Praying for Their Enlightenment

Participating in an ongoing discussion over at Sigma Frame, I notice that most of the correspondents quickly get stuck on concrete details. Some will occasionally make note of generalities, but there is still a tendency to stop at that level and not talk on a higher level yet — moral wisdom itself. Moral truth is much more than mere intellectual principle.

I can certainly grasp how the particulars and principles matter: They exemplify good or bad moral discernment. Moral discernment is really hard to talk about in the first place. It tends to defy words, and we simply don’t have a legacy in the English language for handling such things. People who speak and write in English tend not to even recognize anything above intellectual principle. They pull moral truth down to that level, confusing the two. English can handle parabolic expression, but it is simply not part of the standard thought process.

This is why I keep pressing the image of the Ancient Near East (ANE) as radically different from the West. Even when people can accurately translate ANE documents, a great many scholars still fail to grasp the inherent symbolism of the writing. They keep trying to deduce a literal meaning. They recognize that it’s a parable, but they keep wanting to translate the parable itself, failing to understand that parable is a thing unto itself. It’s not taught, it’s caught.

That’s what I run into with a group of people commenting on Jack’s blog. Most of them are at least familiar with Christian faith, but the discussion often gets bogged down below the parable level. Such a discussion must inevitably require a context that includes particulars, and and moral truth is exceedingly difficult to supply in an electronic forum. All the more so when the participants often lack an awareness of the parabolic level of discussion. There are at least a couple of guys who persistently try to pull abstract principle down to concrete particulars — bad enough — but then it’s far worse when they do that with parabolic comments.

One of the primary ingredients often missing from our discussions is how redemption works. It’s not a matter of principle; redemption is a moral truth that cannot be pinned down by human intellect. We experience it in so many different ways, but we cannot hope to encompass the thing itself. We have to discuss it as something far bigger than any one of us, bigger than all of us together. It’s something about who God is as a Person.

Instead, talk of redemption is usually reduced to a mere principle, if it is discussed at all. In dating and marriage, redemption should be a major factor in our choices, just as it is in all our human relationships. Most of us start off on the wrong foot, get burned, and then try again with hopes of having learned something useful. God certainly runs that show, but it takes some doing to get our awareness above the intellectual level. We can be aware of an awful lot of things we struggle to put into words, and it’s those things that matter most.

Too many men participating in Red Pill discussions take positions that exclude redemption. It’s a matter of concrete rules and principles, but very few men seem interested in moral discernment regarding romance. It’s really hard to explain how something can be both wrong and right, because we don’t season our awareness with the moral truth of redemption. It’s too easy to make rules.

It’s that issue of separating awareness from the intellect. The two concepts in English are not synonymous, though most English discussion of them assumes they are. If you don’t move your awareness above the level of mere reason, you can never hope to touch divine wisdom.

My point here is that a great marriage is possible, but it’s never going to be automatic. Sure, you could stumble into it by God’s mercy, but making it work for the rest of your life will inevitably require some conscious moral effort. The tough part is that it must of necessity require that both parties rise above the level of mere flesh in their conscious awareness. The Bible indicates that the performance is always iffy at best while living in a fleshly frame, but that we can harmonize on a moral level that makes Christ the Lord of our marriage.

But doing so is greatly enhanced by having a moral awareness that escapes the world in which we find ourselves, particularly for Americans. American life militates against that higher moral realm of awareness, mostly without even being aware of the difference in the first place. There is an a priori denial that such a thing could be. So the question for us is not, “Can we come up with a better lore of marriage?” The question is whether we can escape the swamp of moral death to make life worth living in the first place.

Whether I can persuade my correspondents on Jack’s comment section to join a discussion that aims for that is, so far, rather dubious. I keep trying to point things above the level of rules and precept, but it doesn’t float very well for very long. I am surely going to learn more for myself, and certainly learn better how I can express what I become aware of, but I’m not sure I will do much good for most of them. So far, it looks like only a couple of them grasp what I’m trying to do. One or two are actually trying to destroy it.

By now, my readers should likely realize I’m not trying to hijack the Sigma Frame blog for my own purposes; it so happens Jack is on the same sheet of music as I. His posts tend to point to the moral level in the first place. He and I both struggle to put those things into clear English simply because of that vast gulf between our language/culture and the ANE/biblical perspective we both agree is better. We are dealing with Christians mired in that bad cultural orientation, encumbered with a churchianity that doesn’t equip men to operate in the realm of parable and moral awareness.

Pray for us. Take a look at this insightful and introspective guest post by one of the regular commenters. If, by the time you read this, the comments are not loaded with posturing and nonsense, just wait for it. Check back in a couple of days. Then pray for Jack again.