The classical period of Christianity is ahead of us, not behind us. It is always ahead of us. This itself amounts to a new way of thinking for many of us. We are looking forward, into a semi-dark room, groping for the switch, relying on what has gone before but making fresh starts as well. We are pioneers, adventurers on the most thrilling trek of all, the inward passage to the Source.

Many of us are afraid to look, fearing that theonomy may not be possible without hegemony. So we hysterically cling to the illusion of hegemony even though we know the fact is gone for us. But there is no reason for fear. Theonomy is possible without hegemony. To think that there is no theonomy without hegemony amounts to treason of the Faith. God does not leave His playmates in the lurch. He does not require a big weight and presence in the worldly sense. Religious and cultural theonomy is possible on its own, without being linked to religious and cultural hegemony. It all occurs interiorly, in the heart. And in any case, we were only kidding ourselves thinking that we ever had hegemony.

Cyprian's famous dictum, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, 25 is wrong. It has always been wrong. As Tillich says, the New Being 26 is not dependent on the special symbols in which it is expressed. It has the power to be free of every form in which it appears. There is salvation in every Name of God and in every Religion man has made for working out his own salvation.

This is the matrix of life for the Church now and in the centuries to come. The Church is in a condition of religious and cultural heteronomy, not hegemony. We have a diaspora Church, to use a phrase from another point of view. The essence of the Church, which is religious and cultural theonomy, is alive and well within this context of religious and cultural heteronomy. We have to dive inwardly to find it. To learn spiritual theonomy in a context of religious and cultural heteronomy is our challenge. Bonhoeffer saw this challenge through his words religionless Christianity and Hoekendijk saw it through his words the Church inside out. Become monastics.

The over-all problem is, there are many ways to yearn for God, many Names to use, and so, what is the proper course of piety in this situation? It is a problem posed not only by the fact of cultural diversity or pluralism but also by the necessity to accommodate individual taste, which is always unique. The final redactors' answer is, exclude all but one Name and do that by elevating the personality who carried that Name to a position within the Godhead. In other words, their answer is religious and cultural hegemony, the thing we do not and cannot have. We need to examine this problem and the final redactors' answer to it. We need to produce our own answer to the problem, one that is related to but not entirely based on the final redactors' answer.

There are three kinds of religious activity. We call these the lay, clerical and monastic activities. A technical word for monastic activity is religious. In this usage, the word religious means a person who is living a reclusive life, away from the hubbub of ordinary affairs. The word does not imply that monastics are religious, in the usual sense of the word, while laity and clergy are not. Its usage here is the technical one: it is a synonym for monastic.

Religion is an intrinsic withdrawal from worldly attachments and a communion with God in the depth and silence of the heart. People withdraw from worldly hubbub in order to effect this communion as an ever-more-constant condition of life. The depth of Divinity inside a human personality is that satisfying, that attractive to one who has delved inside and tasted Its Sweetness. This is something people who are entangled in worldly attachments -- including most laity and clergy -- are not aware exists and will not believe exists so long as it is outside their experience. (Nominalism is the ordinary condition of ordinary humanity.) But it is the truth. Communion with God in the depths of one's being is infinitely more satisfying and compelling -- for one who has it -- than the blandishments of the world are.

People who are experiencing this truth are the bearers of the standard of true Religion. They are the embodiment of the principle of canonicity. They themselves and they only are plenary competent authority. All three kinds of activity, lay, clerical and monastic, are religious activity, but the monastic kind is the standard for the others. This has long been recognized by virtually the whole Church. Indeed, it is recognized by the Scripture and Tradition, the common sense and the long experience, of every Religion. Monastics are not better, but they are the standard. They are closest to the Goal. Therefore, their views regarding what is and what is not beneficial for humanity are the Canon of the race. When we want to know what is up and what is down in the spiritual or any other realm, we consult a monastic of deep experience. They will have the answer that we need. 27

Now, from the point of view of a religious, 28 the Name one uses in piety is not important because all names are His. These things, however, are important:

using a Name He has given
specifically for salvic purposes,

using only that Name in
spiritual practice (sadhana),

and,

conforming what one is doing
in the name of that Name
with what its Bearer will approve.

In other words, a religious wants the piety to actually work and the ethics to reflect an ultimate concern 29 that is approved by God. A religious has the most useful insight on the problem of piety in any context but especially in a context of religious and cultural heteronomy. We see this fact operating in the early years of the Church, when Christians did live in a context of religious and cultural heteronomy. At that time, it was a religious who identified the problem and proposed what was then the appropriate answer. We have identified him as the seminal redactor of the Christian Canon.

The seminal redactor, a Second Century eremitical religious from Sinai, decided that Trinitarian stochastic structure and a Theology of the Name would answer the needs of Christian piety in the heteronomous context of his and later Centuries. 30 This answer of the seminal redactor to the problem of piety is close to what we need: Theology of the Name and Trinitarian stochastic structure.

Then something happened at Alexandria. The students laid several things into the decisions forwarded to them from the religious at Sinai. They expanded Trinitarian formulation. They inserted the literary persona of Jesus into this Trinitarian formulation. And, over all, they imprinted their Canon with the doctrine of surrogate atonement, which comes from the Pentateuch, where it is spurious. The students made a new Religion. Their Religion is related to the one suggested from Sinai and to the one inspired by Jesus of God, but it is distinctly different from and other than either one of these. Something new came from the furiously writing pens at Alexandria, something not uniformly salutary. 31

What we call Christianity is this thing that came from the students at Alexandria. It is the second Religion of that name, not the first. Now, a third one is required, more related to the first than to the second but also fresh, from itself.

As we embark upon this task, we must remember that the formulation of Christology and Canon was and is driven by the needs of piety, by the universal existential imperative: I want to go home. We may adapt, correct and apply the formulations that were made, but we should always appreciate that, for our forebears, including the final redactors, it was existential and not just speculative interest which compelled their labor. The desire to reunite in communion with the Ground of Being, with the all-in-dwelling Logos, is stronger than any other desire harbored by the Created Order. This desire is the only genuine explanation for any phenomenon. 32

The students' desire to enhance their prestige -- an endemic weakness, pride of scholarship -- got mixed in with worthy motivations. Remove that desire and we have a Christianity worthy of the name.

It sounds like this:

The Name of Jesus is the Christ.

(This is the original Christian Religion.)

Kyrie Eleison
Christe Eleison
Kyrie Eleison

(This is the original Christian Piety.)

The gist is the Name. The Name is the Canon. The Name is the only thing with operational power (Existence, Ontos, Feminine Principle) sufficient to compel the Religion. Doctrines and Canon (Essence, Cosmos, Male Principle) won't do that. They are necessary, but they are not the operational puissance that is required. No one is driven by belief, doctrines or Canon. Everyone is driven by Presence (Parousia, Existence, Ontos, Feminine Principle) if they are driven at all.

Presence operates within belief, but a seeker is conscious of their own belief only during the later stages of their spiritual maturity. For what seem like ages during the early stages of spiritual life, Presence operates in what a seeker takes for a vacuum of belief, an absence of both doctrine and Canon. This is a frightening condition that discourages most from sustained commitment.

Actually, however, Presence always operates in an environment of belief, even when that environment is not perceived by the seeker. Belief must be present for Presence to operate at all. Being does not exist apart from being. The real belief, the actual doctrine and Canon that Presence operates within, from start to finish, is the Name. The Name is the platform for everything at all. Nothing happens apart from the Name. The Name is the Presence. Jesus is in His Name. God is in all of His Names equally. The Parousia 33 is the Name of God. Jesus is such a Name.

The realization of this truth, that the Name is the gist of the Religion, the seminal redactor, a Second Century religious, managed to establish at the center of Christology and Canon formulation. Although much was added around, much of it historically conditioned, contextual stuff of no universal necessity, 34 the seminal redactor was able to establish the Name of Jesus at the center of the Canon as the live battery of Christian piety. This great work is very much what Jesus and His Father had in mind to accomplish.

The two aspects, male (structure, cosmos) and female (effort, power), are coincident in the Name. After Jesus leaves the physical frame, the Christ is no longer He but His Name, which is He. He is in His Name. What saves in subsequent years is not an idea 35 of He or even a body of literature having He as a subject, but rather, the repetition of His Name, which is He and therefore both doctrine (Essence, Cosmos, Male Principle) and capacity (Existence, Ontos, Female Principle) together integrally. 36

The Name of Jesus is the Christ for all believers
who were not in the Presence of His physical frame.

The Name is more important than the kerygma. 37 An eremite's placing of the Name at the center of the Canon is what kept Christianity from becoming just another philosophical school among the many good and useful ones extant during the first centuries of the Common Era. The Name is what makes Christianity universal. The Name means that Christianity accepts Truth from any source. It means that Christianity is not the property of priests. All have direct access to God in the interiority of their own being, which is Being. It is not a mystery school or a philosophy or a set of dogmas or a church or an attitude or a value system or a space or a culture or a time or a book or a way of life or anything else that is partial and conditional. Christianity is a Name. Christ-ianity. It is universal and unconditioned just as the New Being, which is Jesus as the Christ, is universal and unconditioned.

Providence 38 made Christianity universal. Providence made Christianity as something which accepts Truth from any source. Christianity is the Law of Expansion because it is a Name.

Let us summarize. We should distinguish between a seminal and some final redactors. To the seminal redactor I am attributing three things:

the mounting of Trinitarian Monotheism,

the initial cut for a Canon

and, most importantly,

the establishment of a Theology of the Name
as the Ground of the Canon, and therefore, of the Religion.

This seminal redactor, a Second Century eremite, was a deep monastic 39 who came in from the desert with enough command to ensure the presence of these elements in the discussions of Canon formulation which were occurring after Marcion introduced his work. He put in at Jerusalem intending that his decisions should reach Alexandria. Alexandria was the intellectual, spiritual and literary center of the Civilization as well as the focal point of discussions regarding formation of a Christian Canon.

Students cannot arrive at a recognition of the importance of these elements, Name and Trinity, on their own. A monastic has to make students see the importance of these elements and include them in their work. The reason is, students are not seasoned by spiritual discipline. They do not engage in deep renunciation as a prerequisite of genuine scholarship. They do not see the necessity of it. They believe that scholarship is possible apart from personal improvement. Some even suppose that scholarship is possible apart from Faith! As a result, the scholarship of students is always attenuated and only partially useful. Students are willfully blind to the majority of life and phenomena. This is why societies depend absolutely on monastics who are learned. Only they can genuinely see and see what genuinely needs to be done.

The seminal redactor possessed the spiritual excellence and therefore the authority of Moses, Jesus, Paul, Jerome, Francis and Teresa of Avila. He, personally, was competent authority. He impressed the students at Alexandria as a pneumatic of the first order. The development of a Christian Canon at all depended absolutely on the resolve of a personality having this genuine puissance, this intensity of force, which only attends spiritual excellence. The Christian Canon could not have come up without the work of this Sage.

The final redactors were students at Alexandria and their professional associates among the cities and monasteries of the Empire. To these people I am attributing:

the final decisions regarding inclusion of text,

the broadening of Trinitarian usage
(inserting it anachronistically into Pauline and other corpi),

the inflation of Jesus' stature towards a hypostasis of the Godhead,

and, most importantly,

the over-all organization of the Canon into two liturgies of surrogate atonement,
two dispensations of blood-signed covenant:
the Old Testament and the New.