I’ve rattled my cage long and often on subject of epistemology. The Ancient Hebrew mystical approach is not simply another one on the menu of options; it is the approach God cultivated in the minds of those who knew Him best. How the world fails to see that this was the approach Jesus Himself took is beyond explanation. Satan’s grip on the world is very strong.
And that grip remains strong. We can sum up the failure in the US in two main points. First is what the Bible has to say about human concerns. Second is how we say it, in the sense of how we approach telling the world.
The Bible flatly discourages human reasoning about the nature of our situation. It asserts without mercy that mankind has fallen from God’s original design in Eden. It further asserts that nothing men do can return us to that paradise. It particularly says that our instinctive reliance on reason is the first step on the wrong path, the very root cause of the Fall itself. The only path back is by raising one’s consciousness to a higher level than reason, by learning to trust the inherent revelation written into our convictions. In biblical language, we have to get our hearts properly subservient to God, and then rely on what the heart discerns from that connection to God. The heart trumps the mind in revelation.
The Bible addresses the mind only in the sense of teaching the mind how to listen to the heart. The language of parable speaks to the heart in terms only the heart can understand. It serves to bypass the intellect and reveal what is in our convictions, written by the finger of God in our souls.
In sum, the Bible says that we who hope to restore ourselves to God’s favor cannot enter Eden in this life. We must cultivate in ourselves a connection to Eden; we must spend our lives here in preparation for the restoration of Eden. What we do must remain focused in our hearts on that higher realm, and train our minds to implement the implications of that divine revelation. We should hold no expectation that humanity outside of that mystical focus can possibly do anything right.
The way we tell the world this truth is by refusing to engage their silly plans. On the one hand, we should comment freely on their awful mistakes. It is utterly impossible for humanity to remake this world in any way, much less remake it better than it is. Mankind without that reliance on the heart of conviction cannot possibly discern what is good and right. So every human endeavor will fail sooner or later because it cannot be consistent with the design of Creation. Only the way of life revealed in Scripture will do us any good, and it is designed to make life merely tolerable. That is the best anyone can hope for in this world.
But humanity at large rejects this message, so we are left to point out how absurd is human pretense to any useful capability. And we must reject humanity’s plans, at least on the level of taking them seriously. There is nothing we can gain by interfering, because humans without the heart-led consciousness cannot hear the message of truth.
So we withdraw as much as we can to build our own micro-society based on revelation. We gather together in small enclaves of the heart, not completely out of contact with the world around us, but by no means taking seriously what the world says and does. We know that the one and only hope for the world is the path laid out by God: We form heart-led societies based on ancient Hebrew feudalism with a tribal organization. We form them as covenant families in parallel to the rest of the world. We occupy a space above the fallen world, with just a taste of Eden. It’s a mere taste only because we remain in our human fleshly existence.
It’s not that we don’t understand what’s going on outside our tiny feudal covenant nations, but that we don’t expect those without the leading of the heart to understand revelation. Sure, we can read the situation from divine revelation and give sage advice. Of all people, we can discern the way things move in this fallen world. From time to time, they might listen, but don’t count on it. Instead, count on rejection and persecution. When the world without Christ and without the heart-led consciousness welcomes us with open arms, we have done something terribly wrong. The only way to engage the fallen world is from outside, because to embrace a hope for human politics is to embrace the lies of Satan. Whatever passes for “Christianity” today is badly broken, something twisted and perverted and we must avoid being sucked into that.
This the life to which Christ called us, and this is the shape of His philosophy.
