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Sunday, July 14. 2013
Faith Is The Rock - On The Human ... Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Apologetics, Commentary, Holy Scripture at
16:45
Faith Is The Rock - On The Human Need To Believe ... Something
The stability of the mind is predicated on faith, where by faith we essentially mean that intuitive synthesis which unifies our myriad thoughts and impressions into a coherent worldview. This is why, in scripture, faith or revelation – the terms are synonymous – is called the rock, the foundation. ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona (Mathew 16:17-18): for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ... It is the revelation, according to the saviour, which is the rock, the foundation, of the Christian worldview – specifically, the revelation of who he is that is speaking ... namely, the Christ.
The present example, along with New Testament usage in general, thus speaks of a specific faith – that informed by the revelation of Jesus Christ. This is what is meant in scripture when it is spoken of the faith. But, as modern usage also has it, there are many ‘faiths’ – persuasions, worldviews, paradigms of the real – such that the concept should also be understood in the larger sense outlined above – the faculty of intuitive synthesis by which the mind reaches a resultant, a conclusion, concerning the nature of reality. Religious critics, of course, claim that it is reason – not faith – which rightly occupies this place of chief organising principle in the realm of mind – or that at least it ought, as it does for those sober, right-minded individuals, whose self-defined identity is of a vaunted rationalism. But this is simply not well observed. The reason is undergirded by faith, by the implicit assumption that reality is such-and-such, where that assumption involves a quasi infinitude of constituent beliefs, most of them so properly basic to human sensibility and culture that they rarely come up for scrutiny, let alone any serious questioning. Faith is accordingly the primordial substance of experience – it goes to the root, as indeed it is the root – and it fills the vast expanse of awareness, delivering a universe out of chaos. The reason, by contrast, arrives late on the scene, as a graft implanted into the tree of faith. It proceeds to analyse on the fractal edge of cognition and proclaims, aha, aha, I can explain ... not recognising for the most part that all reasoning is circular, a closed entropic sphere, suspended without support in the illimitable void. Where the reason gains purchase, harnessing electricity, for instance, and conjuring a glittering techno-sphere out of the void, it is only because it is nurtured, sustained, imbued with substance – the substance – which is faith. When thus understood we see that faith – what we call faith – is not narrowly religious in implication, although it is indeed religious in the broad sense of a binding or covering of the nakedness of the soul. In Genesis 3 it is spoken of that covering – as fashioned by man, and as provided by God. Both are ultimately of faith, although differing in the way they are informed, such that faith is prior, foundational and intrinsic, to any worldview one comes to espouse – whether materialist or mystical. It is this broader understanding which is basic to an appreciation of the nature of faith, although scriptural usage is typically more specific with implicit reference to the good faith – the faith of God as conveyed in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Faith, in this more specific sense, is thus typically distinguished from wisdom of knowledge, where the latter refers to that relative and partial knowledge – of observation and reason – as it were, an extraneous shoot, grafted into the Tree of Life – that primordial Tree in the Garden of God, which is of the nature of faith – meaning the good faith, unalloyed by knowledge or reason. It is in this specific sense, as per the Pauline asseveration, that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. However, not all faith is thus positive, given the broader use of the term. There is such a thing as faith or intuition gone awry, and here we speak of superstition. Clearly then, the intuition, although primary to the reason, is not infallible. As stated, it is a question of information – of how a mind is informed. It is the quality of information which determines the matter – in the religious as in the scientific domain. And here the reason, to render its due, may serve as a corrective. Indeed, it is here that the essential function of the reason is apparent – that of criticising ideas. It is intuition which generates ideas. Without intuition – or faith – there is are no ideas, and so, no universe. All would be chaos as the reason undermines itself in the conflagration of radical doubt. There would be no world, no sensible cosmos – no self, no other, so subject or object – nothing upon which to base a single proposition, which demonstrates that faith is indeed the rock – the core and foundational principle in the realm of mental organisation. The mind or soul must needs believe something insofar as its very existence is predicated upon, and comprised of that, something. The madman – the insight, I believe is due to the psychiatrist Russell Meares – has not lost his reason; he has all but his reason. Herein moreover lie the grounds for entrenched pathology of belief – for ideology, superstition or faith in the negative sense – that the soul thus misinformed would rather cling to its dysfunctional beliefs, than face existential annihilation in the exposure of rampant all-consuming doubt. It is called the abyss and the dark night of the soul – this radical dissolution of all certainty – and as a passage if initiation, of individuation, of spiritual transformation, it is universally recognised as central to the formation of a viable soul. As also observed Carl Gustav Jung, psychosis is the most direct, if the most perilous, path to individuation. It is perilous indeed, considering the weight of cultural sanctions that are ranged against it. And yet, the experience, in the nature of things, need not be traumatic. It may be of blissful rapture, as per the example of the spiritual birth which is the true Pentecost. The relative ease of the passage is determined by the soul’s inherent disposition as by the spiritual agencies supervening. And whereas the assignation is primarily for the perfecting of the saints (as on this side of the grave), in the greater cosmic context it is the destiny of souls universally. The reason for this is that culture is a lie – a contrivance, an accommodation – namely in its formal institutional conventions. In the cosmological and spiritual asymptote which is the singularity – the biblical Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end – the soul confronts the ground from which it arose, and thus its original and authentic nature. All contrivance, all that is of artifice, falls away in the disclosure of that which is intrinsic. There is a faith then which is natural and uncontrived. It is the rock, the foundation, as the Bible states, and it is the faith as once delivered to the saints. As states Deuteronomy, the book of the two laws (33:27): The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Thursday, June 27. 2013
Got To Be ... Rational ! ? Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Apologetics, Commentary, Evangelism, Holy Scripture at
16:18
Got To Be ... Rational ! ?
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. (1 Timothy 6:20-21)
Christian apologists are typically at pains to demonstrate that their faith is rational. By this they usually mean that (1) it bears scrutiny by some canon of reason, and (2) that the tenets of Christian belief are consistent with an arbitrarily advanced state of scientific knowledge – to whit, the perceived present state. It is perhaps not usually admitted, but the inference is clear – science and reason represent a standard of verity and confer validation regarding the faith. Conversely, something is generally considered amiss where these two epistemological systems – religious faith and observation / reason – are perceived to be at odds. If at this point a suspicion arises that exegetes have the whole thing back-to-front – well, I suspect this suspicion may be entirely justified. We are beginning to glimpse just how profoundly – and, indeed, how subtly – the Christian faith has been subverted in a rational inquisition, which goes back at least to the ecclesiastical councils of Constantine. Christianity, originally, signified the ingress of a transcendent mind, incommensurate and radically at variance with the historic continuum. Then, within a relatively brief period, it was ‘tamed’ – co-opted – rationalised ... thereby loosing its transcendent charter and, indeed, much of its redeeming virtue. Whereas the humanist tradition, which we trace to the ancient Greeks, holds wisdom or intellectual achievement in the highest esteem, the gospel peremptorily informs that here is something altogether greater – something greater not merely by degree, but in a manner incommensurate. As Isaiah (55:8-9) states the matter – For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Of course, modern biblical scholars have turned this around, confidently asserting that their erudite cogitations are infinitely exalted above the parochial and primitive conceptions of scripture. And their basis for this assertion ... is science and reason. We know better, they claim, than the superstitious ancients who wrote the Bible. While extremes of this stance characterise such liberal and revisionist conclaves of the higher criticism as the Jesus Seminar, it’s leaven permeates no less the biblical evangelical mainstream. Its theological articulations, while paying lip service to transcendent verities, implicitly and ineluctably, bow down and worship at the shrine of reason. The stance, indeed is reflexive – it is part of the academic good tone, and entirely taken for granted. Reasonable – rational – formulations are the sine qua non of scholarly discourse. By contrast, the mystical, the prophetic, the revelational, the intuitive, the visionary, the spiritual as a means of biblical understanding – these are inherently distrusted and banished to the outer margins of acceptable dialogue. As one respondent put it to me – anyone can lay claim to a revelation or vision. To which I answer – quite. Nevertheless, the revelational or spiritual attitude has a chance of being right, for it is the way of God enjoined in scripture. Whereas the rational approach has no chance of succeeding, as the scriptures, again, make abundantly clear. The carnal mind is enmity with God, as Paul informs us in Hebrews – and the carnal mind, we may unequivocally assert, is the rational mind. It is the rational mind – with its handful of explanatory variables, its grounding in the relative, its infinite regress of analytic elaboration, without a sure foundation anywhere in sight. Indeed we may recall that it was knowledge – carnal knowledge, referred to in Genesis as the knowledge of good and evil, and all knowledge, in this sense, is carnal – which precipitated the primordial fall from divine communion. This ‘fall’ – assuredly – was from a holistic, spiritual and intuitive, vision to the partial, relative and analytic apprehensions of the rational mind. Consequently it is by no exertion of the rational mind that the conditions attending humanity’s spiritual exile can be reversed – and here, in a nutshell, is the failing of the modern church: its substitution of scholarship for spiritual revelation. The rational mind cannot relate, in any adequate sense, to the unfathomed and irreducible complexity of the organic. As such it is inherently estranged from nature, as it is estranged from the divine. Being finite in its conceptions, it is necessarily reductive in its modelling of natural process, even as it is reductive in its rendering of scripture in terms of a rational creed. The mystery of godliness reduced to a creed – that, in essence, is the plight of the church. For it is the rational mind which is implicitly elevated to godhead in the realm of human understanding. ‘Rational’ is the new godly. The matter is addressed by Paul, stating that the Greeks require wisdom, while the Jews seek miracles, and we moderns are mostly among the Greeks. Yet addressed in this manner are the both epistemological systems – the magical and the rational – and the gospel submits to neither. Both paradigms are rebuked in that we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling-stone to the Hebrews and foolishness to the Greeks. Christ crucified means the sacrifice of the Word – the cultural understanding, whether rational or magical, must needs perish for the spiritual to arise. This in part is what we mean by salvation and the spiritual birth. This is not to advocate an anti-intellectual stance. Our characterisation of the rational mind as enmity with God does to diminish its efficacy relative to a fallen world. But when directed at the highest, when approaching the asymptote of its own conceptual foundations, it necessarily fails. The reason, in its ultimate function, becomes cognisant of its intrinsic and ineluctable limitations, as indeed mathematicians discovered in the early twentieth century. Yet our cultural institutions – the church included – have failed to imbibe this lesson. The rush to deify the reason continues unabated, and its apotheosis is, no less, that abomination of desolation, standing in the holy place, as spoken of by Jesus. In biblical terms, the Word of Life – the transcendent mind of Christ – is rejected. All redemptive efficacy of the Word is lost as the transcendent revelation is lost. The human mind is not raised to the divine, but the divine reduced to the human. This – again – is the crucifixion of Christ in our age. Saturday, June 8. 2013
It’s The Body ! - On The Irreducible ... Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Commentary, Holy Scripture at
15:57
It’s The Body ! - On The Irreducible Complexity Of The Word Of God
It’s the body – the Word of God. It is the spiritual body of Jesus Christ in abstract form and the information content which structures that form – the body inhabited by the Spirit of God. Contemporary philosophers of science, like Stephen Meyer, author of Signature In The Cell (HarperOne, 2009), recognise that it is information which distinguishes living organisms from inanimate matter, and the same holds for the spiritual body. It is the inherent information content, as appropriated by spiritual revelation, which distinguishes the bride of Christ from the religious cults and denominations. The spiritual bride is comprised of the Word – the whole of the Word and nothing but the Word, it is fitting to add. She is one with her Lord who is the Word – she, the bride and mystical body of Jesus Christ. And what distinguishes the living Bride from the dead denominations and religious organisations is this – that the Word of God has life, and as such it is characterised by organic depth and integrity.
This, again to emphasise, is also the hallmark of the natural body. Nature, the natural universe, is unfathomably deep in its workings. It cannot be reduced to a rational conception in terms of a finite set of variables. And if nature cannot thus be reduced, neither can the Word of God – the Word which is the logos of nature. The inspired Word of prophetic utterance, as the self-disclosure of a higher mind, is transcendent of all rational conception – as states Isaiah 55, exalted above the thoughts and ways of man as the heavens are exalted above the earth. Which further explains why, through the ages, the Word of God has been elusive. It explains indeed the historic failing of the church, insofar it is informed not of the Word, but interpretations of the Word – divisive creeds, each emphasising certain aspects of scripture to the exclusion of others. Although grafted into the Tree of Life – the denominational creeds – they are out on a limb, so to speak. Sooner or later they run out of scripture, and compensate by filling the gaps with rationalisations – extraneous notions which have no part of the body. This explains why the body is sick and all torn up. To illustrate let us consider again the natural body. Metabolism of the natural body is regulated by enzymes, complex molecules which act as catalysts for myriad chemical interactions. Many of these enzymes oppose each other in function, and the health of the body depends on their balance, their due proportion and interaction, as regulated by yet further enzymes. Too much of one, to the exclusion of others, will kill the body, even though each one is good and necessary in itself. This is a perfect analogy of the spiritual body. Religious cults and denominations typically run with some exclusive idea, turning it into an overarching doctrine. Sooner or later, as stated, they run out of scripture, eventually reaching a dead end of spiritual stasis. Which explains why denominational Christianity is dead – why indeed we have something called Christianity, which is not Christianity at all. While it might have qualified as such back yonder in the age of Reformation – under the anointing of the cherubic Man (see Revelation 4) wherein rational exegesis was the state of the art – this is the age of the Flying Eagle, an age of restoration and spiritual revelation. The healthy body, as described, is comprised of the synergy of myriad opposing agents, and thus it is with the spiritual body. It is comprised of the whole of the Word, with its often seemingly contradictory notions – a proposition by which the rational mind is altogether stymied. The rational mind cannot cope with the Word of God, and radical attempts – as it were, of putting new the wine into old bottles – in terms of their consequences, typically range from the ridiculous to the tragic. Indeed the carnal or rational mind, as Paul reminds us, is enmity with God. Only the mind of Christ can take this Word and make it perform as intended. And, indeed, we have the mind of Christ – if we are born of water and blood according to the scriptures. As for the rational mind, it looses itself in the abyss, the incommensurate gulf between the rational conception and the irreducible complexity of the materia mystica, the primordial substance, which is the Word of God. We see this exemplified in the increasingly abstract formulations of academic theology, as in the increasingly indirect means of natural enquiry in the physical sciences – both engaging in realms increasingly remote from the data of sensory experience. From the rational standpoint, as stated, the well is infinitely deep, such that the rational mind is, on analysis, is commensurate with the abyss. The Word of God, by contrast, for all its organic depth and wholeness, never departs from the nexus of immediate experience. This indeed is the hallmark of the visionary and mystical, that it is grounded in the embodied experience. And so ... it’s the body, the Word of God. It is not to be held at arm’s length – dissected, interpreted, doctored, explained – it is to be received by faith. As states the scripture, a body hast thou prepared me – which truth holds for the spiritual body as it does for the natural. Only the mind of Christ can cross the gulf and produce the body, which crossing is the new birth by the Cross of Christ – the crossing of Jordan, metaphorically, which is death to the self. This is one of the scary notion of scripture, the truth of which, however, is liberty, salvation, and the power of the Holy Ghost. And it is a dangerous doctrine, subject, like all great truths, to misapprehension and consequent radicalism. But again we can point to the Word as a sure corrective in that any misapprehension will, surely and in some signal manner, depart from the Word. But the mind of Christ, the Holy Spirit, inhabits, upholds and affirms that Word – the Word which is the spiritual body of the bride of Christ. Friday, June 7. 2013When is the Word of God ... the Word of God ?
Is the Word of God always the Word of God? Many of us are fundamentalists in the sense that we take all of scripture to be divinely inspired. And in this sense, I concur, we must be fundamentalists in order to apprehend in full the biblical revelation.
But when we hear something like, the Bible says ... therefore I must ... , here I would caution, be careful. Untold mischief has arisen because of zealots on crusades for the reason that ‘God told me so’ – because of ordinary individuals of goodwill, trying to perform a spiritual service without appropriate spiritual charter. Paul, in Ephesians 1:9, refers to the will of God as a mystery. A mystery ... Here I think of my own spiritual mentor, William Marrion Branham, who posited five conditions that must be met for the Word of God to be ... the Word of God. I cannot locate the original right now, so I will try to reconstruct the essentials of this message. The five conditions are these: 1. It must come by Gods designated messenger. 2. It must come to the person which God intended. 3. It must be in accord with scripture. 4. It must be the Word in season. 5. It must be vindicated. Let us look at these more closely. 1. It must come by Gods designated messenger. Clearly, not everyone who prophesies or quotes scripture speaks for God. There are the misguided and outright deceivers – the false anointed and, as WMB put it in his Demonology series, deceiving spirits ‘versing’ the Word of God. The prophecy, in other words, must come by the Holy Spirit, and the anointed messenger chosen of God. 2. It must come to the person which God intended. Firstly, the Word of God is not for everyone. Not everyone can receive these truths. More specifically, there is specialisation within the spiritual body – not every member individually manifests the whole of scripture. To each is appointed a measure of the Spirit and a portion of the Word to fulfil. The exception here, of course is Christ himself, who embodies the whole, as well a certain great redemptive truths which pertain to the body entire. But concerning the specifics of ministry, of gifts and personal calling, these are unique to the individual, as well as the historic age of spiritual unfolding. 3. It must be in accord with scripture. Among evangelicals this would seem a commonplace, but it is a principle that is violated all to frequently. It is violated on the basis of false teaching, as on the basis of impressions, of sensation and religious emotion. A powerful anointing, a spiritual manifestation – those are often taken as divine sanction, even when there is no scriptural basis for the phenomenon in question. In Amos 3:7 we read in this connection, Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he reveals his secret unto his servants, the prophets. Stated another way, if it is of God, it is in the scriptures. Indeed, where a major doctrine is in question, the relevant truth must be seen to resonate throughout the entirety of scripture. We cannot build a doctrinal case on a few isolated verses, specifically selected to serve our end. 4. The Word must be the Word in season. This, to some extent, follows from (1) and (2), but it involves the greater truth that the Word God has divinely appointed seasons for its fulfilment. It must not be premature, nor should it lag behind – just as the seasons of the year relate to natural cycles of growth. As the Word God is the spiritual seed, it likewise has its appointed seasons. The Law of Moses was the Word God to Israel in the wilderness, but when that same Word, in the person of Jesus, stood before the Pharisees, the Word of Moses was superseded. Similarly, on a finer scale, we may consider the seven gentile church ages and the portion of the Word fulfilled in each. As in Israel’s wilderness journey, the spiritual manna needed to be gathered afresh every morning – with each new age of spiritual unfolding. Whereas the reformers Martin Luther and John Wesley brought such manna to their respective ages, the church of this age cannot thrive, let alone progress, on the doctrine of the Reformation Fathers. For this is another spiritual age, with a further portion of the Word revealed. 5. It must be vindicated. This is my personal favourite – the one which seems to me the most profound. Sure, the first four are significant, but essentially in line with what most biblical Christians would expect. Here learn we a deeper truth. God vindicates his Word by bringing it to pass – thereby showing that it is indeed his Word. In other words, it is not for mortals to interpret the scriptures – well, it says this ... I suppose it must mean ... – that kind of thinking is all wrong. The Word is simply believed by faith – in its entirety, without reservation – and God, by his Spirit, quickens the Word to make it manifest – specifically that portion of the Word to be fulfilled in the applicable season. God interprets his own Word by bringing it to pass – that is the interpretation thereof. So if something is claimed the Word of God, and it’s not happening – if it’s contrived, perfunctory and an all-round drag – that, of a surety, is not the Word of God. The Word of God is the Word in action. It is spirit and life. It is God himself. Tuesday, May 28. 2013The Trinity And The Hound Of Hell
We know something is amiss when apologists are compelled to sound the depths of absurdity. In Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2003) authors J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig confront the unenviable task of explaining the Christian Trinity. One explanatory model which they offer is ... Cerberus, in Greek mythology the three-headed hound of hell, a spectral creature guarding the gates of hades. That’s right – an imaginary three-headed dog to explain the nature of God.
In a more recent podcast Craig explains that this was never intended as an analogy, as indeed there are no perfect analogies for the Trinity, but that it nevertheless conveys something significant regarding the essential idea of a tri-personal being. Where the analogy fails, Craig elaborates, is that, if Cerberus should die and his form dissolve, the three minds of God would detach and fly off into space. States Craig: God is an immaterial substance or soul endowed with three sets of cognitive faculties each of which is sufficient for personhood, so that God has three centres of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. … the persons are [each] divine… since the model describes a God who is tri-personal. The persons are the minds of God. and: … just as Cerberus is a single dog with three consciousnesses, so God is a single spiritual substance or soul with three self-consciousnesses. I submit that, far from being an elegant contrivance, this sounds as atrocious as it is, and we see exemplified the impotence and conceptual absurdity to which trinitarians are reduced in defending their model. We see the unfailing need for extra-biblical referents, concepts and constructs, to maintain what is clearly not a scriptural given. Why – oh why – must theologians conclude that, when God took on human form, this means there are two of them, and when again relinquishing this form but leaving his Spirit, this makes them three? I mean, the Bible explains itself. Jesus said, I am the root and offspring of David, in answer to the very controversy as raised by the Pharisees – how Christ could be God and yet walk the earth as a common man. If only theologians would take the biblical image – that of man – to show forth the nature of God – instead of a three-headed dog or whatever else – the lamentable trinitarian idea would have never arisen. We see, further, the carnal and regressive notion of God as substance, and this quite apart from self-contradictory notion of an immaterial substance. Indeed it appears in the above example that a forth entity is being postulated, i.e. the dog proper supporting the three heads, constituting, as it were, the container or glue, holding together the persons of the Trinity. Not the biblical Spirit – or consciousness – but a spiritual substance constitutes the Godhead by this account – as indeed I always suspected of the trinitarian conception. Without question, the trinitarian reifies his God and, evidently, the more of them (up to a point), the better. While this may seem a reductio absurdum, I have observed it in countless conversations. Faced with the unitarian conception, the trinitarian feels deprived of two thirds of his deity, showing that the trinitarian glasses remain in place, even while an alternative is ostensibly being contemplated. But such is among the consequences when the cart is before the horse with respect to spirit and substance – when there is failure to understand that God is Spirit. Why, finally, the need to theologise? Why the need for argument? Did not Jesus also say, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God? Why then, and for whose benefit, the intellectual acrobatics of theologians and Christian philosophers? I mean, no-one will argue at consummate length that the sun gives light or that water is wet. Insofar then as their recourse is biblical scholarship – textual analysis and the light of reason – they admit in effect that they have not seen God. From which we can reasonably conclude that they – meaning, the greater majority thus engaged – have no idea what they are talking about. Of course this is shocking to contemplate. Let me state for the record my essential respect for Moreland and Craig as leading lights of Christian academia. Scholarship, however, is no safeguard against theological error, especially when the greater consensus is a stake. Our example illustrates the badlands of absurdity into which even the erudite plummet when compelled to defend one of the many misconceptions in which enlightened modern evangelical Christendom abounds. Is it really so difficult to countenance that the church may have it all wrong? As a writer myself, I am further aware that one wrong-headed idea – and here we may definitely include the three-headed hound of Moreland and Craig – when elaborated or defended, leads to a cloud of obfuscation, an exacerbation of confusion, and before long one faces the fact that one is writing gibberish. Of course, without something more than mere erudition, one may never come that far. Friday, August 10. 2012
On The Life Of The Soul Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Apologetics, Evangelism, Holy Scripture at
17:51
On The Life Of The Soul
O God – if there is a God, save my soul – if I have a soul !
Called the agnostic’s prayer, the above is attributed to Ernest Renan (1823-1892). It poignantly conveys the estrangement of the modern and materialist mind from the consciousness and discourse of spiritual things. The soul – much has been conjectured concerning this mysterious numen, and yet the matter has remained elusive. It is something of a mystery even among the religiously minded, and the secular verdict is that it does not exist. The problem, I suggest, is due to confusion concerning spiritual categories in general – that they are considered otherworldly and ephemeral rather than tangible. The soul, according to this view, is the subtle, rarefied, immaterial essence of personhood, perhaps intuitively placed in the region of the heart – for Descartes it was the pineal gland – and deemed to survive the death of the physical body. If it exists, it does so as an article of faith – not as an entity directly experienced. My purpose is not to contradict this conventional notion, but to suggest that it misses the point in significant part – that the soul is indeed the most obvious fact of existence. While it may be viewed as a kind of spiritual singularity – and I think the simile is singularly apt – in manifestation that singularity unfolds into a world of experience. It is not, therefore, an entity within the ambit of experience which may be objectively distinguished; it is experience as such – the whole of it. And thus the soul is ‘it’ – it is all. The soul – and only the soul – is the sole and singular fact of human experience. It is the point of view, the subjective nature of the self within the realm of experience. Waking or sleeping, from the cradle to the grave, it is the soul which is the singular fact of human awareness. Conventionally then, the soul is psyche or mind – the magical theatre of human experience which illuminates the worlds. While we might consider the soul the vessel of experience, the distinction is essentially a formal one. We do not observe a vessel as distinct from content, a ‘mind’ as distinct from thought and sensation. Yet it seems appropriate to speak of an entity – a whole – which comprises the subjective, and therefore the essential, nature of human individuality. Souls, therefore, are rightly deemed precious insofar as each soul is unique, and that comprehended within each soul is a world or universe of experience. Indeed we may speak in this context of worlds, of innumerable universes as the portent of the soul. And yet, while the whole may be considered one from the standpoint of the individual self, there is nevertheless a twofold aspect – a dual nature – to the soul. In manifestation there is the ‘tangible’ stream of human experience, such that the individual self or soul is comprised of that stream. It is identified with the world of its experience. Yet there is also that which beholds, and in this regard the soul partakes of the transcendent nature of spirit or consciousness. Genesis 2:7 states: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. From this I conclude: A soul is the intersection of spirit or consciousness with the material realm. (We note that the breath of life, the Hebrew ruah, also means spirit.) Indeed the principle may be observed in the creation of the world, where it is stated: (Genesis 1:2) The Spirit of God (ruah) moved upon the face of the waters. And again (Job 38:7) When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy – in other words, where the world was sung into existence. Here it is spoken of Christ, the universal or great soul, which is ruah elohim, the breath or Word of God – he who is called the beginning of the creation of God, in whom all lesser souls have their being. The transcendent Spirit moves upon the primordial waters, which is the manifest Word and mind of God. And as the Word is mixed with faith – which is the substance, according to Paul, the primordial substance of which all things are made – when God said, let there be light ... there was light. Christ Jesus, who is also called the faithful witness – he who bears witness of the light – further said of himself (John 5:19): The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father doing, that does the Son likewise. The soul of Christ is the dwelling of God. The same indeed holds for the adopted, or redeemed, son – or daughter – of God – in accord with the biblical principle that man is created in the image of God. Spirit or consciousness moves upon the primordial waters and conjures a reality, a world of experience, in accord with individual faith. As the scripture aptly states, be it unto you according to your faith (Mathew 9: 29). We see in effect that the act of universal creation is re-enacted in the life of the soul. Insofar as there are two creation accounts – Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 – we notice concerning the second that it is centred upon the human experience. The first, by contrast, appears Platonic or abstract in being seen through the eyes of God. Yet the soul partakes experientially of both events or phases of creation. The spiritual soul, as created in the image of the elohim, the transcendent self-existent being that is God, bears within it the knowledge of universal creation, which knowledge constitutes the ground of apriori apprehension, whereupon is added, in the course of a life, the knowledge of human experience. This indeed is the mysterious part, and what distinguishes the human from the sentience of animal life. Whereas animal consciousness is comprised of the natural given in space and time, the human soul apprehends from a transcendent vantage. It views the actual and given through implicitly all-knowing eyes, whence the God-like faculty of abstraction – of imagination and reason – as the universal human aspiration to regain the divine image. The so-called unconscious, accordingly, is not limited to elements of Freudian repression, nor is it altogether explained in terms of Jungian archetypes – ideas and images which inform the human soul and are independent of experience. More essentially, what the soul has forgotten, but for the occasional spark of genius – artistic, scientific, or prophetic – is its function as primordial image-maker and as the very fount of language – as the creative vessel or ark of God. Devine creation, accordingly, should not be considered entirely an event in the remote past, but also an a-temporal or timeless process in the eternal present of divine apprehension. While indeed it is spoken in Genesis of a beginning – in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth – it is a metaphysical contradiction to assert that time was created at some moment in time, albeit the ostensible first moment. Time, rather, is the concrescence of eternity, just as space is the instantiation of the infinite. Of these concepts – the infinite and the eternal – neither is found in nature. They are characteristic rather of the transcendent, of the creative Spirit of God which intersects and informs the space-time matrix at every point. The soul, as we have seen, is the focus of that intersection – the Spirit of God moving upon the primeval waters – such that the soul partakes equally of the immanent and transcendent. The soul is indeed one with the Creator, as it is one with all creation, insofar as consciousness and mind – or mind and thought – comprise the unity which is God and the creation of God. As states John 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And thus within the human soul resides the power to create worlds. Space and time, as indeed the entire universe of human experience, is the unfolding of the mind of God in the context of the human soul. In that boundless creative capacity, however, also lies the potential for evil. We recall, concerning the soul in primordial Eden, that placed before Adam was the tree of life and the tree of knowledge – the knowledge of good and evil – and of death. The soul that sinneth, it shall die, states Ezekiel 18:20, where sin is that knowledge, which separates the soul from the tree of life, which is life, and the source of life, which also is Christ, the empowered Word of God. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect, admonishes Jesus in Mathew 5:48. Indeed, given such unbounded creative potential, when projected upon eternity, it is apparent that even a slight deviation from the perfection of God would inevitably result in atrocity. For the evil of a mere six thousand years has weighed upon many souls to doubt the very existence of God. And thus God determined that sin shall have an end, and that end is death. It is for this reason, finally, that the soul requires a redeemer. And we understand that God, in his mercy, has provided the perfect redeemer. We saw above that Christ is the embodied Word of God, and it is Christ himself who became the sacrifice for sin, so that confession of the blood of Christ restores the soul to its primordial purity in the original creation of God. Indeed the blood of Christ not only vanquishes sin – which is unbelief in the Word of God – but the very effects and consequences of sin. This, in effect, is what we mean repentance – the soul in faith turning to Christ, understanding that Christ, the Word of God, atones for sin, restoring the soul to oneness with God. And although it does not yet appear what we shall be, given the gradual unfolding of the spiritual seed, the soul indeed bears the image of eternity. It goes all the way back, and all the way forward – past and future – transcending time while yet partaking of time. Transcending space while inhabiting space. And partaking of knowledge, while established in the creative fount of omniscience – in the Alpha and Omega, the mystical singularity, the ark of God. Oh, how wonderful! How mysterious and profound! And, oh, what a life – what a magnificent life of the soul! Saturday, July 28. 2012Christian Faith And Fairyland
Heaven, hell, angels, devils – when it comes to spiritual categories, for many evangelicals these tend to be vague and nebulous conceptions. They are deemed supernatural and thus inaccessible to direct observation. Or what of such entities as the tree of life in the midst of the paradise of God, the tree of knowledge and its fruit, and the fiery sword of the cherubic guardian? Could some theologian please point them out? Or the garden of Eden, and the serpent of Eden – where are they in natural history? The list could go on, but the reader will get the point.
The typical theological response is to invoke the language of symbol, metaphor and allegory – to readily explain, or explain away, the mystical aspects of the Bible. The tendency is to spiritualise, to mythologise – to deny the literal or straight-forward meaning of applicable texts. Opposing this tendency is the fundamentalist school which insists on biblical literalism to the extent of attributing the fall of humankind to the eating of a piece of fruit. Both contingents are living in fairyland – by which I do not mean the Celtic dreamtime, but a realm wholly imaginary. Both in their respective way are living a fantasy – their Bible is a fairy story (in the derogatory sense). As there is confusion concerning the concept of biblical literalism, let us examine this question. The literal meaning of anything is not an objective universal given, as fundamentalists seem to surmise. Rather it depends on one’s dictionary, which in turn is a product of usage – common or idiosyncratic. If, for example, by shepherd we mean a herder of sheep, Christ cannot be called the good shepherd in any literal sense. If the term, however, is inclusive of meanings such as keeper, protector and guide, a literal reading is entirely justified. We are mistaken, therefore, to infer that biblical writers did not mean what they wrote – literally – on the grounds that our modern analytical and reductive semantics does not resonate well with the holistic and inclusive language of the ancients. Indeed, insofar as reality is a construct of language – and nowhere in literature is this point made so clearly as in the Bible – it is appropriate to reflect that the ancient prophets and seers inhabited a universe quite different from that of modern Cartesian objectivism. They truly inhabited another world – with different referents concerning the actual and real – as readily apparent in their nonchalant conflating of the natural with the mystical or spiritual. Clearly they did not impose the categorical distinctions to which we moderns with our post-Enlightenment sensibilities are accustomed. For asserts Paul (Romans1:19-20), as I never tire to reiterate ... that which may be known of God is manifest in them [in man]; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead. St Paul, in other words, was emphatic concerning an experiential faith. The prophets and seers of the Bible spoke of realities, of things directly experienced. It is not enough to believe in a God out there somewhere, to assent to an abstract and ephemeral spiritual world on the basis of hearsay. It is necessary to see for oneself. As states Job 42:5, I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. So unless today’s Christians – fundamentalists and professors of the higher criticism alike – enter the mystical world of the prophets, in spiritual fairyland they remain. |
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