This is an exercise in drafting an explanation for the project.
People who have taken courses in philosophy are familiar with at least the Aristotelian expressions of logic and so forth. They may be familiar with latter Western attempts to step outside the Aristotelian boundaries, but it ends up sounding a lot like Science Fiction and has little in common with the thinking of the non-Western ancients. It’s not as if I’m suggesting the whole Western thing is invalid; I don’t dismiss it out of hand. I simply insist it cannot handle matters of faith, that the entire Western concept of faith is stained with Aristotelian assumptions.
Branching out into mysticism and Eastern forms of reasoning is exceedingly difficult for Westerners. There really isn’t much academic work on the topic by Westerners. Indeed, there’s a good bit more on the Far East (India and eastward) than on the Ancient Near East. I could explain Buddhism with a lot less work because it’s more familiar, but I’m not interested in that topic. I’m trying to help people understand the Bible and build their own faith and peace with Jehovah and to follow Christ. The objective is not a unity in knowledge and teaching, but a unity in commitment to something nearly impossible to explain in human terms.
If you have within you the power and sense of peace that drives you through persecution and such, then I can’t complain about your religion or philosophy much. We might not agree, and we might have limited fellowship, but I’m not going to pick at you for the differences. The limits of my duty are to let you know where I have to draw the line; there’s no intent to build an orthodoxy that applies to all humanity. If anything, I use my teaching as an example of how to gain that power and peace. Orthodoxy is for people who don’t have a genuine faith.
That’s not to say we don’t have a more or less objective standard of God’s Justice on this earth. That’s the meaning of my prophetic calling, an utter necessity of declaring what I see in His Laws and how they apply to our current context. That declaration is still offered as my best assessment. It’s never offered as what you must know, but comes closer to what you must do. The fundamental nature of prophecy is not being, doing or knowing, but commitment to a divine Person.
So if you have studied some of the classics of philosophy, you are probably aware I’m not using all the terms in exactly the same way as your philosophy professors. What I’m doing is adding extensions, using their words and meanings to indicate something more. There is so very little acquaintance with the more precise terminology that I avoid it because everyone would get lost. I’ve forgotten lots of it. You don’t have to know all that stuff to follow Christ. But for those who do know something about philosophy and logic, I might be able to help you to recognize the limits of that and how to go beyond those limits. So I extend the more commonly known terminology into a different context.
For example, I use the term “symbolic logic.” Technically, symbolic logic is logical argument written in mathematic notation. What if the math and science aren’t up to the task? What if I want to discuss something for which human intellect is incapable of confronting directly? I’m extending the meaning of the symbolic structure of logic into an area which doesn’t follow Aristotelian rules. Yeah, I’m using a parable of known logical analysis structure for something wholly outside that structure. Got that?
The fundamental point of symbolic logic is abstraction; I’m carrying the principle to a whole new level. I’m not the first person to do this, but I don’t have on hand the footnotes to show you were I learned it. Sorry about that; I’m not a footnotes kind of guy and this whole project is an attempt to reconstruct some of that background. So I’m trying to explain how I use abstraction for something outside the known universe.
This is the fundamental break I keep mentioning between the Bible and the Western world. Despite all the verbiage about planes of existence in Western literature, along with related terms, something in the Western mind fundamentally rejects the meaning behind the words. The intellectual reflex is to assume Aristotle’s unitary universe, which leaves you with agnosticism: It might be there, but we can’t talk about it. That’s not true. God talks about it in His revelation. It’s dicey with lots of mysterious verbiage and imagery, but an entire civilization had no trouble working with it. That is, they had no trouble in the sense it was possible to make use of it and make things happen in this realm of existence.
The key element was making peace with God. The human mind can be aware of that peace or the lack of it, but cannot hope to actually understand the thing itself. That’s because peace of that sort is rooted in a higher realm where God is, not here in our universe. Some element within our fallen humanity is designed to connect with that higher realm and it isn’t the intellect. The very nature of being fallen is letting the intellect rule the decisions of life in the first place.
So I talk about our universe being a temporary bubble, and outside this bubble is the real Reality. That’s a parable, and when I talk about it, the logic of how it all works is symbolic logic with the symbols defined outside this universe. All the operations and relationships between elements is not within human grasp, but we indicate things we cannot describe. That’s the substance of God’s revelation in the first place, along with every parable of Jesus. If your spirit is alive and connected to that higher realm, then some part of you recognizes all this stuff and you can use it. Without that awareness, the whole thing is mumbo-jumbo, gobbledygook, mysterious and generally baloney.
So maybe it makes sense to you, dear reader, and maybe not. I’m doing the best I know how to explain it.
