“ ‘Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,’ The Misfit continued, ‘and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. ’ ”—Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
As Thomas Molnar reminds us in the latest of his many books, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 255 Jefferson Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503; $9.95), The Misfit has not been alone over the centuries in his opinion that the Jesus story—the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection—thowed the whole world, including history itself, out of kilter. Almost from the beginning, it was observed of Christianity that this religion possessed peculiar and irresistible powers, whose ineluctable effect was to desacralize the pagan universe wherever and whenever it encountered it. Henceforth there would be one Mediator and one only—Jesus Christ the Messiah—between man and God, where before there had been hundreds and thousands; henceforth, wherever Christ triumphed, the sun would be only the sun, the stars merely points of gaseous fire, a tree no more than a fibrous shoot of spiritless vegetable life. For Christians, ritual was unavailing without purity of intent, while the City of God provided no direct model for the City of Man, the real model for the Christian life being Jesus Himself; finally, Christianity replaced the cyclical view of history with the linear one, which emphasized the uniqueness of historical events precipitated by the actions of individuals. “In sum,” Molnar writes,
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