Salvation through the Christ faced enemies within the first generations after his resurrection, including the Docetism that threatened John’s congregation and provoked his first letter. Docetism claimed that Christ did not come as a man of flesh, asserting that he came to save man but not with a real body and therefore not as a real man. Those who saw him might have believed him to be a man and to inhabit a body, but Docetism rejected this appearance as a seeming. All that one could ascribe to Christ’s bodily life the docetists dismissed: the body to be torn down and rebuilt in three days was a chimera, Christ the bread from heaven came as spiritual bread only, the one who walked on water did not do so with human flesh, the one who bore the nails and hung on the cross neither endured this pain nor later rose as a body. In this way Docetism denied the emptying of the divine nature and the taking on of full humanity at the heart of Christ’s redemption, insisting that the infinite could not perform the mystery in which it descends into the finite and cleanses man’s faults.
This denial presumed the division of the world into two realms, positing a strict duality between the material and the spiritual. Docetists considered the material realm as flawed and abased, outside of redemption and a divine mistake, whereas they regarded the spiritual as pristine and exalted, the locus of knowledge and salvation. In man’s spirit resided the divine spark that called him to a higher existence, a spark in which the body had no part but contradicted in its materiality. The docetists applied this duality to Jesus Christ with the consequence that they could not understand him as truly God and truly man, for a divinity of spirit could not stand contact with the flesh. The heterogeneity of the realms would not allow that God could assume the profanity of the material and remain God. In this way the dualism of spirit and body intervened and perverted Christ’s incarnation in the docetic mind, separating Christ from flesh and confining him to spirit. The docetists discarded the Christ of flesh and bone, full humanity as well as full divinity, and in his place affirmed an ethereal being. In this manner they lost what was preached from the beginning, that Christ came as fully man in order to redeem men and bring them to eternal life.
The church overcame the old Docetism, vanquishing it with other ancient heresies that threatened fellowship within Christ’s body. Yet with the passing of centuries another Docetism has emerged, a New Docetism of profound and subtle strength, a recapitulation of the infinitizing dialectic cloaked under the promise of exaltation here of the church and there of man, an enemy whose power has unfolded over millennia and whose bloodlust goes unchecked. The original Docetism denied the dialectic of salvation that is the Son incarnate, refuting the notion that the divine could be joined in a single person with the finite, at once remaining infinite and saving sinners. The New Docetism, the inverse of the old, affirms the dialectic in which a finite man ascends toward the infinite as though he could both contain divinity and remain in the particularity of finitude, as though this ascent does not eventuate in formlessness. By the New Docetism man leaves off the law of form and definition in order to dedicate his energies to his disintegration, and this in the belief that he is rising as man, that he is fighting the good fight of justice, peace, and progress.
The New Docetism has swallowed the history of the West, undergirding the long story of conflict between church and kingdom on the one hand and man, state, and society on the other as a single dialectical progress in which form rises and falls with the boundlessness of law. For the New Docetism is above all the dialectical abolition of the law by which God shaped man according to nature and would elevate that nature to incorruption, a devertebration of church and kingdom in parallel with the internal decay of men. Docetism annuls the law as natural and divine, giving rise to the scattering as the principle of man and his environment until it has pummeled both into existence as a set of contradictions, a flurry of changes set against everything opposed to their continual transitions. Like its predecessor, the New Docetism thrives upon the implication that its object is not substantial or tangible, and therefore no longer real. It would devolve man and his world into a vapor without body or soul.
In a breathtaking and unperceived stroke, Docetism long ago twisted the meaning and glory of Christ to its purposes. The spirit that would flatten man’s fortitude does so under the banner of gospel and grace, righteousness and justice and mercy, while disemboweling his world in the name of the kingdom of God. Docetism has not only found room for Jesus Christ within the infinitizing dialectic, but at the turning point in its maturation Docetism proclaims the Christ-Idol as the pulse of its movement. All that precedes the cataclysm known as the Reformation is Docetism’s determination to corrupt the name of Christ by confounding the gospel of life with the scattering. The grace of Christ there merged with the structureless infinity of being divested of law and thereby of form, decapitating the divine aspect of the law and initiating in earnest Docetism’s attempt to infinitize the natural realm. Rather than he who takes up death and transfigures it into life for those who perdure in his name, Jesus Christ became the license by which man annuls the law until death becomes his way of life.
For the Protestant adherent of the New Docetism, the gospel speaks of Christ overcoming sin and death at the cross. There the docetic believer assumes that his iniquity will be conquered because Christ has conquered it, there the docetist claims to see blessing secured because evil has fallen. But Docetists, whether Catholic, Protestant, or secular, do not understand their own logic, they do not perceive that the liberation that they have preached and sung for centuries means not freedom from sin, death, and the law as their crier, but freedom from the law and thereby from the acknowledgment of sin and its penalty. The law and its giving of form Docetism secretly identifies as sin, redefining as enemies the institutions and nature expressive of that law and responsible for man’s limits. With shocking mendacity Docetism defines the graces given to keep sin at arm’s length as death-dealing and strives to liberate itself from them. Docetic man therefore works to remove the mediations that guard him from violence, laboring until they are destroyed and envisioning the destruction as a final liberation. Docetic man deceives himself by believing that in destroying the mediations he will confront a reality in which sin and death have no part. This reality without the mediations is death, for upon dismissing his protections the combat comes hand-to-hand. The life beyond death of which docetic man might dream comes not into and through death but to death. At the end of his striving against the mediations he perceives evil lodged within himself and prepared for carnage. Rather than being swallowed by love, docetic man is enveloped by hatred.
The deprivation of man’s form has arrived at the most recent and thus the most urgent of the crisis points embedded in Docetism’s history. He flutters as the confusion of higher and lower, repudiating nature and limit in favor of the infinite. Man has seen eternal life, hearing it and touching it with his hands, but rather than this life descending from eternity in Christ it has ascended in earth lifted to heaven. Docetic man has abandoned contact with the ground, rejecting natural existence and its submission to and envelopment in death-unto-life, each generation having pulled the ground further from beneath its children. Man at his most prominent now abides in the clouds, high above in his cities, looking out over the millions. He flies from place to place, forgetting time and location, plucking his life out from locale, season, and rhythm. The typical docetic man partakes in a lower but no less devastating habit of flight, floating a few feet above the ground thanks to engines that distort his consciousness and erode his soul. He neglects dawn and dusk, sun and moon, living by the artificial command that there be light or its absence. He forgets heat and cold as if these did not