Category: History

Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on

“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).

I republish this December 11, 2020 post not only for its intrinsic historical and theoretical interest (not to mention its subject matter’s timeliness), but also its bearing on my current project of understanding the attraction of revolutionary Marxism. (Note his concise exposure of two common non sequiturs, one “racist,” the other “anti-racist.”) Marxists have avoided grappling with Rothbard’s praxeological and natural law approach to history and economics (to their detriment, in my opinion). Unlike Rothbard, it is they who are today’s conservatives: they champion oppressive statist social orders as well as or better than hired “prizefighters for the bourgeoisie” whom their rhetoric holds up to ridicule. Those who, like the present writer, lived through the 1960s, will recognize antecedents of today’s newsmakers.—A.G.F.

Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.

Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.

Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).

Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)

“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher;  its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy.  Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver,  and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).

On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution. [That would be January 6, 2021, which (as I wrote about at the time) predictably provoked a counterrevolutionary reaction that reverberates to this day.—A.G.F.]

—Anthony Flood

The Negro Revolution

Murray N. Rothbard

In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.

DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sits around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.

Revolution, in the first place, is not a single, isolated event, to be looked at as a static phenomenon. It is a dynamic, open-ended process. One of its chief characteristics, indeed, is the rapidity and acceleration of social change. Ordinarily, the tempo of social and political change is slow, meandering, inconsequential: in short, the typical orderly America of the political science textbooks. But, in a revolution, the tempo of change suddenly speeds up enormously; and this means change in all relevant variables: in the ideas governing the revolutionary movement, in its growth and in the character of its leadership, and in its impact on the rest of society.

Another crucial aspect of Revolution is its sudden stress on mass action. In America, social and political action has taken place for a long while in smoke-filled rooms of political parties, in quiet behind-the-scenes talks of lobbyists, Congressmen, and executive officials, and in the sober, drawn-out processes of the courts. Outside of football games, the very concept of mass action has been virtually unknown in the United States. But all this has been changed with the onset, this year, of the Negro Revolution. Continue reading “Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on”

To “Remake the World”: The Perennial Dream of the Left, Old, New, and Woke

On the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland I find myself embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.

This project will involve me in the risky business of imputing motives to people who claimed to know how the world worked, how it ought to go, and where history was heading. I want to be fair to people I deem mistaken, for I was once mistaken (if that’s not a euphemism) in just the way they were. Some American revolutionaries will admit the failures of their revolutions, but never reevaluate the conceit that human beings can “remake the world.” The day I gave up that conceit is the day I ceased to be a revolutionary.

Professor Alexander Riley, Bucknell University

I distinguish the merely mistaken from those who compound their mistakes with crimes enabled by the power (governmental, academic, and cultural) they wield. Such social outlaws are to be defeated, not refuted. I’m therefore concerned that what’s called “Wokeism” marks, not a break with Marxism, but an organic outgrowth thereof. What would allay my apprehension is a Marxist condemnation of Wokeism. Until I find one, I must take comfort in the writings of Bucknell University sociology professor Alexander Riley, especially his illuminating “Why Wokeism is Not Marxist” and his scorched-earth discrediting of Mark Levin’s American Marxism, “Marxism Misunderstood.” (Please also consider taking a look at my “Marksism Levinism,” an earlier review that complements Riley’s.)

A Marxist critique of the so-called “1619 Project,” which Riley adduces as evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (Here’s the latest; friends will attest that it’s not the first such article I’ve forwarded to them.) My mental jury’s still deliberating.

George Novack, 1905-1992

Exhibit A in my study is Marxist educator George Novack (1905-1992) under whose influence by God’s grace I did not fall. Alan Wald, whom I mentioned the other day, befriended Novack and began corresponding with him in the late 1960s and would visit him in New York City—my city—and in the end eulogize him warmly and at length, facts I learned only yesterday. (This originally appeared in the magazine In Defense of Marxism in 1992 and anthologized in 2016 here.) I now know exactly where he lived in his last years and how easy it would have been for me to look him up.

Poster announcing symposium for Alan M. Wald on the occasion of his retirement from UMichigan in 2013. https://events.umich.edu/event/12956

The life of Marxist revolutionaries, especially intellectuals, has a negative theological or atheological dimension. They are almost never unsocialized “village atheists,” but unbelief is ever in the background, or under the floorboards, of everything they think, even it only implicit or taken for granted. (It’s impolite, even beneath their dignity, to argue against religion.) In the case of the Novack, the philosophical writer, however, it had to surface sooner or later. I will foreground the fundamental question of worldview, which foregrounding will have a Christian-apologetical purpose.

Worldview is a topic to which Wald adverts every so often, but so far I haven’t caught him exploring it philosophically. That’s not his patch. He suggests that what marks off people he admires from the rest is commitment to remaking the world. Not to improving what they can, but to overhaul the whole.

But that God’s patch (Revelation 21:1).

Milestones and Memory’s Millstones

I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.

For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).

For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.

I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.

Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.

Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.

Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”

Hegel, Blanshard, Du Bois, and Me

The first three men listed in the title meant something to me at different times, and today’s date, August 27th, is significant in the lives of all three.

Kugler lithograph of Hegel (1770-1831) with students.

A Marxist undergraduate in philosophy in the early ’70s, I naturally took an interest in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose “dialectical method” Karl Marx claimed to have put on a materialist foundation. Etymology alone should have suggested to me immediately that διαλεκτική (dialektikē), rooted in λέγειν (legein, “to speak”) cannot find fertile soil in a cosmos consisting exclusively and exhaustively of ὕλη (hyle, “matter”). But materialists take for granted their reasoning ability, even though what they presuppose renders reasoning problematic. August 27th is Hegel’s birthday.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1987)

Breaking with Marx in the mid-’70s, I was seduced by the elegant prose of the rationalist Brand Blanshard. His doctrine of internal relations was more hospitable to dialectic than materialism, but no more rationally satisfactory. It was an undemonstrated, and indemonstrable, working hypothesis that requires omniscience to be in back of everything (for which Blanshard never argued). Every particular is the way it is just because everything as a whole is the way it is. This is worthless as an explanation unless one happens to be omniscient. August 27th is also the date of Blanshard’s nativity.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1907

In 1963, however, it was the deathday, if you will, of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, in whom scholarship, civil rights activism, Pan-Africanism and, ultimately, Communism of the Stalinist species coalesced. He left the herculean task of his editing his literary estate to Herbert Aptheker. This generated work for about a dozen research assistants, including the teenaged edition of yours truly. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before Martin Luther King memorably addressed the quarter-million souls thronged at the Lincoln Memorial after their March on Washington. King was the event’s last speaker; a few hours earlier Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP (which Du Bois co-founded in 1909), had informed the crowd of Du Bois’ passing. (See the program below.)

Sixty years on, I remember that day. Tomorrow will mark a personal milestone, one I’ll leave my readers to sleuth out.

Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery

Aptheker and Rothbard
Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)

For over forty years, my political history had two Jewish New York intellectual “bookends,” the communist Herbert Aptheker and the libertarian Murray Rothbard. In 2009 “Austro-Athenian” libertarian philosopher Roderick T. Long, in a blog post that first bore this one’s title, noted the overlap of their thought, at least on the subject of slavery, without noting the irony of that convergence.

Before going our separate ways home after a session of Murray’s seminar on the history of economic thought (at New York University in 1984), I gingerly mentioned to Murray that ten years earlier I had worked as Aptheker’s research assistant. His eyes widened in delight. He then told me how “interesting” he had found aspects of Aptheker’s The American Revolution, a subject on which he, Murray, had written Conceived in Liberty (five volumes). This was more cognitive dissonance than I could handle, so I didn’t pursue the topic. (I now regret passing on that opportunity, but then my association with Aptheker was still something I want to move away from.)[1]

Professor Long’s post needs no further preface. Here the link to it: Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery. I welcome comment.

Note

[1]  “. . . [T]he ‘Consensus’ school of historians . . . became ascendant in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as the Progressives reflected the Marxian outlook of American intellectuals of the 1930s, so the Consensus school reflected the neo-​Conservative ‘American celebration’ that typified intellectuals in post-​World War II America. . . . [B]y deprecating the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, the Consensus school could isolate it from the indisputably radical French Revolution and other modern upheavals, and continue to denounce the latter as ideological and socially disruptive while seeming to embrace the founding heritage of America. The leading Consensus historians were Daniel J. Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter. . . .

“. . . But the Consensus historians did make one important contribution. They restored the older idea of the American Revolution as a movement of the great majority of the American people. It replaced the view held by Progressives and Imperialists alike that the revolution was a minority action imposed on a reluctant public. Particularly important in developing this position was the judicious work by John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783, still the best one volume book on the revolutionary war period. On the left, the Marxian historian Herbert Aptheker also advanced this position. He chided the 1930s Progressives for their opposition to the revolution as a minority class movement in The American Revolution, 1763–1783.” Murray Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution: Bibliographic Essay,” Literature of Liberty, No. 1, March 1, 1978, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/modern-historians-confront-american-revolution. (Emphasis added.—A.G.F.)

The contingencies of history: how John Hope Franklin might have become W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant (thereby almost certainly preventing me and others from becoming Aptheker’s)

In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.

Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he  still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.

Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.

Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.

The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)

And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.

Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.

In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)

Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.

But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.

In defense of Lord Acton, revisited

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, Knight Commander Victorian Order, Deputy Lieutenant, January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902

On the birthday of the great liberal Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), I’ve decided to republish what I posted three years ago. (It will be new to some, if not most, of you.) It’s prefaced by links to Acton-related posts of mine and followed by the text of a 2006 answer to an attack on Acton—which I’d call ignorant were its author not a learned Catholic historian. Like my Christ, Capital & Liberty, whose chapters began as blog posts critical of another traditionalist Catholic, the arguments and evidence marshaled in my essay deserve more exposure than my old site can give them.—A.G.F.

 

 

John C. Rao, Ph. D. [Oxon.], Associate Professor of History emeritus, Saint John’s University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“In Defense of Lord Acton,” reproduced below, was written in January 2006 in response to “A Message from Bethlehem: Lord Acton Tends to Corrupt,” a smear of Acton as a “Gnostic” by Professor John C. Rao of St. John’s University. The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic periodical, published Rao’s defamation of Acton on the last day of 2005. Its original title of my response was, “Do Illiberals Tend to Smear? Or Is It Just Professor Rao When It Comes to Lord Acton?” The editor not only didn’t publish it, but even after more than one query, wouldn’t even acknowledge receiving it.

In Defense of Lord Acton

The significance of the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace for society is always a timely topic, and never a more welcome one than at Christmastime. It is the motif of Professor John C. Rao’s vast historical studies, and I expected his recent column in The Remnant1 to add one more variation on that theme. He more than disappointed any such expectation by taking the occasion of the season to impute heresy-mongering, if not heresy itself, to Lord Acton, a man who regarded communion with the Church as dearer than life itself. That is, Professor Rao maligned a fellow member of his own profession, a towering figure in European historiography who participated in the unearthing of many official archives. And he did it not by examining any of Acton’s own words, but rather by repeatedly asserting what he “really” meant. Feeling glum2 cannot excuse such a lapse from the standards of controversy. Continue reading “In defense of Lord Acton, revisited”

Pat Martino and Herbert Aptheker: Half-century Memories

Pat Martino (L) and yours truly, January 1, 1973, 3:20 A.M., Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, NYC.

This photo was taken on January 1, 1973 at Folk City, 130 West Third Street, in Manhattan.[1] After several months of screwing up the courage to ask Jazz guitar legend Pat Martino (1944-2021) for a lesson (I had first spoken to him there on September 9, 1972), he agreed earlier that New Year’s Day to give me a lesson if I’d be willing to travel to his home in Philadelphia. Before taking the  train at New York’s Penn Station on January 24th, I noticed the  headlines of the newspapers that day: the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War would be signed three  days later.

A philosophy student at New York University (NYU)—where I took Sidney Hook’s last course—I had spent 1972 worrying about how I might avoid the military draft. Although my Selective Service (SS) number was 40, I heard they weren’t going to call higher than 25. Shortly after that, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.

I had been anxious about the future. Fighting my Vietnamese comrades was out of the question, but the various “draft-dodging” (or court martial-inviting) options were not much more congenial. You see, I was from 1971 to 1975 a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (CP), one who had registered with SS and was then assisting Communist writer and theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) with finding various books and articles pursuant to his literary executorship of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers.[2]

That’s whom Pat Martino was posing with on New Year’s Day 1973. For the nearly five decades I knew him, I hasten to add, he was never aware of my politics.

On the advice of CP attorney John Abt, who urged me to claim my First Amendment right of freedom of association, I declined to answer the Army’s questions about my political affiliation. After isolating me from other registrants for a few hours and then interrogating me, the SS officers dropped the matter and let me go home. I never heard from them again. I returned to my NYU classes the next day. They probably have a thick file on me.

January 1973 is also the month Aptheker acknowledged my assistance and that of others in his introduction to The Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Kraus-Thomson Limited, 1973), which he edited along with an additional 40 volumes of Du Bois’s writings.

In 1946 Aptheker returned from Europe where, rising to the rank of Major, he had commanded the all-Black 350th artillery unit. That’s the year Du Bois (1868-1963) made Aptheker—unable to secure an academic position in the Cold War’s the first year—the executor of his literary estate. In that introduction my name appeared in a scholarly publication for the first time.[3]

Herbert Aptheker signing over W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts in 1973 (that is, the portion that had been entrusted to him: the rest went to Fisk University and to Ghana, where Du Bois took up residence in 1961, never to return to the country of his birth).

In a few years I’d part company with him, a story for another time. I eventually settled accounts with my erstwhile political conscience in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. 

Over the last fifty years I pursued philosophical, political, and musical studies in ways I could never have imagined (or, if I could, would necessarily have welcomed). At 19, a half century (a reasonable unit of historical account) seemed impossibly long to me. It does not feel that way today.

Aptheker, a widower in his last four years, passed away at age 87 almost two decades ago; Pat, having made a seemingly miraculous comeback from amnesia-inducing brain surgery in the early ’80s, succumbed to a long illness last year, age 78.

Socially isolated, I left the Party in 1975 and Marxism altogether a couple of years later; I never became either a professional guitarist (not for want of trying) or a professor of philosophy. Each man left his mark on my sense of life. I enter the new  year appreciative of their influence and hope by God’s grace to continue to build on what I’ve learned from knowing them and so many others.

I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Anthony G. Flood

January 1, 2023

My wife Gloria, Pat Martino, and me, September 9, 1995, Blue Note Club, NYC, directly across the street from where Folk City was, 23 years to the day after I had first spoken with him.

Notes

[1] The Fat Black Pussycat night club/comedy venue does business there now. Before Folk City, there was Tony Pastor’s Downtown (1939-1967).

[2] Of the countless requests he gave me over the years, here are four.

 

[3] 

 

Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th

Given the season, I’m reposting what first appeared here last July 19th under the wordier title, “Having become flesh on 25 December, 5 BC, He began tabernacling among us on 29 September, 4 BC.” I highlight evidence buried in the notes of E. W. Bullinger’s The Companion Bible, first published a century ago.  Don’t miss the notes appended to this post. (If you have difficulty falling asleep, they should do the trick.) Merry Christmas! —A.G.F.

 

“And the Word became (ἐγένετο, egeneto) flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and dwelt (ἐσκήνωσεν, eskēnōsēn) among us . . . .” John 1:14

In “The Divine Purpose,” Otis Q. Sellers wrote:

In all the work that God has done for mankind, is now doing for mankind, and will yet do for mankind, there is a definite goal, a fixed purpose. To state it as simply as possible, His object in all His work is to produce a people who know Him, who understand Him, who love and appreciate Him, a people with whom He can joyfully dwell, and among whom He can center Himself in view of a greater program for the universe.

If the Bible is read carefully from Genesis to Revelation, it will be found that this end is reached and becomes a reality in Revelation 21. There under a new order of things described as “a New Heaven and New Earth,” the tabernacle of God is seen as being with men, He is dwelling (tabernacling) with them, they are His people, and He is their God. This is as far as Revelation takes us, yet we can rightfully go a step beyond this and envision a great divine program in which mankind will be vitally involved as those who are working and not those upon whom God is working. A tabernacle (skenos) in Scripture when used figuratively always denotes a center of activity, and it could not be that God would bring about such a center and then not use it.[1]

To “become flesh” is to be, not born, but rather “begotten,” that is, conceived. The root of ἐγένετο (egeneto) is γίνομαι (ginomai), to come into existence.

The one who is born, who exits the womb, is already flesh, which precedes “dwelling among us.”[2] (She who “can’t bring a baby into this world” and so procures an abortion only achieves the death of an already begotten and in-the-world baby.)

The English “to dwell” doesn’t capture the Greek ἐσκήνωσεν (eskēnōsēn), the form of σκηνόω (skēnoō) in John 1:14. The root is σκηνή (skēne), originally the hut or tent where players changed masks and costumes behind the stage; later, the stage itself. (Our “scene” descends from this.)

When Jerome translated into Latin the Hebrew הַסֻּכּ֛וֹת (hasukkoth) of, say, Deuteronomy 16:16, he used tabernaculum, the diminutive of taberna. (Our “tavern” echoes this.) He rendered that verse’s Hebrew as in solemnitate tabernaculorum, that is, “in the feast of the tabernacles.”

Tabernacles are booths. Annually, Jews today set up booths where they commemorate סֻכּוֹת‎, Sukkot, one of three Torah-commanded pilgrimages to the Temple which was destroyed in 70 A.D. (The other two are פסח, Pesach, “Passover” and שבועות, Shavous, “Pentecost.”)

In 5 BC, the angel Gabriel announced two conceptions, that of John (the “Forerunner”: Luke 1:13), and then of his cousin, Jesus (Luke 1:31). Gabriel addressed the first to John’s father, Zacharias; the second to Jesus’ mother, Mary. According to E. W. Bullinger: Continue reading “Conceived on December 25th, born on September 29th”

C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography

The following of review of John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.—A.G.F.

The Boundaries of a Mind’s Quilt

In his biography of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s (C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 1). Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility.

The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963 Beyond a Boundary. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.

A glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom; the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936); the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson; the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). Each in itself was a tour de force; collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him.

Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X; there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. In this respect, Williams has delivered. Continue reading “C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography”