Month: September 2026

Attuned to Nature, But Tuning Out Nature’s God: Thoughts on Eric Hobsbawm

According to Richard J. Evans, the late communist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) fell in love with nature. Nature’s God, however, found no place either in his heart or his thoughts, at least not his published ones.

In 1935, Evans wrote, Hobsbawm (then in his late teens) “felt a sudden, ill-defined”

. . . longing [Hobsbawm journaled]. For what? Perhaps for the fields, strong, red, deep fields, and broad, warm meadows. Or for the dead-silent woods at night. Or for the great sea, soft, lightly swelling its weight, shining benignly red and silver in the evening. I want to lie down peacefully, very softly, under the great sun. In the wondrous, deep sun. I want to be still, completely still, and lie there until I fall asleep, in the sun, in the warm grass.[1]

Whence, however, the object of this rapturous longing? An explosion of matter and energy indifferent to Hobsbawm and his loves, a happy but accidental product of planetary and hominid “evolution,” one by-product of which was Hobsbawm’s psychological report that has no significance beyond itself.

The heavens—and, by extension, nature—declare the glory of God (Psalm 19), but Hobsbawm’s materialism rules out such expressions of reverence and gratitude. The heavens declare nothing. In nature’s beauty, Hobsbawm found respite from his academic and political toils, but never a reason to question his atheism. It was a brute fact, one to be enjoyed, perhaps, but certainly also taken for granted.

Hobsbawm would be “still,” as God desires us all to be, but never, as far as we know, affirm Him in that stillness. (Psalm 46:10) Hobsbawm knew God, but suppressed that knowledge (Romans 1), even though in it lay the root of the intelligibility of everything he professed to know and love throughout his long life. He had no grounds for proclaiming autobiographically, as he did at age 85:

What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. “Dialectical materialism” provided, if not a “theory of everything,” then at least a “framework of everything,” linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.[2]

“So, Flood, why do you care about Hobsbawm?”

I care, because the questions he raised as a young man a century ago in Europe between the Wars remind me of those I raised half that long ago in the Bronx. The man helping me answer them was Hobsbawm’s contemporary, the American Stalinist historian, Herbert Aptheker.[3] In my case, God countermanded my suppression of the truth; not in Hobsbawm’s.

And that liberation was entirely of grace. It was nothing for me to boast about. (Ephesians 2:9)

Notes

[1] Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, Oxford University Press, 2019, 62. To my visitors who may not make time to read this 800-pager, I recommend Gabriel Winant, “A Diaspora of One,” Jewish Currents, July 29, 2019; Corey Robin, “Eric Hobsbawm, the Communist Who Explained History,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2019; and Susan Pedersen, “I Want to Love it,” London Review of Books, April 18, 2019.

[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Pantheon, 2002, 97. It is a fatally flawed framework, as all secular alternatives to the Christian worldview must be. See my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, independently published, 2022.

[3] When the Soviet Union crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, it no more occurred to Hobsbawm to leave the Communist Party of Great Britain than it did to Aptheker to leave the CPUSA. Hobsbawm defended Moscow outright, identifying “fascism” as a clear and present danger. The “suppression of a popular movement,” Hobsbawm wrote, “however wrong-headed, by a foreign army is at best a tragic necessity and must be recognized as such. While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as possible.” (Quoted in Evans, Hobsbawm, 343) At least he didn’t develop his casuistry into a book-length apologetic like Aptheker’s The Truth about Hungary, Mainstream Publishers, 1957. (The link opens a PDF of this book, courtesy of the Espresso Stalinist.) See my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, independently published, 2019.

Christian Individualism and God’s Sovereignty: Dissenting from a teaching of the man about whom I wrote so much

[Also on Substack.]

God does what He wills; fallen man finds this irredeemably offensive. Even many who profess faith in Christ cite passages from Scripture against their plain sense, which is that whatever happens, happens according to His eternal decree to create.

Over the past nine years, while working on Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, launched a few days ago, I came to grasp the foundational status of a Christian’s view of God’s sovereignty. What I believe about it might not sit well with brothers and sisters of mine who closely follow the exegesis of Sellers (1901—1992) in eschatology and ecclesiology, but not necessarily about the being and nature of God, to which the question of His sovereignty pertains.

What I believe about it is basically what the Reformed tradition has taught for half a millennium. If the latter is true, that’s only because that’s what the Bible has taught for millennia—if fidelity to God’s Word is one’s criterion of truth. I would only remind them that in differing from Sellers (and them) on this score, I’m trying to model the individualism that he exemplified. Since they are individuals, however, I cannot safely generalize about their doctrine of God. I cordially invite them to challenge mine.

When I knew Sellers in the late 1970s, I sensed a divergence between what he and I found in the Bible on the topic of God’s knowledge but had reservations about exploring them. I was a Ph.D. student in philosophy, not in Scripture. I was a new Christian learning from him; I didn’t feel comfortable pressing him on philosophical issues.[1] That’s not what I came to him for.

To me, Sellers seemed to write as if he believed that what God knows about us creatures depends in part on what we bring about by our actions. God knows all that He wants to know, but also only what He wants to know. That is, Sellers would say, you cannot “force knowledge” on God, as though God’s knowledge were an avoidable perception rather than a creative constitution of the thing known.

What God chooses to know, however, is what He had already chosen (“in eternity past”) to create—which is causally, organically related to everything else He has created! A change in any member of one class could only affect members of the other class.

God cannot foreknow what a man will do unless his ancestors and contemporaries are in place to condition his actions. For example, Jesus could not have foreknown Peter’s denial of Him unless He also foreknew that no Roman soldier would mortally wound Peter before his betrayal in a disturbance that might have arisen in the temple courtyard that fateful night. And the same goes for all the ancestors of all of the men and women we meet in pages of God’s Word. But God is not a supercomputer. He foreknows (יָדַע, yada) all that transpires in space and time, and He does so causally, not passively: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew (יְדַעְתִּ֔יךָ, yadatikah) you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) There is, therefore, no need for Him to “micromanage” spatiotemporal affairs “along the way,” so to speak, to ensure the fulfilment of prophecy.

At the risk of making my readers uncomfortable: God cannot know non-pornographic things perfectly without also knowing the pornographic things to which they are causally related. He knows the content of every pornographic film, but that doesn’t mean His relationship to it is like that of its sinful human audience. Sellers would invoke the prophet Habakkuk: “His eyes are too pure than to behold evil (רָ֑ע, rah), and He cannot look upon iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13), as if that settles the matter. But the evil (רָ֑ע, rah) He doesn’t (anthropomorphically) “behold,” He creates! (Isaiah 45:7). It’s the same word in both verses. No “blind spot” mars His grasp of creation.

His working all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) after the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11) includes pornography and every other evil. I see no reason to, but rather every reason not to, follow Sellers in restricting the scope of “all” to the immediate context (as he has exegeted other passages where τὰ πάντα occurs): all things (πάντα, panta) emerged (ἐγένετο, egeneto) from His creative act, and without the latter, nothing has emerged (γέγονεν, gegonen). (John 1:3).

In creating this world, He who transcends space and time created the space-time continuum and all the spatiotemporal interactions that occur within it—including those between Himself and His created image-bearers, such as between the Son of God and His murderers. That His cognitive grasp of His creation is not absolute is, for me, simply not a biblically faithful possibility. (Since my grasp is imperfect, however, I’m open to counterargument.) We often have specific, detailed purposes for our days, our years, our lives. Why should God’s purpose in creation be thought less meticulous than ours?

God’s perfect foreknowledge does not imply (as some suggest it must) that we are not responsible for what we do because “we could not have done otherwise.” To argue thus is to bring to the Scriptures an alien standard of knowledge, one that flatters a sinner in his presumption of autonomy. God is the only autonomous actor.

That is, we do not refute “Calvinist” metaphysics—which I believe many are eager to do, but which I have come to believe falls naturally off the Bible’s pages—merely by showing that it offends secularly humanist sensibilities toward what we “must” be free to do (including “doing otherwise”).

To be continued.

Notes

[1] Another issue was the Trinity, which I called “tripersonalism.” He was averse to using traditional language for any idea he thought couldn’t be derived from Scripture; thus, my terminological accommodation. In 1979, I wrote a paper, distributed to him and a handful of others, showing that Scripture teaches it. If Sellers had any comment on it, it never reached me.

From Stalin to Sellers: A Christian Individualist Reflects on Geoffrey Roberts’s “Stalin’s Library”

[Also on Substack] This Christian Individualist’s path from the one man to the other over the past fifty years was paved with books. Yours truly, the young Stalinist, was a bibliophile, but so was Stalin the mass murderer. Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books [1] is surprising me (I’m more than halfway through it) with his description of a life that resonates with me at so many points that I’m forced to reevaluate—not repudiate, but painfully re-examine at some cost to my self-image—the love on whose altar I sacrificed much else of value.

Roberts documents, in a profuse but captivating way, what I had surmised from earlier study: that Josef Dzhugashvili (1878/9—1953) gave himself over to his love of books. Omnivorous reading, which had propped up his familial inheritance of the Russian Orthodox faith, also helped him rationalize and then cement his conversion to Marxism and eventually his revolutionary discipleship under V. I. Lenin.

Roberts’s Stalin is a flesh-and-blood historical actor with strong feelings in all the areas of life that we all know from the inside. I’m grateful to Roberts for permitting me to infer that, even at my most foolish, perhaps I was not willing to cross certain lines (e.g., murder, bank robbery) to prove my commitment to The Cause. The truth of that is known only to God, to Whose mercy I entrust myself.

In the history of professing Christians in this dispensation, there have been romantic idealists who, had they the means, would not have hesitated to use them to annihilate “enemies of the Faith,” that is, fellow believers who interpreted Scripture differently. I’m thinking particularly of the ironically named Pope Innocent III (r. 1198—1216), who wiped out the professing Christian dualist sect, the Cathars, and made outcasts of Jews and Muslims (Saracens) living in “Christian lands.” I shudder to think what he would have done with more effective weaponry. (After all, weren’t those hapless tens of thousands a threat to the “souls” of every Catholic they ideologically infected?)

I’m not singling out leaders of the religious society in which I was raised. The great Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin would not have extended the hand of fellowship to Otis Q. Sellers or to any believer he influenced. Nay, they would have immolated us all or entombed us alive, just as surely as Martin V, let alone Innocent III, would have caused recent occupants of the Papal throne to be incinerated as “heretics.”[2]

In my eighth decade, I view life stages, not as arithmetical deductions, but as seasons I’ve passed through. That’s true for my enemies and heroes alike. As a teenager, I grasped abstractly what it meant to be in one’s twenties, thirties, and so forth. Now I understand those ages viscerally. Things that were merely facts in a biography now represent existential turning points.

The same goes for the loss of friends and the illnesses and deaths of loved ones. Every historical actor I ever read about or personally knew suffered something about which they had to suppress their feelings as they answered this naif’s questions. Lovers live as though they’ll continue along the same lines until some unknown and distant endpoint. No, death may very well overtake one or the other, sometimes when one is in advanced age and grieving the loss unimaginably. My libertarian genius friend Murray Rothbard (1926—1995) left Joey (1928—1999) too soon. Fay Aptheker (1905—1999) predeceased my erstwhile friend and ideological apothecary Herbert (1915—2003) when he was physically and mentally at his most vulnerable.

Stalin’s bibliophilia had no “aesthetic” dimension. It served his commitment to communist revolution and to securing its gains, whatever the cost. The communist vision effectively functioned as his “Absolute,” a pseudo-transcendent object against which he measured everything else. But since the latter cannot function in one’s life as a genuine Absolute, Stalin was bound to distort his relationship to reality—his family, his friends and comrades, and to truth itself.

By contrast, another bookworm, Otis Q. Sellers (1901—1992), consecrated his life, not to the demonic fantasy of communism, but to the God Whose Logos is the Truth and revealed to His people truths of the enscripturated, propositional kind—the One on Whom “Koba” the ex-seminarian fatefully turned his back, just two years before Sellers’s nativity in the new century.[3]

Notes

[1] Yale University Press, 2025.

[2] Although Jan Hus was executed in 1415 and Martin V was not elected pope until 1417—both events occurring while the Council of Constance was in session—what Martin did immediately after his election leaves no doubt that he endorsed the council’s ghastly sentence. Before becoming Pope Martin V, Cardinal Oddo Colonna was an influential member of the Roman Curia. On behalf of then-Pope John XXIII, he (Colonna) had investigated the Czech reformer’s writings, branded Hus a heretic, and issued his excommunication, demonstrating a longstanding personal and theological opposition to Hus well before the execution. (That “John XXIII” was Baldassarre Cossa, whom Angelo Roncalli (1881—1963), the “good” John XXIII, r. 1958—1963), later declared an “anti-pope,” thereby settling a five-century “debate” over Cossa’s status and regularizing the papal chronology.) On February 22, 1418, just months after his election, Martin V promulgated Inter cunctas, the papal bull recognizing the decisions of the Council of Constance, including its condemnation of the thirty “heretical” articles of Jan Hus. That execrable screed also mandated that the Holy Inquisition interrogate and hand over to secular authorities any suspected Hussite—the very mechanism that had led to Hus’s being burned at the stake.

[3] In April or May 1899, Dzhugashvili left or was expelled from the seminary in Tiflis in his native Georgia. Officially, it was because he missed his final exams. “Uncle Joe” said it was because he ran Marxist propaganda circles within the seminary walls. By 1899, he had taken on the alias “Koba” (the fictional Caucasian bandit of Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 The Patricide (მამის მკვლელი, mamis mkvleli) and traded in his mother’s Russian Orthodox Christian faith for Marxism. The ex-seminarian, having abandoned any path toward the priesthood, briefly took a job as a meteorologist, and transformed himself into a dedicated agitator for atheism.

More on George Novack, Trotskyist philosopher, from a visitor

Almost seven years ago, I concluded “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead” with “If you [visitors to this site] can shed any light on Novack’s life and times, please do so in the combox. Thanks.”

Well, yesterday, Michael Zimmerman, a diligent student of Novack’s writings, took the time to correct misapprehensions I was laboring under. He granted permission to publish our brief correspondence, all dated today, which I include below in full with gratitude.

A general, “metaphilosophical” answer to Novack and other philosophers may be inferred from my Philosophy after Christ. — A.G.F.

Here is Mr. Zimmerman’s first message:

I recently came across your blog post dated November 6th, 2019 titled “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead.” It caught the attention of my search engine while I was doing some research on the life of Novack. What immediately stood out is that you have mistakenly labeled a picture of novelist James T. Farrell as being that of George Novack.  Farrell’s picture carries the caption “George Novack, 1905-1992. Circa early 1930s.”[I have corrected this. — A.G.F.]

You ended that entry with an open request for comments from anyone who can shed light on Novack’s life and times. As a student of his, I thought I would offer some insights into what his work has to say on the positions you have attributed to Novack.

Firstly, Marxism-Leninism became a term of self-reference for the petty-bourgeois Stalinist caste and its loyalists in the nationalist communist parties in order to conflate their counterrevolutionary movement with the workers and peasants revolution of the early 20th century. To my knowledge, Novack never called himself a Marxist-Leninist, but firmly aligned himself with the Trotskyist movement, having personally worked with Leon Trotsky politically and philosophically, and having given his life’s work in service of a Trotskyist party. This is an important clarification because search engines and large language models (such as ChatGPT and Gemini) are using your website to justify claims about Novack as a Marxist-Leninist, a title which cannot apply to Novack given the trajectory of his political life. Continue reading “More on George Novack, Trotskyist philosopher, from a visitor”