“You can’t make a parable walk on all fours.” I was amazed at the time I heard that, how a rural preacher could point out something thousands of scholars had missed over the centuries. While my little parable implied there was a chance some single event could become the turning point to uncloaking an important truth long hidden, it’s not like that.
Over the past couple of centuries in particular we have a substantial written record to show religious thinkers have fully embraced the linear and concrete logic which now controls Evangelical theology. This is part of the massive global deception under which we now live. This theology assumes there is a particular point in time we could point to, at least in theory, when someone ceases being a dead spirit and becomes “born again.” We in our time-ridden existence would naturally see it that way. It’s not simply, “Only God really knows when.” It’s more like, “God knows there’s no such thing.” We make the mistake of thinking God is equally limited.
There are many playing lip service to the notion of God rising above the space-time continuum, but precious little application of it to the foundations of our assumptions. The hero in my little story assumes a discrete time and place answer to his quest. In the reality which that story symbolizes, a part of the answer is escaping that assumption. That’s the truly mysterious part, because locked as we are under the ticking of the clock, where the very orientation of our thoughts is ruled by sequence and the passage of time, we cannot easily step into the Spirit Realm of Truth.
Let’s suppose you heard about someone becoming sick a few days before, and you haven’t gotten an update on their condition. Can you pray for them still? Of course. Do you suppose God will move to answer your request when you don’t know the current status? What if they had died and you didn’t know yet? Could God reach back into yesterday and honor your request by healing them instead of letting them die? We would never know if He did, since we are incapable of functioning with a knowledge of alternate time lines of existence. We can imagine it via fiction, perhaps, but stepping into an actual alternate universe makes no actual sense to us.
The limit we suffer here is the linearity of our mental process, in a universe made by God who suffers no such limitation. He views all of this existence from outside, as a single event. We know He can and will determine some parts of this, but we are incapable of grasping just what and how much, primarily because we are looking at discrete departure points in the answer. In our logic, you cannot have both free will and divine election. Yet God’s Word seems to assume both are true. Our demand for logical clarity, where none can exist because God won’t grant it, has led to a vast archive of bad theology. We have the Westminster Accords, all nice and logical, neatly packaged, yet it doesn’t answer all the questions in the Bible. They carried it way, way too far. The scholars who worked on it were crippled by the assumption things had to make sense, when God bluntly says they will not — “My ways are not your ways.”
Would it help if I said Western Civilization is entirely too “left brain,” not enough “right brain”? The problem with that would be the necessarily dismissive terms we use to discuss the right brain approach. Even then, the dichotomy is largely academic, and in many places is a false dichotomy. That’s because the consistent working of the Holy Spirit will seldom satisfy the left brain, but is far bigger than mere right brain functions. Efforts among professional educators to balance the left with the right in pedagogy invariably turns out to be an excuse for attacking the left brain, and building up something with no brains. Still, I cannot deny some elements of the right brain domain of operations are very close to the way God works in the Bible.
If our hero continues probing in the dark, trying to find a concrete object to identify as the layer of deception over some part of his world, for him to find it would make a nice story, but it would no longer be the thing I’m facing. Rather, we would end up talking about, say, Iran’s nuclear program. Here in the US, at least, no one is telling the facts on Iran. Go do the research; there is zero evidence Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Even if they wanted to do so, they utterly lack the equipment to make bomb-quality fissile material. Furthermore, we are bound by treaty to help Iran do what they are doing now, which is to make good nuclear power stations. How bluntly can I say this? Every US politician and media mouthpiece is lying about this, and knows they are lying to you! But it’s not that simple. The deception about Iran is possible only because we have allowed ourselves to bury true Christian faith under an avalanche of false epistemology.
I don’t expect a simple resolution to my search. The answer is not a Holy Grail hidden in some Mediterranean chapel. The mere existence of such fables as the Holy Grail is a part of the deception. Things which could not possibly matter are played up as “the big secret” — there is no such thing. The problem is not secrets of a concrete nature, nor even of an abstract nature. The problem is we have crippled the human soul from crossing over, from rising above the intellect to the spirit. The vast legacy of understanding available to the Christians of the First Century has been hidden, buried, taken from us to prevent recreating their effects on the world. No, not totally lost, obviously. Too many people love Jesus, and you can’t do that without His very real presence. Still, there is something more we should have, and we don’t have it.
I’ve brushed may hand against it a time or two…
