Page 148 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Operation Belshazzar

opportunity to beat down opposing views with verbal abuse and
heavenward imprecations; having recently lowered his sights and
literally beaten up a literally lighter-weight opponent at a conference
on Holy Land archaeology, he attracted the fleeting attention of the
media and thereby the interested scrutiny of Al Magnus.
Cyrus Lee’s career had not begun smoothly. Instead of parlaying
his Doctor of Divinity into a cushy pastoral position as an ordained
minister, he insisted upon developing his thesis into a book for a
popular audience. Not a particularly nimble stylist in that genre, he
entitled his vanity-press tome, The Cathoprot Conundrum. He had been
forced to pay for publication, scraping the bark off his family tree
(and soon afterward being amputated from it) for five hundred
copies. For years he had lugged them around in the back seat of his
beaten-up old car, erecting a card table at swap meets on which to
sell them below cost. Finally, with more than four hundred volumes
remaining, the vehicle had been destroyed by a fire of unknown
origin while parked behind a barbecue stand at which he was dining
al fresco. To any subsequent Christian opponent with the temerity to
suggest that the conflagration had been a devastating review from the
Great Critic, Cyrus retorted with a challenge to remove the lightning
rods from every God-fearing church in the United States.
As may be surmised from its reception, the theory Lee
propounded in this work was guaranteed to please no one. His
research into soteriology, the esoteric aspects of salvation, refracted
through the cracked lens of his metaphysical microscope, inspired a
rather eccentric view of divine deliverance and its two millennia of
Western ecclesiastical elaboration. He described a pendulum of
justification, swinging between works and faith, set in motion by
Saint Paul’s decision to let early Christians off the hook of obedience
to the letter of Mosaic Law by propounding the notion of salvation
granted without effort to new adherents simply by their act of
swearing belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. This began an
irreconcilable swing between legalistic and ecstatic versions of the
religion, the “conundrum” of Lee’s title. He generalized this in a sort
of sociological fashion, having recourse to Max Weber and William
James—again, red flags to wave in front of the faithful. As
hierarchies develop through time, salvation through works
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