As humans, we cannot function without context.
It’s a critical task in the stages of development that we gain some kind of context. Descartes’ thought experiment was a prime example of delusion; you cannot start with nothing when you already have context. If you could take away the context, you would take away humanity itself. Instead of having purity and clarity, you would have nothing at all. The world around us would not cease to exist without humans to perceive it, but humans cannot perceive it objectively. The assertion that such a thing is possible is a pernicious self-deception. Perception is not reality, but reality is out of reach without perception.
The task of perception is not possible without our humanity. We are hard-wired with a whole raft of physical needs. Turn them off and we die. The quest of faith was never to ignore those needs but to fulfill them righteously. Those physical needs cannot be silenced in our consideration of the world around us. Satisfy basic physical needs and other things crop up, all pretty much hard-wired in terms of how it affects us. It is only our current mythology that pretends we can sandbox our minds away from our humanity. We have to settle for what we can get and stop the peacocking.
Mythology is context, and if your mythology does not reflect reality, you’ll always be confused. You might still get some things right, but our peculiar Western mythology was specifically designed to minimize our ability to get things right. It may seem random chance, but poking around the roots of how our civilization was born will reveal that the seed for the tree was plucked from the Tree of Knowledge, not the Tree of Life. Ours is the only culture with no cross-breeding, as it were. Not all of our mythology is equally evil, as my use of the symbols from Eden would indicate. The problem is what we read into those symbols.
Paul describes the case where having a full background in revelation by itself will save neither your soul nor your ass (Romans 2). He presents the case where those with none of the Bible in their background could still find faith and obedience to God’s will and reap the benefits. They get the power of the Word without the written word. They can even go to Heaven without knowing the name of Jesus because they manage to act in His name anyway. Paul makes the point that humans are wired to seek an answer to spiritual apprehension, that it is possible we could find a desire to live morally. God is able to judge the hearts and intentions of every human from within their context and impute righteousness on His own terms. Those who do have that background in His revelation do not thereby gain the privilege of playing gatekeeper of Heaven.
Please notice the scattered descriptions of how the First Century churches handled troublesome souls. The ultimate sanction was disfellowship. You could still show up at the meetings, but you were considered an outsider and not permitted to lead or have much input. You weren’t family. The reckoning of kinship was based on something besides feelings. However, there was no thought given to more forceful measures no this plane of existence. On a higher plane, one prayed for God to hand that difficult person over to Satan’s authority for discipline.
How did that evolve into using political authorities — the sword — to compel external conformity?
That change was a radical departure from the gospel. Paul admitted that some of what he demanded as leader of the churches he planted was simply his custom. In other words, it was context, and it often meant trading one’s former context for another. There are plenty of things the Apostles pointed out as truly essential in a universal sense, things they learned from the ultimate authority of the Son of God. They admitted a certain limitation in what kind of answers they might come to when things got complicated, but there came a point when they simply had to get back to work on the grounds of some common context. It’s not hard to construct a summary of those things and understand how they apply in your context. That still left an awful lot of room for different approaches to obedience.
Even in the act of sharing with you what I consider to be universal requirements, all you get is my context for those things. I won’t even pretend to hold any universals in themselves. Given the nature of human interaction online, there is really very little I could or would do to enforce anything resembling conformity. Given my understanding of things, I have no interest in that. I can’t dismiss your different understanding, but I may have trouble handling your context. If it’s too alien, there’s not much I can do except ask you to go your way in peace. Even then, it’s a matter of avoiding areas where we cannot come to terms; you can stick around if you aren’t trying to attack what I’m doing. The morality of how we interact is itself a major element in reaching for God’s truth.
I rather like digging into the context from which Scripture comes. I’ve had the exposure to study of those ancient civilizations and how they viewed their world. Some other people invested an awful lot of money in letting me go to university, and I am unable to express how grateful I am for that. I’m doing my best to pass it on. However, the larger task is translating that into our context today. That means stripping away as much context as I can possibly understand and put things within reach of those who cannot go where I’ve gone. You can’t get from me what I don’t understand. I don’t pretend to know where the bone separates from the marrow (Hebrews 4:12) for you, only for me. Still, I’m focused firmly on making the most of removing non-essential context.
I’m specifically interested in disposing of things in our culture that don’t fit a genuine life of faith. You’ll often read here critiques of how people who claim Christ have failed because they don’t know Christ, having allowed themselves to become entirely too wrapped up in our culture. Too many missionaries are carrying cultural religion instead of Christ. So, yes, I’m at war with much of mainstream Christian religion as contrary to what Christ actually taught. The main thing they get wrong is mistaking context for truth.
It’s not as if we humans can’t actually make adjustments in some parts of our context.
