianity, is the gnostics…that’s where you get all this Jesus was an essene and the Church stamped out all the competitors so they went underground to protect the Truth…it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense. Dangerous, incoherent nonsense, that feeds people’s ego and prevents them from making any real, lasting progress but leads to prelest.
You call us death-worshippers because we trust the pattern of the seed. But you are the one who hates its God-ordained death, the very mechanism Jesus called essential for bearing fruit. (John 12:24)
Your “divinity within” rejects the structure of the creation it's embedded in.
Also, how the hell did you mix rasta with Gnosticism?? Yikes.
Define rasta for me real quick.
Gnostic Rasta makes no sense. Ethiopian Christianity (Rasta's root) explicitly rejected Gnosticism. Gnostics say matter is evil. Rastas affirm material creation (ital diet, dreadlocks, earth as Zion) you're combining incompatible worldviews. Pick one.
Explain Rastafari and why they believe in the Crown and how it connects to Gnosticism 🎤