Over at the First Principles website Saginaw Valley State University professor Lee Trepanier has a thoughtful essay ( Voegelin and Christianity ) explicating Voegelin’s now famous revision of his project, specifically his rejection, introduced in Order and History: Vol. IV , of the historiogenetic speculation that dominated the first three volumes. It should be noted that Voegelin’s admission that a unilinear historical interpretation ultimately fails is an indication of the scholar’s absolute devotion to the truth of reality.
Voegelin, Trepanier explains, determined that the order of history is analgous to a "web of meaning in a plurality of nodal points and patterns," and rejected the notion that there is a "finality of meaning in the unfinished process of history."
Voegelin was not vexed by an apocalyptic tension, nor was he deceived into an existential isolation, via the imagination (a doorway to gnosticism); rather, he continued steadfast in his belief that man’s conscious experience with the divine occurs only in the metaxy — not externally — and that "The strength of the gospel is its concentration on the one point that is all-important: that the truth of reality has its center . . . in the presence of the Unknown God in a man’s existence to his death and life."
In Order and History: Vol. IV , Voegelin further declared that, "History is not a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but the process of man’s participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction."
In acknowledging the universality of the "scattered in time" hierophanic event that revealed man’s existence in the human-divine relationship, Voegelin appeared to be questioning the revelatory finality of the Christ event in declaring, "The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it, is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation."
In his conclusion, Dr. Trepanier raises a number of interesting and insightful questions: "If any event in all reality constituted meaning in history, is it not the Resurrection itself? (D)oes the history of order only emerge from the metaxy of human consciousness? Can there not be another history of order that comes from outside human consciousness, such as the actual birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?"
