It never stops. Every where I turn, I keep encountering the same blindness, though expressed in different ways. And the people who wallow in that blindness rarely seize the hand offered so they can be pulled out. Mercy cannot be forced.
As you might expect, the majority of my family and friends — virtual or otherwise — are not exploring the same spiritual territory as I am. It doesn’t end the relationship, just limits it. So I end up very much closer in spirit with a lot of folks I’ll probably never see on this earth, and rather distant from those I’ve encountered in meat space.
After a few years as online friends, I actually met Jason once when he came to visit relatives near where I lived at the time. We were already moving in different directions spiritually, but fellowship doesn’t require agreement on every point of faith. He must answer his own conscience. I’ve bluntly told him he’s too Westernized and not Hebraic enough, that his epistemology is not like mine at all. He recognizes something of the nature of our differences, but I doubt he has time and resources to follow me closely. That is, in our sharing, he seems to acknowledge nothing I teach. There is no reason to end a solid friendship of this kind, but there are limitations on it, so we share things on a lower level. It’s not less love, just less involvement.
For you, my dear parishioners, I would endeavor to explain how to answer the question my friend Jason raises, because my answer is nothing like his. For him to adopt my approach would probably destroy much of his world, to be honest. He lives and works in a different environment, and his answer is typical of his associates in the ministry. Jason knows that I love him as a brother. Nothing in this is meant to castigate him personally, but to examine the tradition he represents.
That tradition confuses the Two Realms. It remains mired in the Aristotelian assumptions of the Enlightenment. Virtually all of evangelical Christianity is essentially an expression of the Enlightenment, which itself was the full awakening of self-conscious Aristotelian reasoning deeply mixed with Germanic tribal moral mythology. In blunt terms, it defines Jehovah in character more like Zeus/Odin than the Hebrew God. The Enlightenment is alien to Scripture and you can’t use that approach to get a valid understanding of the Bible. It only pretends to be biblical.
The sound of Hebrew pleading with God for mercy over sins is simply proper protocol. It recognizes the whole prerogative is God’s. You don’t presume upon God, but you do carry the confidence to call upon Him in the first place.
Moreover, that Old Testament narrative refers to things on the moral level of the Law of Moses. It’s all about conduct that needs refining, and represents the need of the mind to learn how to obey the Spirit. But it is so very hard to put into words how the Enlightenment religion of evangelicals creates an entirely artificial concept of the Spirit Realm. There is some evil and intractable insistence that it must be rational. You cannot convince an Enlightenment soul that “rational” is not the pinnacle of truthfulness. Rather, it is a very long way short of it, and a really crappy substitution for it. Rational is the best man can do and woefully short of where God can be found. It is blasphemous to assume or state that God is reasonable, that anything we say of Him must be rational.
So we have Jason describing Jesus like a modern Western evangelical. Not because of the words chosen, but his image is false because of all the unstated assumptions behind it. It assumes too much that “born again” means something it cannot, that we can relax and not worry about our sins because we got fire insurance to keep us out of Hell. While spiritual birth does mean an eternal change in our standing with God, as described it has nothing to do with the Old Testament approach to God for mercy. This is where we see the worst confusion between the Two Realms. The question of moral conduct is not one of eternal standing. The Old Testament worshipers were not worried about Hell in that sense, but worried about missing out on the moral treasures available in this life.
And that is still a very valid concern in the New Testament. Do you think the Apostles wasted all that ink on better behavior for nothing? Was it not Jesus Himself who pressed for the necessity of changing our behavior to match the ineffable meaning of the Law, which Law was a parable of higher truth? The kind of worry that Jason addresses never arose in the minds of the Hebrew people. That sense of fear is entirely a product of Germanic mythology, foreign to the Hebrew culture. Don’t read that back into the Bible, folks. They didn’t live in the dreary world of Beowulf.
Reading those heathen cultural assumptions back into Scripture is, in one sense, the one flaw that ties together all evangelicals. It’s the wrong religion and the wrong god.
