Semi-annual Review of Assumptions

Brothers and sisters, it comes to my attention I may need to restate certain essential foundational issues for the purposes of evaluating whether my blog, and my teaching, is worth your time. The foundation stone is Christ. In the guise of His Holy Spirit, if He does not move you through my work here, you need to move on to other things, mindful of His calling on your life. Willingly I explain what is behind all this, but there is no debate. Nothing in the gospel message directs me to convince you, only to inform you, to pull out my own heart for you to see. What you do with it is between you and God, as you owe me nothing. What I owe you is simply what I owe Christ Himself -- utter and complete transparency.

If it were possible to accomplish God's work by debate, then surely Josh McDowell would know. He has said in many places how often he was able to debate the atheists into a corner, but it did nothing to change their spiritual condition. If rational discussion and logical proof could change the heart of man, Paul would not have needed to flee Damascus, Stephen would not have been lynched, and Jesus would not have been crucified at the behest of the Sanhedrin. Paul made it all too clear the mind of the flesh is hostile to God's truth, and is unable to grasp it.

Spiritual truth is not within the capabilities of the rational engine of human understanding. That's because spiritual truth is a Person, not an objective reality. He stands far above reality. You can posit and assert all you wish about God, but you cannot bring Him to life in any soul without His divine election. All your statements will fall miserably short. God uses whatever He pleases to bring revelation to every heart, but it does not lie within the words and actions of any human. The power and initiative are His alone. You are commissioned to tell, and the results are entirely His.

This is not to say human reason is somehow in itself an evil thing. It is merely a tool, with distinct design limits. It does just fine for most basic tasks of passing through this world. We can use it just fine for observing how physical entities interact, to the degree we are able to measure those interactions. So long as God tarries sending His Son back to close up shop here on earth, we will continue our advancements in grasping consistent physical realities without any need whatsoever for a spiritual understanding. However, it is utter damnable hubris and heresy to assume that marvelous gift can make sense of spiritual things. Spiritual things will ever be beyond the grasp of the rational mind.

This is the primary reason Jesus used parables. He knew the rational mind could not grasp ultimate truth in the first place, but a spirit awakened by God could. Since ultimate truth cannot be confined to mere human words, it was necessary to use parables to point the mind to a place where it could be open to things it could not process on its own terms. Spiritual truth is only processed by spirits, and the spirit is hardly any part of the conscious human mind. Indeed, the very connection between them is beyond human understanding. So from parables the spirit discerns the will of God, and informs the mind by some undefined process what is required here and there. The mind might tend to see some patterns, but will never completely own the process.

If we hope to condition the mind to become more adept at hearing from the spirit, where dwells His Spirit, we must learn a form of logic not commonly exercised in this day and time. Indeed, it is pretty much universally condemned, unless it is subverted and compromised. Either way, in our modern Western culture, we are ill-equipped to operate along the assumptions so very common to the culture God chose for first revealing Himself to fallen man. Indeed, we can trace back to just how big this problem was when we realize Jesus operated from this ancient culture of God's own preference, and His nation did not. The leadership of Judea had in His day long since moved away from the ancient Hebrew cultural base, and had deeply perverted it with something we call "Hellenism" as a convenient label.

Let there be no mistaking this: Any part of modern scientific rationalism is inescapably tied to Hellenism. It all comes from the Greek philosophical traditions, which include Plato, Aristotle, etc. There is no "pure reason" without them. There is no escape from their legacy. Any claims to the contrary is intellectual dishonesty. There is no practical distinction between "reason" as discussed in modern Western Civilization as against "Hellenism" as a term to describe a man-centered influence the Early Church had to fight, in particular in the guise of the Gnostic Heresies.

To suggest the Early Church embraced Hellenism in its teachings is a damnable heresy. Jesus clearly rejected it. However, so deeply stained is our modern Western minds with worldly assumptions we tend to read that rationalist framework back into the Scripture. We have this vast horde of instructional material in our seminaries and colleges which promotes such idiocy as saying Scripture is "propositional truth." God is not a proposition! Nor is His Word -- His Son -- a proposition. The writings in the Book of Books is not meant to convey "propositional truth." The people who wrote that Scripture would weep for embarrassment if they could be here to witness what we make of their ministry. The very logic of the Kingdom of Christ is far, far beyond anything which can be locked inside printed words on paper, in any language you choose. That is a Hellenistic perversion, a man-centered approach to the message of God, and it will not stand.

The very notion of "propositional truth" assumes an image of truth as some objective reality apart from God. Jesus the man learned an awful lot from reading the likes of Isaiah, and quoted him often, but He felt altogether free to rephrase things, as did all the writers in the New Testament. Further, they didn't choke on using the Septuagint, of all things. Not because it was a better translation -- that is manifestly false -- but because the precise word didn't matter as much as what the words indicated. That's the very nature of parabolic logic. Things we can touch, to include words and human thoughts, are but symbols at best, pointers to something far beyond words and thoughts. Conceptions of objective reality as somewhere out there with God in Eternity is blasphemy, for it raises something lesser than God to His status, or brings Him down to a lesser place. The Word of God is a sacred trust, and we must do what we can to preserve it, to make sure what we have is as close to the original as we can get it, but not because the words themselves are sacred. If that were so, every translation is a sin.

Carrying that Bible all over the place is not some magic talisman. Memorizing it word for word is simply to echo the sins of the Hellenized Pharisees. You cannot hide mere words in your heart, because the heart is not an intellectual faculty. It is a decisional faculty. It moves on commitments, not rational content. That is how the Bible conceives the meaning of the heart. That word "faith" is not a matter of rational content, for it makes demands which are utterly irrational, completely indefensible in terms of human logic. Faith is just another word for loyalty and commitment, a living, burning desire to please God, not slavishly follow some human grasp of ink characters on paper.

Don't talk to me about what the Bible says in words. Tell me what the Bible demands of you as God's personal servant.