Our culture is dominated by the illusion that reality can be objectively measured, as if the universe could exist without humans. God revealed that the universe would not exist were it not the proper setting for telling a story with humans at the center of things. Humanity before the Fall was the pinnacle, the climax of Creation, as far as He is going to explain anything at all.
His explanation and interaction with us is the whole purpose; that’s revelation. We need to see His glory. A critical element in the basic assumptions of revelation is human perception. Not just sensory data, nor the reason by which we process it, but revelation assumes a whole range of faculties our culture denies are even possible. Thus, the primary task of Christian faith in our day is to push the envelope and live in such a way as to question all our cultural assumptions about reality.
As the song by David Meece linked below correctly notes, we humans in our fallen state are the reason Jesus came, and why He suffered and died. That should humble us, not make us arrogant. It’s also why He rose again and now stands in Heaven watching over us. He came into this fallen realm to challenge all the false assumptions. His death was a rejection of those assumptions and His resurrection stands as a challenge today, because His blood still runs though our veins, as it were. He calls to the world through us.
Because of the vast layer of cultural nonsense that has been pasted on top of that ancient faith, we struggle against our own fellow believers to get this message out. There is a huge Christian mythology about the nature of everything Jesus taught, and it rivals the Jewish mythology against which Jesus fought during His ministry. Jesus was not Jewish and neither was the Old Testament. Judaism was the awful Talmudic perversion of Old Testament religion.
Folks in the Old Testament were born again and went to Heaven, too. Paul says quite bluntly that membership in God’s eternal family was decided before we were born. Indeed, it stands as an eternal fact outside of time and space, because our temporal existence is just a small bubble inside the far greater extent of Creation. I can scarcely go anywhere among mainstream Christians without encountering people whose brains operate under the assumption that our temporal experience of time-space constraints affects God, too. They cannot even register the concept that there could be an existence outside time and space. Our spiritual destiny stands as eternal truth itself.
We should not be surprised when discussing this eludes the ability to express in human language. That’s partly why Hebrew language itself is parabolic in nature. It’s not that Hebrew people had no use for blunt literal descriptions, but that nothing really important could be conveyed that way. It’s the same point I make in noting that Hebrew intellectual traditions include Aristotle’s logic as the lowest level, rather like a juvenile level of reasoning. Nothing really important happens there. You have to learn symbolic reasoning and parabolic discussion. The dividing point for us between Heaven or Hell is simply not something we can explain in concrete terms.
But the means to calling men into Heaven is not in doubt. Jesus did not change the message of His cousin, John the Baptist: repent! That is, examine the Law Covenants and search for something that calls your name. Read between the lines to the higher meaning of the law code. In some places, Jesus could rather bluntly explain how Moses was a poor reflection of God’s divine justice (see discussions on divorce and marriage). In other places, He got parabolic and talked about it indirectly. The point was that before His sacrifice, you had to go through the relevant covenant law as the passage to recognizing the deeper spiritual importance. Time and resources spent pursuing the Law was an investment that yielded spiritual awareness. You were converted by that investment.
In Christ, the process is reversed. We begin with spiritual insight as a free grant, followed by the call to rightly divide the Law. The issue is not that something eternal has changed. Your conversion experience does not affect things in Heaven, in that sense, but is merely your awareness of Heaven. You are directly connected in awareness and your faculty for perception has changed. Now the Law will make sense to you, provided you shed the limitations of mere human reason and sensory data, and awaken those higher perception capabilities God had granted Adam and Eve before the Fall.
Yes, conversion is a human experience. It is a well-understood psychological process. It can be implemented by all manner of persuasion, including fraud. Conversion is merely the observable manifestation, and may mean nothing at all. That’s okay. On our end of things, we cannot possibly know if another person is genuinely connected to Heaven, only that they appear to act like it. Religion of necessity must include those who may not be end up in Heaven. Our practice of faith has to include sufficient cynicism to let in folks who behave well enough to offer no threat to fellowship.
At any given time, the bulk of a church membership offers very little actual support for the mission. They may contribute to the material means, but don’t really do much else. They are too busy absorbing it all, struggling against the inner resistance to the mission. Those who actually push ahead with the message of repentance become leaders simply because no one else is doing much. They grow, they change, they become different people. They show themselves willing and able to shepherd, and so they do. The only thing left is making sure we constrain those who actually cause harm. Church assumes a spiritual awareness as the purpose, but doesn’t require it, much as any other kind of family will often include a lot of children who contribute little and eat a lot, making messes all the time. We ostracize only genuine threats.
It’s never objective; it can’t possibly be democratic because the bulk of membership will always be children. They have a voice, but decisions are made by someone and that someone is the family leadership. Their decisions will always be the result of some mixture of inspiration and their best human understanding. It can’t be fair, but it must be that the character of whomever God places as family head is the deciding factor. God works through honest mistakes, too.
We have a long way to go shedding Western Christian mythology to recover what Jesus actually taught.
