The Pharisees taught that God's Law was the ultimate truth of God, refusing to understand it was merely a shadow of a much greater truth. Sure, they understood there was a higher realm, that there were angels and such, but they so utterly mystified it, one could not talk about it. They destroyed the parabolic method of teaching by literalizing the parables. Thus, the whole of God's blessings could only ever be what comes in this life, on this plane of existence. There was no room in their thinking for blessings of the spirit, because they did not allow for the notion humans could have a spirit, a faculty higher than the mind. This was why Nicodemus was so utterly thrown off when Jesus said it required a spiritual birth to understand what He taught.
So the Pharisees began during the 3rd Century BC formulating their Talmudic traditions based on their exposure to Alexander's evangelistic zeal for Hellenic intellectual culture. They embraced the Aristotelian epistemology and reduce holiness to something a man could do with his mind and body. Thus, the false teachings which arose saying celibacy somehow made one superior in God's eyes to those who married. It made the teachings of Kosher a matter of ultimate holiness, when Kosher was never meant to offer anything more than worldly ritual "holiness". Staying away from certain foods had a health effect, of course. And staying celibate might serve some functional purpose in the lives of some, but those things were not holiness in themselves; they arose from the holiness of one's commitment to serve God.
Today, Systematic Theology is the equivalent of the Talmud in the established traditions of the modern church. I wrote it elsewhere, but it still applies here:
Starting with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, fallen man has been granted an ever-brighter light of revelation on the path back. The bare trace in the wilderness became a highway, until the very living Incarnation of God’s self-disclosure Himself was born. God didn’t simply choose a nation, but created one from scratch, arising from a particular cultural background. Revelation cannot take place in a vacuum. Inscriptions on stone are not sufficient; it must be living and breathing, including the whole of what makes up a dynamic human identity. The ancient Hebrew world was the setting God designed for His revelation.
It’s not simply a matter of 2000 years. First, the Son Himself pointed out how the nation at that point had long previously slipped away from its genuine Hebrew identity. They were not true to Moses, much less Abraham. The teachings of Jesus were a call to return to a very different frame of reference, so for us it’s more like 3500 years. Plus, it’s 5000 miles, several shifts in language, culture and civilization, and a wholly different intellectual frame of reference.
Grace cannot be grasped by the human mind. It can’t be told, only indicated. Only a living spirit can receive it. Human awareness itself was broken by the Fall, disconnected from a living spirit. In His mercy and wisdom the Father provided the means to call us back to the place where His Spirit stood waiting to reunite us with our spirits. The shining beacon of truth is beyond the fallen mind, so God offered a lesser expression, something which could be grasped in the fallen intellect. It’s primary expression is in the Law Covenants — Noah and Moses — as indicators, something the mind could grasp as a parable of the unspeakable Truth of God the Person. To know God is to know His will; that is as much as any human can know of God. The Laws of God were within reach of fallen man, the merciful provision of a path to grace. Law is not the goal, nor the sum total of revelation, just a mere manifestation. But even with that, we have a massive gulf to span on our human level. The thread of revelation through human history included not merely a pile of logical propositions, as if truth could be objectified. Nor is is sufficient to say revelation is in the gestalt, the whole of it. It’s a radical shift in epistemology, of awareness itself.
It’s not the data, nor the software to process it, but an entirely new operating system and logic, because grace completely changes the hardware. It’s a whole new architecture. You can only port so much of it without starting from scratch. As long as you read Scripture from a Western mind, you will miss an awful lot. You’ll get that you have sinned, deserve to go to Hell, and that Jesus is your only hope. You will have only a very poor idea how to follow Him, though. To fix the problems [of how we live today] requires a radical solution most readers are not prepared to contemplate. God’s solution is mandating a change in cultural in our frame of reference. So long as there is a Western Civilization, there will be no solution, no good human government.
I can't say it often enough, in enough different ways. What we have today is broken; that much is obvious. The solution is not simply more of the same, nor simply a different application of the same. We have to set aside the whole of Christian Church History and go back to the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles. We cannot simply read them through our modern day Christian Talmud of human intellectual traditions.
I am driven by the Spirit of God to prophesy, and to warn all who claim to serve Him: Turn! Turn from your wicked ways. Repent of Western Civilization and return to His ancient ways.
Nobody is asking you to give up English, computers, and what we know of our world through science, but to understand those things cannot rule over our reading of Scripture. Whether we can succeed in removing the lenses of Aristotelian epistemology is not the issue; we are obliged to try.
I will not be silent.
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