SALTED WITH FIRE

I would say that one can perhaps best view my apocalypse or apocalyptic writings through an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic, where at the end of history, at the top of the logical spiral of the Absolute Spirit or SA [Savoir Absolu of Glas by Derrida] is the trinity of art, religion and philosophy. You can read this book and perhaps someday my other, unpublished writings, going back to 1985, and find little if any critical writing on any other subject. However, there is a fourth mode in which I write, a literary style, somewhat poetic and autobiographical, which effracts the circularity of that Hegelian triad and opens the system to its other. The effraction, a term I borrowed from Derrida, is a thing I posit as the I that breaks the matrix of GodChurch-World, and destroys that ring, consigning it to the flames, in what I call an arrival ending both the dialectical confiscation and the deconstructive impasse, also a theme of the later writings of Derrida after his real religious turn in about 1991, who both deferred arrival, famously, yet called on it to come, in a Messianic and increasingly Apocalyptic sense. His steady but as always oblique approach to a prophecy concerning a time that is now occurring has only through the writing of my work in the last two years come to be understood by me as a revelation concerning the Roman rule. The work I have written effracts systems on different levels, not only that of SA and the other totalities of closure that now are attempting the absolute anti-spirit, and of critical, philosophical and theological writing by the personal and poetic I, but in these pages you have finished reading by the synthesis of the literary with the critical due to the form and pressure of the time. In economic terms, and differently from the deconstructionist tenet that it can only be done from within the thing to be deconstructed, I am performing a further break from a radical place in the exteriority where I found God in 1989. It may be that the young man studying at the seminary with me a few years ago in order to become a Roman priest was right, that Gods hands are tied. Often, in the almost eight years since, I have defended the thesis of idealism that God is the absolutely free, but at last wondered to myself a few days ago what if? What if

the young man was right? What if somehow God is not free? What if Rome somehow has practiced the closure on God first of all, by placing certain words of Christ against others, and through the constant call for mercy, cry for mercy, invocation and preaching of mercy, and the doling out of it en masse in the confessional, has in effect made it impossible for God to come again in justice. If He does so He will deny Himself as the merciful, and no longer be God, who cannot deny Himself. It is in the Roman interest, of course, to see the second coming deferred, forever if possible. Perhaps as was thought after the resurrection, Christ was supposed to return at once, but something happened to prevent Him. This may be the meaning of the scenes in Acts where the people in awe of the apostles lay all their money before them, to get near the power of the Spirit of Pentecost, and then those who do not are incredibly struck dead at Peters feet for not giving every bit of money to him. Peter took the money, when he should have said give it to the poor. This is the true simony, not the Magus attempting to buy power, but Simon Peter selling it. The Church went wrong in the very beginning and has been wrong ever since. Power and money. Mammon. So they have tied Gods hands to keep on with their corruption extending now even to the ritual abuse of children on the one hand and of the mass on the other. If this is the case, I asked myself what is to be done? If the power of the keys given to Peter in Matthew to bind and loosen has bound God in Heaven, bound his justice on earth and in heaven, while loosing only a seeming mercy, words of mercy, at least, it seemed to me there could be a way to overcome the power of the keys and, if it is thinkable, to untie Gods hands so that He could act. It is absurd, therefore, so think like Tertullian and believe. If the set of all of the Words of Christ are a closed set, a canon circumscribed, both without by decree, and within by the incessant gloss of fathers and theologians, so that everything is determined, it could be possible to make this closed set overall indeterminate, if a statement could be found that fulfilled the mathematician Gdels theorem that for such a set there will always be a proposition that is either both true and false or the

validity of which cannot be determined from the other propositions in the set. There are things said by Christ that seem to be false, that some hearing Him would not die until they saw Him return in His kingdom, for instance, for the Church is obviously not the Kingdom Come. So, I searched for an inexplicable statement and found it in Mark, where Christ says everyone will be salted with fire. The fathers say this is both hell, on the one hand, and the Holy Spirit, on the other, which is a flat contradiction, and Gregory the Great says of the passage that no one should disturb the peace and unity of the Church, by which I think he sensed some trouble to come based on these words. In fact, the context of salted with fire indicates the fire of hell, but which I think cannot be, for it applies to everyone. One could say that the term fire is equivocal, some to hell and some to the Spirit. If this is the case, it may be the Lord said it in this manner, as he said other things hard to understand in the parables, not to be understood, but this in an absolute sense, in order that the phrase salted with fire is both/and, not either/or, and therefore, according to the logic of contradiction I laid out earlier in the work, the words are true in a sense which the logic of the Church based on Aristotle and Aquinas cannot accept. All of the truth is that truth is both true and false at once, this is the whole, which thus cannot be closed, so the words salted with fire fit the logic of set theory, in that they are both self-contradictory, thank God, and cannot be glossed from other propositions in the Words of Christ. Therefore, all the sets propositions are indeterminate, due to the rules of the closure of the ring set, which provide for the multiplication of the indeterminate term over all the others, making them all indeterminate, the very multiplication the Church has depended on for the internal closure of the set, all being absolutely true backward and forward. If all of the Words of Christ are indeterminate, then those authorizing the power of the keys are, too. They cannot be proved true or false, their truth or falsity is in principle absolutely unknowable, and the Pope cannot use the passage to enforce his power. Therefore, God is free. His hands are no longer tied. We are free to believe His Words or not, as

faith permits, may God increase our faith, and He is no longer bound by the power of the keys once held in error by the Roman Pontiff, but now returned to their rightful owner. O, Christ, come quickly! Theology and the Church, though not Scripture in which all truth is hidden [that dangerous book as a one-time friend called it in most unfriendly terms as he stressed the necessity of earthly existence], are the The God Enclosure that men and women use, if possible, to trap God, because they fear Gods freedom [and their own], a God who made a world where lions rend the flesh of living antelopes, for instance, not to mention human societys evils. It may be that God is completely incomprehensible, despite human reason, so He is not even true. God is not nice, but neither are we, really, though in hypocrisy we would pretend to be. Yet, although this is, willingness to love is the secret by which we live. The willingness to love by which we live implies a willingness to love not only each other but God, foremost, and to believe Him in His promises. The Jews in the wilderness did not believe that the Promised Land was ripe for the taking. They balked and refused. So many times have the people of God refused to enter in. It may be that here at the end of things God gives us once more and one last time the chance to do the right thing. Let us not be those children of the kingdom that the Lord says will not sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, instead cast out into the darkness wailing, while many from the east and the west gather in with the patriarchs and the prophets. It may be that the Church need not be destroyed even if prophesied by as diverse sources as Malachy, who envisions only one Pope after Benedict XVI, and the Book of Revelation and Daniel, which I think I have shown, however briefly, must apply to the state of affairs in the Church today. It may be that those currently performing their roles in this passion of the Church do not understand what they are doing or why and do what they do in their own minds and those of others with the best motives. It may be that God, as shown in Numbers, and at other places in scripture, can change his mind. If the Church repents, it can still be saved. I will not lay out a program for how the Church may still save

itself from a judgment that I fear it will incur if it holds to its present course. There are men in the Church who need to think on these things and at the time that is most acceptable, take action. That the fate of perhaps one billion souls rests in the hands of so few is cause not necessarily for terror but for hope. If good men be willing to stop evil, evil cannot win. There are better angels of our natures, and they appeal to us, even now. There is no such thing as fate. All are free, God, man, the Church and history. That Revelation promises the thousand year reign of Christ on earth is a prophecy we should look to. How many alive today in the Catholic Church will walk with the Lord in His Kingdom Come is not known. I believe the time is short until it commences. Let none of us, I pray, be the man to whom God says depart from me, I never knew you. To know the good, to see that it needs to be done, and not to do it, is a sin. To know the truth and not to acknowledge it is to be an accomplice to falsehood. To never walk in the splendid beauties of the New Jerusalem would be the worst tragedy any man could suffer, especially one who was responsible in a special way to be aware. We all work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and even the apostle Paul did not count himself as one who had attained.

Michael Bolerjack