A Place in Glory

Catacomb Resident Blog has been talking a lot lately about the necessity of a cultural shift in our minds to the biblical standard of collectivism and honor/shame based thinking: Collectivism 1, 2 and 3; honor/shame culture 1, 2 and 3.

Nobody in their right mind will dispute whether the Hebrew people lived in a collectivist society based on honor/shame. This is quite different from our western individualism and guilt-based culture. Everything we think, say and do is pickled in this different approach; we struggle to understand the biblical version and lack the language to discuss it properly.

And let’s remind ourselves that God Himself built up the biblical culture by hand, while western culture was left to human imagination under the guidance of spiritual forces hostile to God’s loving plans for humanity. In general, the other spirits that guide humanity hate us.

It’s not just a question of whether we can teach ourselves to understand the Bible as a collectivist honor-based culture, but whether we can understand life itself any other way. While we could take a look at Asian and some African cultures for some clues, the one big issue is that God Himself stands in the place of a collective society. Instead of drawing our identity and sense of what is right from deference to the community, we get it from God Himself. However, the Holy Spirit communicates in terms of shame/honor and collective loyalty.

The hardest thing for us is to abandon the false guilt complex upon which the entire Western Civilization is based. There is something inside of us that operates as a repository of guilt, but it is part of the fallen flesh. It is not based in your heart; it’s part of the accursed human intellect and emotions.

Thus, your guilt complex seeks restitution in terms of particular debts and restitution. Such reckoning is rooted in some imaginary objective standard of right and wrong. The Bible speaks entirely in terms of honor and shame, of personal transgression of our duty to God. It is feudal in nature.

The difficulty, then, is our instinctive reaction to the teaching about convictions. It’s a long transition into the biblical mindset. I’ve long said that our consciences are the starting point simply because just getting ourselves to pay attention to them is a challenge in some cases. We’ve said that the conscience is our mental interface to the heart, where our convictions reside. The conscience of westerners is damaged, but it’s all we have.

That means there is a healing process for the conscience, as well. It has been fed lies and is loaded with false guilt. By seeking out the convictions of our hearts, the conscience is taught better, but for most people this is a long journey. The repository of false guilt tends to muffle the voice of the Holy Spirit so that we do not hear clearly.

Once again: the sole issue here is that we need to wean ourselves from that imaginary objective reasoning standard of conscience and learn to trust the very personal connection to the Holy Spirit. He is alive, and truth is a dynamic thing that rests entirely on God’s whims. You cannot capture it and freeze it in time and space. It’s a relationship that evolves constantly. It’s not chaotic and rootless, but it does change with the context. Your only hope is to dig through the rubble of your soul until God speaks clearly in your convictions, from moment to moment.

You will most certainly hear things falsely when you start down this path. Don’t despair; God is patient about this, but you must commit yourself to the path He has made for us. Obey your conscience while knowing full well it will get things wrong, but it’s all you have. There is no objective standard; that’s a lie from Hell. Your standard is the community of saints in Heaven who are watching, all affirming what God says.

Seek His honor and glory, and He will grant you a place in it.

Note: Just as a reference point, I’ll point out that leftism is a false collective. Lefties cling to the guilt and innocence theme, but try to hold everyone accountable to the collective. However, their collective replaces God with the State.