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Sunday, May 15. 2016The Mind Of God, The Mind Of Man, And What Is Wrong With Christendom
The purpose of prophetic scripture – and all scripture is prophetic – is to communicate the mind of God. In the words of the apostle Paul, we have, we possess, the mind of Christ – we, who are born of ‘water and blood’ or Word and Spirit, according to the gospel of John. The great salvation we have in Christ, our spiritual investiture as sons and daughters created in the image of the Most High, is the substance of the divine revelation we have in Christ. And it is the sacred scriptures – what we call the Word of God – which constitute the spiritual seed, which is to say, the informational content of the divine investiture.
One would imagine then that our Holy Bible – the Word of God – would be treasured by the churches of the world – that it would be valued, revered, preserved and studied. Alas, the opposite is the case, namely that the churches of the world are ready to trash the Bible – and that’s all of them, where by church I mean that which declares itself under the rubric of organised religion. And there is but one consequence of this attitude – the abrogation of that great salvation and its attendant blessings. Now that’s a very hard saying, I hear the retort – how can one sustain this, my assertion? It is really very simple. What is extolled by the churches – by religious organisations – is not the Bible, but interpretations of the Bible. The object of engagement is not the transcendent mind of God as imparted by his Word, but a man-made creed, a reductive distillation of sacred scripture in conformity with the conceptions of human intellect. This much is self-evident, as it is their mutually dissenting creeds (ostensibly deriving from the same textual sources) which distinguish and define the more than 30,000 declared denominations of Christendom. One may observe this in countless church organisational websites, as under the banner of Who We Are or What We Believe, where follows a summary of tenets to which the faithful are invited to subscribe. Of course, not one in ten who depress the pews can actually give an account of their doctrinal pedigree, wherefore none of this has anything to do with actual worldview or belief. What it purports is simply this, namely that such-and-such [insert creed] – when push comes to shove and we’re up against the wall – is what we pay cautious lip service to. Not Jerusalem but Rome is the mother and wellspring of the modern church. Not a mystical experience in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but a creedal confession has become the ostensible hallmark of the Christian faith – which confession is invariably coercive, perfunctory and spiritually inert, insofar, as should be evident, one cannot make oneself believe what one does not believe. Yet it is this psychology of dogmatism – as, perhaps, in the spirit of Tertullian: I believe because it is absurd – which, although antichrist to the core, is worn militantly, defiantly and as a badge of honour, by churchmen, typically with all the fanaticism and lack of humour characteristic of a medieval inquisitor. What happens in effect is that instead of elevating the human understanding to the divine – the declared purpose of scripture – that divine legacy is redacted and altogether diminished to accord with human conceptions. As our secular critics rightly charge, God is created in the image of man, in what constitutes, unknown to them, an inversion of the biblical investiture. Whereas no such critique would fly in the face of an apostolic faith as grounded in spiritual experience, it is evident that the modern church has none of the spiritual goods enjoyed by the original disciples – not to put too fine a point on it. This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with Christendom, and we’re all agreed that something is wrong. Here then is to our church doctors who operate with manicure scissors, when the axe is laid to the root of the tree. A word in your ear, my dear friends. While the organisational churches are fussing about fundamentals, while they are busy reinventing the faith or discarding the whole thing as archaic, while utter confusion thus reigns among the churches – even in that same hour the mystical body and bride of Jesus Christ is putting the finishing touches – dainty and exquisite – upon the spiritual temple. As states the Revelation, Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife has made herself ready. Wednesday, December 23. 2015Merry Christmas !
The Bride may rest for the Groom does the wooing.
A Merry Christmas to all from Arkangel, and a wonderful new year ! Monday, November 23. 2015Sailing The Apocalypse
A REVIEW OF
HARALD KLEEMANN : ESSAYING THE APOCALYPSE Published on Amazon Kindle and now also in Paperback A mystery for 2000 years, the Apocalypse of St John, the biblical Book of Revelation, has a vexed history among the documentary springs and currents of Christendom. For centuries this singular text at the close of the Bible has been variously derided, deplored, lamented and dismissed. It has been probed and prodded by a veritable army of exegetes, yet without anything having been produced either profound or disposed to engender consensus among Christian readers. To this day a majority of Christians are prepared, for lack of any better option, to ignore this book, consigning it to the margins of anonymity and conjecture. The situation is at the very least extraordinary insofar as a canonical text – an integral part of what is deemed the inspired Word of God – presents a total mystery – this book which is properly called the Revelation of Jesus Christ, the only book in the Bible purportedly dictated by Jesus himself. Can we countenance how odd this is – this radical estrangement from so vital a portion of our sacred scripture – vital, at least, by any consideration of its own interior testimony? Now, for the first time in the history of Christendom, a coherent, compelling and spiritually meaningful account is presented to the public which does justice to this biblical text, while being consistent with Christian experience, with the relevant history, as with biblical scripture as a whole. Whereas past interpretations amounted to little more than conjecture, whereas exegetes were prepared to dismiss as meaningless this singular text, and whereas it seemed a book of mayhem and catastrophe, a visionary nightmare best left alone – our exposition entirely reverses this negative estimation. At last the Book of Revelation may assume its proper place – not merely as an integral part of scripture, but as the veritable key to the whole of biblical scripture. The prophecy is understood for what it is – neither narrowly historic in emphasis nor entirely eschatological / futuristic – but of profound spiritual significance to the Christian faith and experience in every age. Nevertheless, the Revelation could not have been understood in ages past, pending the quickening of a prophetic age – an age of disclosure and apocalyptic ferment – which is to say, our own present age. Insofar as it is spoken of sevens seals with which the book is sealed, textual scholarship does not suffice. A comprehensive revelation of the Spirit is required to elucidate the mysteries. As affirms the Revelation itself, it is the Christ of God who opens the seals, the only one found worthy to apprehend this book. As such its unveiling and reception are neither incidental nor gratuitous, but signify a pivotal stage of prophetic fulfilment. As the Revelation of Jesus Christ, it comprises the biblical essence and summation – what we may call the capstone prophetic revelation to the church in an age of spiritual consummation. In Essaying The Apocalypse we embark on a spiritual journey through the visionary worlds as encountered by the disciple John in his exile on the isle of Patmos. Explained is the entire symbolism as we accompany the seer through an illimitable prophetic landscape, and in his concourse with the revealing Angel of God. Along the way we expose the aeonic deception whereby the church fell from its spiritual calling – and of God’s provision in countering the satanic subversion. We learn the secret the ages as we see beneath the seals of God’s redemptive mystery. And we are spirited into the inmost heavens, coming face to face with the transcendent ark and its cherubic guardians – beyond space and time, beyond the redemptive cycles of the ages, beyond resurrection at the end of the world, in the eternal presence of God. At profound depths of conceptual integration the Revelation is perceived to reflect the divine opus – of creation, fall and redemption, and new creation – illuminating not merely our text in question, but the Bible as a whole. A grand unified synthesis thus emerges, combining the witness alike of history, of scripture, as of the Christian experience, which threefold resonance bears transcendent testimony of its divine provenance. Essential biblical doctrines addressed include the nature of God, divine creation, prophecy and inspired scripture, divine atonement and eternal salvation, foreknowledge and predestination, the nature of spiritual revelation and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Added are theological / philosophical reflections concerning the greater Judaeo-Christian prophetic legacy, and the eternal purpose in the mind of God. Apocalypse means revelation – disclosure, and the unveiling – and what is revealed is Christ, the Word of God, in his creative and redemptive eminence. In the language of biblical symbolism, we move beyond the spiritual veil – beyond the outer courts of historic Christendom – into the sanctum of the spiritual temple, which is the human soul. Spiritual categories – the symbols, types and archetypes – are rendered lucid in the universal language of prophecy – the language of embodied human experience. No longer we need wonder at the symbolism – scriptural guessing is at and end – the spiritual veil of the ages is lifted and Christ stands revealed before our eyes. Book Information: Author: Harald Kleemann Title: Essaying The Apocalypse – A Spiritual Reading Of The Apocalypse Of St John, Also Called The Book Of Revelation Published by Amazon – see above link on this page. Tuesday, February 3. 2015Refuting Einstein With A Flashlight
When I think of secular critics of the Bible, such as the so-called new atheists, I am reminded of a cartoon depicting popular incredulity concerning Einstein’s theories when these first gained cultural currency. Demonstrated with a flashlight (in the cartoon) is the fact that light doesn’t go round a corner; it travels in a straight line. Einstein is therefore refuted.
My point is that an appreciation of relativity theory requires a measure of scientific literacy, along with at least an intuitive grasp of the subtle concepts involved. And so, of course, it is with the Bible – in that a certain qualification is required for its spiritually meaningful apprehension. The scriptures themselves are quite overt and emphatic on this point. Mathew 11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. John 8:31-32 Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Isaiah 28:9 Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. Isaiah 55:8-9 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. It is revealed to babes – to those, according to John 3:5, born of water and spirit. In Isaiah this is qualified somewhat, showing that it is not exactly the newborn who accede to doctrine and knowledge, but those that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts. John again concurs, Jesus stating: If ye continue in my word ... ye shall know the truth ... Truth, in other words, is revealed to those who persist – not to those who set out, or merely take a dip. One can only wonder then at the brazen confidence exhibited by our critics in the altogether unfounded assumption that they are able to read the Bible and pontificate concerning its content. Yet from their perspective the matter is clear. We moderns are infinitely more sophisticated than the primitives who wrote the Bible, and what with a liberal arts education, or some comparative religion, anyone is suitably equipped to deal with the relevant texts. It is noteworthy that even C. S. Lewis fell into this error – namely in the belief that he, the self-confessed layman of the Church of England, should be competent to pronounce on diverse aspects of holy scripture. But this, of course, is consonant with the intellectual culture of our age. The emphasis, the basic assumption, within our modern seminaries is that Christ is apprehended through scholarship – that it is doctorates and ordinations which enable a man to pronounce on spiritual truth. Yet as the quoted passages indicate, this assumption is false. If thus the 'church' cannot get it right, it's reactionary critics are - inevitably - twice confounded. So concerning our dialogue with the kind of militant and vociferous atheists cited, it suffices to observe that they have no idea what they are talking about. Tuesday, February 3. 2015God Hiding In Plain View
This thing was not done in a corner, it is stated of Paul in Acts 26, concerning the passion of Christ. Effectively the whole world bore witness, although the tremors registered but faintly through the halls of worldly power. It is no different today. The image of the Crucified is a universal icon. Whether by divine foreknowledge or accident of history, this image and its surrounding narratives have become intrinsic to what we call the Western canon. They are in our face, so to speak.
It is ironic then that spiritual seekers – in ages past no less then today – disdain the transmission in plain view, and seek for knowledge in realms of the esoteric, the hidden or occult. The Bible cannot be trusted, it is claimed – it has been edited, expurgated and contrived in accord with a sinister agenda. At best its asseverations pertain to the shallow and exoteric, to the outer courts of conventional understanding and myopic religion. For the real spiritual meat one must enquire among hidden and secret documents, among spiritual lineages suppressed and persecuted, among Hermeticists and Gnostics, perhaps in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, in the writings of the Essenes and the perennial lore of the Grail. Such is the claim. While we might welcome this broader historic and cultural perspective, we know the essential claim to be false. Our biblical source documents, extant in thousands of manuscript copies, are remarkably consistent. Variants do occur, likewise in their thousands, but these are mostly transcription errors, such as the occasional word being omitted or misspelled. There is nothing to call into question the essential purport of the documents. Concerning biblical critics, one has the impression rather that such as seek to undermine the integrity of scripture are motivated by ulterior considerations. They are offended by its content – that content or purport, as they perceive it. As to the other claim, that of extra-biblical wells of the sublime and profound, one might ask what sublime and profound which is not also intrinsic to biblical scripture? The problem here is that no-one understands the Bible, and the majority of would-be critics – here one thinks of the so-called new atheists – do not even know its content. The churches are beholden of their non-biblical creeds, and secular critics have the overt historic church in their sights, thus being twice confounded and removed from the spiritual heart of the matter. Concerning the biblical transmission then, the God of the Bible is indeed hiding in plain view. The biblical legacy is ‘out there’ in the public domain, its text ubiquitous in millions of copies. It is hailed, expounded, debated and derided. And yet ... its purport is a mystery. This legacy, this presence, is rather like a beacon or ensign. It is saying, here I am, here is something ... But beyond that all is conjecture and confusion, a melee of claims and counterclaims, of creeds and sects and cults and traditions – namely insofar as the public eye and mind is concerned. Spiritually speaking, we assert hat God is hiding in his Word – that the Word (i.e. the canon of scripture) functions as a spiritual veil. The Word is also synonymous with the spiritual body – that is, through the sacrifice of the Word the spirit is released and God is beheld face to face. This is the significance of the atoning death of the cross, and of the new or spiritual birth. But, as the apostle further observed, there are none that understand. Saturday, December 21. 2013On Self-Refuting Materialism
An injustice, no doubt, to Geber – the 16th century alchemist, distinguished for his cryptic style – is the characterisation of anything as gibberish. But such is the English usage, and it remains to consider some modern gems of the genre, as uttered by self-confessed rationalists in support of naturalism or materialism.
As statements, these examples are analogous in form and content, and thus characterised by the same self-refuting logic – or illogic – typical of such arguments, showing not only that they cannot possibly be true, but that they indeed are void of meaningful assertion. They are, in a word, gibberish. 1. States philosopher John Shook: Naturalism is the view that the only reality is the physical universe of energy and matter as gradually discovered by experience, reason and science. (In debate with Christian apologist William Lane Craig, and on his website, naturalisms.org – although the statement now appears to have been removed, Shook perhaps realising its absurdity.) Physical nature here is defined as the putative object – as the one thing real – whereas experience, reason, and science, these things are gratuitous. The whole subjective apparatus, as ultimately grounded in consciousness, is simply taken for granted. It surely exists – insofar as it does the discovering – but in a curiously abstract, primary, and unacknowledged sense, which is not itself subject to scrutiny. The thing to be explained in Shook’s universe are energy and matter – the only thing real – whereas mind or consciousness, although surely an equal mystery, are evidently not within the field of vision. An analogy, for better or worse, is that of a man at the cinema. He is focused entirely on the big screen, not considering that the enthralling images he beholds are dependent on a projection apparatus – an apparatus pertaining to an ontological order entirely other than the objects of his attention. On a certain level he knows it’s there, but his focus is the movie. In a curious sense he, himself, has become a character in a secondary reality – abstracted and idealised – of exclusively physical entities. He regards the movie as a dynamically closed and independently existing system – entirely unaware of its secondary and contingent nature. 2. States eminent physicist Victor Stenger in an article entitled Quantum Quackery (Skeptical Enquirer, February 1997): Quantum physics is claimed to support the mystical notion that the mind creates reality. However, an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations. The jewel here is obviously the retort – an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations – no doubt uttered with a straight face, and oblivious to the massive self-contradiction it contains. Let us consider the elements in this formulation. Again we encounter objective reality – we encounter no special role for consciousness – the whole of which is said to be consistent with all observations. The decisive benchmark in this formulation is, clearly, observation – all observations. It is observation which reveals an objective reality, without any special role for consciousness, either human or cosmic. But what is observation, if not an event in consciousness? Any observation presupposes the ground of mind or consciousness as an intrinsic primary given. So we may paraphrase: An objective reality with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with the intrinsic primacy of consciousness. Self-evident nonsense! The assumed emphasis in both examples is upon the empirical object – the physical or material universe. The fact of apprehension of such an object, by which alone it is manifest as an observed phenomenon, is entirely taken for granted. The observing consciousness – the fact that there exists a conscious expanse, a luminous window upon reality – these are considered a side issue, of no special significance or interest. Although ontologically fundamental to all human experience, they are placed outside the observational frame of reference, namely in deference to the sacred object – the idol of materialism which they disclose. Whereas in human experience the ostensible subjective and objective form an inseparable whole, this integral whole is denied in the context of these formulations. As thus exemplified, the materialist worldview is maintained by dividing the universe into two, discarding one half (arguably the interesting and significant half), and constructing its epistemological edifice of the half remaining. The materialist conclusion is thus a necessarily consequence which follows trivially from the myopic focus employed. Significant and revealing in these formulations, however, is the implicit primacy of consciousness as a gratuitous primordial given. As outside the observational natural / material frame of reference, it is implicitly accorded transcendent status, however inadvertent the attribution may be. Similarly transcendent in this regard is the observer, a being which hovers, ghostly and godlike, in the pure ether of Platonic abstraction. Indeed, like water to a fish, it would seem that mind or consciousness is too basic a phenomenon, at least for some observers, to seriously weigh in the empirical balance. As to the objective universe, it subsists, suspended within the hermetically sealed hypersphere of epistemological isolation, a bubble within the transcendent void which is the ground of observation and rational thought. What can we make of such skewed perceptions? One might think that the phenomenon constitutes a rare psychological disorder – and perhaps indeed it does, so that its seeming prevalence in the academic sphere is merely a matter of the disproportionate amount of noise it tends to generate. The simplest explanation I can adduce is that of cultural conditioning. In short, the materialist creed is hammered with slogans, with unexamined rationalisations, which conceal a metaphysical axe to grind concerning any notion of transcendence. The result is ideology – the inability to see what is plainly before one’s eyes. Monday, July 15. 2013But Is It Science ? - Intelligent Design And Other Controversies
The reactionary brigade in any field of science, given its usual intellectual constraints, adheres to fundamentalisms that often coalesce into slogans. It’s not science! they are wont to exclaim concerning any field, hypothesis or concept, which challenges their categories in too radical a manner. One area of enquiry thus dismissed is that of Intelligent Design – briefly, the idea that the highly ordered complexity observed in nature is best explained by an intelligent cause. Here it is mostly the pro-Darwin lobby, with moral support from philosophical materialists in general, which maintains the charge that ... Intelligent Design is not science.
Let us then examine the statement (as a class of assertion of the type described, and with specific reference to Intelligent Design theory) ‘such-and-such is not science’. What can we make of the statement, ‘X is not science’? Well, it’s firstly not saying anything profound in the sense of engendering insight or fertility of ideas. It’s more like, X is not science – end of story. The implicit meta-statement is of disengagement, of keeping the matter at arm’s length. Thus already we see some dissonance between the overt statement and its implicit purport. Prima facie the claim is of an analytical nature, purporting to say something about its object – Intelligent Design. What it rather discloses, however, is its own inherent stance, saying in effect, I cannot / will not engage with the matter. But even this is all quite immaterial insofar we are dealing with what, on closer scrutiny, turns out to be a non-statement. That’s right – the assertion ‘X is not science’ is quite meaningless. And let us be emphatic here: It is pure gibberish. For let us consider what its champions would needs be implying, namely that conceptual entities such as fields of enquiry – ideas, conjectures, theoretical constructs – come ready-labelled, as the case may be, with the appropriate designations – such as science, non-science, and of course pseudo-science – and that they (bold, dauntless, and independent thinkers that they are) can detect these labels. But this, of course, is pure nonsense. Nature does not come thus ready-labelled for the convenience of ostensible sceptics, whose intellectual horizons preclude engagement across paradigm boundaries. It is not that ‘science’, as a mystical quality, somehow adheres to fields, to theories and ideas. It is whether the question at hand – whatever it is – is engaged in a scientific manner. This would seem elementary. Yet it continues to elude our self-appointed vigilante guardians of permissible ideas. Thus, in stating that such-and-such is not science, they are saying in effect that it is they who lack the ability to consider the matter scientifically – whether for want of the requisite intellectual tools or, as is more typically the case, out of philosophical paradigm constraints. The deficiency, as per our example of Intelligent Design, thus does not inhere in the field under consideration, but in its critics. |
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