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I am unworthy to shine a real prophet’s shoes.
Yet I cannot dismiss the notion I have been called to some sort of prophetic ministry. It won’t leave me alone. Crazy as I may seem at times, it would be far, far worse if I tried to walk away from that.
Aside from a tiny handful of people who speak to me in person, and a few readers here and at my other blog, I have yet to find anyone who embraces my message. I’d love to find others saying some of the same things on their own, and in different ways. But even the highly intelligent folks like Vox Day ignore my efforts to raise the issue. I’ve tried, there and lots of other places.
That issue is the serious conflict between our modern and postmodern approach to human knowing (epistemology) and how Scripture is founded on a different set of intellectual assumptions than what is common today. It’s not enough to refer to “orientalisms” in Scripture, but to embrace that different form of logic and thinking as the one God uses in His revelation. Do we imagine God chose the Hebrew-ANE folks by accident? Was it because He couldn’t come up with something better? He didn’t simply choose the Hebrew people; He created them specifically for this task.
Review for a moment the business of calling Abraham to break completely with his ancient urban ways, to become what his people despised, a tent-dwelling nomad. God wanted the peculiar mix of Abraham’s very broad education and intelligence with a different lifestyle. Then after a few generations of expansion, He had them exposed to Egyptian culture. Then He brought them back to the land of Abraham. No, no accidents there. After allowing the slave generation to die, and their children hardened in that semi-desert nomad existence, they were ready to face His mission for them.
Paul writes bluntly this was no accident, referring specifically to the Exodus (1 Corinthians 10:1-11) and the moral weakness of the last slave generation. Paul also writes in his many letters about how we still have to emulate some of those Ancient Hebrew customs, noting how we must carefully research the Old Testament (“rightly dividing the Word”) to understand what applies to us and what does not.
What I find most heartbreaking is the unspeakable arrogance which arises from placing human logic on the throne of the heart. It’s the Tree of the Knowledge all over again. When you try to warn folks, it simply goes in one ear and out the other. After spending considerable time explaining it to one fellow, he then went and wrote on his blog how necessary it was to show how faith is “reasonable” in terms of Aristotelian logic. Can’t you hear the whish sound as my words passed over his head?
I think I understand just a little of how Jeremiah the Weeping Prophet felt when virtually no one in his world would listen. I no longer suffer clinical depression, but in that other sense, this situation is depressing.
Behold, my mission — I can do no other.
The Man and the Woman lived in Paradise. They were innocent; they had not yet departed from God’s revealed ways for them.
The Tempter came into Paradise and spoke to the Woman. He asked her about all the resources in the area, and wondered aloud if God had said all of it was provided for their needs. The Woman responded it was indeed, but there in the center of Paradise was something they weren’t supposed to mess with at all. Doing so would be fatal.
The item she mentioned was assuming the authority to decide and evaluate what was good and just. Humans could choose that, but God warned it was deadly.
The Tempter insisted that was not exactly the truth. What would actually happen is she would suddenly be able to understand things from God’s perspective. In other words, the Tempter assured her if she simply took upon herself the authority to think and reason about what’s really important, and not bow to revelation, she would be truly free and happy.
So she took the bait. The Man was foolish enough not to argue with the idea, but he knew better. They both placed their human reason on the throne of decision and began to evaluate all things for themselves.
Immediately they knew they had made a big mistake. This business of human reason was a hideous, ugly beast, making them feel ashamed they had given it any authority at all. They tried to find ways to cover their new weakness, but ended up missing the point entirely. That was the nature of the weakness.
So when God came to visit, as He always did, they were intensely aware they could not stand before Him. They knew their idiocy would make His Presence fatal to their now damaged beings. So they hid out.
God called to them, then asked if they had chosen that one possible failure, out of all the other things they could have had. The Man answered from his now broken perception of reality, whining about his moral failures and blaming his wife. God spoke to the Woman to find out if she knew what she had done. She admitted being totally deceived about the whole thing. The Tempter was given no chance to explain, because he was never out of character.
So God cursed the Tempter, warning him there would come a time when his craven choice to attack the woman on the one issue wherein she was weak, and thereby attacking the Man through his weakest point, that the Tempter would one day be crushed by someone born of a woman, a mere human. It would be someone who didn’t suffer such weakness.
To the Woman, he warned her weakness was now magnified in her broken being. She would fight tooth and nail to again reach that authority to tell her man what to do so he would obey. Yet, the Man would have no trouble figuring out how to dominate her when it mattered to him. It was his destiny to always be the final decision maker, and it didn’t matter what she wanted. The most precious gift of all — their unity — would be very hard to achieve.
The Man was warned he would never quite understand by his reasoning power what really mattered. He would pursue physical comfort and never really get much. Even at his best, he would still die relatively young because he would no longer understand by his own reasoning what God had done in Creation, and how the moral fabric of the universe worked.
Then God gave them a means to cover themselves just enough to survive awhile until they had adjusted to the new situation. They were exposed to a world from which they were now disconnected, no longer God’s managers over it. They would exercise some talents through intelligence, but never enough to really grasp the nature of things. The moral fabric became invisible, no longer an instinct, because it belonged to the eternal plane, and they were now in the fallen plane.
Then God placed His revelation to guard His gifts. On one level, mankind would have to submit to the Laws in order to find any representative portion of Paradise here on this plane. They would have to choose that before they could even hear about the other plane of existence above. From that time forward, all humanity could return only by dying on one level or another.
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The fundamental nature of the Fall was placing the human intellect as ruler over the decisions about fundamental things of our existence. It necessarily means rejecting revelation, or at least taking authority to judge revelation, and guarantees an inability to understand it. To subject all things to the tests of reason is the very root nature of what it means to be fallen.
Faith is the means to passing that Flaming Sword of Truth. Faith dethrones the human intellect, and puts the spirit-Spirit nexus in charge. The mind becomes merely the executive, the element charged with the responsibility of organizing and implementing what comes out the spirit. Faith does is not at all reasonable, but makes demands wholly unreasonable. It demands you walk into that Flaming Sword, that you take up your Cross — that gory implement of tortured execution — and face utter failure as humans measure such things. Success as the Spirit sees things is not at all consistent with the way fallen men see it.
I am responding to this item posted at OfB where I am an Associate Editor.
(In case you are wondering, that fancy title is little more than a cover by which I can wheedle vendors into giving me stuff for free, leverage sources of information who might not give a rat’s patootie otherwise, and so forth. Granted, the Senior Editor would likely publish almost anything which fired me up enough to write, no one at that e-zine makes a dime from the work. With advertising, it just about pays for itself.)
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Humanity is fallen. For this reason, we tend to offer some honor to folks who do what they are supposed to do. We want to encourage more of it, which is the other side of the blade we use to slicing and dicing those who fail, or actively transgress what is proper and fitting.
The danger is when we pretend to apply one standard, and substitute another in its place.
The Bible is a Hebrew document. I’ve offered large amounts of material to justify a distinction between Western Civilization and Hebrew Civilization, as well as proof modern Judaism is no longer Hebrew, but a Westernized (Hellenized) perversion of it. The Christian Scriptures are inherently Ancient Hebrew in nature, and without understanding that unique mystical epistemology, you will miss some of the best stuff when you read them.
Here in our Postmodern Western world, there are multiple layers of cultural mythology between us and understanding what the New Testament writers meant, never mind the Old Testament. The Apostle Paul writes:
Likewise the women are to dress in suitable apparel, with modesty and self-control. Their adornment must not be with braided hair and gold or pearls or expensive clothing, but with good deeds, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. A woman must learn quietly with all submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. She must remain quiet. For Adam was formed first and then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, because she was fully deceived, fell into transgression. (1 Timothy 2:9-14, NET Free)
This is not merely spouting his Pharisaical demands. Paul had already spent more than a decade breaking himself away from the Talmudic garbage, which Jesus called “traditions of the elders,” but was speaking from a very clear and solid grasp of the Ancient Hebrew outlook. Furthermore, that outlook is being proved correct when we read between the lines what manipulative pick up artists say works with women. Those manipulations work because real pick up artists ignore the cultural mythology and what women believe about themselves, and take full advantage of how women actually operate. Part of the scientifically verifiable human behavior pattern is how women cogitate. There is something inherent in female nature which is flexible and adjustable about facts and logic. Women are able to ignore facts and logic as some things in this world are much more important. Otherwise women would be unwilling and unable to follow their husbands when God changes their calling.
It’s not misogyny. That is, Paul is speaking from God’s revelation, while every cultural background which argues on any grounds is speaking from the lies of Satan. It has nothing to do with whether women can become good solid scholars and theologians. It’s a complete failure to notice the cultural mythology to which most of Western Christendom clings.
A further error of Western Christianity is ignoring the sharp divide between the Two Realms, that of the Spirit and that of the Flesh. “That which is from the Spirit Realm is spiritual in nature, and what is from Fleshly Realm is earthly.” Sound familiar? Jesus said it, and Paul echoed it copiously. Christianity assumes some folks are Heaven Born, that we share an eternal identity which is not available to those without Christ. What we have below is concrete and specific; what’s above is altogether different and requires the use of parabolic language because it is out of reach of the fleshly intellect. Here’s the main point of contention: Most Western Christians deny the intellect is fallen. That’s heresy, and approaches blasphemy. The intellect is part of the flesh. The mind is incapable of understanding, nor even wishing spiritual things, says Paul. It is not supposed to rule in decision making, but to implement the decisions made in the spirit, which was brought to life by union with His Spirit.
Both Creation and the Fall have pre-conditioned each sex to exhibit qualities and character traits unique to that sex. At the same time, we realize there is a large overlap of common humanity. God granted to humanity Law Covenants, such as Noah and Moses, as the means to finding what’s the best possible world here in the Fallen Realm. If you have a spiritual birth, an eternal identity, the Law Covenants become what they were always meant to be, parables of higher ineffable truths. We love to quote that passage about “rightly dividing the word” and try to forget it was referring to the Old Testament, where those Law Covenants are recorded. We are supposed to understand those old covenants, as they indicate something about how the mind needs to organize itself to obey the spiritual imperatives it cannot grasp.
Intellectual achievement is fleshly, under the realm covered by the Law Covenants. Your theology is nothing more than your own mental organization for fulfilling your indescribable faith. The theology itself is not sacred, is not a direct revelation of God, just your grasp of what revelation means to you. It may be quite agreeable to a lot of other folks, so that you are called a theologian, but that does not make your brain and thoughts sacred. Nothing of the Flesh Realm can be inherently sacred, because everything on this plane of existence participates in the Fall.
Female theologians are not a big problem, so long as what they teach reflects the Law Covenants. If they pretend to parse things on a more spiritual plane, they can teach everyone except adult men. Paul says on such matters they will take their cues from those appointed to be spiritual shepherds: pastors, apostles, etc. — all male. It’s not because women aren’t smart enough, it’s because something fundamental in feminine nature. It’s because of something utterly necessary for a woman to be a woman. It’s not a put-down or diminution, but women are a treasure in their own right. Paul spoke for God. You can strive all you like to qualify that downward to a lesser standard, but the reason Paul gave for his church customs was something eternal and revealed from Heaven, and not too hard to grasp from the account of the Fall.
So men griping about feminized church atmosphere, they are hardly thinking of the biblical standard of manhood, but something more a mixture of German and Victorian mythology. That’s actually pining for a pagan and sinful standard of manhood. I would object, too, but on biblical grounds. When our Postmodern Christian women complain it’s not a good idea, I doubt their underlying assumptions are any closer to the biblical standard. Indeed, our current feminist orthodoxy is a doctrine of demons, too. Scripture points out repeatedly we justly criticize men for acting like women, and vice versa, because it represents a rejection of what God requires of us.
Women are accorded honor for doing what women are supposed to do, according to that revealed ancient standard of Scripture. That means first showing a superior understanding of what the Law Covenants point toward, which includes knowing her role as He declared it. If she goes on to exercise good, reliable leadership in such things, we make her an elder. Woman can participate in government of the church, because organizational matters are within their roles. Everybody needs a mother. Spiritual perception is another issue entirely; everybody needs a father. Men will surely fail in this, but it’s their role. In matters of ritual and teaching, men are the appointed actors.
Most debates in Western Christianity today are utterly missing the point.
Update: As you may note in the comments below, my good friend Tim suggests I may have missed Amy’s point. Maybe I do. What I read was a woman’s complaint churchmen were insulting womanhood. She seemed to be disappointed there was a some element of the “battle of the sexes” in church politics, at least in what those men were discussing. She’s half right; they were insulting women. But the entire debate is building on a false foundation. If she wants to appeal to Scripture, she needs to understand the larger implications, not just the Bible as read through Modern Reformed glasses.
I was trying to point out those men were begging for a more manly church from within a whole frame of reference which is wrong to begin with. Thus, Amy’s complaint was also missing the point, too. From where I stand, the difference is not so great between a liberal feminist activist position, which is painfully in-your-face, versus the subtle assumption men aren’t supposed to make it an insult to say some guy is feminine. Women are supposed to be women, and men are supposed to be men. The Bible leaves no doubts about that, going so far as to command the sexes not wear each others’ clothing. But when modern churchmen say such things, they are wrong, but from the biblical point of view, so is Amy. That’s because both of them presume a civilization which is utterly broken in the first place, and any attempt to balance between the feminine and masculine influences is doomed.
Even with relatively conservative American social assumptions, such as perhaps are held by Amy and the men she described, the whole thing is silly, asking the wrong questions, and obviously coming up with the wrong answers. When someone suggests whining is a feminine trait, they are wrong. It’s a sinful trait, and biblical women aren’t supposed to do it, either. Personally, even if I agreed with her presuppositions, I would still find most seminary guys of the Reformed tradition are more feminized than the most of the American male population as whole. Their version of “manhood” is already pretty soft by Western standards.
There’s a little of Samson in all of us.
Samson took hold of the two middle pillars that supported the temple and he leaned against them, with his right hand on one and his left hand on the other. Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” He pushed hard and the temple collapsed on the rulers and all the people in it. He killed many more people in his death than he had killed during his life. (Judges 16:29-30, NET Free)
I’m a Christian Mystic, inherently pacifist by nature. I hate seeing people hurt and suffering, and I’m loathe to add to it. But there are most certainly some things more important than my life. Indeed, more important than all human life. All humanity is born in sin, and all deserve to die, and sooner or later we all will. You can’t get out of this world alive. Frankly, I’m eager to leave.
I also know and understand God’s Laws, and He is the One who gets to decide when that end should come. Not by force alone does He rule on such things, but by authority and accountability. His revelation says He holds people accountable for taking life unjustly. His definition of what’s just is not too hard to figure. Those same Laws cover suicide, and you aren’t permitted to take your own life unless you actually deserve to die.
I’m not one of those silly Western absolutists who say, “No one deserves to die.” That’s a lie from Satan; it guarantees more needless killing in actual practice. The mystical side of me says God alone can judge such things, but the lawful side of me insists someone has to execute His justice because He demanded it, literally. It’s the root element of the Covenant of Noah. It’s all perfectly consistent if you understand ANE Mysticism.
God’s Laws make me reluctant to punish anyone for anything. My experience only reinforces that. It’s pretty easy to absorb a great deal of injustice if you really cling to justice itself. God handles most things pretty well without my help. But I do have a mission, an appointment to serve Him. I’m not permitted to tell Him what I will and won’t do. My sense of mission forces me to consider the possibility there are some things more sacred than human life.
You can push me to the limit. That limit may or may not enjoy broad consensus, but that’s not my problem. I’m accountable to the One who drew that limit. Cross that limit, and all bets are off. If you push things beyond God’s justice, don’t expect me to keep playing by your silly rules. It’s not at all about my anger, but about God’s justice. I’ll grab the very pillars of earth and life itself, if necessary, and shake down any system you can name. I’ll use whatever authority and power God places in my hands. If that means I’m taking your life, too, you should have expected that before things got crazy. I’ll be glad to offer all the warnings and explanations you like, but surely you understand some of it will inevitably be contextual.
I don’t anticipate actually taking human life, simply because the odds are small it would come to that. As I say, I’m a pacifist. But I don’t believe in absolutes in the sense we can understand them.
There comes a moment when there’s nothing left to save, and you have to destroy it all.
I could be wrong, I’ll admit.
I am utterly certain of one thing, though: Sane people will admit to mistakes. Not just the theatrical lip service of admitting being less than perfect, but real repentance, stuff that matters. Most people who don’t admit to mistakes are neurotic. A few are psychotic. But some are just plain old evil, no matter why they do it.
You can’t tell me these people are operating in good faith. If I understand what’s going on, they surely do, since they are far better informed, and all with better educations. Nobody has to tell them they are causing problems and hurting people, or that what they do is not just or lawful. The only possible motive is enjoying the suffering of others.
Here are some examples: Ben Bernanke. He knows better than any of us just how completely his service is wholly devoted to the bankers and their retainers. Go ahead and write him a letter, telling him you got him pegged. Won’t matter. The only reason he does that sort of work from his office is because he’s not man enough to walk up and simply stab you to death in person. No, he directs a bunch of other people who will destroy you by a thousand cuts of the other sort, taking everything you have to live for so that his buddies can be fatter and more comfortable. I refuse to discuss his actions in terms of some fabled honest belief he’s doing what’s best for the nation; he knows better than that.
Or his buddy over in HHS, Kathleen Sebelius. It wouldn’t have taken her ten minutes to find out the newest regulations published on 20 January 2012 would force all Catholics in the US to either violate their religious commitments or fight the government. She knew that already. With willful malevolence, she proceeded on the path she knew would hurt people. And it was in the upper reaches of the military that hatefully directed chaplains not to read the letter from their archbishop to the troops, describing this conflict in terms of Catholic conscience. After my years of military service, I can tell you those folks at the top are some vicious and spiteful folks. They are not nice people; otherwise they would never have gotten to the top.
Look, if I thought Catholics were right, I’d be one. But there is nothing to gain by running around poking your fingers in their eyes. They aren’t guided and influenced by such pressure. They may have funny ways of doing things, and I take issue with lots of their positions, but they didn’t arrive at them lightly. Much of it came through the fire of persecution and savage opposition. They firmly believe it’s worth shedding their own blood for these things. Sadly, I have to wonder if the Catholic senior leadership will really show some backbone, because if they push hard enough, those craven thugs in government will back down. The latter aren’t fighting for anything bigger than themselves and their personal comforts. They simply have agreed to come together and fight as one for their common comforts. This is war.
Indeed, the lies and casual disregard of morality is a standard feature of military management (I refuse to call it “leadership”). So rare are those candid statements about things, I have to wonder anyone in uniform survives publishing such honest appraisals. Does no one realize the only way to change another country to your liking is to colonize it? Anything less is a contrived excuse for slaughter and fraudulent waste.
I’ve been reamed myself for being honest, and watched others get it even worse. There are people today — God help me — I’d be willing to see executed for the lies and sheer meanness they poured out on honest and decent soldiers. If I could just find an honest court of inquiry, I could easily succeed at prosecuting their case based on my personal knowledge alone, and the testimony of their victims.
But judges these days often, after some years of good service to grand raping thugs like Monsanto, then turn around and resign for a better paying job with their real constituency. No, not every time and every place, but don’t expect any real justice until God Himself comes thundering down upon the earth. That so many of us tolerate these things makes us all equally guilty.
I might be wrong on some things, but I’m willing to stake everything I have and am on the outcome.
(Warning: This is one of those crazy mystical posts.)
There are plenty of times when God changed His mind, and let someone know.
In the Bible, time was not viewed at all the same as we do here in the Postmodern West. There in the ANE, time was all about ripeness. Time was not something to be sliced and diced and weighed out in microscopic increments. Scheduling was pretty flexible unless you were at someone else’s beck and call. People actually had an attention span in that ancient world. They didn’t mind running through their lives with thousands of loose ends hanging, if the time for decision wasn’t right. But they would still manage to pull it all together when ripen it did. They knew how to wait for things. I’m trying cultivate this, and it’s quite a struggle.
Our concept of perfection is probably all out of whack, too. We have this crazy notion it requires something static, something which cannot be supposed to change because it was already perfect, no? That’s okay if you are a kid, but real adults might understand things are never so simple. Those concepts might apply if we were dealing with something perfect on this level of existence, but in the Spirit Realm, things are decidedly different. Indeed, I can only describe things in symbols and parables.
Too often in the past few years I’ve sensed the Presence of Decision. Something came very close to happening, but at the last moment, turned away. That is, so far as I was concerned, something didn’t happen that could have happened. Who knows whether it would have affected anyone else? I’m quite sure something happened somewhere else, because things are always happening somewhere in the world. But I’m sure there are a great many more things which could, and even came up close, but turned away.
I doubt anyone knows what caused the turning, what made it different for God’s decision. Maybe it was nothing at all on this level, but something we could never understand, much less discuss.
It happened again today, though. Some potency stood very near me, then moved off somewhere else. How else can I explain it? It was like turning suddenly to catch a glimpse of someone’s back as they strode off in the distance. Was that someone I knew? I could feel how close they were, even though I didn’t see them at the time. But this was not like missing an opportunity, given I sense the Divine Presence pretty much all the time (when I’m paying attention). It was more like someone I might have recognized, but they were too busy to stop, or simply decided at the last moment it wasn’t the right moment. Or maybe they waved as they passed by, smiled and winked, and kept going. “Maybe next time, Bud.”
Now, aside from the real possibility of serious delusion, I have to wonder if this ability to sense such things is fairly unique, or something commonly available to folks in the right frame of mind. I lean to the latter. I just don’t believe I’m all that special. At any rate, perhaps you can use this notion. It’s a lot like smelling invisible rain. It’s on the wind somewhere, but it never comes within sight on the horizon. You know it could have, maybe in a certain sense should have, but either way, it almost did, but just didn’t happen.
Go ahead and laugh at me, because I’m sure God has a sense of humor, too.
My longest military assignment saw me sit for six years or so in the Netherlands. I was based at a support facility for the Americans assigned to AFCENT (Allied Forces Central Europe) HQ, a branch of SHAPE (Supreme HQ, Allied Powers in Europe), which in turn was a major portion of NATO. All that stuff was just a short drive from each other in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Somehow, my wife and I gained some influence at the NATO Chapel on the AFCENT base. I was just being myself, and so was she, and it never occurred to either of us to have any particular ambition. My wife volunteered to help out in the chapel, and thus, was a coordinator for one of the organizations (PWOC, Protestant Women of the Chapel).
During one of their annual celebrations, the director of PWOC went around to all the husbands of the women in this sizable group and asked them to say something nice about their wives. The objective was to gather enough quotes to make a game of guessing whose husband said what. I offered the only thing which made sense to me: “My wife is the one person who has always stood behind me, supporting all the crazy stuff I do.”
The director looked at me with a slightly disappointed face. “Anyone could guess who that is!”
That was 20 years ago, and it’s still the truth.
