Forgive

Posted on February 13, 2014 by ehurst

The issue of forgiveness has long been pickled in lies.

Western Christians struggle against the unconscious Anglo-Saxon world view, the dreary world of Beowulf. All the attempts to brighten things with affirmations and positive celebrations still reflects the merriment of inebriation, since that is the only way Anglo-Saxons knew to be lighthearted. The Anglo-Saxon version of God was brooding and dark, like some moody and tired old warrior. You might be able to amuse Him, but He remains essentially a grouch. Even when the images have faded, the underlying assumptions about reality persist. Anyone familiar with studies in comparative civilizations will recognize it immediately.

So it’s no surprise that most Western Christians don’t have a full grasp of the what Bible says about forgiveness. Most of them assume without question that it must include a measure of emotion, that you haven’t forgiven if you don’t restore the full range of warmth and affection emotionally. This is simply not true, and it’s a very big barrier to Christian growth. It creates a false piety by necessity, in which at an early age Christians are taught to submerge certain feelings that are not permitted because they are somehow sinful, despite being entirely right and natural in God’s eyes. It only complicates things when the equally flawed religious liberalism twists matters in yet another flavor of the same mythology.

In the first place, sin is fundamentally arguing with God. It won’t matter where the argument comes from; the issue is you don’t accept revelation. Something inside of you raises competing demands to play God. All sin is first and foremost an affront to God in His majesty as Creator. It’s personal. Though your sin may be directed against one or more fellow humans, it remains primarily an affront to God as Maker of those humans. He is the only one with standing to sue for the loss. He is the one with whom all moral accounts must first be settled.

This business of Satan, somehow imagined as an equal opposing force, is utterly anti-biblical. Satan serves God. He was demoted from some better position to that of Divine Lictor and Jailer. It helps if you imagine that Satan is incensed at what he considers an unjust demotion, but his spite is aimed at us. Satan will slake his embarrassment on us. When you refuse to stand in God’s favor, you find yourself under the authority of Satan. Satan cannot do anything God doesn’t allow; God never allows Satan to tempt you with things God didn’t make you capable of bearing. Your problem — my problem — is that we keep drifting away from the safety zone and into Satan’s clutches.

The second issue is that sin is best understood as taking something, causing a loss, creating a debt. Injustice against God’s moral character places you in debt to God, a form of slavery. Satan is God’s collection agency. You are placing chains upon your moral existence in this earth. Using the term “spiritual” is simply inappropriate because Western Christians insist on mixing the Two Realms. Scripture addresses it primarily as a hindrance to your mission here below and a failure to shed the chains and weights of unsettled debts. Debt is slavery; it places upon you obligations to someone who may not have your best interests at heart.

Inasmuch as someone’s sin affects you, they owe you. There is a moral balance sheet. They need to clean up the mess they made in your life. Your job is to take the issue to God and ask for terms of settlement: What does He regard as a just settlement of the issue? While it may not be possible for you to address the debtor directly, in your own mind you need to grasp the moral terms of release (only vaguely connected to actual monetary value in the mundane sense). Making amends does not require a formal apology with the implied groveling as we view it in our Western minds, but more properly in Eastern terms where a debt indicates a very confined and limited liability. (Westerners are oblivious to the biblical concept of roles and limited dominion.)

At some point, carrying that load of debt owed to you will weigh on you, too. So you decide to write it off. That’s the higher meaning of Jubilee years, though carrying a grudge for fifty years is a bit much, showing that the moral implications are not limited to a literal meaning. There are thousands of Jubilee moments in your life when debts have to be expunged from your moral reckoning and you move on.

Thus, forgiving someone has nothing to do with feelings. You aren’t required to “forget” in the Western moral reckoning, with all the hugs and kisses. You are allowed to remember that this person should not be trusted again; you do this because you already know you can’t trust yourself for very much. Distrust is not a sin and has no bearing on this issue. Forgiveness is not pretending it never happened; that’s an Anglo-Saxon myth. The imagery in Scripture of how God handles our sin is stated in Ancient Near Eastern terms, and you shouldn’t read an alien mythology back into it. It’s recognizing you couldn’t pay what you owe God, so it shouldn’t surprise you that human weakness prevents them repaying what they owe you.

Thus, you should learn to forgive yourself on the same terms. All those fine schools of psychology are just models of human complexity that allow us to address the few things within our reach. The reality is too complex; it’s like the difference between real spacecraft and your cheap paper-n-plastic model rocket. There is enough similarity that we can learn something useful. In some ways, we humans act as if there are several persons within our heads. Recognizing conflicting demands inside your soul is perfectly normal. You should hardly be surprised to discover one part of you holds a grudge against some other part. Declare a psychic Jubilee on yourself and silence the unreasonable demands when you discover false debts internally.

By now, perhaps you realize the single greatest problem here is the vast burden of our Western Christian mythology. It boggles the mind how often you can encounter a vociferous assertion that God must be shaped in our minds under the world view of Beowulf with a mixture of Greco-Roman folly, as well. There remains a vast archive of Christian literature still held as authoritative today that mistakenly asserts the dire necessity of clinging to this foul stew of Western mythology. This raises a false view of God to the point it become idolatry, a false god in itself. I realize what a burdensome task it is to wade through all the competing approaches you might find in Ancient Near Eastern literature, both common and obscure. That does not excuse the foolish insistence on choosing some other falsehood simply because it’s a different flavor. It is well within the reach of ordinary human scholarship to recognize the unique Eastern approach in Scripture, without fouling it up by splashing Western mythology all over it.

We stand today inheritors of an ocean of intellectual and moral sewage. We are stuck with a mainstream Western Christianity that is loaded with nonsense. It’s bad enough every individual carries their own personal mixed mythologies, but we suffer under leadership that can be downright oppressive and vicious in defending the subtle lies of culture as the only way God permits us to think.

Beowulf is not Scripture.

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Psychatrickiness

Posted on February 12, 2014 by ehurst

God revealed Himself in a human context. To address the fallen human condition, God declared Himself in terms of what He requires of us, specifically explaining that such requirements are in our own best interest, because they line us up with the very nature of His Creation. He fully intended that we should read between the lines of His Law Codes to see His character. We are supposed to recognize His divine character in other manifestations. Anything coming along later that properly agrees with that character is a reflection of His commands and a reflection of Himself.

Pointing out these manifestations of God’s revelation from alternative sources is my calling, my mission on this blog. It’s the other edge of the same sword that points out where things fail to agree with God. All truth is God’s truth; all deception is a lie against God. All truth is a manifestation of God Himself.

I find that most of Western Civilization as a structure is itself a matrix of lies with very little truth. There are places and times where something arising from Western minds can approach God’s truth. Thus, I like the work of Dr. Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who said most of psychiatry was nonsense. This was no academic theory, but a recognition that the disease model of “mental health” was the single biggest flaw in the science of helping people integrate their consciousness with reality. He said the vast majority of such problems were moral, not a matter of illness.

Dr. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled) told us that neurosis was a failure to adjust to reality. Our human existence on this earth is supposed to suck; some suffering is entirely a legitimate fact of reality. If you don’t accept that, you’ll just create new artificial suffering that drives you deeper into neurosis. He wrote that while still a secularist, and this first book of his is the one I actually recommend to folks.

Then there was Dr. Eric Berne (Games People Play). He moved away from theory in the sense that it wasn’t necessary to analyze what’s in someone’s psyche. All we really need is a model for norming a person’s interactions with other people. Fix that and most everything else becomes manageable. The norming itself was a matter of function, based on some philosophical assumptions about human nature that just happen to accord with God’s revelation enough for Berne’s model — Transactional Analysis (TA) — to work well in many cases.

I don’t recommend reading all the books that attach to these men and their work, unless you already know it’s your calling to do so. It’s enough that you are acquainted with some basics of their ideas. For example, we see that TA relies heavily on assumed roles in human interactions. Related work by Dr. Thomas Gordon of Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) fame makes much of the idea of domain, in the sense of taking ownership of some problems along appropriate refusal of others. It echoes that old “Prayer of Serenity” — some things you cannot change so you learn to live with them. If you feel the urge to read some of this stuff, I suppose any of Gordon’s books would be the least wasteful of your time; there’s also one for Teachers (TET) and leaders of other kinds (LET).

Let your cynical side remind you that all of these basic ideas have been turned into a highly commercialized franchise that carries things way too far. Deifying a reflection of truth is behind the warning in the Bible about worshiping the creature instead of the Creator. It’s more than just animals or inanimate objects, but ideas, too. Modern Judaism worships a foul caricature of God, deifying their understanding of His revelation, to the point they claim He is bound by their analysis of His commands (though they probably wouldn’t admit as much). That sort of craziness is built into Western Civilization.

But I use bits and pieces of all of these things, and a lot more from sources most Western Christians refuse to consider. I’m not smarter than anyone else, but I do know what God requires of me. That is, by degrees my discernment of whether something echoes His call on me sharpens daily. I am firmly convinced that He is able to do the same work in you, so I try to express elements of that journey here. There is no franchise here; I don’t take my self and my ideas that seriously, as if there were something universal in my discoveries. My hope is that you’ll recognize those bits and pieces that you can use because they sound like the call of God for you.

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Truth Is Just a Word

Posted on February 11, 2014 by ehurst

Over the years on this blog and in similar previous efforts, I’ve tried to explain the concept of Two Realms. I’m not the first. Well within our reach is the last chapter of the Lewis’s Narnia series of books, a chapter titled “Farewell to the Shadowlands” — a very pointed reference to our existence here below. I’ve referred to it in the past as “the prison of the soul” (1 Peter 3:18ff). At times I’ve approached a clinical explanation and even published a whole book of academic research reconstructing the ancient understanding of it. I contrast our existence on this plane of reality with something utterly beyond, the higher reality.

Most people can eventually get the concept itself. It’s not utterly foreign to our Western heritage, and most people can get it when I insist the Western mythology is all wrong about what that higher realm is like. I suppose most folks can even absorb at least some portion of my ANE version of it, at least in theory. They can grasp the idea that said higher realm is real truth, whereas what we have here is a shadowland of lies and other attempts to obscure the truth.

The problem is the huge conceptual gap between that and the facts with which we all have proceed. This is the task of explaining the moral fabric of the universe, a monumental job. Most folks have this overwhelming sense of having at least enough facts because it seems to work. What they don’t understand at some fundamental level is that this whole thing is conditional. Most of what seems to work does so only because there is a wider perception that it does, an artificial construct in itself. Let this context shift just a bit and the whole thing starts coming apart. But that exposes folks to such an alien reality that they often don’t see it. They can’t process it, or they process it very poorly. There is such a broad base of “ought to be” this and that, and the shock can be just too much.

So much of our social conformity is so deeply ingrained that I struggle to introduce corrective perception without choking my readers. If I tell you that the single greatest threat is indebtedness to any financial institution, you might get that, but see no way to proceed without it. Some people very close to me still can’t find a way to live within their means, despite a much bigger income than mine. Their shadow insists they must have certain things with a measure of availability that responds to the most ill-considered whims of the moment. Something in that unreality sounds in their ears like a siren call and they crash on the rocks repeatedly. For a time they pull back into some recovery mode, and then they build another boat and do it again. Something fails to touch that core of behavioral orientation and the unconscious process that keeps it alive.

Precious few souls are capable of making significant progress quickly once you point that out. But even pulling all that stuff out of the basement of the soul into the light of consciousness is only half the battle. They still have no idea what to do with it. They still keep changing the same old price tags on things, without realizing they are working in the wrong currency in the first place. The underlying value system is what’s wrong; that’s what got all those things crammed into the basement in the first place. Most of it is trash.

It’s one thing to swallow all the crazy Internet conspiracy theories that you encounter. It won’t matter how much fact informs the theory, as long as there is one grain of falsehood to distract. If it creates fear, TPTB will encourage it. Fear itself is what keeps this world system in place, wandering the shadows of falsehood. When you realize this life itself is not much to lose, it’s easier to wade through the shadows because you can orient on the light. You realize that the very solid looking barrier is just a shadow; push through it. We are still in the shadowlands for now, but we don’t have to believe in the shadows.

Yes, the single greatest slavery is the system of debt. It’s not a bad idea to whittle them away and get yourself out of personal debt, but almost every currency in use today is itself a form of debt. Every human entity today uses debt on both sides of the balance sheet because they don’t realize they can prosper without it. Even if they do, some wicked political authority will simply find an excuse to impute an involuntary debt, so most don’t try to see the system in-depth. They don’t look for ways to maximize independence.

If I try to identify the entities behind this broad system of control, readers are likely to be seized by some unconscious revulsion. We’ve been programmed by a false reality that makes certain discussions inherently wrong because they are socially forbidden. How do you sing the sweet truth when the very air itself filters out your voice? There are so very many tripwires programmed into human minds that any discussion is blown apart before the words can get through. The few who do get some portion of truth feel like they have to embrace the shadows because the facts are hidden behind the shadows. It’s not enough to toss out precise labels or to name names; there are multiple layers of shadows and each one hides yet another falsehood. It really is just a tiny minority of humanity that has managed, up to now, to control not just the perception, but the very eyeballs and nerve fibers of the rest of us.

It forces me to be guarded about what I post lest my blog disappear and my account suddenly cease to exist. No, I do not trust WordPress to do the good moral thing, because their very existence depends on a certain measure of keeping the shadows in place. So it’s pretty hard to avoid the impression I’m hiding secrets that I show only to certain initiates, or that I simply don’t have the knowledge or talent to express it. Rather than confront this thing head on, I’m finding a measure of success by working at a different angle, one that those in control cannot themselves understand very well.

I’m planting signs, subtle indicators that, if you really get what they mean, you are in a position to find it for yourself. Lord knows, there’s enough self-cynicism to distrust my own perceptions just for my own use that I don’t need to offer my own detailed analysis of everything. I remain confident that I can point out enough leaks that, instead of putting your finger in the dike to hold back the flow, you’ll probe and pick at it until you find your own stream of reality. The dike is just a bunch of dirt, no solid rock of truth, holding back the sea of lies.

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Politics Is Death

Posted on February 10, 2014 by ehurst

We have no stake in the politics of this world.

We have nothing to gain by using political force, even when it’s truly popular and democratic in nature. Rallying the troops is utterly inimical to Christ. The church was never meant to have a political structure recognized as such today. It was meant to have a family structure by which all influence was voluntary. The ultimate sanction was treating you as non-family. When things got really ugly, they could kick you out of the meeting the same as any household could kick out an unwanted visitor. The whole thing was private and any reference to external authorities was actively discouraged.

Notice the radical difference between the council in Acts 15 compared to the First Council of Nicea in 325. In Acts, the apostles used their own personal influence and the results were hardly good politics. Instead, the whole thing depended on voluntary cooperation from the churches. The critical issue was the apostles making sure their work in Gentile lands didn’t alienate the original Judean church leaders. It was mostly about keeping ritual peace between them, not changing any teachings. In the end, nobody argued that the Gentile churches (often including a few Hellenized Jewish converts) had to be Jewish, but that their practical expressions of faith should cling to certain elements of ancient Hebrew piety as universal. It was tantamount to allowing Jewish Christians to be Jewish in Christ while asking the Gentile Christians to be at least Noachide, which would have been consistent with the Old Testament (so far as genuine scholarship can determine).

The point was this new faith in Christ made no sense without a Hebrew outlook on what mattered in this world. As we read Paul’s letters, we see he pressed this even farther in requiring Gentile churches to adopt some critical elements of Hebrew lifestyle (like conservative clothing), while dropping plenty that didn’t matter (like male head coverings). This was the whole point in learning to “rightly divide the Word” — which would have been the Old Testament at that point.

In Nicea, the whole point was not the content of teaching but the political uniformity. Constantine maneuvered the church leadership into politicizing things with his civil authority behind the results. As a pagan, he cared not a whit what they decided, only that they nailed down something he could wave around as the officially permitted doctrine. There was the implied threat of his power of the sword to those who didn’t fall in line. While that didn’t solve all the issues the synod took up, it was the clearest break point of the church leaders openly courting political authority. In their minds, clearly something had to be done or those poor souls might end up in Hell.

Somewhere between Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which bluntly states that spiritual birth is not in any way dependent on human choices, and that synod in Nicea, church leaders had come to assume God couldn’t do His work without their help. The salvation of souls really depended on them making sure the right stuff went into people’s ears. In other words, “salvation” had become a matter of human intellect and decision, a direct contradiction to Paul’s writing, not to mention Hebrew thought.

All political theory runs on the assumption that “salvation” depends on the right ideas getting through the right ears so that people decide the right things. This is a radical departure from a Hebrew outlook on reality itself, not to mention politics. The Hebrew outlook was that only tribal political and social structure could ever be valid in God’s eyes. You stuck with your kinfolk or you went on your own. Raucous though discussion might be, at some point someone already recognized as the final “decider” made the decision.

Not efficient you say? You miss the whole point. You can be sure the council in Acts 15 was as rowdy as any Jewish family dispute. At some point, they all recognized the word of the Spirit and yielded their opposition. That’s how they expected it to work. Had they not come to terms, they would have parted ways, but you can be sure Paul would have kept his ministry in line with his best grasp of what was the essence of Moses, not simply the contemporary habits of his own nation. The whole point is stability as God defined it over the vast expanse of His revelation, not political efficiency as humans imagine it. The church was a New Israel whose only sword was the Word of God. The church as a separate society had to remain stable based on traditional assumptions of how humans acted in concert, not as the world viewed such things.

The church leadership by 325 AD were wholly compromised in their basic world view. It was no longer Hebrew, but Western. The whole thing was a mistake, nailing down as obligatory something many genuine followers of Christ today do not accept, including yours truly. Trinitarian doctrine answers all the wrong questions. A Hebrew mind would not have asked any questions about the nature of the divine. A Hebrew mind would ask first about the testimony of who Jesus was, and then asked, “What do I do now?” Notice what Paul asked on the road to Damascus; that was a Hebrew approach. It never occurs to an Eastern mind to wonder about the nature of something, but of what the moral requirements are. Paul referred to the likes of the Arian question as disputes about words.

Nicea was Western legalism, not Hebrew Mysticism. It enslaved the churches to a Western legal frame of operation, totally foreign to the ancient Hebrew tribal lifestyle. This change didn’t come overnight; it began with the agitation of Judaizers, Gnostics and others who were trying to take advantage of the early Gentile churches. John’s Apocalypse and his letters warn of this very thing, referring to the political and intellectual compromise as the Harlot Church. It broke his heart to know what a vast wealth of moral advantage would be lost. John didn’t fear for people missing out on the miracle of spiritual birth, but the heritage of power to participate in the mighty glories of God. Instead, God would raise souls to life despite the bad witness of Christians who never completed the transformation of their minds into genuine spiritual agents of Heaven.

That transformation includes leaving behind human political considerations, and engaging in the ancient tribal ways of Hebrew families. We cling to eternal moral principles, not ephemeral considerations. Jesus said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)

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Nicey-Nicey Is Not a Virtue

Posted on February 9, 2014 by ehurst

As Westerners, we simply cannot imagine the alien feel of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) social interaction.

The depth of perversion in our Western social mythology makes it nearly impossible to wade through the vast mountains of crap to see the truth. ANE folks might be well aware of the emotions in someone else, but they seldom cater to those emotions. Even in the presence of earthly authority, cowering was morally unacceptable, regardless of how often folks might have done it. Nobody cares what a quisling offers. Due honor is best rendered by someone who does not fear an honorable death. Moral truth has always been more important than life itself. Our Western version of noble courage is just a hair’s breadth from insolence because it builds on an entirely false premise. The entire social fabric of the West is built on the fear of death.

Westerners do pay lip service to the idea of facing death with courage, but it’s not at all the same moral concept as in the ANE. The complexity of the whole question takes books to answer. Not least is the complication of how the two civilizations used language itself. We read too much into the words, whereas the ANE folks used words to conjure imagery not always meant literally. Hyperbole was actually polite in some instances, whereas Westerners see it as dishonest. Still, we can pick out single issues here and there to illustrate the vast oceans of difference.

The question before us: How do we adopt the biblical moral background and make it work in our current situation? Some of our words and actions must conform to prevailing norms merely as a means of communication. If we don’t speak the language, there is no message. At the same time, our message must demand a change so fundamental as to remain somehow alien even as we make it clear. More than art, this is the work of the Holy Spirit speaking through us to declare His truth to the world.

If I say we have to serve in humility, that does not contradict the need for blunt statements that are certain to bring emotional distress. Speaking the truth is a humble service. Humility is the flavor of our delivery of that truth. Thus, I often remind readers here that you need not take me seriously; I am not some genius seeking to lead. I am a servant seeking to point out things you might not have noticed before. I want to help, but you have to take that step for yourself, and it has to be your own individual path before the Lord. I am not good enough to be your model, but I cannot avoid serving as an indicator of things God wants to reveal about Himself.

Thus, I would indicate to you that it’s a mistake to conflate humility with fearfully placating someone’s feelings. Humility is acting as if we aren’t too important to do whatever mundane task stands before us. It’s the call to divine justice setting things right in some small way because big ways aren’t open to us. We aren’t quick to talk about what’s on our minds because we aren’t that important. We don’t command an audience at our whims. But when someone asks, we answer with bold honesty the best we know at that moment. We may not know the answers to all the world’s problems, but we know what God demands of us.

Thus, we speak with all the authority of Daniel and his friends before Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3). The emperor asked what deity could save them from the furnace. Daniel said it wasn’t for him to correct the emperor, but he was confident that Jehovah could handle it. If their God chose otherwise, it didn’t change their resolve to serve the One who held their ultimate fate in His hands. Better it was to die in peace with Jehovah at the price of war with all humanity and every other deity that might exist.

A significant portion of humanity today has a huge appetite for emotional drama. In Western social mythology, this has been raised to the status of deity. A high portion of contact from other humans will be as much a matter of seeking fresh drama as anything else. Fundamental to our response is our alienation from that very thing. Drama should be merely the flavoring we use to communicate, not the substance of our existence. You are not at all responsible to God for the feelings of another, nor their personal sense of entitlement. You are responsible to Him for breathing His justice into every context. Practice allowing the drama to blow away like an obscuring mist in the breath of God’s clarity.

The proper mixture of firmness and gentleness is a matter of your calling in the context. Your word choice will reflect who you are in Christ and your sense of the moment. However, your answer is all about God’s truth, not anyone’s feelings. Our modern sense of being nice is entirely too dependent on the bogus feeling factor. Resist that lie.

Be alert for Satan’s flaming missiles of false guilt regarding nicey-nicey.

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One More Time: Epistemology Matters

Posted on February 9, 2014 by ehurst

Somehow I’ve got to find a clear and forceful statement to counter the evil intellectual slavery of minds practiced by Western churches.

First, the bluntly stated thesis: If you do not seek to acquire the Hebrew intellectual understanding of reality, you cannot progress in your faith. If we do not teach that Hebrew intellectual approach, we cannot share the message of Christ fully. For people suggesting there is no significant difference between our current world view and that of the Hebrew prophets and Christ Himself, they are at best woefully ignorant of the Bible. Once warned of their ignorance, to proceed contrary to such an understanding is evil.

If you ain’t got that Hebrew head, you ain’t got revelation from God.

You might still end up in Heaven after leaving this world, but you won’t have a clue how to walk in Christ while you are here. I’m not worried about people getting “saved” from eternal damnation; that happens regardless of human idiocy. God is sovereign over His Creation. What we lose is the vast wealth of blessings available to us in this world. We have no mission without embracing the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual background, because that ANE background is reality as God defines it.

All theology is mere human response. Western Christian theology is an odious pile of human sewage at best because it starts from a rejection of revelation. Revelation must include the proper intellectual background built by God as the conduit for revelation. You cannot rightly approach the task of religion by treating intellectual grounding as optional. You either buy into God’s revelation of you don’t have revelation. You might have a lot of brilliant reasoning, but you don’t have truth; you don’t have Christ. Christ was a Hebrew man and it takes precious little to prove that His teachings were distinctly ANE in character and shape.

At no point in Scripture will you see any claim that the words are themselves truth. That conception is read back into Scripture by Western Christians. If your brain can handle something, then it’s not revelation. It is merely your response to revelation. Your theology cannot ever be binding on the conscience of another. We cannot prevent charisma, zeal and talented expression in human language from seducing people who rely too much on what they can process in their heads. It is entirely natural for people to buy into that stuff. This is how the Hebrew religion was perverted and morphed into Judaism; the rabbis were mesmerized by Aristotelian logic. However, the Holy Spirit does not work directly with the human intellect, and all the more so if that intellect bears a Western flavor.

Theology cannot be divine; it will ever be no more than a parcel of religion. It will always be merely a human response, not a word from God. Truth is by its nature divine and above human intellect.

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Job 26

Posted on February 8, 2014 by ehurst

Most Western readers will not understand what happens here. Eastern philosophers typically skip over a great deal of explanation that they would consider obvious.

Bildad’s short speech was true as far as it went. The problem is he carries it too far. If no man is right in God’s sight, what would be the point of clinging to an upright life? And how could any man, least of all Bildad, have standing to castigate another man for sin? We have to recognize the difference between parabolic statement and something entirely too literal.

Job’s response implies this without stating it bluntly. First, he blasts Bildad with sarcasm. Bildad would have been utterly useless helping someone who actually didn’t understand God’s revelation. He was a moral bumpkin in a world where moral education was almost mandatory for existence in that Ancient Near Eastern culture. Not just ignorant of moral truth, Bildad and his friends were militant in their rejection of it, even as they abused and perverted common expressions of that truth.

Job hammers home his point by restating Bildad’s argument in superior terms. That is, using the full reach of parabolic expression, he declares how God is beyond comparison. It is critical that readers understand this, as it would seem his words at face value aren’t very accurate theology. That’s the whole point: God is beyond human intellect and every attempt to confine Him to formulas, regardless how carefully worded, will always fall short. Thus, Job makes Bildad look silly, both in using better symbols and in clearly stating that they cannot be taken literally. Job can say it better than Bildad, but it’s still just parable and poetry.

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Sacrificial Service

Posted on February 8, 2014 by ehurst

In order to give shape to what I consider a renewed religion, I made some changes to my static website (gone as of 2020). One of the first articles linked there is “Summary of Opposition,” an outline of how I oppose current mainstream Christian religion. I’ve made some edits indicating this is, indeed, a fresh approach to religion. I also note that it is most comfortable to introverts, who are generally ignored or forgotten in Christian religion. The biggest change is adding the following paragraphs to that page.

The primary expression of this religion is service to others. Our calling and mission are not shaped by human need, but by the internal drive of the Spirit in offering whatever gifts He has built into us. We sacrifice all human pretense and pride in offering what we have that matches what people can use. We cannot offer what we do not receive first from God, so we allow to roll off of our backs any false guilt for something we cannot or should not give. The sole source of our mission and service is the move of God’s Spirit, not human talent or human need.

As a reaction against all the false sales-pitch evangelism of today, we endeavor to remain utterly quiet and prefer avoiding human notice. We are not leaders among men, though we could easily lead in those moments when it is our mission. We are servants and our primary expression of faith in Christ is the confession of John the Baptist, that we are unworthy of the most most degrading services in His name. In our hearts we carry all human need, including our own, in the same basket. However, in our external expressions we elevate others to honor above us. Thus, we never claim any human advantage or privilege, but simply take for ourselves the lowest tasks without complaint or offense. Our love for others is our message, the message of God’s mercy.

In our thinking, we strive to find ways to reclaim what has been lost against Divine Justice, for that justice is first merciful. We absorb injustice with Christ on the Cross. This does not prevent us offering stern warnings against sin, but we first demonstrate Our Lord’s power over sin. Even in our failures, we demonstrate the humility against which our Enemy has no defense.

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New Jabber IM Account

Posted on February 7, 2014 by ehurst

I’ve registered with a Jabber IM service at Jabber.AT (Austria); user name is “soulkiln”. It’s a solid server with good security. As I understand it, they are linked with several other servers. So if you feel the need to have a private instant message chat with me, I’ll try to stay logged in while I’m at my computer.

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A Virtual Religion

Posted on February 7, 2014 by ehurst

I perceive a need to better organize the religious purpose of my leadership ministry. Some of you are familiar with my static website (gone as of 2020). While this blog will remain my virtual office, the site will become the repository for a virtual church. Just about anyone can point to my blog and say, “That’s my spiritual elder or one of my spiritual advisers.” The terms for using my services remains the same as always: If you ask, I serve you. However, far fewer of you would be willing to point to my static site and say, “That’s my religion.” The distinction is how far you are willing to go with it. Anyone can read it for whatever reason, but the static site will be more organized to present a firmer religious identity. What follows is a draft of the introduction.

Faith is one thing; religion is another.

Faith is the human response to a spiritual apprehension. Faith is roughly synonymous to commitment and trust in the unseen, unknowable power and majesty of our Creator. It stands above and beyond reason, with demands that are eminently unreasonable. It all hearkens to a life beyond this realm of existence. Faith is the tension of remaining a human within a fallen domain, yet in contact with something on an entirely different level of reality.

Religion is the implementation of faith. The distinction is critical because religion as a human activity does not require faith, but faith requires a religion. Religion assumes a faith and serves to organize the demands of that higher realm. Inherent in religion is a sense of shared faith between humans who seek some means to give shape to their common apprehension of the Spirit Realm.

A virtual religion is one where that sharing of faith is more or less confined to expressions and interactions via electronic devices on a network. An online fellowship is still people expressing their common faith experiences, but typically unable to meet in the flesh. No one denies a great deal is lost that way, but it does not make it any less a religion, nor any less valid.

At the same time, it adds options not otherwise available. On the one hand, it’s the same faith, the same shared apprehension of spiritual reality. On the other hand, it opens yet another kind fellowship entirely. A virtual religion can be in addition to a meat space religion with no interference between the two. This is entirely apropos, since the network world is so radically different from human space. Indeed, the network is itself a parable of the Spirit Realm.

Aside from a warm hug or handshake, you have almost nothing to lose by engaging a virtual religion. That is, it matters not a whit how you appear or your physical abilities. It is virtually impossible to check up on your real world behavior, and your network congregation must take you entirely at face value. Yes, you can utterly deceive your virtual church, but it gains you almost nothing to do so. Indeed, if you are able to carry off such a deception, there is virtually no harm to them. Unmasking you as a fraud has no real effect on them. There is a sense in which your online persona is as real as your fleshly self for the same reason as it is separate. The only meat space investment in your virtual persona is the time required to put on your virtual show.

Of course, it assumes you have the equipment and some means to access the Internet. There is nothing anyone can do to democratize it any more than it already is, but we know some few souls would be excluded by this. That makes each of us as members of this virtual fellowship a conduit into meat space for our shared faith.

Thus, content is everything. In this, it is very much a religion, a human activity in pursuit of spiritual dimensions.

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