Heart of Faith: Chapter 2

Posted on April 6, 2015 by ehurst

Chapter 2 — Sensory Heart Science

Look up the term “bioelectromagnetics” — as a branch of science, it’s been around awhile. While the bulk of research is aimed at exploring how electromagnetic fields affect biology, some scientists have discovered that the human body generates its own fields.

We have long known that the human body has its own electrical currents. The nerves in our bodies form a network for passing information via both chemistry and electrical currents. It’s pretty low power because that’s all it takes. And wherever there is electrical current, there is usually a certain amount of electromagnetism. Since the brain is a tightly packed bundle of neurons and electrical activity, it stands to reason that it offers a measurable electromagnetic field. However, being so weak, you just about have to keep your instruments in close proximity, if not directly against, the head.

If you introduce a stronger electrical impulse to the head, you can wipe away memories. Recently, research indicates you can also plant false memories with carefully tailored electromagnetic interference. The field around the brain isn’t that strong, so it doesn’t take much to knock it around. A hand-held battery is enough to operate tasers that pretty much shut the whole thing down.

What keeps tasers from being consistently fatal is that the heart has its own electrical system that is considerably stronger than the primary nervous system. Indeed, the heart has its own neural network, running parallel to the brain’s nervous system. It’s so much more powerful that scientists have discovered that the electromagnetic field generated by the cardiac system is thousands of times stronger than the one from the brain. In fact, the heart’s field is measurable as much as fifteen feet (4.5m) away from the body.

This heart field has its own resonance. While the equipment used to measure this can detect a reaction with the presence of other hearts within range of the field, few scientists pretend to know much about just what it is that reaction does. That is, we don’t have any real scientific details about how two human hearts interact, only that they do. There’s an obvious and largely untapped potential there. Further, the resonance responds to the presence of a wide range of other living things, including plants or even some supposedly inert objects.

So it’s a simple matter of fact that the heart is a sensory organ in its own right. But beyond that fact, the science gets pretty murky. I would suggest part of the problem is that scientists still tend to associate emotions with the heart. That is, you can find a lot of effort to use this information as a means of giving the mind a better connection to human emotions. Even when scientists recognize that the heart has its own “brain” of sorts, they tend to assume the intelligence in that brain is closely associated with emotions. It seems as if it never occurs to them to look elsewhere in human nature.

Perhaps that’s because science in the West remains trapped in Western assumptions, particularly as found in the teaching of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He taught that the universe was a unitary entity. While he gave room for the existence of non-physical beings, he insisted they were confined to this universe. Materialism is written into his basic assumptions about reality. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t encounter Ancient Near Eastern philosophers who traveled the entire Mediterranean Basin, but if so, he consciously rejected their notion of a distinctly separate Realm of the Spirit. So it is that modern Western science just assumes such as reality and makes no room for human nature beyond the material and rational.

Indeed, this is such a pervasive assumption that it affects Western Christianity. Despite parroting the words of Scripture that flatly state we have at least potentially a spiritual component, you end up with Christians instinctively picturing “eternity” as unlimited time, instead of time being no longer a factor at all. We suffer a similar mental image about the Spirit Realm regarding the space factor. We cannot imagine an existence that is not affected by time and space. So we read that bias back into the Bible and come up with a lot of false notions about what it says.

But saddest of all is that Christians seem to have ignored the entire field of study about the heart as a sensory organ. I’ve not found any major Christian teachers addressing this in writing. How do we suppose Paul was able to tell that a certain disabled man had faith to be healed (Acts 14:9)? Did Paul have long-range clinical analytical abilities? Or would we prefer to think of God’s power as murky as magic? Would it not make more sense to envision that he was within range of the literal heart-to-heart sensory field?

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Heart of Faith: Chapter 1

Posted on April 5, 2015 by ehurst

Hebrew Outlook

On the one hand, we need very much to correct the Western assumptions. Even very scholarly Christians tend to operate from perverted Western notions without giving it much thought. We can call them “perverted” because they are entirely heathen in nature, arising from outside the ancient biblical traditions. On the one hand, Western Civilization owes a great debt to ancient Greece and Rome for a rational organization, but the deeper mythology of what it means to be human comes from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture that absorbed what was left of Greco-Roman Civilization. Both were at times even anti-Christian, so for the organized Church hierarchy to adopt any part of it was a moral and spiritual compromise. Yet the Church embraced it wholly. Far too much of that heathen background still deeply stains mainstream Western Christianity today.

On the other hand, it would be very easy to get lost in the details. My previous books (see A Course in Biblical Mysticism and Biblical Morality for examples) only introduce the vast ocean of differences between Western Civilization and the Ancient Near Eastern outlook in the Bible. Even then, such studies restrict themselves to what Westerners already know from their own attempts to understand Ancient Near Eastern culture and intellect. It’s not as if we could simply become a part of that ancient way of life, but if we don’t get a feel for the differences, we make no room for the Bible to speak. That the differences are significant is simply too obvious to anyone willing to take a brief look. If you haven’t pursued this before, you may struggle a bit. In this book, I’ll simply ask you to be aware of it until you have time to verify my assertions later.

The Bible authors assumed that the reader was possessed of the Ancient Near Eastern background that dominated their world. Thus, you don’t find Jesus or the Apostles railing directly against Hellenism because virtually no one in their world called it that. Rather, Christ spoke in terms of how things ought to be, which was always consistent with the ancient Hebrew viewpoint. From our standpoint today, we can easily see how Jewish scholars had swallowed an entirely new and different intellectual orientation that Alexander the Great had evangelized during his conquests in that part of the world. We have to take the time to roll back that momentous shift in thinking and recover those ancient biblical assumptions.

In terms of cosmology, Hebrew thought presumes ultimate reality is the Spirit Realm. That realm of existence is entirely separate and different from our existence here in this world. It’s not a difference in location, but a difference in quality. Ours is more like a restricted pocket, almost an artificial construct, within the Spirit Realm. You can in theory touch the Spirit Realm any time because it is the fundamental realm of existence in the first place. However, we are generally separated from it by our fallen nature.

Creation is not limited to our plane of existence, but we could hardly grasp anything outside of our portion. Ours is the lowest, the most “dumbed-down” part of existence. Where we are is rather like the bottom of the well, where it always dark, dank and confined. We experience here the limitations of time and space, but the rest of Creation suffers no such thing.

God’s existence is rooted outside our domain. We are inside of a highly constrained bubble of existence that He holds in His hand. We are forced to use all sorts of metaphors, figures of speech, parables and symbolism to begin addressing what we need to know about things outside this realm, and that includes God. All we can do is characterize Him, and it will always vary with the context, because He is simply outside of all our categories of mental grasp. To imagine that we can make Him consistent with our logical categories is frankly blasphemy. It’s not just false and misleading, but downright sinful.

In broad terms, the Bible indicates that God made our world and placed us in it on far better terms than we experience now. We were the pinnacle of Creation in terms of this world. It would be silly to suggest that the universe exists for us. Rather, the Bible indicates that the universe exists for God’s glory. In terms of our focus on the question, everything exists to draw our attention to His glory. Not merely as passive entertainment, we are supposed to participate in making His glory apparent. Initially, we did that reflexively as stewards of His Creation.

Something changed all of that. The change was not in Creation itself, but in us. Whatever else is meant by the term “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” it symbolizes a decision to make judgments about good and evil apart from God’s revelation. It amounts to usurping God’s authority and making ourselves our own gods.

Why this doesn’t work too well is not immediately apparent. While Western minds can obviously catch onto the arrogance of this choice, there’s much more to it than that. Human faculties are utterly incapable of judging such things. We are taught in Western education that human reason is the highest possible faculty, that intellect holds to key to conquering the universe. If we can just remove all the impediments to our intelligence, there is nothing we can’t do. Such is the essence of the Fall. To imagine that Creation can be brought under the control of human hands is sheer madness.

If God creates anything at all, He weaves His own moral character into everything. That is part of how it glorifies Him. Creation is not merely a passive lump of matter, but He breathes into it His personality. We don’t take seriously enough Paul’s characterization of Creation as a living thing that longs for His glory to become apparent (Romans 8:18ff). It’s not a question of objective fact; you could never prove it on those terms. Rather, in our existence here we should act as if Creation itself desires His glory, because Creation is programmed to respond to His glory shining through us. Paul insists that it makes a difference in how things happen to us, and Jesus surely demonstrated it by His miracles. Whatever potential we might discover in this universe, it rests on understanding God’s character.

But the human mind is not up to the task — not by itself. The Bible repeatedly refers to the heart as the human faculty for understanding God’s character. It’s not enough to know His commandments, but there must be a firm commitment. And it’s not enough to be committed to the discipline of obedience, but God demands personal loyalty. Not just a reasonable loyalty, but a commitment that reaches beyond the grave. Human reason is incapable of justifying such a thing on its own terms. Even if you assert as a given that there is such a thing as the Spirit Realm on a higher level above our plane of existence, the mind does not possess the power to do more than organize or implement things. It requires another level of understanding that is above intellect and above the mind.

In the Ancient Near East, such talk would not have raised any significant questions. They took much of this for granted. It was so deeply enmeshed in their understanding of reality that no one had to explain it. For them, it was merely a question of who the god is that demands their loyalty (Acts 9:5). In our far different time, in a far distant place, we have lost contact with such an instinctive understanding. It requires a little more information to overcome our built in resistance.

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Psalm 44

Posted on April 4, 2015 by ehurst

Western scholars seem to be unsure whether the Sons of Korah wrote this or if it was simply dedicated to them. English translations vary on whether it is “by” or “for” them. Even more disturbing is the insinuation by Western scholars that this psalm accuses God of failing Israel when she was faithful. While they observe no other psalm seems to say this, they are shocked by the apparent sarcasm aimed at God, despite having nowhere else to turn.

Here we need to repeat the lesson of Job: Sometimes God does stuff that makes no sense to us, and we have no reason to expect He is accountable to us. If there is one lesson Israel most needed reminding of, particularly leading up to the Exile, it was that no human entity has God over a barrel. Even God’s Chosen People face suffering and sorrow that seems entirely unconnected with anything they understand, and it has not changed after Christ. Our God portrays Himself as a mysterious and imperious Eastern Potentate, with concerns far beyond our imagination. He is God and we are not. That this seems so foreign to Western sensibilities should serve as a warning that Christians need to pay more attention to the cultural background of Jesus, who was an Eastern man founding a new Eastern religion that was built on top an ancient Eastern religion and culture. Despite the tone here, we have no reason to suspect the psalmist isn’t aware of the bigger picture, but is simply telling how it feels.

So the psalm starts out describing how the nation had a long record of God’s covenant faithfulness. The Conquest of Canaan Land was all about God’s power and glory. The army of Israel was just along for the ride, going through the motions as commanded. Then it gets personal: “You are my king!” This is followed by a call for God to repeat in that time what He had done during all those past centuries, showing His power over the enemies of Israel. This is the boast by which Israel taunted their vanquished enemies.

Then comes the anguished cry. What happened, Lord? Now we are being slaughtered in battle. The psalmist feels the nation was sold cheaply. And it is now the enemy who taunts Israel in the name of their heathen gods. The psalmist insists they have been faithful and cannot imagine how they might have transgressed the Covenant in such a way as to bring this upon their heads. Did God fall asleep on them? This is how it feels when the inexplicable things come into our lives, and very much how it felt for Job.

The final verse is a renewed call for God to rescue them on the basis of His own character. They aren’t going to get help anywhere else.

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Heart of Faith: Intro

Posted on April 4, 2015 by ehurst

It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. Ours is the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.

Early Christians were very Hebraic. This is not the same thing as the Hellenized Judaism of Christ’s day and that we still see today. Rather, Christ was calling His people back to the ancient Hebrew perspective that predated Greece and Rome. He called them back to the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual assumptions about life and reality itself. The Old Testament arose within that frame of reference, and simply cannot be understood from a Western viewpoint.

The Bible speaks consistently of the heart as the seat of the will, the driving sense of commitment to eternal values and questions of morality. Scripture further presumes the reader understands that the heart is superior to the mind. Human intellect was treated as an extension of the fallen fleshly nature, incapable of dealing with genuine moral considerations. Rather, the heart was where real decisions in life were made. The mind could smother the voice of the heart, but it could in no wise do the same work.

Whatever it is that God has to tell us, He speaks to our hearts, not to our minds. In order to understand how this works, we need to go back and rebuild the ancient Hebrew cosmology and anthropology.

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Heart of Faith: Front Matter

Posted on April 3, 2015 by ehurst

Serializing the draft of my next book under the working title “Heart of Faith.”

Smashwords requires an advertising blurb for each book. They want a long and short version.

Short: Your heart is not simply a metaphor of feelings, but a genuine sensory organ. It also has its own parallel neuron network and even a brain. Biological science can tell you that much, but for Christians, the Bible revealed long ago that your heart is the only part of you capable of hearing God’s voice.

Long:It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. It’s the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.

Preface

It is impossible to write this book without at times stepping into a first-person narrative. The very nature of what I hope to accomplish requires that you understand the intensely personal nature of God’s truth.

God is a Person, not some impersonal force out there in the cosmos. Further, all truth is a reflection of His character. There is no objective body of factual truth except in the wild imagination of Western rationalists. The Bible says flatly that God can remake reality on-the-fly and that all things are wholly subject to His whim. When He decides to let us see Him doing it, we call it “miracle” — otherwise we would never know the difference. All of reality remains entirely dependent on His attention, and Scripture affirms His interest does not wax and wane like ours does.

While there is a vast body of common experience in Christian faith, there is plenty that is of necessity entirely unique to the individual. The Western reflex to emphasize the common can literally smother the unique. Even Western liberalism trades one set of enforced conformity for another against Western conservatism, so this is not a question of those competing philosophies. The Bible is neither, but a wholly different kind of approach to thinking.

That’s what I aim to show you in this book, but I can only tell you what I have learned and experienced first-hand. You are bound to find that some of this simply cannot apply to you. It is between God and you. God makes His own path in each human soul.

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Proverbs 7

Posted on April 2, 2015 by ehurst

Solomon has seen it all. While at her pinnacle the Kingdom of Israel was never large enough to be called an empire, she was the single most stable and prosperous nation in a sea of instability. Previous empires had already declined and those not yet born suffered internal chaos. The timing was perfect for a man of unprecedented wisdom and good fortune to draw the attention of numerous foreign powers there at the crossroads of three continents. What he had not seen directly, Solomon learned from the constant flow of traffic seeking his court.

If the New Testament hammers home the message that human sexuality is easily one of the greatest gifts of God, and at the same time, the single greatest threat to personal holiness, the authors learned it from the likes of Solomon. If any man knew such danger, it was the man with far too many wives and concubines. In the midst of this, he still found such a severe threat from adultery that he continues to hammer on it from every possible angle. In this chapter, it’s all about the personal weakness to temptation.

He begins by echoing the symbolic references in the Law of Moses about tying God’s revelation on your arms and writing it on your forehead. However, Solomon makes the point that if you don’t write it on your heart — if you aren’t fully committed with a strong moral fiber — all the revelation in the world won’t help you. Make God’s truth your best friend, he says.

Please note that, while he might imagine he has cause for demeaning women in general, Solomon is careful to confine his repeated warnings to adulterous women. This translates well into the modern recognition of what some behavioral scientists refer to as “hypergamy.” While our modern Western culture denies it, woman are wired to always seek a better mate. Feminine ambition in nest-building is popularly portrayed as an anomaly, as if it’s some kind of perversion from the more natural “pure” female instincts. Mosaic Law recognized the truth by building barriers against that very normal instinct. However, with all the strictures, we see that Hebrew society remained relaxed enough for adultery to be a problem.

It’s not as if Solomon portrays women as the greater threat to social stability. Rather, it is the difference between how the two sexes threaten shalom. It’s easy to forget that the Law of Moses came from the mouth of our Creator. It reflects reality as He made it. When it comes to sexual immorality, the biggest problem with men is their passivity. In the Hebrew society, there was a complete absence of the mythology of a man pursuing a woman’s favor. Lacking that myth, men were more likely to restrain themselves than women.

Thus, the archetype for adultery is the wily woman seducing a foolish man. Solomon paints a very sharp, detailed portrait of this. As is typical of Hebrew literature, there are elements of hyperbole. Still, the essence of the image rings true, particularly in the final result. In ancient Hebrew society, the man who surrendered to such enticements was doomed in every way. If he wasn’t executed outright with her, he became financially liable to the husband. The fool was making himself a slave to the woman and her husband’s justified wrath. That his wife was fundamentally the cause didn’t change things; it was hardly unknown for a man to marry a loose woman as a social pretense to cover his predatory scheming.

Solomon finally warns his readers to keep their hearts in charge, and not allow the mind and lusts to take control. The mind has no inherent morality, and will simply serve to implement whatever the will chooses. If the heart is silenced from its moral awareness, all that’s left is mere logic, and that’s not enough to keep us from sin. Further, we dare not forget that adultery itself is also an image of idolatry in general. All kinds of sweet temptations can turn into an adulteress-in-effect.

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Heart Mind

Posted on April 2, 2015 by ehurst

Just a quick note…

Part of the failure of the various scientific approaches to understanding the heart’s neuron network is that they don’t go far enough. The secular scientific approach recognizes the heart has a very active and powerful sensory field, but they leave it at that. They don’t go on to recognize that the heart has its own form of intelligence.

We really don’t have the language to describe it. How do you describe something superior to intelligence? God gave us the heart to lead the mind, so even using the language to call it a superior form of intelligence tends to weaken the concept. The heart is far more than another sensory organ, but internally for it’s very like the difference between human intellect and divine wisdom. God created human intelligence, so there’s no comparison between God’s kind of thinking and ours.

The heart’s “thinking” is more like God’s in the sense that it “thinks” in terms of eternal moral necessity. God designed the heart, not only to perceive His character directly, but to process that perception for us independently of the brain. If the brain is alert and ready to submit to the heart, then the brain can be guided in its inferior kind of reasoning and logic to implement our effort to live according to ultimate reality.

The heart is quantum intelligence. When the mind surrenders to the reign of the heart, those lesser intellectual capabilities are enhanced. You gain a kind of assurance and purpose that clarifies everything. The mind is inherently more effective when the heart rules.

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Next Project: Sensory Heart

Posted on April 1, 2015 by ehurst

I know it’s April Fool’s Day, but I have something serious in mind here.

This won’t work if I put it together like my other books.

God is a Person; His revelation teaches us to treat His Creation as a living thing. Revelation also points us to a communion with Creation as each of us is a part of Creation. It’s not a “doing” nor precisely a matter of “being.” It’s an “I am” kind of thing, though when describing it in English, the difference is hard to state.

We aren’t lost or absorbed, per se, but voluntarily immerse ourselves. There are elements that outlive our human existence because they are eternal. We are connecting ourselves to Eternity, and it simply isn’t possible unless some part of us belongs to it. However, there are other elements of this that remain ephemeral and momentary, in that it requires an active effort to drag the resistant flesh around as Eternity moves us through this world.

We cannot pretend to really understand it all; human language breaks down under the strain of describing it. The Bible presents it mostly in terms of covenant relations with God. The two primary Law Covenants (Moses and Noah) don’t offer much direct reference to what they really mean. You are supposed to realize that on your own. There is something in the covenants themselves that call to your higher faculties. It’s really up to you how much of that you seize upon and connect to what’s behind it all.

The Bible was written by mystically minded people, in a mystical language about a mystical grasp on something forever beyond mere words. Christianity was born an Eastern religion because Old Testament religion was also Eastern in nature. The Hellenization of OT religion into Judaism was a damnable perversion, and the Westernizing of Christianity is likewise damnable.

There is no such thing as “propositional truth.”

So it’s not crazy and weird to suggest that what our Creator intended is all mystical and ineffable. That’s His nature, insofar as any part of His Creation can even pretend to know Him. That means you and I.

It is not that we are the purpose behind the rest of Creation, but that God’s witness to us required all the things we experience in our universe. The vastness of Creation is pitifully tiny in God’s reckoning, something He put together with unspeakable wisdom and skill in just a few days. You can immerse yourself in what your senses and logic can grasp, but you cannot get to know God that way. You have to rise above human reason and intellect, because relying on that is the very essence of the Fall. You have to awaken higher faculties. You have to connect on a different level, so that your mind becomes a mere servant, an executive organizer that implements what God requires. God does not address Himself to the human intellect. He speaks only to the spirit and heart.

The heart is a sensory organ with it’s own “brain” and is far more powerful than the intellect. That much is simply scientific fact. You can read the highly academic papers and books of Stanford University biologist Jan Walleczek and associates; they are hard to find and often expensive to access. You can also find the much more accessible Heart Math Institute, so long as you realize that it’s wrapped in a high pressure sales pitch. I’ll point you to the landing page for their basic explanation, but warn you that it’s all about drawing you in, almost like a cult.

For our purposes, it is enough to simply note the facts for those of you who simply cannot proceed without a valid factual basis: The heart has a measurable sensory field and interacts with other fields, particularly the measurable energy fields around other living things. The scientists can detect a field presence extending about ten or fifteen feet (3-4.5m). What they cannot tell you is that your own heart can interact with living creatures in Creation much farther out. In general, the scientific approach doesn’t yield a whole lot for the investment. It requires a massive cerebral effort for a tiny improvement in your existence. If your mind remains in control, you really can’t get very far. I assure you it’s better than nothing, but nothing like the approach hinted at in Scripture.

The Bible points you to a path that takes you face to face with God. It cannot be factual; it is wholly personal. There will be obvious similarities with those who share this gift, but as a whole, it grows as something utterly unique to you. That’s because the whole point is to awaken parts of yourself that have been silenced by science and all that it represents. We don’t give you something you don’t already have. God put it there. So far as anyone can tell, He put it into every living soul, not to mention every other creature that lives. Indeed, it connects directly to matter itself. This connected-ness is fundamental to Creation, and is a direct reflection of God’s own personal character.

So when I begin putting this together, it will of necessity be in the first person voice, for example. It’s personal. But I’m not willing to confine this to what I have experienced myself. It will inevitably include some of the work from Sister Christine. I’ll be including some of my wife’s story. Some of you could probably write or at least relate your own experience with this awakened communion with Creation. If you are willing to share your own witness to the truth with us, let me know.

Sure, you can fake it. A decent writer could splash out all sorts of goop that sounds like what I’ve written above and the rest of us would never know. There’s no way to prevent that. But those of you who understand what this is about will surely grasp how there is no particular interest in exercising that kind of editorial control and “fact checking.” That’s because, in the final analysis, God knows the truth about you. If you use His name in vain to manipulate others for some imaginary personal gain, He won’t let it slide.

But the whole point is my firm conviction that this particular part of God’s ineffable truth is within reach of all humanity, including those who remain spiritually dead. There is something about the mercy of God expressed in His Law Covenants that calls to all of humanity with a measure of redemption. That was the purpose of the Law as Law. You can decide how much of it you want. I am convinced that you need not be “born again” to experience the living moral sphere of God’s Creation. What’s missing is the background that permits folks to be open to such a sphere.

We can’t remake society, and certainly cannot correct the massive deception that is Western Civilization, but we can give people an exit ramp that takes them off that vast highway to Hell on earth. There is sufficient scientific research to draw attention to that ramp. Everyone living can surrender their intellect to the higher faculties of the heart, which is really the only way you can properly understand God’s Word. The Bible itself frequently refers to this faculty, but Westerners have been taught to read it as a figure of speech. We need to awaken this thing in every soul that we can possibly touch with the truth.

Nobody will make any money from this project, and the resulting written product will remain free, available in multiple formats. Nothing is aimed at controlling the outcomes. Nobody will be asked to join anything, only commit themselves to what they can discern from their own heart-mind. Go ahead and write your own book if you like; it’s not a competition for some limited resource. This stuff won’t change the world. It could awaken a few more souls to what the world actually is. It won’t take much for readers to realize why it’s worth any investment of our personal resources. How can we who sense this reality keep it to ourselves? The moral fabric of Creation itself demands we do this.

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Unintended Confirmations

Posted on March 31, 2015 by ehurst

One of our fundamental teachings here is that God’s character pervades the whole universe. Regardless of apparent facts, you won’t really begin to understand reality until you characterize it on some level as a living thing itself. On some level, reality itself is dynamic, and any perceived entropy is the result of moral blindness.

While human morality is going downhill as we approach the end point of God’s patience, you might be surprised to find that virtually nothing that shocks the conscience today is all that new. There is abundant evidence on a mere human level of understanding that this stuff ebbs and flows and is often simply hidden from popular perception. So we end up having to discard our notions about just what it is that will trigger the final judgment of our Creator, recognizing that it’s nothing you and I could possibly understand. What the Bible does reveal are symptoms of decline. The cause is something more fundamental and less overt, something which reason alone is simply not sufficient to discern. Human depravity is not exactly cyclical in itself, but it’s more a matter of what we notice.

Thus, John’s book of Revelation is not actually about events, but fundamentally about types and trends.

There are distinct boundaries written into human nature, just as they are in the rest of Creation. There are any number of myths about how far Creation can be adapted by human intelligence, as well as myths about how concerted effort could eventually change human nature itself. We are both the pinnacle of Creation and very much a part of it. Fundamental to our fallen nature is rejecting the Fall. So you’ll run across any number of reasonable-sounding theories about where the human race could go if only we make a few adjustments. But that’s been tried and failed repeatedly in history. A primary example is the Tower of Babylon.

Not as proof, but we cite such things as symbolic examples that illustrate the truth. Truth becomes self-evident if your heart can make itself heard over the programmed cacophony of fallen human imagination. We see it in recent history and we can see it at work today on multiple scales.

If you read much at all about Scientology, never mind whether there is any truth in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and related theoretical work, you realize that the organization currently has hit the wall. Efforts to control and regiment in minute detail all outcomes is unraveling. Statistics are hard to pin down because of organizational secrecy, but one gets the impression there are growing waves of defection and the membership numbers are suffering. The income streams are threatened by the church’s inability to avoid negative publicity. Whether or not it’s about the money might be subject to debate, but there’s no doubt the organization as we know it would cease to exist without the vast property holdings.

Indeed, many defectors argue that the real power of Hubbard’s teachings are buried behind the courtship of celebrities and relentless doctrinaire pushing of failed projects. That a significant portion of the membership is unaware of the inner workings is manifestly obvious. My point is that the organization as a human entity has reached the failure point in part because it ignores the limits of human tolerance, both among members and outsiders.

You might have noticed their lawyers aren’t fighting nearly as hard today as they have in the past. There was a time they were able to intimidate the IRS into making a deal over their tax exempt status, but these days they seem unable to sustain the protracted avalanche of legal pressure against even small private organizations, not to mention local and state governments.

Lots of cults have come and gone during my lifetime. We’ve already seen the rise of numerous major splits and splinter groups in mainstream religious institutions, as well. Some of you may remember the Anglican Church not long ago shifted official policies about ordination and lost whole congregations, and rival hierarchy offices that undercut the old geographical structures with parallel identities. The traditional leadership offices are losing their claim on legitimacy. The older organization was already in steep decline, but the splinter groups are often quite active and growing. This is one step away from total separation, and the euphemism for this is Anglican Realignment.

Historically we recognize the Anglican Church as the first successful organizational departure from the Roman Catholic Church. That is, Anglicans were “protestant” only in being out from under the Roman Pontiff, but otherwise hardly that different in terms of how things are done. Of course, over the centuries the two have drifted farther apart. Meanwhile, the Roman Church still suffers from splintering. Ignoring protests from any significant identifiable minority, or simply failing to accommodate them, guarantees schism, regardless of whether one considers them justified. Today in Brazil a significant splinter group of bishops and priests are demanding a return to conditions prior to Vatican II. They are partly reviving a previous splintering that claimed the name of Pope Pius X; their current label is “The Resistance.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we have any number of notorious American Catholic nuns demanding even more liberal reforms. One has to wonder just how little it would take for a complete split of American styled Catholicism from the Roman hierarchy, with so very much passive resistance to the ancient traditions already boiling beneath the surface. This stands against the background of a very shaky federal grasp on the states and any number of rising resistance movements.

In each case, you could as a member of the organization pretend that there is something sacred at work, that God is on one side of the debate or another. You could insist that any failures are simply the work of the Devil. Try to convince outsiders if you can, but you’ll likely run into a skepticism and even cynicism that you are lying, that it’s mere propaganda.

From a secular point of view, it would be very easy to get lost in analyzing all the details. We can’t predict the point of failure until we get much closer to it, when the people involved finally decide they can’t go any farther. That’s my whole point here: When leadership refuses to recognize that people have hard-wired limitations in their adaptation to demands from the system, the system will surely dissolve. When it does, internal pressures can be sufficient to cause explosions of some sort.

And to what do people turn as their instinctive safety net when all Hell breaks loose? It’s always some form of tribalism. That simply demonstrates how we are wired. But if you embrace that truth and go back to discover God’s revealed form of human government, you’ll find that no shepherd-led social structure ever fell apart.

It’s not that we are any better. Our only claim is that we never expected much in the first place. When any human activity starts down the path of organization, there is a fundamental moral fabric at work that you cannot ignore. Ignore that and your efforts are doomed. Embrace that and you at least won’t have to worry about internal failure. There are plenty of organizations in this world I consider evil to varying degrees, but they persist purely on the grounds that they remain tribal in structure.

Humanity continually confirms the Word of God, despite itself.

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Prayer Update

Posted on March 30, 2015 by ehurst

First, God alone knows how grateful I am that some of you are praying with me. I wish I could tell you, but it’s off the scale.

The torn muscles in my left leg are almost healed. I am very near to previous activity level, so thank you for joining in that prayer. It’s working!

We finally got a starter relay for the car. You’d be amazed how confusing the websites are about what they have decided to call it, versus what Volvo calls it. The old one was bad, but it didn’t fix the problem. Later today I’m pulling the starter and I’ll take it to the parts house to see how long it takes to get another (approx. cost is US $120 $150). At least this is fairly easy to access.

The old static site is now closed. If you run across a broken link in my older blog posts referencing soulkiln.org, let me know. I’ll be fixing the links for a long time to come, I suspect, since we are looking at more than 5 years’ worth of posts. Reason for closing it? The thing ran its course and served its purpose, but the ministry has moved beyond what I could do with that site. I pulled all the content into my books or here on the blog, including some PDF files. My heart told me it was time to let that old project die.

For now I’m going to continue with posting the chapter studies in Proverbs and keeping an eye on things I’ve been called to watch. Always, always always — I am your pastor if you need. I’m semi-retired and have plenty of time. Check my “About” page for a link to my resume if you want to know the various ways to get hold of me.

Thanks again for praying with me.

Update: Got the new starter put in. It tries hard to turn the motor, but the engine won’t spin at all. Now I’m stumped. This calls for someone with more expertise.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments