Some of my readers still suffer from the effects of legalistic literalism in their education. Writing here on this blog, I often use certain terms loosely because of the necessities of parabolic language. I could nail down with precision that my use of the term “Law” (capital L) typically means the Covenant of Moses, and that adding an “s” (Laws) expands it to all the known Law Covenants. This is tough enough against a whole bunch of confusing ideas fed into our New Testament reading from mainstream Western Christianity.
The Law of Moses (see, you understand that variation) is one thing; the Talmud is another thing. In fact, the Talmud is many things, because Judaism officially discourages Gentiles from reading the Talmud. However, they are embarrassed by that prohibition and offer for public consumption a highly redacted version. Then again, within Judaism are multiple factions that include and exclude varying portions. I have neither the calling nor interest to examine all the details, but I am aware that much of Orthodox Judaism actually does include the Kabbalah (multiple spellings possible) literature as part of their Talmud. For someone trying to dig through Judaism and back into the Ancient Hebrew intellectual viewpoint, that’s a lot of crap to wade through, in part because almost everyone you meet will believe the Jewish claims that their current religion is precisely what Moses meant to teach. Secular scholarship (and some religious scholarship) disproves this easily, but it’s a scholarship highly obscured by politics.
This blog is not about picking on Jews or Judaism, but I also won’t bow the knee to their claims. I would rather they continue ignoring this blog and what I teach. If/when that changes, I’ll do what I can to remain open and honest, but make no mistake: Political Judaism could shut me down in a day, easily, and just about lock me out of the Internet through background influences. I teach that we aren’t here to challenge the system, but use it for Christ’s advantage.
The same broad political influences seek to blind us to anything outside the officially approved orthodoxies on just about every topic. For those of you who can tolerate my teaching here, you should understand that a major and critical component of our understanding God’s Laws (AKA: moral fabric, divine justice, God’s character, ultimate reality, quantum this-n-that, etc.) is sexual and gender identity.
We challenge Western mythology about that. We do not accept the stereotypes that arise from Western cultural foundations — largely a mixture of Classical Greco-Roman thought and Germanic tribal mythology. We know that the Enlightenment voices generally claimed a return to more-or-less pure reason and Aristotelian logic, but it was distinctly jaundiced by the world view of the folks who gave us Beowulf. Thus, we have a full range of background assumptions about reality that close off a great deal of investigation. In particular, it marginalizes and ridicules a far larger legacy of culture and intellectual history from the Ancient Near East (ANE), not to mention other civilizations around the world in human memory. The biblical view of gender and human sexuality is quite different from what dominates Western Civilization.
It is almost impossible to discuss much of anything in God’s moral justice without some reference to your gender. It is the fundamental context within which you must determine His will for you. Scripture flatly states — repeatedly — that God made us different and that you absolutely cannot come to grips with reality until you first settle any confusion on that issue. Everything we understand about our world today from God’s revelation requires a solid grasp on what He first and foremost says about sexual identity. Fix that problem and a vast majority of world ills would go away.
To come back to the Bible with Post-modern Western mythology and question revelation about its assertions on the topic is easily the single most egregious stupidity we face today. But pretending we can fix other people’s sin on this issue is almost equally stupid. It’s our calling to wait until that teachable moment when the Spirit power arises to open hearts and minds to the truth. Until then, we cynically expect some of the most devilish nonsense from those around us.
