Somehow I’ve got to find a clear and forceful statement to counter the evil intellectual slavery of minds practiced by Western churches.
First, the bluntly stated thesis: If you do not seek to acquire the Hebrew intellectual understanding of reality, you cannot progress in your faith. If we do not teach that Hebrew intellectual approach, we cannot share the message of Christ fully. For people suggesting there is no significant difference between our current world view and that of the Hebrew prophets and Christ Himself, they are at best woefully ignorant of the Bible. Once warned of their ignorance, to proceed contrary to such an understanding is evil.
If you ain’t got that Hebrew head, you ain’t got revelation from God.
You might still end up in Heaven after leaving this world, but you won’t have a clue how to walk in Christ while you are here. I’m not worried about people getting “saved” from eternal damnation; that happens regardless of human idiocy. God is sovereign over His Creation. What we lose is the vast wealth of blessings available to us in this world. We have no mission without embracing the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual background, because that ANE background is reality as God defines it.
All theology is mere human response. Western Christian theology is an odious pile of human sewage at best because it starts from a rejection of revelation. Revelation must include the proper intellectual background built by God as the conduit for revelation. You cannot rightly approach the task of religion by treating intellectual grounding as optional. You either buy into God’s revelation of you don’t have revelation. You might have a lot of brilliant reasoning, but you don’t have truth; you don’t have Christ. Christ was a Hebrew man and it takes precious little to prove that His teachings were distinctly ANE in character and shape.
At no point in Scripture will you see any claim that the words are themselves truth. That conception is read back into Scripture by Western Christians. If your brain can handle something, then it’s not revelation. It is merely your response to revelation. Your theology cannot ever be binding on the conscience of another. We cannot prevent charisma, zeal and talented expression in human language from seducing people who rely too much on what they can process in their heads. It is entirely natural for people to buy into that stuff. This is how the Hebrew religion was perverted and morphed into Judaism; the rabbis were mesmerized by Aristotelian logic. However, the Holy Spirit does not work directly with the human intellect, and all the more so if that intellect bears a Western flavor.
Theology cannot be divine; it will ever be no more than a parcel of religion. It will always be merely a human response, not a word from God. Truth is by its nature divine and above human intellect.
