The Boundaries of Sanity

There are some folks we cannot help.
It is particularly hard for evangelical Christians to grasp this: There are times and places where you shake the dust off your sandals and move on down the road. There are people in this world God did not appoint you to help. It’s not a limitation on truth, but a limitation built into each of us.
The fundamental flaw is the assumption logic is the right tool, or even the main tool. Humans use logic, but hardly operate by it. We should not expect them to do so, and it would be frankly wrong to believe reason is the best standard for human operations. It has a very limited application to reality. To believe the highest aspiration of humanity is to operate by reason is itself bad religion.
Jesus, the Son of God Himself, told His followers to shake the dust off their sandals when the message of truth was rejected. Persistence in loving is not the same as persistence in bugging someone. There is more than one meaning to, “True love waits.”
I belong to a mailing list for which I am a moderator. Of the small group who share this task, I have the most time, and I am the most active. I have to read all the messages, despite some of it grating on my nerves. We have at least one very educated Christian Pharisee. He’s not a cartoon Neocon. He is a Neocon, but not stupid. I don’t harass him or insult him. I do consider him irredeemable.
The nature of the Pharisee’s error is rather plain, to me at least, in the text of the New Testament and in the Talmud. Theirs is a closed system. Nicodemas gave us a hint during his discussion with Jesus that night in John 3. He saw the miracles of Jesus, felt the power of His teaching, but knew it was against everything he was taught on the way to his PhD. It didn’t fit; there was a jarring disconnect. What Jesus said confirmed it didn’t fit, because Nick was closed to the truth. It was impossible for him to absorb a standard Hebrew parable, the one about being reborn.
He and Jesus spoke in the Hebrew vernacular of the day, but we can be sure John recorded the gist of things in his schoolboy Greek. The term anothen offers a certain ambiguity to us, and from the ensuing discussion, we can safely assume it was equally confusing in Hebrew because Nick had a Greek mind. It is generally translated “above” and can imply “from the top” in the same sense we use that phrase. Unfortunately, the English phrase “born again” has taken on a lot of baggage which simply misses the point. Jesus was trying to warn Nicodemas his head was in the wrong world.
For at least three centuries, Nicodemas and his kind were pickled in Aristotelian logic, while trying to disengage his epistemology. The jarring disconnect between this and their acknowledgment of miracles, and things supernatural in general, forced them to create a mental space where the stuff they dared not deny as their entire national tradition was kept around as superstition. Sacred superstition, but really it was little more than magic, inexplicable and operating by obscure rules which didn’t make sense to them.
Jesus was telling this Dean of the Law School, as it were, he wasn’t even on the same planet as what Jesus was doing. Had the Judean leadership remained faithful to the Covenant of Moses, Jesus would not need to do these miracles. He was simply restoring the justice, the birthright of the Covenant, by correcting things Satan was permitted to break and pervert. The leadership had opened the gate to Satan’s evil power because they were no longer guarding the gate. They weren’t teaching the Law as Moses gave it, but were engaging all sorts of silly legalistic nonsense. The Covenant was not simply legislation, but an orientation toward justice. It was far more flexible and merciful than most of us grasp from where we stand today, because the Jews had turned it into a shallow caricature.
They were absorbed in the joys of analytical discussions of the words of Law on an intellectual level, without reverencing the fundamental mystical nature of the Law. They ended up embracing their logical analysis as more binding than the Law itself. To protect this body of analytical study, they built up a mythology of saying it was the oral tradition from the lips of Moses.
Scholars completely outside both Judaism and Christianity can see almost immediately how the Talmud (“Oral Torah”) is patently a rejection of the written Torah. There is a painfully obvious gap in the very assumptions about language and knowing itself between the two. The rabbinical scholars were reading the same old Hebrew words from an alien intellectual climate.
How many of us can recall the indescribable thrill when, in our youth as we clawed our way toward adulthood, we stumbled across the ability to reason and use logic? Somewhere beginning around age ten to twelve, humans develop the capacity for formal logic. With a good education, this can be a very heady experience. We suddenly reject all the past because we realize we can see through all the crap we’d been told by people who couldn’t be bothered to explain the whys and wherefores. We knew. Of course, we were full of crap, but with responsible teachers around us, we would have eventually worked that out.
There was nobody around to help the rabbinical scholars when they first discovered Aristotle, shortly after Alexander the Great conquered the region and brought his own very evangelistic Hellenism in tow. They bought it, were utterly thrilled with it, couldn’t resist the siren song of claiming mastery of mysteries. They had managed to bring God down to their inspection, and found themselves competent to decide what He could and could not be. This is what happened in the Garden of Eden when someone convinced Adam and Eve they could be like gods, judging good and evil for themselves — it was the very essence of the Fall.
Jesus had the mission to offer the Pharisees a corrective. Most of them rejected it. These were the same folks Paul faced later in his churches as a threat to genuine faith in Christ. We today refer to these very beguiling and charismatic Pharisee preachers as “Judaizers.” They claimed they were seeking to bring Gentile Christians back to Moses, but they didn’t even comprehend Moses. They were dragging the Christians by various deceptions into what we now call Gnosticism. That’s because the Judaizer heresies drifted naturally in that direction. Kabbalism is simply a derivative of this from a yet later period. The nation of Judea had plenty of problems already, but none of that would have happened without embracing Hellenism. Something unique about the way this intellectual trap works in the mind creates a fortress which serves to imprison those taken by it.
It works precisely the same in modern evangelical Christianity. Not everyone is that way, any more than was every Judean in Jesus’ day. However, it is so deeply rooted in the core leadership, it’s almost impossible to break the rest free. Having been inside and outside and all around this thing, I can now smell them at a distance. Sure, I’ll give them a chance to see some light, but they almost uniformly denounce it as darkness. There are some, like Nicodemas, who can probably stumble through the darkness into the light, as I did. Sadly, so far, most do not.
When I run into them, I refuse to debate with them. Debate itself as a form of exchange is simply meeting them on their own turf. I simply state the truth when the opportunity is given, help those who reach out for it, and let the rest wallow in their graves. I can’t fix that. I’ve been crucified plenty of times, and I’m glad for the opportunity to share in my Savior’s sacrifice. It has nothing to do with whether they will some day met me in Heaven. I have no idea what their eternal destiny is, any more than they do about mine. What I do know is I don’t have to work with them, nor take them seriously, any more than context itself requires while I carry out my mission from God.
But logic is not the answer; it is the jail which holds them.