History and the Mountain of Ascent

Seemingly calculated to shock his mainly Protestant audience, James Jordan constructs a historiography in Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future that predicts the end of the Protestant age of history. Jordan suggests that the shape of historical narrative is an ascending spiral.¹ Pagans selected the ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail, to inform their historical imagination because narrative themes so often repeat themselves in history.² Christianity does not live peacefully with this simple model. Creator God infuses history with direction, everything coming about for God’s greater glory and the communion of his people with him (1 Jn 1:3; cf. 1 Cor 1:9; Jn 3:16). Previous ages resemble subsequent ages in some sort of cycle, but the whole apparatus is going someplace.

Communion with Creator God vivifies every aspect of historic narrative. In the pre-fall state of man, walking with the Lord in the Garden supplied the purpose and direction of his action. After Adam’s fall, redemptive history hinges on the restoration of communion with God. Reminders of the direction and rhythms of history permeate both old and new testament liturgies. Aaronic priests entered close to the presence of the Lord in the tabernacle and offered sacrifices of ascent (Lev 1).³ In the temple liturgy, on the greatest feast day, the high priest actually entered into the veil of the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the people, for God cannot commune with unclean men (Heb 9:7–10). His entrance into the oracle was, of course, preceded by ritual cleansing which prefigured the atoning role he himself played on behalf of the people, as was any entrance into the inner court (Ezek 44; Zech 3:3–4). In the liturgies of the church under the New Testament, the church ascends with song, prayer, and hearing the Word up to the sacrament of communion in which the people enter in upon the veil of God’s presence and partake of the feast he offers them. A very old way of marking the moment of ascent is with the call and response: “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.⁴ But liturgical rites are not the end of the theme; ascension defines sacred geography and architecture as well.

As the people of God ascended to Jerusalem and the temple worship to celebrate passover, they traditionally sang the “Songs of Ascent” (Pss 122–134). One imagines them winding up the switchbacks, ascending closer to God to worship. This pattern began in the garden, which is set on top of a mountain (this much is obvious from the layout of the Edenic rivers as described).⁵  Within the ideal temple itself, Ezekiel’s temple vision makes much of the number of steps into each further court (Ezek 40:22, 34). The thematic thread shoots straight through Zion to the heavenly Zion of John. Even the post-diluvian pagans understood this idea so well that they made false mountains of ascent in the form of pyramids and ziggurats to commune with the divine. As God works his redemptive purpose in history, historical man follows the liturgical pattern of the people of God, ascending around the mountain to come into communion with him. Much of Jordan’s thought brings to the fore a microcosmic understanding of liturgy. Liturgy reflects the order of the universe, especially this theme of ascension (see for example, Jordan’s discussion of the elevation of the Garden of Eden in Trees and Thorns).⁶

In Crisis, Jordan goes further and lays out three cyclic ages through which history cycles as it ascends: the Tribal Age, the Kingly Age, and the Imperial Age. He overlays the Tribal Age of man onto the age of the early church, the Kingly Age onto the middle ages of Christian Europe, and the Imperial Age (Babylonian exile to Christ, roughly) onto the age of Protestantism. The church both takes on and pushes the spirit of the age, the people of God front-running the peoples of the world. So as the age of empires falters, Jordan wonders, “what now?” and speculates that we are restarting the cycle on a grander scale. He envisions the next age of history as a new Tribal Age, drawing people around the old social functions that are the beginning of social cohesion.

The Church in the Tribal Age

Jordan mainly draws applications which contextualize the church in this new historical age. His prescription for the church is to lean into the liturgical and organizational tendencies of the people of God in their past tribal forms:⁷

Tribal worship—enthusiastic singers gathered by elders around a table—must always undergird every phase of civilization. While a more monarchical-liturgical kind of worship is appropriate at the cathedral, it must not displace the tribal-liturgical worship of the weekly gathering.

And later, he enlarges on the theme and summarizes:⁸

The Church is the true form of the tribe. To meet this situation, the Church needs to put the communion table back where it belongs, in a place where the chairs or pews enable people to sit enthroned around it…Second, the Church needs to recover enthusiastic singing. In this regard, the charismatic movement has been a preliminary, groping response to the felt-needs of lonely people. The charismatic type of church responds to the needs of people to feel drawn together and lifted up around God. This sensation of being gathered, along with enthusiastic music and festivity, meets the “tribal” needs of the human being.

Simplifying Jordan here would do him a disservice. He most certainly does not mean to call the church to a disordered enthusiasm. Based on his life and work, he means to make the singing of the Psalms central and enthusiastic and to make the Lord’s Supper again a “supper,” a wedding feast. In doing so, the church would provide the social fellowship so central to what it means to be human which is so lacking in our modern lonely age.

Anecdotally, Jordan’s realization accurately describes the draw of the church on the young generations. The recent generations seek the church out initially as a place of social belonging. This has been the theme of the three conversions of young people I have personally witnessed. Young people are joining the church as if they were joining a tribe. The successful expansion of Western imperialism stretched the social structure to its realistic limits (which turned out to be amazingly broad), catalyzing the breakdown of higher-order social structures and the individualization and anonymization of man. But man is a social animal and seeks out social structure when driven by loneliness. A new tribal age of the church is inevitable.

The End of the Protestant Age

But what does it mean for self-identified Protestants to move past the “Protestant Age” and into a “Tribal Age,” an age of new beginnings? In some ways, Protestants already live in this de facto reality. Crisis points to the weakness of the “Protestant form of the gospel” in the context of modern evangelism.⁹ Shared social super-constructs such as an understanding of sin and universal morality were prerequisites to the simple Protestant gospel presentation. Such social awarenesses have burned out, being replaced by a sort of secular morality and secular understanding of sin, seemingly based on indelible collective guilt for historical wrongs. The defining Protestant institution of the university has also burned out.¹⁰ No longer are universities taken to be the ultimate social arbiters of knowledge; they are battered by a deep, popular suspicion arising out of decades of policy failure and philosophical error promulgated by the university’s hollowed-out, secularized form. Further, the rise of the internet has exposed the credentialed intellectual elite to a vast sea of hecklers, some of which even come away with victorious laurels when they debate the esteemed professors of the old system. So perhaps it is not a question of plugging the dyke but of meeting society where it is at and building new social cohesion from the ground up on the tribal model.

---

An appreciator of Jordan from the cradle, William Seabolt is a government student, full-time legal functionary, and amateur Theopolitan.

---

NOTES

1. James B. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future (Monroe: Theopolis Books, 2016), 7. ↩︎
2. For more on historical cycles and the pagan conception, see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954). ↩︎
3. James B. Jordan, Trees and Thorns: Studies in the First Four Chapters of Genesis (Monroe: Theopolis Books, 2021), 85. ↩︎
4. Hippolytus, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, Bishop and Martyr, ed. Gregory Dix and Henry Chadwick (London: Church Historical Society and SPCK, 1968). Note, however, that while ancient, this may not be broadly representative of contemporaneous rites. ↩︎
5. Jordan, Trees and Thorns, 37. ↩︎
6. Jordan, Trees and Thorns, 37. ↩︎
7. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, 20. ↩︎
8. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, 37. ↩︎
9. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, 30. ↩︎
10. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity, and the Christian Future, 22. ↩︎