Dr. Heiser says something that American Christians in particular need to hear: We as Christians need unity; we do not need conformity. The problem is that most Christians are convinced that it is theologically necessary to have conformity. In other words, their frame of reference is so deeply socked into western assumptions that they cannot hear the Hebrew God saying that it’s not necessary.
Every time I examine a difficult passage that garners debate, it often comes down to the refusal to understand that God built the Hebrew frame of reference to reveal Himself. It’s in the frame of reference itself, and all the stuff expressed in that context is just a mixture of manifestations. What happened in the Bible narratives is one set of events that express who God is. In another historical setting, He still expresses Himself in the same ways. Because too many people ignore the Hebraic context, they honestly do not understand what happened the way God understands it.
Reality is variable. We keep saying sagely that the Bible is not science. Indeed, it’s not even really history, when it comes down to it. There’s far too much contextual material necessary to get a full historical impression. The Hebrew Scriptures unveil a Person. It’s a portrait of someone you really need to get to know. You cannot trust your human perception or your experience, but you can trust that Person.
No two of us can possibly expect to encounter exactly the same world as anyone else. We might conspire to choose one common understanding of reality. That’s what civilization means. But at the very least, that common understanding will fray at the edges. There will always be some variation that seems utterly compelling to us, but seems balderdash to someone else.
It is not necessary to squelch all of those variations, if your primary mission in life is to know and serve God. That uniformity is necessary only if this world is all you have. For us, this world isn’t even important; it most certainly is not the whole of reality.
This needs to become a common doctrine among Christians, because it explains a primary difference between what the Bible assumes without stating versus what people assume in isolation away from the Hebrew outlook.
I don’t have any good answers as to how we might overcome this vast deficit of Hebraic thinking so very necessary to follow Christ. Looking back at the history of how we got into this mess, it seems almost inevitable, as if no other outcome was possible. The task of teaching the Bible has become so very highly compartmentalized, and the specialists are quite thoroughly isolated from other specialties. They crank out vast numbers of articles every year that no one outside of their specialty is likely to ever see.
And all of that material is locked behind very expensive pay walls. You and I could not afford to see even a digest of it. The system works very hard to keep this almost secret.
And the guys who emphasize bringing all of this down to the church level never see or hear any of it. They are entirely too busy fulfilling obligations to a system that demands a “professional” degree filled with tons of stuff no church has any business doing in the first place. And because of the presumption of expertise that comes with that professional degree, we now have to load that poor seminary graduate down with a huge organization of people. He’ll never get to know most of them.
I wonder if anyone else will ever see the problem we have right now. I wonder if we will ever see a concerted effort from people with the skills to rip out all the crap and reduce the burden of getting a genuine Hebraic outlook to something manageable to people who run the local Sunday School department. When was the last time the publishers of Sunday School material gave much thought to that?
