Revelation is true knowledge; everything else is just application.
Further, you must rise to your own application under God’s command. I cannot make rules for you. The most I am permitted to do is decide if your application conflicts with mine, and to what degree. Then I must decide whether it prevents fellowship and mission partnership, and how much limitation. Then I have to remain flexible enough to recognize when the context and God’s leadership demands a fluctuation.
In other words, absolutism is a huge mistake.
The ancient world understood this instinctively. To Westerners, this seems to give reality a sense of constant flux, an instability that is uncomfortable because it requires constant attention. Our fallen nature demands that our intellect rule, and the intellect presumes it can lock some things in stone and not consider them any further. God says you have to remain in constant communion with him, always ready for the most inexplicable changes. Further, I insist God demands of us a quantum reckoning of reality, where a given object can be multiple things with multiple values all at once. The question is not the nature of the object, but it’s role in your mission. It inevitably requires you seek some awareness of what a thing means to others involved in the context, even if you can’t accommodate their values.
If I tell you I have a pacifist orientation, that doesn’t mean I regret my military service. There was good in it, and something of that life still beckons today. It was both evil and noble. If you wear that uniform today, I have no trouble telling you what great sorrow you are causing against God’s justice, but also what great good can come from walking in God’s divine justice within that context. I can tell I’m glad I’m not in your place, and yet wish I was.
It’s not enough to propose a simple distinction between flesh and spirit here. Its unjust to suggest my internal conflict is merely carnal desire for human pride in the uniform and accomplishments against the spiritual wisdom of withdrawing from human conflicts. That’s a Western style of compartmentalization, an over-simplification. The interaction of soul and spirit is far more complex than that. It’s wrong to slaughter people in foreign countries who are no threat to your country. It’s wrong to lie about whether they are a threat. It’s wrong to occupy their land and absorb their resources, to absorb the astronomical expenses from your own country’s resources. But it’s good to learn human limitations and overpowering your human entropy, of living in difficult circumstances. It’s good to learn to take orders on a human level. It’s good to learn to live on multiple levels of reasoning, but not good to let it make you schizophrenic.
The Western mind is all wrong for reality, because it has no clue about reality, only an apparent grasp that seems to work part of the time. If you evaluate Western success by Western values, it proves nothing. The values of Christ on the Cross lead you to embrace an entirely different kind of success, not discernible from a Western epistemology.
If you want to follow Jesus, take up your own cross and crucify your Western assumptions.
