Let Me Un-explain It

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ehurst

Mainstream Western church leaders do teach there is a difference between Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology. For the most part, the latter is actually more of biblical doctrine in their minds. That is, they see it as revealed assertions around which they must structure their rational system. The discussion goes off track for them when you start talking about revelation as not doctrine, but the revelation of a Person. Sure, they can accept the words, but not the implications.

This is the biggest problem we deal with when comparing between the various teachings of churches against the teachings of the Bible. The Bible casts itself as the covenant documents of an eastern potentate. In the ancient societies of the Bible, everything was a matter of the personal connection you had with God. You can’t reason your way to faith, because faith isn’t what’s in your head, but in your heart. The heart-mind is all about persons and personal relationships, not mere sentiment. This isn’t fanatical loyalty to a sports team or military unit; it’s loyalty to your own Father.

I’ve noted before that the biblical teaching of predestination is one thing, but it does not justify the Doctrine of Election. There’s nothing wrong with believing in Election if that’s how you organize your thinking, and it informs how you act, but you must keep in mind that this is your own response to faith. It’s not a universal doctrine by which we judge others and their teachings. The Doctrine of Election is a rational structure built around the biblical revelation of predestination. And the biblical use of the term is quite different from how it’s used in Systematic Theology.

A related mainstream teaching is Federal Headship. Again, it’s just an attempt at rational explanation of something in the Bible. And what’s in the Bible is a matter of personal connection, not objective rational structure. The doctrine of Federal Headship is basically the idea that some ancestor can make a moral choice that is binding on you. Thus, Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden affects all of his progeny — in essence, the whole human race — by some cosmic law that God enforces. This teaching depersonalizes our connection to Adam and to God. Worse, it misses the point.

The story of the Fall was never meant to portray a baldly literal historical event, but was offered as an indicator of our fallen nature, and tells us something about how Satan works. The story is cast in the context of God as an eastern potentate, and Adam and Eve part of His household retinue. They were gardeners, managing God’s private park according to His instructions. He came to visit them in the park every day, and they communed over how God wanted things to go in His private garden. But though they possessed something of God’s nature, they lacked the fortitude to carry out His wishes on one critical issue: They could be manipulated to trust their own capabilities instead of trusting revelation (communion) from God. In essence, they sought to become their own gods.

It’s not that Adam made a choice to bind us all under the Fall, but that Adam acted according to the same weakness that we all have. Granted, the language in Romans 5:12ff in most English translations makes it sound like a legal inheritance, but the Greek scholars translating the New Testament into English are dominated by a Western viewpoint. The issue is not a matter of legal precedent because God doesn’t work like that. We inherit a sinful nature by our DNA.

There’s no place for questions of God’s fairness in saddling every child of Adam with the same legal judgment as against Adam. This is what we are, and you have no business questioning how God made you. We are part divine and part fallen; made to commune with God and naturally unable to do so consistently. God didn’t put on us a sentence of death; that’s ours by nature. It’s what we choose by virtue of our inherent tendency to seek our own way in God’s Creation. The solution is to surrender that throne and restore the communion with God. He calls to us and puts it all within reach.

And Jesus kept wording things in terms of embracing Him, not just His teaching. This is all about a personal encounter, getting to know a Someone, not a something. It’s not a question of plumbing the depths of reason about the problem and all its parameters. It is a question of restoring a wayward child of God, of restoring the natural affection between the two. And it’s not humanity, but you and I individually coming back into proper filial loyalty to (faith in) God.

Even my effort to explain this is broken. What I’m really trying to do is un-explain, to break down the false explanation we’ve all be given by virtue of our birth in an English-speaking culture. Then I’m hoping to indicate to your mind something your heart will recognize already.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Let Me Un-explain It

Odds and Ends 08

Posted on August 27, 2019 by ehurst

This past Sunday I took some of my bike apart. I was hoping to get the freehub off the rear wheel and re-lubricate it. I couldn’t figure it out, since it is not what all the tutorials show should be there. There is no 10mm hollow bolt holding it on, but something else I couldn’t see down in the center of the hub. So I did the best I could with drizzling some gear lube in there and put it back together.

Every time you take that stuff apart, it never goes back together quite the same. I noticed that the axle is just a bit short, so there’s no room to shim it and keep the knobby tire from rubbing the frame. So I put the hybrid tires back on because they are narrower and fit better. I need to get to the bike shop in downtown OKC with the bike so they can get me a longer axle of the same type. But a lot of businesses downtown were closed due to power outages this morning, so I had to put that off.

Massive heavy storms hit last night, bringing winds around 80-90 MPH out of the NNW. Some of the sycamore trees across the street lost big limbs. Lots of areas were without power, but the Lord granted my prayer to keep ours working. Still, I couldn’t ride where I was planning to go today, so I grabbed my cutting tools and started working on the downed limbs. I figured it would make things easier for our maintenance team, and maybe I could clear the sidewalks for my neighbors.

I started at dawn — around 7AM local time. When I used to do that kind of work for pay, it was my habit to start with the small stuff so that it was easier to see the big stuff. I clipped off all the smaller limbs and piled them up. Then I cut some of the bigger stuff with my tree saw, and saved the really big stuff for my chain saw. I did this on a couple of different big limbs. When maintenance showed up, they were very pleased at my work, because it meant one more emergency they didn’t have to chase. They could get on with current work orders. The chief set me up with power for my electric chainsaw, but it refused to work. It was brand new when we moved here, and I haven’t even used it for a single hour yet, but it refuses to run.

Okay, so I dragged out my big ax and got to work on the rest. It’s all cut up and I can feel every bit of it, but it was a great workout. Fortunately, sycamore is a very soft wood to cut. Unfortunately, sycamore is a very soft wood that breaks when the wind blows like that. I could hear lots of gas-powered chainsaws working around the neighborhood, cutting all kinds of broke trees, so I know the city will send out trucks to get all this crap. Ours is cut up and ready.

They use something like a long dump truck, but with a small crane mounted on the frame between the bed and cab of the truck. I cut it to easily fit in the claw that rig has on the end of the arm. I kept thinking I might need to do this some day, and retained a selection of tree and brush cutting tools when we moved. My son kept most of them, but I have just a few: limb loppers, tree saw, machete, camp ax and long splitter ax. That last one is a special combo tool; it’s not exactly a heavy splitter, but a very heavy chopping ax with a thicker head. I use it because I’m a heavy hitter and it suits the way I chop, but it takes more effort. Despite cooler temperatures, I was drenched in sweat when I got through.

From a high of 260 pounds last winter, I’m down to about 235. Taking my time with losing weight avoids having too much skin sagging in places. The body gets a chance to adjust and keep things tight. I know that it’s natural to hit plateaus, too. The trick is to keep the metabolism high and let the stomach shrink; feed the body you want to have. It’s not classic calorie counting, because that starts from the false assumption that every body is the same. Mine is not just unique, but peculiar. So I’m trying to make permanent changes in my habits by listening to my body with my heart.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Just a Reminder about Virtual Community

Posted on August 26, 2019 by ehurst

Recent chatter from several folks provoked a reminder: Virtual faith communities cannot provide the face-to-face fellowship we are all commanded to build. Radix Fidem is not a religion, but a meta-religion. It’s an approach to forming your own religion. We seek only to establish a better understanding of what religion is supposed to do. If your meat-space context of life does not permit building that fellowship outside of mainstream churches, then seek the Lord about where you can infiltrate and find you some real fellowship.

Some of you are able to hold out for something better, but Radix Fidem doesn’t come with rules to guide whether you should belong to a regular church somewhere. That’s a matter of your individual mission and calling. I once had hopes for building something more substantial, but it seems now obvious that cannot happen on any significant scale.

The reason is simple: In the current period of tribulation and turmoil, it is exceptionally difficult to build something so completely different from the existing establishment. Not impossible, but it is difficult enough that it’s hardly an expectation we could hold over each other. I’m going that route because that’s my calling. Don’t feel obliged to copy my efforts. Let’s take the long view and give God time to shake loose the bonds of religious organization that won’t survive the coming changes. We can talk more about how to build organizations later.

Right now, it’s better for at least some of you to infiltrate existing organizations, waiting until the time the Lord calls for more direct action. We should be infiltrating everything. And if you can get along for now without fellowship, that’s fine, too. You are the one who knows what God wants you to do.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Just a Reminder about Virtual Community

The Wrong Place

Posted on August 25, 2019 by ehurst

The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom in hearts, not in the flesh. It is not rooted in this world and refers to a higher reality with entirely different rules. The whole issue is pulling away from this world in the first place. Meanwhile, the root nature of the Fall is substituting the capabilities of human flesh for divine revelation in deciding how things work in the first place. The flesh cannot possibly see the whole story without help from above.

So the big mistake church folks make is dragging worldly stuff into the business of the Kingdom. God’s Word reveals what it takes, and somehow Christians flatly ignore what it says about what really matters.

In the first place, the Kingdom proceeds with revealing the glory of God without reference to the worldly system. The only time we see God paying attention to the way of the world is to demonstrate it’s failures, and to provide a counter. This is what we manifest, so we need to make a pointed rejection of those same things.

A primary element in that demonstration of Heaven’s way is to reject the need to accomplish things, as if our actions require passing through an evaluation by the world. The only thing we need to accomplish is internal change. We could accomplish nothing at all and still bring the Lord glory. His glory is in the process, not the product.

So church folks keep trying to make church more like the world instead of like Heaven. There is no valid need for the kind of uniformity we see in most organized religion. Uniformity typically seems important in doing all kinds of stuff that isn’t important in itself. There is no need for the scale of most organization, either. Size seems important only when you must get done things the world will notice. But the Kingdom of Heaven proceeds without reference to what the world is likely to notice.

There are no people we need to impress. God alone is the one we need to please, and it doesn’t help that so many church folks define God in terms He would reject. The measure of what makes the most sense on our human level has nothing to do with what pleases God. When someone says with manufactured sagacity that they don’t believe God will be pleased with something He told me I must do, all I can say is, “We aren’t talking about the same God, obviously.”

Without the room to pursue your individual calling from God. you are in the wrong place.

Posted in religion | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Teachings of Jesus — John 14:25-31

Posted on August 24, 2019 by ehurst

Jesus continues talking about returning to His Father’s Heavenly court to take up His co-regency. He explains how it will work for them.

Jesus speaks to their hearts. The heart is capable of storing things away in memory for when the intellect is ready to receive it. The intellect is the part of us that organizes and implements the divine wisdom of the heart. The heart is where the Holy Spirit speaks directly. In this case, the words of Jesus while He is still alive are the same message that the Holy Spirit will speak to them again later. It’s the same Person, but He will come in a different form. He will remind them of the things Jesus said, and will breathe life into that teaching, so that everything comes back to them with a new meaning.

Then He proclaims that what He has deposited in their hearts is the very power of shalom. It’s nothing like the thing our world imagines “peace” is, but something completely different. It teaches us to not take this world and this life so seriously. Instead, we take the message of Christ seriously and bring it to life in our world. If that means dying, or anything short of that, the message is by far more valuable. Don’t be afraid of what happens to you when you are faithful. More to the point, He wants them to stop being so tormented over His impending departure.

He tells them that those who really are committed to Him will rejoice at His departure. It is by far the very best thing that could happen. By returning to Heaven, Jesus returns His New Covenant Kingdom to the Father. The Father then becomes directly involved, so that there can be no possible higher authority promoting this thing.

Jesus makes it a point that He tells them bluntly so that their faith will have a handle, a reference point that their minds cannot dispute. He noted that He was running out of time and wanted to pass on a few last notes for them, something that will provide a transition to their faith. The reason time is short is that the prince of this world is making his move. While He has no actual authority over Jesus, but is rather under Jesus’ authority, Jesus will obey His Father’s command to submit to death. This will be His final proof that He loves His Father as a faithful son, and will set the example of obedience for all who enter into His Kingdom.

It was time to leave the Upper Room and go meet the arrest party.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Teachings of Jesus — John 14:25-31

In Support of USS Liberty Survivors

Posted on August 23, 2019 by ehurst

This is no obsession. I have studied the attack on the USS Liberty in the past. I’ve also experienced the hateful force of military bureaucracy covering up crimes while serving as a Military Policeman. I’ll grant you that serving in the US military can place you in a very tragic moral situation, but the real problem with that is how the US government hides it from the common folks. It’s the hiding that makes Satan so happy.

Let me recommend this one article as a sample. You don’t even need to read the whole thing to get the gist of it. There is no reason to doubt the account there. It’s a sample that should help you understand how pervasive that hiding can be. I’ve encountered some really decent folks in the American Legion, but I won’t ever join that organization because of their leadership. They have courted me several times. It is most certainly not a democratic institution, contrary to their propaganda.

It’s the same thing with churches these days: I’ll never join a church whose leadership supports Zionism. It’s not the sole reason for avoiding church membership; it’s just one of several major flaws in mainstream Christian churches. I fulfill the demands of the gospel by conducting worship in my home. In general I don’t bother to attack those churches any more than I harangue the American Legion. The modern State of Israel is a significant matter on this blog, but hardly an obsession. We stand in support of Biblical Law, and on that foundation we have standing to mention from time to time things we must oppose.

Whatever morally questionable things the USS Liberty Survivors might have been doing out there spying in the Mediterranean Sea, there’s not much room to discuss that until their justice is first restored. Their situation is so grossly and egregiously wrong that nobody much has standing to accuse them of wrong until we first put them back on equal footing with their oppressors.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on In Support of USS Liberty Survivors

Draper Bikeway 19

Posted on August 22, 2019 by ehurst

It’s all about the gaps. In this case, we see the first layer of asphalt freshly laid at the northeast corner of the bikeway, near where SE 89th and Stanley Draper Drive meet. This was part of the final drive to get the entire loop paved and finished. I shot this about a week ago.

Below is the section of the bikeway right at the main north entrance to the Draper recreational area. It was one of the last gaps closed, in part because it still has some heavy equipment parked in the staging area. Also, down in the bottom where it crosses the actual East Elm Creek itself (for which the reservoir is named), there was a lot of unfinished dirt work until just the past week or so.

But here is a gap that opened up after it was given it’s initial layer of blacktop, near SE 119th Street. There was a large crew working along the southern half of the eastern shore, putting in open culverts because heavy rains would move tons of dirt over the bikeway when they were just regular ditches. This was something I warned about a couple of years ago, and I don’t think it was in the original plans to resort to such extravagant measures. I’m pretty sure this represents an add-on. At any rate, the heavy equipment involved in creating these culverts tore up the single, rather thin layer of asphalt, in part because the lack of good drainage had weakened the soil under the pavement. I rode over it several times in a bad state until they pulled it up and rebuilt the bed. This will have to be repaved from scratch.

These last two photos show the East Elm Creek crossing below the dam in various stages of preparation. This represents the last unfinished gap to be closed. The first shot of it above is from last week. There was an ancient open culvert they finally broke up right where the previous work dead ended. In the second shot, that has been removed and the drainage is now routed out around the whole area. This was shot today, showing a bulldozer making the last surface shaping, showing that it will be a rather sharp zigzag curve. Notice that the curbs have already been laid down to the edge of this unfinished section. Just about 100 meters left here.

The other item of note is that the second layer for the north and east section was begun this morning. When I rode past the asphalt crew was starting right where the previous finished surface ended just a little shy of the northern end of the western shore. There was fresh tack on the section ahead of them, running off east and over the ridge, so they plan on slapping down a lot of asphalt today. There were four dump trucks already lined up ahead of the asphalt machine, waiting with their hot loads to dump into the mouth of that thing.

Posted in photography | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Most Government Is Inherently Evil

Posted on August 21, 2019 by ehurst

If we can embrace by faith the doctrine of the Fall, then our hearts can lead our minds to a more realistic philosophical frame of reference. Mankind is broken and cannot be fixed in reference to this world. The only fix is personal and individual, something spiritual, not social or political. It requires an individual commitment to another world beyond; Christ warned this was simply not possible via any human structure. The old national covenant was an experiment, a proof that it was not possible to redeem mankind en masse.

At the same time, the Old Covenant was very clearly a revelation of how things actually work in this world, if only humans could be made to listen. And the Old Covenant tells that truth so forcefully that it doesn’t bother to explicitly state some points that should be painfully obvious. Not just humanity, but all of Creation itself is hard-wired for eastern feudalism expressed in a tribal social and government system.

This is quite contrary to human reason, but that’s the whole point of the narrative on the Garden of Eden: human reason is not capable of discerning how things actually do work. Only revelation can answer that question. So we can justly say that virtually all of our world today is enslaved to a hideous lie.

The biggest factor in that lie is the brevity of human life itself. It’s a vicious circle that feeds on itself, as moral blindness makes life even shorter. The power to see beyond our limited human range of awareness is possible only in the heart, not in the intellect. The mind can see it in theory, but cannot actually touch it, so it remains an abstract nothing. The only way to see moral truth is with a much longer range viewpoint. We can see shalom only in terms of multiple generations.

Here’s a divine paradox for you: It is exceedingly hard to get good moral people into government. Good moral people do not want that kind of power over others. Revelation warns of that, but the message has apparently been too subtle for most to grasp. The best rulers in human history were those who came to power while pursuing other plans. They accepted the necessity of being rulers as the only means of helping those they loved. The greatest high moral examples of conquering heroes were those who crushed only those who threatened even worse than they got.

Whatever it is that you might invest into the meaning of the word “democracy,” it cannot possibly work. It never has, and it never will. It appears to some to be a rational and effective way to do things, but it never has actually worked in the long run. Instead of granting the masses power over themselves, it simply changes how they are enslaved. It demands they be deceived with materialism so that the worst people can rule over them.

There will always be a ruling elite. Everyone serves someone — that is a fundamental fact of human existence. It is not part of the Curse of the Fall; it is the nature of being human itself, even in Heaven. We are not deities with our own powers, though our intellects (without the constraints of the heart) will certainly believe there are no limits to what we can dream up and accomplish. But a system of choosing one’s government via any rational system will invariably fail, because it demands that government authorities have the ambition to rule. That ambition comes only with an evil heart.

So the only hope for occasionally having a good government is to have a system that, at the very least, inhibits ambition. It’s a system that makes expanding power very costly and impossible to maintain, so that the norm is small government close to you. It’s the system we call tribal feudalism. Hereditary tribal chiefs are the only hope for any decent government, even if it comes only sporadically. There is no better system.

Since there is no way we can expect to see anything like that in our world today, beyond a tiny handful of blessed tiny kingdoms, you and I should recognize our best hope is simply staying out of the way of bad “democratic” government. It’s a Beast. Sure, we can attempt in various ways to recreate that feudal dominion on a much smaller scale, a partial application that brings a measure of peace and harmony. It’s exceptionally hard in a Western society because our mythology of western feudalism is ass-backward from the eastern version. It requires some careful reshaping of personal expectations, and most people have no patience for that.

My point is that you learn to see the situation from the heart. Recognize with your intellect that the heart-mind is superior. Just sharing this idea should cause your heart to rejoice in the truth. If you can compel your brain to bow the knee to the heart, you’ll understand the logic of such things.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Most Government Is Inherently Evil

Predestination Is Not Election

Posted on August 20, 2019 by ehurst

The Doctrine of Election isn’t really in the Bible, but Sovereign Grace is.

Keep in mind that the Scriptures were written mostly by Hebrew people. God designed their language and culture as the means to reveal Himself to fallen humanity. The Hebrew language itself is inherently symbolic; most common expressions were parables. This language arose from the Ancient Near East, a range of people, places and cultures that were utterly convinced that there was a Spirit Realm, but that you could not possibly describe it in human language. So virtually all ANE languages were indicative, not descriptive. Ultimate truth is beyond actual knowing, yet that ultimate reality made serious demands on human existence.

And while the Hebrew people were notorious for falling away from their Covenant, the firm assertion of Scripture is that there is only one God — their God Jehovah. The whole of Hebrew Scripture points to a very personal reality, animated with the life force of Jehovah. Everything in reality was seen in light of relations with Him. He is depicted as an imperial eastern potentate, a tribal feudal ruler. His nation was His family, adopted by covenant. He was ever-present in all of Creation. The whole of human existence was a matter of how devoted one was to His dominion and authority.

If you read Romans 9, Paul’s clearest statement on predestination, you realize that the term he used (Greek: proorizo — a horizon established in advance) applies to God’s mercy on people in this life. That is, it’s predestination in the sense of your lot in life. While it most certainly implies eternal destiny, there is really very little said about that directly.

This is a very Hebrew approach to the question. Don’t focus on your eternal destiny because there is no way we can talk about it. However, be aware that there is an eternal Spirit Realm where the consequences of things in this life are played out. In Hebrew revelation, death means the end of your opportunities to seek Jehovah’s favor, to bring Him glory. Seek His glory in this life because no one can explain what happens afterward. In other words, there is precious little about us going there, and an awful lot about how that other realm affects life here.

Backing up to the previous chapter in Romans, Paul encourages his readers to seek the power and glory of eternity in the here and now — “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4). Even when he says something about what lies beyond death (8:18), he then goes on to talk about how that demands we manifest divine glory here and now. When we talk about eternity, the only way to hold that discussion is to talk about what it demands of us in this world. The word “saved” (8:24) falls in the context of redemption of our current existence. We need that expectation of eternity to cope with this life.

Thus, the whole discussion of predestination is focused on conforming to the image of Christ (8:29). Predestination is all about choosing us before we even enter this life (sovereign grace), but seeks to shape what this life will be for us. We are then required to make appropriate choices about our lot in life. Get your priorities straight in this world and eternity will take care of itself.

In that sense, we see that the classical systematic theology statement about divine election misses the point. It tries to settle a question about something we cannot possibly know in this life. Sure, you can become quite secure and convinced in your own eternal destiny, but it comes in the personal awareness of God’s favor, not some declared official status. Election cannot be objectified; it is inherently personal in nature.

When Paul addresses the issue of works, it is invariably in the context of dealing with Jewish legalism. Even Greek and Roman folks knew better than that nonsense. And the Epistle of James castigates Hellenized Jews for trying to separate works from faith. Thus, when Paul says legalistic performance won’t serve any purpose, he’s on the same sheet of music with James. The key to God’s favor is seeking it through revelation. Revelation is inherently mystical, symbolic, full of parables, because there is simply no way human language can capture the essence of the Spirit Realm where God and His throne reside. Jesus taught in parables to indicate truth in a way that would unite heart and mind in service to the Father, but could not carry the mind there alone.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

What’s Wrong with Augustine?

Posted on August 19, 2019 by ehurst

(This is being cross-posted on both blogs.)

A fundamental element in my personal sense of calling is putting the gospel message in reach of everyone. There are plenty of good servants of God who helped me along the way; most of them were academics in one sense or another. My job has been to bring that high brow stuff down, largely by seeing the foundation clearly, but emphasizing the implications. I am okay with high-brow stuff, but it’s not my mission to operate on that level very much, especially in what I write.

So when someone asks me about Augustine of Hippo, it requires warning you that if you want a high browed discussion from me, you are asking the wrong guy. Still, my summary is likely to answer the basic questions.

The man himself was a Berber, but born long after the overpowering Roman influence had changed his native land in North Africa. Thus, his family spoke Latin at home and prided themselves on upholding the best of Roman civilization. He passed through a very strong academic background, which included a hefty admiration for Hellenism, as well. Eventually he became a Christian and embraced a very romanized brand of Christian religion. His high intellect and solid classical education produced a body of work that remains influential in Western Christianity today.

On the one hand, his writings could be considered the foundation of Western Christianity in a certain sense. Not in the sense that he is the whole thing, but he represents a major turning point in pulling things back together after they had begun to fragment and scatter intellectually. He was a big-picture thinker. There’s nothing wrong with reading modern translations of his stuff if you have the time and inclination; you can find free copies on the Net.

Here’s the fundamental issue: He represents the turning point away from heart-led faith. He brought faith down into the realm of the intellect in a way that changed the shape of Western Christian religion forever. In his own thinking, he was trying to make faith reasonable, to show that faith and reason were not enemies. But he was already deeply infected by the notion of the heart as something far less than the way the Bible depicts it. In his writing, the heart is crippled compared to the biblical image. He still sees the heart as ruling, but with serious limiations.

He had no notion of the heart with its own “mind” superior to the intellect. He moved that function into the brain, and sets up the idea that the mind is not completely fallen. His work prepares the way for the Roman Church to declare that the intellect can be more-or-less morally perfected, that it can be fully redeemed while in this life. That perception is the foundation for how the Roman Church has turned out.

I’m not claiming credit for originating this criticism. Granted, I have yet to find anyone else who says it like this, but I’m sure others have grasped this before me. I learned heart-led as a conscious notion from non-Christian sources. It’s inherent in the traditions of the Ancient Near East, and very obviously consistent with the ancient Hebrew traditions, though seldom directly explained in studies on that. Even standard commentaries you find in Christian homes will tell you the Bible sees the heart as the seat of the will, in the sense of commitment and faith. But it is also consistent with some of the pagan philosophical stuff you can find in more recent writings. There are some very bright non-Christians who picked up on this as they struggled to find something deeper than Western Christian theology. But even among pagans, the heart-led way tends to be a minority view.

Still, we can be sure that the whole concept of the heart as a sensory organ and a distinctly separate “mind” that can process what it senses, and as a superior source of understanding of philosophical issues is nothing new. It is the best explanation so far for what I have lived with most of my life, and answered all my questions about faith. It soothed all my soul’s wounds from the abuse at the hands of a world that prefers Augustine’s approach. I won’t tell you this is God’s answer to all humanity; it’s the answer that works for me.

Standing on Augustine is an excellent start down the path of criticism for the Enlightenment and everything that follows it. But all that does is drag things back as far as Augustine. We still need to be aware of Augustine’s major failure. Not that he consciously rejected the truth of the heart-led way, but that it was lost and buried by the time he came along. We can find glimmers of that higher path of the heart throughout Church History, but it was almost always the view that was rejected and squelched by the mainstream. We can thank Augustine for that.

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments