Stay with me here while we untangle several things. Put on your quantum thinking cap so you can handle multiple levels of consideration at once.
Westerners in general tend to false dichotomies. This is part of the package that comes with a unitary universe. Even Western Christians tend to project this world into eternity, with a host of obvious contradictions from mixing and confusing the Two Realms. This is the reason we here at Kiln of the Soul pay little heed to the various brands and threads of Systematic Theology. We are content with biblical doctrine as it stands, giving every individual room to develop their own internal sense of organization in the matrix of God’s revelation.
The fundamental nature of the Fall was placing the intellect on the throne of the soul. The mind cannot rule; it was never meant to rule. It was alway intended as a means to implement God’s revelation, which comes into our awareness through the heart and its native higher intelligence. Westerners have a deeply confused notion of the heart; Scripture says it’s the faculty by which God addresses humans. So it stands to reason many of us would tend to overlap in our theological reasoning due to shared experiences in the flesh, but no two of us should come up with the same theology because we are not clones. The mere fact that Western Christians tend to emphasize theology and the resulting practices as having great importance shows that they lack an awareness of the Spirit Realm.
Witness how “deeper spirituality” almost always depends entirely on cerebral operations. Never mind the verbiage; look at how they put the terms into practice. This shows how worldly Western Christianity is. It depends entirely on prevailing cultural and intellectual assumptions instead of challenging them. That the West is firmly anti-biblical is painfully obvious, but only if you take the time to step outside the prevailing cultural assumptions long enough to compare the known facts of how folks in the Ancient Near East approached the basic questions of life. The compromise between organized Christianity and the world is so complete that we despair of using the word “Christian” — it comes with baggage we must reject.
Part of that baggage is binary thinking, a correlative of linear logic: Everything must fall under the control of human reasoning, or it must be dismissed as inconsequential. There is no place for revelation, only sensory perception, memory and reason. That most people do this so very poorly is not the point. This is the religion of the West.
So perhaps you can read something like Zimbardo’s Time Perspectives and understand it, but you would end up with lumping everything under two groups: Present Orientation or Future Orientation. All the rest is just attitude problems against the imaginary holiness of Western Middle Class materialism expressed as Future Orientation.
We aren’t permitted to discuss Eternal Orientation. A timeless perspective is not acceptable in the matrix of reasoning here. This has nothing to do with the better scholarship but the relentless trend in the bulk of human actions that seek to constrain us, and even threaten us who adhere to Radix Fidem. In a broad sense, we are not permitted to operate outside the cultural and intellectual norms. Nobody on this earth is going to defend us. The mainstream Christian religious institutions merely use the words of the Bible’s Eternal Orientation, while loading the words with meanings that poke God in the eye.
Here’s our “goal” — When God calls us home, we intend to cross over with joy and peace. There is nothing to accomplish; there is no measurable standard that applies. The way to die with peace and joy is to live in the same. The way to live in the same is to dismiss the obsession with goals and objectives, and simply learn to take comfort in the whims of God. From one moment to the next, we seek only to please Him and conform to whatever demands He makes in every context. There is a consistency to them, but not for Western minds. It takes a mind ruled by the heart to get it.
For the most part, we can easily grasp the shape of His whims by absorbing His Law Covenants. That is, we take the time to understand them in their own cultural context. We come to the realization that we exist to honor Him, to bring Him glory. That terminology does not indicate a flat thing, static and clearly defined, but a living being. In general, we can characterize His glory as living by His moral character so as to claim the blessings He promised. We seek to harmonize ourselves with His broad intentions in revelation; in so doing, we harmonize ourselves with Creation, with reality itself.
The mental habit of seeing this all as living and organic is what makes us enemies of the West. It is the West that deviates and perverts what God has done. We seek to turn ourselves, at least, back to the path revealed by God.
This is Radix Fidem, the Root of Faith.
