War on Western Moral Assumptions

Walk by the Spirit — whatever else that means, it requires that we shift the focus of our awareness to the heart-mind.

The matter of “doing God’s will” is not a long list of rules and principles. The actions and their results are mere manifestations, not the thing itself. His will starts with operating from the heart-mind. His will is, by definition, embracing the image of His revealed character as the moral fabric of the universe. It requires exercising a non-intellectual faculty that the Bible calls “faith,” itself just a word that means commitment to live by our convictions.

The path for Westerners typically requires that you first understand the Spirit speaks to us through our convictions. Something in you is capable of addressing what amounts to divine moral necessity in the context of every choice. It will often contradict everything you’ve been taught to believe so that the demands of conviction defy logic. Doing the will of God is not in the content of the decision, but of how you arrived at that decision. Holiness is not in performance or thought, but in a desire to please your Master.

The difficulty is that our sense of awareness begins with the arrogance of the intellect in presuming to define what is good and right by whatever capabilities it holds as the highest faculty. Intellect and reason usurps the faculty God gave us for knowing His will — conviction resting in the heart. Instead, we pervert the image of “heart” as some quasi-emotional thing simply because we happen to notice that it often brings on potent emotional responses when it opposes logic. The a priori assertion that reason is the highest faculty of man is the main problem, for this is the very foundation of the Fall. This is eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In Hebrew thinking, that “knowledge” is the assertion of reason as if senses and reason together are all we need to understand reality.

How it is that so very much of Western Christian religion buys into this fundamental precept — that faith cannot defy logic — is a long study in the history of intellectual hijacking of the Apostolic religion.

In the final analysis, what specifically you choose to do in any given context is not the focus of discerning whether it is holy or not. Holiness is in the path you chose to arrive at the decision. That we might between us be driven to different conclusions about what is the best course of action is simply a manifestation of our fallen nature, not some flaw in the process. Further, it serves no divine purpose to debate who is right or wrong; the question is only whether we should in that moment work together or separate far enough to avoid conflict.

Even when I use such language, a large portion of mainstream Western Christians will imagine that they can buy into the teaching. But then you try putting that to work in their real-world projects and see how quickly they decide we don’t belong in their program. Their objections will be slathered in Western moral biases. We can be sure that walking by the heart-mind must of necessity lead you on a collision course with Western assumptions of what is morally right. Even if we use the entire package of Western intellectual traditions of scholarship, we still arrive at the recognition that the very fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality and morality in the West represents a powerful rejection of what Jesus believed as a Hebrew human. It’s the unspeakable arrogance of Western thinking that sees the truth and of this and simply asserts that the Western notions are somehow universal, and that God was patronizing to the Hebrew people because they simply wouldn’t understand the truth of European tribal mythology.

Walking by the heart will inevitably draw you into conflict with that fundamental assumption. Walking by the heart can only draw you closer to the Hebrew moral assumptions that Jesus lived and taught. You would be amazed how people stumbling upon the truth of heart-mind living can study all kinds of stuff that Westerners would never touch, stuff that is also completely outside of biblical revelation, and still find themselves repeating the fundamental truths of Scripture as understood by the Hebrew intellectual traditions. And why do they not then confess Christ? Because so far as they can find, the message of Christ perverted and buried under a rejection of the heart-led existence they discovered. The Church demands they reject the truth of God’s moral justice in order to be a “Christian.”

If you live by the heart-mind, you cannot escape God’s moral character. The only way you can avoid God’s truth is to remain dead to your heart-mind. God designed us to find Him in our hearts, not in our orthodoxies. The only way you can get closer to God is to reject Western Civilization.

If, on some level of your awareness, you are not at war with the fundamental assumptions of Western society in all its manifestations and flavors, then you are not walking in the Spirit.