The OT North as Type of ALL Christian Division - Not Just One or the Other - or How a Great EWTN Pastor and EWTN Theologian Helped Me Go Deeper

I just went to the Holy League Men's conference a couple months ago, and it was a great ride. It had fantastic speakers including an EWTN celebrity priest, a stellar preacher and man of God.

East Fulfills North?

Well, allow me to recall an incident that led to some great development of my theology.  I shared with this outstanding priest my “Old Testament North is the symbol of the New Testament East” analogy that I have written of before [Fatima: Communism and Relativism as Fulfillments of Assyria and Babylon], in that just as the Old Testament North took 10 of the 12 Tribes, leaving the remnant South behind as the true kingdom, so the East took 4 of the 5 Apostolic Sees (the 12 Apostles fulfill the 12 Tribes), similarly leaving the remnant kingdom in the West as the true kingdom.

The priest, whom I will leave anonymous since I didn’t ask his permission to mention, said Protestantism makes more sense, since, from my memory of what he said, the North eventually divulged into far greater errors than the East ever did. He named a very prominent Catholic theologian and celebrity as someone who proposed this example, that is, as seeing the North as Protestantism, too. (I will leave this person, who is a wonderful, brilliant man of conviction and love, anonymous as well, since I have not spoken to him to bring him into this.)

East Fulfills North to Some Degree: Apostolic Tribes, Chastisement in the Hemispheres

The problem is, neither of us is fully right. The first analogy is perfect for the tribes and cannot apply to Protestantism, since Protestants took no Apostolic Sees with them. Protestantism has no Apostolic authority. It was the East that took most Apostolic authority with them, just as the North took most of the tribes, and it is established Biblical theology that the 12 Tribes are a type of the 12 Apostles. Protestants had no claim to authority. They took no Sees with them. The best that any Protestant rebel was was a priest, never a bishop. (Admittedly, the Anglicans were originally in schism, but they quickly fell into the condition of heresy). Hence, Protestantism fails miserably in this case, and the Orthodox score 100%.

Too, the analogy with Fatima was absolutely perfect, as follows:  first, the North was chastised after the split a while later by a first beast, Assyria. The South had over a century to consider their sister’s fate and repent, but she did not and so went under a different beast, Babylon.

Here, again, the East fits perfectly: a century ago, per the epic prophecies of Fatima, a great portion of Eastern European civilization went under a terrible beast, totalitarian, atheistic materialism.  For 100 years now, the West, the sister lung, has had time to repent of her progressive godless materialism and has not, so we are now going into a similar beast, godless, but different from atheism:  not so much totalitarian atheistic materialism, but, as Papa Benedict put it, a dictatorship of relativism with its associated hedonistic materialism. Indeed, the persecutions of forcing persons of faith to violate their conscience in business practices, healthcare, insurance, and academics, to name a few, are simply NOT a fluke. They are a grave threat to our way of life until the evil relativistic culture we have is healed.

But the East Fails Where Protestantism Fits

Yet, the celebrity priest and theologian are right on the other spectrum; that is, they are more right about later developments: the East did not go into utter chaos and ruin like the North eventually did. The East is fairly stable with Apostolic Sees and Tradition.

Can We Have the Best of Both Worlds?

Then, it hit me. I looked up the history: the North, as soon as it split, set up two centers of worship, not just one.  These could be, on one level, the two dimensions of New Testament rift.  Let us probe it. Firstly, the two centers of worship were in opposite poles of the nation, more or less: Bethel near the southern border, some merely 15 miles or so from Jerusalem in the South—the true place of worship—and Dan near the northern extremity, very far away from Jerusalem, relative to the North/South geography. This perfectly images in this layer of meaning the two forms of rift in the New Covenant, schism and heresy, in that the Orthodox are quite close to us (they have Apostolic Succession, and hence all seven sacraments, Sacred Tradition to interpret Scripture, and the first thousand years of doctrinal development in common), whereas the Protestants are quite far away (Protestants lack Apostolic Succession, and so lose five of the seven sacraments, lack the Mass since they lack the Eucharist, and reject Sacred Tradition, leaving in them doctrinal chaos and perpetual questioning of many Catholic teachings).

Too, in another dimension of Northern spiritual history, the first worship, chronologically speaking, was hybrid good and bad: it was corrupted by the idolatrous calves at the entrances of both places, Dan and Bethel.  Nevertheless, some elements of Yahweh were retained many times.  That is, it largely remained hybrid.  But then, with Jezebel, the utterly diabolical Baal was introduced some 55-60~ years after the schism [the schism occurred in 930 BC and the start of Jezebel’s imposed corruption was basically immediately after Ahab assumed the throne of Israel, which was incidentally when they were married.  This was somewhere between 874 and 869 BC].  This was totally bad, just as in the New Covenant, schism was a lesser form of separation, then Protestantism, severe. Bingo. The North can encompass both forms of separation and not merely one or the other.

This could be the key to the best of both worlds!  The North can be a type of all Christian Division, not just schism, or just heresy: both schism and heresy, since it had two places of worship and two progressions of error. In other words, firstly, the first place of worship, Bethel, closest to Jerusalem, symbolizes schism, and the second place, farthest from the same Jerusalem, heresy.  Secondly, the timing of the worships is also symbolic: the first phase of worship that was hybrid and not utterly corrupt can image the lesser form of NT rift, schism, whereas the second phase, much worse, that came to prominence around 55-60 years after the OT schism with Jezebel, heresy, or Protestantism.

This also corroborates my past theology of Jezebel in Apocalypse Letter 4 as Protestantism.  This is part I of a discussion. The Seven Letters will be revisited soon, and this will be recalled.

For now, reference:

The Apocalypse Letters to the Seven Churches and Seven Ages of the Church