ACBM: Outline 2

Posted on July 4, 2013 by ehurst

Part 2 of the current proposed outline for the course:

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Part 2: Defining Biblical

The ANE use of language to indicate, not discrete objects and ideas, but moral importance — parabolic and symbolic, indicative.

1. Ancient Near East

We see a clear sense of fatalism as a tendency and the intensely personal nature of things. Despite the language of mythology sounding like a unitary universe, the actual belief is likely different due to how laguage use is different.

2. Abraham and Mesopotamia

Abraham carried the germ of this broad civilization into a nomadic lifestyle, which modified the moral expectations.

3. Covenant Nation

The sojourn in Egypt reawakened an awareness of The Otherness of God and the higher realm. It was Solomon’s court, though not necessarily Solomon himself, that brought back the germ of materialism.

4. Hellenization

Devastating perversion built on centuries of slowly losing the grip on genuine mysticism.

5. Judaizers

Perverted the early church away from pure Hebraic outlook.

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ACBM: Outline 1

Posted on July 3, 2013 by ehurst

Proposed outline with key items so far:

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Part 1: Defining the West

1. Greece, Rome and Germanic Tribes

The use of Western languages as a means of transmitting mythology — nominative, descriptive and discrete.

2. Greek Philosophers

Socrates we know only from what Plato says. Plato emphasizes logic as a higher standard. In the process, he proposes pure reason rather as a depersonalized god, a disembodied deity. Aristotle pushed out the implications of this. He was not atheist, but an agnostic. His primary question was not, “What can we know?” — the common understanding of epistemology. His question was, “What can we know such that we can act on it?”

3. Roman Organization

Less cerebral and theoretical; much more pragmatic and application. Most modern Western alphabets are Roman.

4. Germanic Mythology

Germans did not so much invade Rome as were invited to do the hard labor of defense. Eventually they were promoted up the ranks until they ruled.

Epitomized in Beowulf. Gives us the notion of manhood in the storm gods and womanhood in Oester, the Earth Mother.

5. Western Church

Attempts to tame the German tribes and Christianize simply for the purpose of raising the Church back up to her former political status she had under Constantine and friends. They lusted for that political power. So the Church compromised until the Germans would swallow it.

Defending against the advance of Islam did not prevent Islamic contributions to the intellectual heritage of the West. Arabs gave us the symbolism for abstracting concrete Greek geometry with algebra. They also gave us a much broader awareness of nature in the form of medicine and biological inquiry.

The various political movements reacting to the ascendancy of the Church were not necessarily what is popularly believed. The Reformation was more about changing both the logic of theology and the resulting political leverage.

6. Pinnacle: The Enlightenment

Secularized and agnostic, an attempt to revive the classical culture of Greece and Rome, but with a powerful German flavor of morality.

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ACBM: A Critical Element in Analysis

Posted on July 2, 2013 by ehurst

It’s not enough to simply translate some ancient tongue into a modern written language; you still have to deal with how language itself was used.

During those years I spent reading both the ANE and Western classics of literature, I was a bit confused that ANE mythology in translation sounds a lot like the Western kind. It was some years later I recognized the subtle difference. ANE languages tend to share one trait almost completely absent in every Western language: symbolic logic. Rather than drag out another discussion of how this is different in terms of thought, let’s look at how it impacts the means of communication.

Aristotle didn’t dream up a unitary universe. It was implied by the mythology and how the Greek language communicates. Greek, as with most other Western tongues, is nominative, descriptive and rather literal — it uses language as a direct label on reality. The underlying logic is descriptive. You are supposed to take the language itself rather literally. That doesn’t mean there are no artistic uses, no symbolism and metaphors. It means the standard use of language as a means of transmission arises fundamentally from a very worldly set of concerns. It assumes concrete observable reality is the whole point.

Aristotle and his friends built up their assumptions about reality from the same collection of Greek myths, all of which assumed directly that, whether or not we are able to see everything in the universe, there is no other possible realm of existence out there. It is excluded by fundamental assumptions. I don’t recall whether Aristotle pointedly excluded it so much as his teaching makes no sense otherwise.

On the other hand, I believe the case can be made that ANE languages arose from a wholly different consciousness about reality. Hebrew itself went through a few heavy transitions. It began as Abraham’s use of Chaldean/Aramaic. By long exposure, it accommodated the Canaanite version of that language and became distinctly “Hebrew” as opposed to Aramaic. During the Exile, it was pulled back toward Aramaic, so that classical Hebrew was a different language that scholars could detect. It meant the writings of Moses were hard to follow by folks returning from Exile.

What did not change is how Hebrew as a language operates as a means of communication. The people were themselves fundamentally mystics. They assumed language arose from a frankly religious purpose. Giving it a written form was a convenience, but language itself had a moral function. Thus, a Hebrew noun was not so much a label as a symbol. The word for “snake” — nakawsh — as a spoken word was a moral comment about Satan first and foremost, and descriptive of snakes secondarily. It was not that Hebrew people detested any scaly serpent, but they detested Satan and his works. The natural behavior of a serpent reminded them of the moral image of how Satan did his job. So while they didn’t hesitate to kill predatory serpents, from what we an tell, they didn’t blanch at handling harmless crawlers. We note in passing didn’t encounter that many of the latter in their environment.

For ANE people, language itself was about symbolism, a way to transmit something of moral importance. It’s not that Hebrew writing doesn’t have a literal use. Abraham’s use of numbers in pleading with God about the numerical limits of wrath and justice in Sodom and Gomorrah can be taken literally in terms of the numbers. However, typical of Hebrew writing, the episode itself was more important for what it symbolized and revealed about God. Nor should we attempt to read too much symbolism in the Exodus account where the Elim oasis was described as having twelve springs and seventy date palms. Twelve is pretty precise (“two and ten”), but the palm trees are approximate (the Hebrew was “seventy;” the KJV elaborates unnecessarily), as it would be in most cases in English. Again, the point was to show there was nothing at Elim to complain about as with Marah. Whether the words are used literally or with broad symbolism, the purpose of telling a story was to impart a moral statement.

Rarely would you have a cold factual statement in Hebrew. Even when that is the apparent purpose, such use itself makes a moral statement. That’s true of most ANE languages to varying degrees. With some languages we simply can’t tell what’s going on with it because written samples are scant. I note in passing Egypt is included in the term “Ancient Near East” (ANE) and their language is similarly bathed in symbolism. It was originally written in pictographs. One of the biggest mistakes made by scholars today is reading a Western intellectual bias back into Egyptian studies.

How language is handled, how it is used and what it was supposed to accomplish in the hearer and reader, is often ignored in the study of antiquities. It is an obsession peculiar to Westerners that precise wording is important. Take a look at the Gilgamesh Epic. There are a great many variations on the basic tale, and we can be certain the original bears only some faint resemblance to the final version published. An ANE reader wouldn’t give it a second thought. That’s because the bottom line is not the story but the fundamental reason for the myth in the first place. It was moral symbolism. That is what was transmitted, the mythology of the Mesopotamian intellectual background. It’s contextual. Changing the fundamental facts of the story is fine, so long as the symbolic moral message is retained. Nothing in the original story was meant to convey some narrative anyone actually believed in terms of historical facts. Getting the story straight would have been a silly concern in their eyes.

On the contrary, we have broad evidence Western peoples tended to believe literally the myths of their culture. That didn’t prevent hyperbole and exaggeration, but people tended to repeat the basic narrative as somehow sacred, bearing a demand that you buy into the facts. There was no such intellectual orthodoxy in the ANE. Yet we encounter a wide range of scholarship that assumes just that; folks assert with a straight face ancient Hebrews would memorize long passages word-for-word. That may be true of Judaism after it was Hellenized, but that’s a mythology in itself. I find no credible evidence any ANE culture engaged in such a concern.

No, I don’t pretend to be an expert in Antiquities; I’m simply reporting what I found and how it helped form my current beliefs, which will certainly affect this project.

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ACBM: Perspective

Posted on July 1, 2013 by ehurst

As part of the introduction, I propose the following as a broader explanation of the perspective and thesis of the course. Part of the idea is to offer readers and students every opportunity to decide this is not for them, or to decide they really need this.

Perspective: There has to be a reason, leading to a motivation, for bothering with all of this study. Simply acquainting the reader with history and literature is not an end in itself. At some point we have to admit we hope people change, that they adopt an outlook and sense of purpose informed by all of this background.

Virtually all of humanity stretching back into the dim mists of ancient times was born into a social context. Someone always took the responsibility of teaching and training the youth in the ways of those among whom they were born. The primary means was the collective mythology of the culture and society. While in common usage, the words “myth” and “mythology” tend to be used as handles for dismissing something as irrelevant to real life, in reality this is nothing more than rejecting one mythology for another. The function of mythology in any society is providing structure for addressing oneself to reality.

All societies operate on a mythology as the very ground from which thought itself is formed. The frame of reference, the matrix and structure in which the hooks are fixed for catching and holding experiences so that sense can be made of them, cannot come from nothing. The human mind is wired that way. Western society pretends that matrix is reality itself, but that very belief is mythology by academic definition. Every previous civilization that came before Western Civilization asserted the same thing, and those that follow will be just as dismissive of the West as the West is of all those coming before it.

It would be of little use to organize and offer a course such as this without an underlying motive of trying to sell readers on the idea of adopting something that is better, more consistent with reality, than the Western view. Failing that, the readers will at least be able to grasp the nature of what they choose and what they reject more consciously.

Therefore, the following study is cast in terms of implications. It is not enough to study Western Civilization; there are a wealth of courses on that subject itself. The same is true of previous ancient civilizations. While some courses are critical in approach, the underlying assumption is to help you celebrate being Western, or at least see the potential for moral goodness in Western Civilization. It’s a call to be proud. This course counters that call, and attempts to define the same wealth of facts and theories as something worthy of shame.

If we could restate the description of this course, it would be one of comparative morality. Most people never consciously examine the fundamental assumptions of what constitutes and defines “good” and “bad.” Rather, they simply assume their own view is roughly equivalent to that of God Himself, as it were. It never occurs to most people that their own context is just one of many possibilities. Worse, virtually the entirety of Western Christianity assumes their Western brand of religion is precisely what is portrayed in the Bible. The aim of this course is to show that is manifestly false. Not that any one tradition within Western Christianity is better than another, but the entire collection is wrong because they all share a common set of false assumptions.

The thesis behind this course is that the biblical viewpoint is radically different from what is held by virtually every Western Christian, regardless of their traditions and labels.

As always, your comments are welcome.

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ACBM: Getting a Little More Serious

Posted on June 30, 2013 by ehurst

This is my current version of the introduction to the course:

Objective: This course offers a comparative cultural anthropology study of the unique intellectual approach from which the Christian Bible is written. It presumes the student is Western and is not wholly aware of what it means to be Western, nor how radically different it is from the culture promoted by Scripture.

Structure: The material is presented in a standard academic Western approach. The course first summarizes the meaning of Western cultural identity. We will review seminal literary sources that help to reveal the formation of Western intellectual assumptions. Then we will turn to the contrasting approach from the people who gave us the Bible. This approach assumes the biblical identity is profoundly alien to Westerners. This course presumes familiarity with typical Western academics on at least a baccalaureate level of education.

It is not necessary to actually read whole libraries. There is nothing wrong with reading good summaries as a review of previous surveys. Some of that material will be summarized here, but the reader will cheat himself if he has never read the sources.

Those with a purely academic interest in the subject can benefit from this survey. However, let the reader make no mistake: This course is a weapon aimed at the very heart of Western Civilization. The West is a battered and leaky vessel, and passengers would do well to disembark at the earliest opportunity. Such a departure requires a conscious choice for some other means of moving through life. This course assumes consciously and without debate that the biblical civilization is both different and better.

All the more so is this true of readers who claim to follow Christ. If you aren’t a biblical mystic, you are not following Christ.

I would love to hear some feedback.

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Contextual Justice

Posted on June 30, 2013 by ehurst

If nothing else, Solomon’s Ecclesiastes warns that you cannot put God in your logical box.

It amuses me to no end how many Christian teachers say words to that effect, then promptly turn around and proceed trying to make God reasonable. The mental reflexes of Western minds are so perverted that you can’t get them to heed the Word of God. Even when they know as much truth as the mind can know, they cannot bring themselves to obey. They aren’t capable of pulling the intellect off the throne and letting the Spirit rule. They spend their lives frustrated by that haunting sense they don’t quite get it, though most refuse to acknowledge that disquieting voice. I’ve seen it up close in the lives of those who tried to teach me.

You won’t catch me pretending to understand it better than they, but I am at peace in a sense they never were. It nearly drove me over the edge, but I forced my intellect to kneel before the Spirit. Then I spent years studying what it should mean to my mind, teaching my mind how to obey its Master. The Master has chosen to reveal Himself in the guise of an Ancient Near Eastern sheikh. He persists in operating in that fashion, not because He’s play acting, but because the ANE sheikh is actually the closest earthly expression of how God Himself operates. Deconstructing the symbolic image of the sheikh won’t help much, because the context of truth and revelation remains inside the image. There is no “objective reality” to abstract from it. That is, whatever the symbol points to is well beyond the intellect. This is as close as the human mind can come to the truth.

A critical element in this parabolic image is that God’s Justice is entirely personal and it is always contextual. It cannot be systemic; it cannot be organized and institutionalized. For the sake of our mind’s ability to operate, there are some things which appear universal, some things which are always a sin in every context. By the same token, there are some contexts where nothing can be good or right. That’s a little more complicated to explain to the mind, but still quite simple in spiritual terms. If the system itself is built on falsehood, then the system cannot produce good. Individuals within the system can do justice and reap God’s blessings, but the people with actual authority in such a system will always be cursed because of their commitment to the lie. There is a sense in which powerless cynicism can put you in the place of God’s mercy.

That powerless righteous cynicism is about all that’s left to Christian Mystics in America right now. God’s wrath still has to fall on the system, but the Lamb’s Blood on the doorpost of your life can still keep you from suffering the full effects of His wrath as His hand passes.

It helps if your expectations are realistic. A major element in God’s moral imperative within this fallen realm is not being so hung up on a false mythology. The Western mythology of “justice in the end” will lead you to expect something God simply doesn’t do, and never has done. It might sound like something you read in the Bible, but that’s because you take literally something that was parabolic.

Western intellectual culture has tried to bury the entire concept of parable, and very few people in the West understand it at all. It’s more of that confusion of the Two Realms, of attempting to make literal something which is symbolic. Symbolism in that sense is not allegory. Stop trying to process it at this level. Recognize that the truth is above this realm and above the intellect, that it is far more complex than any human intellect can ever hope to grasp. But it still affects us here, so we struggle to catch a glimpse of something on which we can act. Yes, if your spirit is awakened, your spirit will understand perfectly well, but your mind cannot hope to do more than listen when your spirit guides through contextual convictions.

When you get past the mythology of expecting your mind to get it, and you are prepared for your mind simply to read the necessities of the context and obey with flexibility and faith, then you realize something virtually the entire world cannot get. You are in a position to understand God’s wrath will not be complete this time around. That is, when His Justice falls on America, the entire collection of evil psychopaths will not simply be destroyed or disabled so we can get a clean sheet of paper on which to design a new system. In every turnover and transition between governmental systems, even when things were catastrophic, the same evil class of psychopaths were around to reassert their will in whatever new system was built. God is not going to cleanse the slate just yet.

Don’t pin your hopes on God’s wrath removing our criminal ruling class. His wrath will fall, but because He uses an agent for His wrath — Satan — it’s not going to turn out beautiful. It will simply be a very big mess. If you can’t quite get your head around this as the true manifestation of God’s Justice working in this context, then you cannot understand anything that matters. You cannot demand God meet your logical expectations. The imagery of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is the Second Coming, the day of Final Judgment of All Things. We aren’t there yet. God’s cleansing wrath is not coming in fullness, so the transition will not be complete. The destruction will be wide spread and deep, but not complete. It will not be what Western minds think of as poetic justice except in a few isolated cases.

God reserves the authority to choose who will be wiped away, who will be disciplined and who will be left to recover their evil plans. Get it through your thick mind: God is in control of the political landscape. He tolerated a measure of evil and ignorance in ancient times to suit His inscrutable purposes, and that hasn’t changed. His plans are beyond us. Even when the prophets spoke of things He would do, it was always a matter of only what the people needed to know to be obedient to their calling. Let’s train our minds to hear what Jesus said and what it should mean to us. He promised we would always be in a position to please the Father if we learn to desire that.

Please, please: Stop this blasphemous lie that Christ came to change the politics of this world. His Kingdom is not of this world — how hard is that to understand? The only way that will change is when we see the New Heaven and New Earth. When that happens you will surely know, because there will be a new you in a new kind of body. Your fallen intellect will be redeemed and your spirit and mind will cooperate without the blinding curtain of the fall. If you want a real political change, it will require you go back and get a college degree in tribal social structures because that is the only political system God will prosper. If you aren’t willing to live under the Law Covenants literally, don’t expect God to work in your human politics. The real truth of the matter is that’s how churches are supposed to be organized, but I don’t expect to ever see that in my lifetime. Enough for now that you simply understand secular human politics is not your concern, beyond watching and commenting intelligently from a prophetic viewpoint. You probably have enough on your plate simply obeying the immediate demands of the Spirit.

You must seize the faith that you will have enough to obey in what matters, and the rest is probably not nearly as important as you imagine.

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Ecclesiastes 8

Posted on June 29, 2013 by ehurst

The Hebrew language did not lend itself easily to blunt or direct literal statements. Good Hebrew was loaded with imagery and parabolic expressions. Here, Solomon paints a scene of serving in his courts. Who wants to be a wise servant of the king? Solomon builds an ethic by hints that indicate something far larger, something difficult to render in English.

Wisdom makes you preferred company, while ambition makes you enemies. You’ve already committed yourself to obey the king, to be a loyal servant with no hidden agendas. God is watching your heart, so try to make the most of it. In Ancient Eastern courts, one never betrayed a distaste for the king’s personal presence, and silly fear only got you into trouble. Just relax and do your job. Few people can keep up a pretense long enough to get away with plotting against something the king really wants. Cynicism is no sin in carrying out his orders, but never doubt his ability to keep an eye on you. Acquaint yourself with his ways and what pleases him; develop a sense of timing that makes him smile. A king with a thousand concerns has no time for you to get your act together. You probably cannot imagine the creativity of a king who intends to punish disobedience, though.

But even a king cannot know the future. He can’t even restrain the wind, so how could he hold back the hand of death? Once you are deep the middle of things, you can’t bail out. In the heat of battle, your commander isn’t going to dismiss you from your place in the ranks. Stand your ground; uphold moral honesty. If immorality owns you, it will always betray you to your enemies. With all his grand wisdom in the flesh, Solomon could not understand how it was some people were given power over others. No matter how wise the king, somebody would be crushed by his most benign choices. No man can change that, so get used to the idea that you can’t pick your kings or your superior officers.

That’s not the worst of it. In every sector of life there are bad people who gain fame and fortune. The text in this portion varies wildly among the various manuscripts, so don’t get hung up on the precise wording of your favorite translation. What the manuscripts have in common is the image of someone who rejects all moral standards and God doesn’t strike them dead, even if they come into the Temple itself. We fallen humans are very temporal creatures; when justice doesn’t fall in what seems to us a timely manner, we think justice has failed. Solomon warns this is something we all must fight against. Human wisdom cannot unravel the mystery of God’s work, His inscrutable choice that seems to violate His own revealed Law. You cannot know who will be hurt when you let that mystery hinder your own holiness.

Don’t get lost in such mysteries. Rid yourself of the instinct to correct everything you see, to demand action from some human agency, or worse, as if you could correct God by calling Him on the carpet for offending your grand logic. Find your role in the scheme of all those things you can’t possibly control and be faithful with what lies in your power. Don’t worry about things you can’t fix. Enjoy the simple good things God brings your way and trust Him. Solomon had already gone the route of trying to figure it all out, worrying about all the things that affected him but that he couldn’t do anything to alter. Could he have stayed awake endless days, there wasn’t time enough in a human life to figure it all out. Don’t believe anyone who claims to have it all worked out on the level of human intelligence. Some things will never make sense.

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Meta: ACCM = ACBM

Posted on June 29, 2013 by ehurst

After further consideration, I believe it will be more to the point if we call this proposed course A Course in Biblical Mysticism.

As such, this course will be almost Cultural Anthropology. It is comparative civilization; I’m explaining the biblical approach by contrasting with that of the West. It’s meant to be more academic; it’s what men can know about it without getting too deeply involved. At the same time, it will be an invitation to become a part of it.

Most importantly, it will serve as the basis for a prophetic slap upside the head of Western Christianity, a warning that it has little in common with Christ of the Bible. We who are genuine Christian Mystics are aliens, ambassadors from another dimension. We have taken up residence in some bodies provided by our Lord so that we can participate in life on this plane, but we could never actually belong here. Whatever we were before our awakening isn’t really all that important. The new has come; the old is dead. There is some continuity on the human level of body, feelings and intellect, but there is now a higher faculty that is so completely larger, so utterly far beyond what we once were, it’s a radical departure.

But we need to explain it in terms that will allow someone else who has been awakened to recognize they are a part of us, and cannot remain attached to their old existence. The content of the new is already covered in another document (the Bible) so we have to make sure folks can understand it properly. It’s in an alien language arising from an alien thought process. So we attempt to describe the prison in which most people’s minds reside so they can see the exit.

We have to address them where they are in their current language. That’s what it means to attempt an academic course syllabus.

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Myth and Scripture

Posted on June 29, 2013 by ehurst

Myth and mythology have more than one meaning.

In typical conversation, they are dismissive terms used to discount something you don’t want to believe. You refuse to be accountable to it. As literature, they are essential to understanding the worldview of those who adhere to said mythology. In more human terms, they are the essential structure of our identity. The are the ground from which we sprout intellectually. It is damned hard to break away from the mythology of your youth in the sense your very thoughts are built on them. There is a vast ocean of unconsidered, unconscious reference material that restricts your mental processes in the sense you can’t start from nothing.

The path to breaking out of a mythology is making it all conscious. You have to study what it does in those other senses not normally used in conversation. You have to go back and rebuild that foundation and this is no small task. We get some part of this when we do counseling, but too many counselors refuse to be ready for a deeper plunge. Most counselors love counseling, but aren’t searching for truth; they just say they are. Even psychotherapy is mostly baloney, because it continues to build on the same old mythology, just emphasizes a different set of stories within that mythology. At best, psychotherapy simply exposes to people a better understanding of the mythology under which they’ve been operating the whole time. This, while assuming it’s altogether holy and righteous.

Precious few people who make the radical choice are fully aware, so their choices tend to be less radical. They settle for whatever is labeled “radical” among their own kind, still building from the same mythology. I can’t settle for that. Everything I write constitutes a call to go back to the very foundation of our existence.

In doing so, I recognize the absolute necessity of having a mythology. It is not possible for humans to float in space above all mythologies. You can pick a different one or attempt to build a new one, but you must have one or you can’t think. The brain is hard-wired that way. To pretend you can bypass that necessity is to adopt a very bad mythology. I chose to examine the Hebrew mythology; actually, I’m convinced it chose me. To avoid it was madness. The call was my sanity. This is why I don’t have time for lambasting pagans and secularists who describe something of the same process, of fleeing whatever madness held them into whatever felt like freedom for them. Tell me it’s your sanity and I’ll take your word for it. If I can’t find that element of sincerity in your choice, I’ll always suspect you didn’t try. It’s not for me to choose for you, but respect has to be earned, and it’s earned by manifesting some element of sanity from a very badly broken default.

So my sanity is the mythology of the Ancient Hebrew people, often best known in the form of the Bible. I call it “the Word of God” in the sense I cannot build on something which is foreign to it. A critical part of that choice is shedding all the talk, and the very thoughts behind the talk, of “propositional truth.” Truth can’t be a proposition; truth is above that level. Truth comes at the level of presupposition. If you start from nothing you go nowhere. If you acknowledge your starting point, then you are somewhere already. I don’t struggle with making myself accountable to Scripture. It’s assumed in the broader sense that it functions as my mythology, my frame of reference, my intellectual foundation.

My justification for this is, so far as anyone can show me, that Jesus did it that way. You can come up with a thousand other “Jesus” figures for whatever is your mythology, but if you talk of moving away from the Bible, you aren’t following the same Jesus. Don’t pretend we are brothers and sisters on the intimate level of spiritual fellowship. We can be pals, friends and respect each other, but you are cutting yourself out of some things when you make that choice. I’m not attacking your choice; I’m pointing out the implications. You would be utterly wrong if you think I’m choosing to cut you out, because I don’t see any choice. This is a foregone conclusion, a presupposition, before we get to the conscious discussion. It’s part of the mythology upon which my very soul is built. We call this “conviction” in the sense of something binding from a source above reason and choice.

You may feel you have no choice, too. Go for the gusto, buddy, but don’t be surprised if it creates a barrier to fellowship.

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Hire That Christian Mystic

Posted on June 28, 2013 by ehurst

My biggest problem as I contemplate the project (A Course in Christian Mysticism) is how to combat the confusion of the Two Realms.

Even when I manage to describe the whole concept clearly, the knee-jerk reflex of virtually every Christian I’ve met is to ignore the difference and confuse the teachings in the Bible. I’m amazed at the Law Covenant stuff that winds up confused with spiritual birth issues. Worse, there is a whole bunch of Christians who consider themselves “mystic” who simply are not. Whatever it is they blather about, it’s mostly another brand of religious cerebral contortion.

If there is one thing I could wish to fix, this is it.

If we could get Christians to extricate their minds from the mess, we could resolve a broad selection of category errors in their logic. You see, there is no one better able to understand the moral implications of everyday life like a solid Christian Mystic who doesn’t confuse Law with faith. Faith is that extra-sensory perception, that super-rational faculty of connection to the transcendent divine realm. That realm is the greater portion of reality that utterly escapes words and logic. Because we engage this as the presupposition before we begin to approach reasoning, we have the truth established as a proper foundation. Thus, morality as the fundamental question of “what ought to be” in this world is generally resolved in advance. It becomes a matter of recognizing the imperatives of that higher truth as it reveals what our Creator intended we do in this fallen realm. It is more than mere logic and always changes to fit the context.

Our faith remains in the clouds, obscured by parable, just barely possible to indicate by words and exemplary actions. Meanwhile, our religion will be what our human selves can understand. It will be a catalog of words, actions and logical organization by which we implement those higher demands.

Thus, your Christian Mystic becomes the very most reliable employee you’ll ever have. If you can present the nature of the job honestly, and they are comfortable with the moral implications, you don’t have to worry about corrupting influences or intimidation. They will do what you tell them they are supposed to do because it’s the right thing to do. Compensation becomes merely a matter of giving them sufficient resources to keep doing the job. If they can show up, they will. If the job if physically possible, they’ll try to do it. You’ll need to understand they are committed to the people/person in charge, not to the impersonal corporation. But you won’t have to compete for their loyalty. They will operate from a genuine interest in your welfare as the boss; they’ll pray for your well being all the time. They’ll act on the assumption the Creator Himself is in favor of their efforts on your behalf.

Depending on what you can make yourself believe, you may find that a great many things randomly do work better with them around.

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