How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.
This is an article in a series. Please see:
How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.
The Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus on a Cross for the Sins of the Word: The Man
Ok, what do we have so far?
- We have righteousness and sin as originally spiritual, not physical.
I repeat that this does not mean that physical activity does not follow a righteous spiritual action and state as its reflection. It means its not a very good physical representation; it’s only indicative, and a two-dimensional one at that. You could say it’s the sin of the symbolism of the Holy.
It’s never a 100% reliable reflector. Sometimes it is so bad that it does not even look like it could have any resemblance. Physical action is a symbol of the internal state, and as such, it is a superficial means to the apprehension of any internal movement and state. The point of righteousness and sin is never external, any more than the point of life. Life indicates externally, but it exists fundamentally only internally with a directly unintelligible aspect, something that God can only understand without a symbol. This is why in 1 SAM 16:7, there is a sharp distinction drawn between one’s inner core and how it shows openly, that man looks on the outer appearance, but God looks on the heart. Jesus’s constant complaint of the Pharisees is that they rejected this so that whatever the heart is, it is represented comprehensively by its inferior: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”
It seems like 2+2=4, but don’t underestimate it. If the logic follows carefully, it is the beginning of exposing what righteousness and sin really are and what this special man is all about. Physical activity is not diving a final judgment on spiritual reality. That reality may be fake.
Physical things are objects, actions, and spoken and written words, tangible symbols of authorities of origin. Symbolism is just pure cause and effect. You can see results, those things, in spatio-reality, and so there may be their immediate cause. However, it is not rational to take their cause as immediately apparent and evident as our usual view of physical reality. Often the reason is entirely invisible, mysterious, and is operational in and on the physical world but is not thought of as another object, but some force behind it, such as gravity.
But what about people?
The body picks up an object. The object moves as an effect of your hand, contacting it and moving it. But the more distant causes are unseen, beginning with the internal processes and structures within the body hidden from view. There are again innumerable things about how the body works that are describable medically. But physical life itself is a mind-boggling, nearly infinite concert of chemical and physical processes working together every nanosecond that we don’t fully understand. Still, all of this, those two dimensions of apparent and hidden, when the hidden is moving far from understanding, are only matter or its forces locked to its operation if we are only looking at someone’s body. This apparent-effect to hidden-cause relation goes much deeper if we think of persons as more than bodies. The more difficult, inaccessible, and often more mysterious abstract force of an influencing object carries over into the limits of casual perception of a person’s actions in knowing that person accurately.
In this cause-and-effect, when you think of the hand as a symbol of its effect in the moving of the object, matter and its movement become associated with the most inscrutable and crucial dimension and goes to the essential aspect of identity. The hand, the symbol of the physical activity, represents a physically aligned, abstract symbolic signification, what the Bible calls carnal, of one’s intent, will, and attitude. The person attached to the hand now has plans for the object behind a particular motivation, which are engaged to bring physical reality in line with his incorporeal but physically concerned side. Those plans and motives are not to be found somewhere in the cells of the brain. They don’t have mass. The symbol, or effect of his action, is essentially now a sign of him as a mich more different thing than matter, of many abstract forces working all at once within him that without which that hand would not have picked up that object or picked it up in that way. Now, only at this level, you have to say that the symbol of the hand’s movement is somehow representative of that which is beyond it concerning moral intentionality. That moral intentionality is associated with and emblematic of an overall sentient cause, and that hand motion, that external moral emblem, is cursory by comparison.
What I describe is the automatic, mechanical aspect of a human being. He is smart, can plan out a goal that fits into a larger purpose, and engages his body to carry it out. Humans devise, judge, calculate, and mentally feel for their benefit. But this level does not involve belief, love, and non- physically concerned or selfless emotion and empathy as the forces behind the action. These actions are effects of those still more abstract and more profound forces not found attached to the material world at all. They are for themselves, of what we may call spiritual, directly non-physically aligned causes. Here, physical actions and objects are still morally typical, but not as much and not as accurate because of the increased distance between outer and inner.
Physical action does not naturally involve activities for the realization of spiritually aligned intent, or morality, only those of self-preservation, pain, desire, and calculated practical purpose. The spiritual intention is expressed perfectly and originally only in his spiritual aspect, one’s noetic motivators and actions, which can then attribute to physical expression. Here, physical expression is expected but not so accurate in showing a direct correspondence to its cause.
Spirituality and physicality mark the difference between what you might call a biological android and real human sentience as relating to morality. One is said chained in a relationship with his body, mind, and self-satisfying emotions. The other led by things much more incorporeally motivated that are of no value to those limited physical considerations whatsoever, and his material life may even be in danger for such spiritual motivators.
Here is the crossover into man’s multidimensionality
At some point, the spiritual cause becomes even more distant and unlike physical reality. So remote that it brings it into proximity with God, for which some kind of agreement occurs between the two essences. Even the idea of externality or superficiality or symbol becomes at this point less connected to the outside world and more that of an inside one. The reason we tend not to think so in religion is that physical symbols, physical actions, are more in line with the physical motivators and affections with which we are obsessed. We would very much like it if real, transcendent spirituality is believed rightly determined by the transient things in which we have already invested ourselves. That spiritual symbols were the same as physical symbols. Ideally, “Grace” is, you see, free of transcendence, not only free that it’s without cost to us.
External symbols for these much deeper spiritual motivators and realities, which I will discuss, still signify the morality of the spirit in the same way that specific physical actions signify the integrity, health, and soundness of the physical individual. The same way, but not to the same depth or accuracy. Spiritual symbols, which are real reflectors of transcendence, have no other symbolic function than showing the reality and soundness of the spirit alone. The idea is that if this kind of spiritual morality of actions and soundness of belief is complimentary in cause to God’s mind, then there is a Holy agreement between one’s spirit and another based upon what God is, not what we are naturally.
This distinction is fundamental because if we don’t get it right, then physical action will more inform our morality than will the spiritual dimension. There are a lot more critical ways the superficial determines the substantive than is represented by the length of someone’s phylacteries indicating righteousness. Don’t think that Jesus is telling you that long, loud prayers in the marketplace are an example of an ultimate posing in the name of God, or even that taking food out of the mouths of children and the persecution of the innocent are the most compelling examples of sin. If so, that this is the revelation of a real God of transcendence for which the world waited for millennium until Christ, Christ could have stayed home and left Confucius to do his work for him.
If Christ is a revelator, all of his references to moral action by some bodily movement are symbols of the influence of spiritual truths, meanings for which no other sense can represent, and only one response by man can evidence its contact. If these truths were limited in consciousness to and stop at a meaning which only refers to its dimensional category, categories are not revelational. They are pedestrian and common. They have been the language of religion and philosophy for centuries because Man was without a real revelation from a transcendent God. In that condition, you can only speak about him in the most general of terms. For example, the revelatory meaning would not conceptual, such as “spiritual” or “truth.” Man constructs all ideas. It would be a particular spiritual truth that is unreproducible by man. We look in revelation for the end of the symbolic signification process, where we finally have a symbol that can point only to a truth dependent upon an unnatural, non-contingent, and intelligent power. A symbol which, by definition, is impossible to reduce or modify to some other until that same power gives it. What kind of “spiritual truth?” Where is it found in the mind of transcendence? Is it sufficient to be called the informational equal to God?
Christ’s moral actions and teachings are not about physical symbols of “spiritual” truths of whatever we think is revelational, that place in the Church that we insist on holding them. Mans’ response in faith is not primarily about physical actions by a belief in “spiritual truths.” It is a response in a spiritual activity because of the influence of a spiritual truth that is so close to what God is that it can act independently as a means of representing his existence and nature until God decides to give something more, and not before. If God is supernatural, so is this symbolic revelation. Morality is then acting like God, being his moral symbol, but in being his Imago Dei is possible only because of the direct power of the moral disclosures of knowledge about him not replaced with something else out of man’s head and hands. Therefore, the meaning of Christ’s moral actions and moral teachings do not stop at and are not about physical movements in a display of “spiritual truths,” the unqualified idea. They are about how we are to symbolically, morally handle God’s truth, the knowledge behind the concept, which objectively and exclusively proves his moral, Holy existence in a rebuke to the notion of all false gods, who are not and cannot. You know, about faith in something? Real moral faith is a spiritual symbol of representing one kind of spiritual truth, which kind is at best expected by natural man to be honored but never given a place of supreme importance over his creations and personal choices.
Here is how it goes:
- Physical symbols of physical things (primitive man)
- Physical symbols of spiritual things (religious man)
- Spiritual symbols of spiritual things (spiritual man, end of symbol to signification process)
Symbols of spiritual things are symbolic of the moral implications around certain revealed spiritual truths by the Divine. They are so powerful they stand-in for a personal manifestation of God in consciousness. Spiritual symbols are actions in mind, concerning the search, engagement with judgment, the decision over and spiritual truth claims, the most pressing and consequential of which, for example, is whether Jesus historically fulfilled the words of the prophets, the purported messengers of God. We are in the highest kind of moral action to decide in the affirmative, aligning this with God’s essence in an act of fundamentally spiritual, not physical morality in caring for his creation out of love, purposing to give them the one means of being like and living with Him. Spiritual symbols, after this affirmation of original spiritual truth, then become all thoughts oriented to its supreme importance, its understanding, and dissemination into the world. Physical actions follow, but not always perfectly, not always fast, not always consistently, not always recognizably associate. They can also look perfectly and consistently like these real truths spiritually influence them, but as far from them as the east is to the west.
