There is only one conspiracy that Christians are permitted to believe in. And this is so because ideology (particularly partisan ideology) and real theology cannot co-exist in the same head.
And that one conspiracy is the central Mystery, the essential meaning of all history.
What makes the “good news” of the Gospel so good is that this Mystery — the real meaning of history — is that at the heart of all reality is love.
Love is the mystery, the center of reality. Love is precisely the fact that God gives Himself away to us. Love consists only in the fact that Self sacrifices Self for the sake of the Other.
It is a common misconception that the sacrifice of Jesus in Love began at the Cross. Actually, that sacrifice began long, long before that historic moment on Golgotha.
Love was realized when the Lord surrendered the prerogatives of HIs heavenly divine glory and descended into the Incarnation, when He entered into humiliation. He, the Second Divine Person of the Trinity, was the Divine Spirit of His human soul and body: He assumed all of our nature completely, our total “psycho-corporeality.” His suffering did not begin at the Passion of Holy Week: it began the moment He was conceived by the Theotokos, when He entered into a fallen, darkened world.
But was even this self-sacrifice at the Incarnation entirely new?
No, it was not. For the Holy Trinity itself is in eternity a communion of constant and total self-sacrifice, in which each Divine Person finds his Personal center completely in the Others.
The self-sacrifice of the Cross was a climactic articulation of what had already been inaugurated at the Incarnation, which itself was an expression of what the Holy Trinity had always been, is now, and always will be.
This, all the Apostles said in their Gospel ministry, was the Mystery hidden throughout the ages, lying at the fundamental root of reality.
In their three-year “seminary” preparation with Jesus, the Apostles were sent out two by two to announce the reality of the Kingdom, which is the actualization — the living out — of the Mystery of Divine Love. When they came back, they spoke excitedly of the power of the Gospel, and its blazing defeat of the spirit of antichrist.
It is deeply interesting just how Jesus responded: “In that same hour He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was Thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to Me by My Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.’”
No one really understood the mystery (or "conspiracy"), the real meaning, of history. That is, no one until now — when the Word of God, the Logos and Truth of reality, had come to reveal it in the rhetoric of the Gospel.
Then Jesus continued: “Then turning to the disciples he said privately, ‘Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it’” (Luke 10.21-24).
Christianity is the unveiling of the great secret, the mystery of history. Real history revolves around only one great and magnificent golden braid: the revelation of the God-Man Jesus Christ, Who has come to bring that same communion of the Trinity, and to invite human beings to participate in that very divine nature (2 Peter 1.4).
In the divine-human unity of Christ, in His Person, we are offered that same unity in His glorious grace. Communion with the God of love (and beauty and peace and truth) is the "open-source" secret of the ages that has been revealed, and "shouted from the housetops" (Matthew 10.27).
All of the “before Christ” past was oriented toward that moment of His Nativity and the Gospel. The entire Old Testament history, all the “begats,” was focussed on the Birth of the Son of God as Son of Man, from the womb of the Theotokos the God-bearer, the Virgin Mary, the All-Holy Daughter of Israel. That is true history. That is the mystery.
That is the only ideology -- or rather, theology -- that Christians can embrace.
Or be embraced by.
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