Theological Controversy?

Even mainstream evangelical theologians and Bible scholars recognize that Hebrew culture refers to the heart as the seat of the will, which is then linked to convictions. Before I moved away from evangelical circles, I already understood from my professors that convictions reflect the divine presence of God in your soul, and that they can overrule your reasoning. That much is mainstream already.

My efforts to implement a sense of moral focus based on that teaching is what led me to leave the mainstream church. At some point I realized that God speaks primarily in our convictions, in the sense that if we argue with our convictions, we will find ourselves opposed to God’s work in our lives. Most evangelicals understand that this is territory difficult to explain and often tell you that you must follow your own convictions where they take you, even if it means changing churches. To be honest, most often they say that as mere political wisdom. If you don’t fit where you are, staying will cause trouble. Big shot leaders told me as much personally. I left their ministries out of compassion; I was unwilling to cause trouble.

Over the years since then, I have struggled with legacy of teaching that cannot follow where God wants me to go. It has nothing to do with whether they are wrong, but that it doesn’t fit the calling of God in my life. The question boils down to following my convictions.

But arising from the same basic educational experience was a lot of time in philosophy classes. So I also had a grasp on the intellectual differences between our Western evangelical religious environment versus that of the Old Testament. My philosophy courses offered a frame of reference for analysis, and I was able to dig into cultural anthropology and archeology. Most of that came from genuine evangelical believers, too. The scholarship was a little more obscure, but still a part of the Western evangelical scholarship. Always in the back of my mind I wondered why those scholars didn’t actually walk in their own teaching. If this is what God’s people thought, and this is how God revealed Himself, then why do we build our faith so very far away from it? Why do we cling so tightly to secular philosophical assumptions that are so obviously hostile to the Bible? Why do we not take more seriously the command to be in the world but not of it?

I can’t speak for them, only my own sense of calling. At some point I began taking more seriously the terminology of being led by our hearts, with the caveat that we aren’t referring to Western literary concepts of the heart. In other words, the Bible seems to take almost literally the idea of thinking with the heart, whereas in Western tradition it has always been a figure of speech for something quasi-emotional. The way Western literature uses the image makes it much more similar to the Hebrew concept of “bowels.” Given that Hebrew literature refers to bowels as including human compassion, it would be inaccurate to make “bowels” merely equivalent to Western notions of emotion. The two concepts overlap, but we should assume the Western notion is the one that’s mistaken, an artificial construct. The Hebrew language also makes much of numerous spirits that can infest or bless our lives, so if we dismiss all of that as a figure of speech simply because it would be so in our culture, it is a huge mistake.

Even worse is how so many Western Christians seem to have this unconscious assumption that the Hebrew people of the Old Testament were ignorant simply because they clearly had a different outlook on reality. It always struck me as funny that they ignore how Jesus took seriously that Hebrew stuff, too.

I’m not superior, just telling you how I got here.

And “here” is now the position that ultimate truth is beyond the grasp of our intellect. Hebrew thinking and logic is indicative, not descriptive. It is symbolic, relying on parables to characterize things that the mind could not possibly grasp directly. What we read in Scripture about God’s Person and the Spirit Realm is a characterization, a packaging that allows us to explore our moral obligations. Any intellectual conclusions you reach will of necessity be tentative and personal, our best estimate of what God requires of us individually. When I write about where Satan comes from using Old Testament prophecies, it’s not as if I am declaring facts. This is all parable: language indicative of things we could hardly comprehend with our fallen minds.

That you might read the same Scripture and reach a different characterization does not signify a conflict between us. It simply means God intends each of us to serve Him differently. You will have to come to your own mental grasp so that you can organize and implement the moral imperatives that register in your own soul. So you can write all the theology you like, but theology will never be more than your individual structure applied to things that will ever remain ineffable. The ultimate truth will never yield itself to human reason; human reason must bow to the heart where God speaks. Words don’t “mean things” in Scripture; Pharisaical minds assert that “words mean things.” Such an understanding arose after Hebrew scholars were infected with Greek rationalism. Legalism is the perverted result of Hebrew parabolic writing run through the meat-grinder of human reason.

We need not agree in minds, but in our hearts.