Living Treasury

Seek the potter and the fire, you lump of clay.

In the Ancient Near East (ANE), the highest levels of scholarship might include as much science as they had at that time, but the bulk of research effort was in studying the moral significance of things. It’s not as if they never understood questions of being or doing, but that such questions were relegated to lesser concerns. Men of great learning were more interested in understanding the fabric of reality itself, a question Western scholars deny is worth consideration.

ANE scholars wrote a lot of mumbo-jumbo in the eyes of moderns. That’s because they were occupied with things that eluded words. Most ANE languages were inherently parabolic in the first place, so the only way to really understand what they had to say is to embrace their mindset. Precious few Western scholars have a clue, and some of the best are dead. Their books are hard to find; you are lucky if someone else offers bits of that material in footnotes or reviews.

Even if you did read it all and understood it, there’s no guarantee you would qualify as a book boy to those ANE scholars. Somewhere along the line of study, something inside of you has to awaken and those parabolic expressions no longer sound like mumbo-jumbo. They had to pursue it with their might, and precious few rose to prominence because they just didn’t get that higher awareness. They could quote the experts at length, but might not get a reliable answer of what makes for a wise course of action in any given context.

Those who did — like Daniel in Mesopotamia, and Joseph in Egypt — rose to great power in the various imperial governments under which they served. They were exceedingly valuable staff members, often irreplaceable in that sense. It wasn’t a high IQ, but a sense of what was morally appropriate on a cosmic level, and thus would work quite well in the long term. Their decisions were in harmony with reality itself. You don’t get that from science; it’s not even a scientific question. You can’t moral answers from science.

These people understood that, on some level, parabolic language that referred to a living Creation was rather literal. The cosmos is alive; the universe has a soul and self-consciousness. Nobody can prove that. It has to strike you as self-evident or it means nothing. If you can’t sense the life in your surroundings, then you’ll never understand it. Pantheism is a half-truth that misses the point, but is essentially correct, in that God’s character is woven into the fabric of reality.

So the very best elements in a genuine Christian faith are beyond words. Unlike the ANE scholars, we have a living example of Ultimate Truth who roams all of Creation seeking hearts ready for a touch of His Spirit. We don’t need two centuries of life to pursue the implications of the moral fabric and reach a place of enlightenment. Our Lord grants that connection immediately in His Son. But then He holds us accountable to go back and study through His Son to discover the implications of that connection, which happens to be what the ANE scholars sought to understand. “We have this treasure in clay pots…” and it’s all about that treasure, not our brittle human existence (2 Corinthians 4:7).

It’s not a question of what I’ve achieved. Over the years of my life, questions of ANE moral scholarship came to me in bits and pieces, always taking root, always dropping into place deep below the conscious consideration, sprouting later into my awareness. I’m a scholar in the sense I’m still studying what the ANE experts knew, and what the ancients could teach me. I can’t count the number of better scholars who never seemed to live what they knew. I find it incomprehensible, because this stuff grabbed me by the throat. It has me in its grip, and I cannot help but share it with you.

Other folks know something about this stuff. Sometimes it appears there’s a conflict in the details, but that’s not what matters. I have to walk in the light I have, and I assume they’ll do the same. But the whole point is not what I can spell out in the paint job on this clay pot, but the treasure inside. Your senses will never find it, but if you sense the treasure within, it’s because you have your own clay pot fired and ready to start catching the sparklies falling from Heaven.

That’s what this blog, the Kiln of the Soul, is all about.