Giving to the poor is possibly signing this spiritual morality, but if its the primary reflector of such morality Christianity, it’s not the earth-shattering and unique disclosure of the mind of God that it pretends. It’s just as well a self-help book written and sold by Oprah than by Paul. The essence of morality is the movements in and around the truth that saves spirits by placing them in contact and agreement with its essence, God, not the movements in and around bread that saves bodies by placing them in contact with its essence, God.
I digress, but I write this in the age of Trump. One presidential candidate is an open homosexual while simultaneously affirming himself as a devout Christian. His “Christian” voters are motivated and energized by the biblical contradiction because so is their faith motivation a biblical contradiction. The other using his more than arguable Christian faith as a voting inducement while his voters pretend that its biblical, the motivation coming from an enamor of personal professions over evidence. Perhaps this time like no other shows how broken is public Christianity under the default assumption that Christ’s morality is primarily expressed physically and driven by nothing transcendent.
I hate politics, but because we are in a representative republic, it is part of our duty to participate for the good of all. It’s not part of our responsibility to treat our faith like politics or politics like faith. I’m a conservative, but I hope my conservatorship is exclusive with truth’s a little more heavenly than the Scandinavian appearing Elizabeth Warren’s professional advancement by claiming to be a Cherokee Indian, as bad as that is. Guys, politics, and it’s like by any physical act, is heavenly and of ultimate spiritual expression only in the fallen fever-swamps of our macabre theological imaginations.
Christ’s morality by mortals is expressed in part physically, but in that imperfectly, symbolically, not literally. But the thought of this unfulfillable and a purely philosophical spiritual morality thought possible goes hand in glove with a culture that increasingly believes that only by its own efforts and within Man’s creative spirit can Christ’s righteousness be found in us. Conservatives cry about the sin of homosexuality (yes, its a sin) being condoned by the Church while clear passages of the Bible denounce it as sin. Liberals cry about how evangelicals could support such a reprobate subject as Trump while still holding to a Christian ethic. What we can’t seem to understand, or want to, is that no matter how hypocritical Christian Trump or Buttigeg supporters are, real hypocrisy with Christian morality lies not in a difference between scripture and physical practice, which can only be its imperfect representation. It is the hypocrisy of motivation for belief in scripture by its potential and ultimate fulfillment in any external human expressions like heterosexuality or the public denunciation of Christian posers. It is at the crucible of spiritual motivation that accepts a truth, far from one’s efforts to transfer that truth to physical reality, where is the place of real sin, and only upon which any physically expressed righteousness counts as acceptable to God as an evidence of faith. Physical acts are sins of possible indicators of something much deeper. If you take them as the primary kind of transgressions, its no wonder why there is no sermon or theology book to help Christians understand where faith should begin, not end?
Open, proud homosexuality in a professed Christian is a powerful indication that this person fails to understand and give importance to the biblical truth claims that underlie its prohibition, not its similitudes, its outward expressions. It’s only an image of possible and deep dysfunction. You will not change the signification by changing the symbol. The symbol exists at the command and pleasure of the original meaning.
Aligned conservative Christians who put “give under Caesar things that are Caesar’s” as an admonition to dutifully pay taxes, nothing more, or support a presidential candidate because he is a Christian when it is obvious to anyone that he is only using Christianity, are no less giving indications than the liberals that they might be anti-revelational. I say this as a Trump voter. Not politically anti-revelational, because politics is a cultural phenomenon. Spiritually anti-revelational. But you can’t be too sure.
Still, nothing that you can do with our body is a great indicator to use in the judgment of a person’s soul, of your fundamental spiritual state. And nothing that Jesus ever said about morality was meant to be fully emulated by bodies either, only symbolically indicated. It’s about spiritual actions around “who do you say that I am.”
The only way to perfectly satisfy Christian morality is in the spiritual act of dipping from a Holy, entirely spiritual well of divine knowledge, drinking it, deciding its true, and wanting more in that spirit. Every other act is potentially as messed up as everything else that exists in which things happen, that is, the carnal world in which things happen. Our actions will be less messed up and more reflective that original truth if was are animated by it, but its always going to be messed up and infinitely inferior to that original truth and its display by spiritual action.
We should be sexually in line with the created order because, like that fixed order, we establish God’s will for creation to come in line with his will for revelational reality and ideality. That they are to oppose but love each other in the way of making new spiritual life. We fail. The best you can do is admit it and try harder. We should be kind because God, in foretelling and willing Christ into the world, is given to all, the wicked and the righteous, so that Truth might save them. We often are not. Admit it, and try harder to make a good symbol of His kindness. We should pay our taxes because of the authorities in charge of the carnal world, like God, secure and regulate the physical conditions under which this Truth may thrive and reach all. We often revile and refuse to honor them. Admit it, and try harder. And guess what? All attempts to tinker the political world into a configuration that produces the kind of righteousness that Christ preached is doomed to either capitalist materialism and inequity or socialist genocide, slavery, and autocracy. Either they are real but not ideal or ideal but can never be real when God’s economy promises both at once. This world can is capable of rulership righteously and in line with Christ only as His faith is ruled perfectly only by a supernatural being and His knowledge. Admit it. Honestly, the most powerful kind of Christian political symbol is no symbol, unless it can only point directly and unwaveringly to the prophetic revelation of the Messiah, predicted, fulfilled, and coming again.
Spiritual symbols are effects, reactions, and indicators of abstract and more profound internal substances of authority and use, which can only be knowledge. A belief, one of these essential spiritual symbols which I now introduce, is a spiritual symbol of this authoritative information, like the trust and idea Jesus is Lord. But, again, this motivating information why Jesus is Lord is not driving such action if it’s not deeper and more remarkable than the concept symbol in the mind of “Jesus is Lord.”
You don’t trust anyone because, well, you trust them, or because if you say “I trust him, I trust him” 100 times, then you trust him. You trust him because of information about what he has done to deserve that trust. He walked your dog every day when you were away. He picked up your kid from school when you could not. He goes to your church and is an excellent person to everyone. Not that you had a dream in which an angel told you, “trust him.” Because of a demonstration of his.
But I say again, trust in your neighbor, a physical symbol when in some physical action of yours, can be justified by things that only you could know about him with respect to how he has treated you. But still, he cannot show this trustworthiness to everyone on the planet, and in a way that would compel us to think that every culture is equally obliged to accept it. God cant judge the world for how it regards the righteousness of your neighbor. Trust in a universal savior is a trust in something that he has done in disclosing the truth to everyone, everywhere, and it’s so powerful that its acceptance and denial are life or death. It has to involve not just things incidental to a point in time but for all history and all people that will come.
But most importantly, what God did in the physical world, no matter what is not to benefit the physical world any more than to help the carnal mind. If he did something, if it’s for the benefit of anything, it’s the spiritual mind. Anything done physically has no eternal value at all unless it’s some representation of a universal truth about the nature and content of righteous spiritual action, which determines spiritual, eternal life. Giving to the poor is our duty, our obligation, but there are far more essential actions for a far deeper hunger for far more important things than food. These are beyond concepts, creedal bullets, propositions, traditions, self-benefit, and good feelings.
We hate it and bristle at the mere suggestion of this idea that you do anything spiritually. We never go there. “Spiritual action,” “spiritual symbol,” are not precisely theological or pulpit buzzwords. You will never hear them. Why?
We talk around them by speaking of faith as something that only involves knowing something and making some decisions over. We never use these terms because what is “spiritual” is supposed to be emotional and intuitive. And we sure don’t talk about what from God exactly, biblically, informationally, is supposed to precipitate and demand faith in the spirit. It’s supposed to be anything that turns you on, anything that is compelling you.
But the spiritual expression of faith, a spiritual action, is much closer to what faith is and what is fundamentally driving it. Within this spiritual dimension of expression, honest judgment, and love of truth are closer to what God is than emotion, intellectual attraction and desire, romantic love, self-love, and autonomous reason. Again still, what is fundamentally diving a real love of truth and honesty in judgment is closer to what God is than any of your possible spiritual expressions. There is no way to honestly avoid the crucial idea of the fundamental moral action as spiritual if we are also obliged to entertain “judgment,” “faith,” ‘choice,” “trust,” and “truth.” If they are not spiritual objects and actions, they are nothing.
That was probably at least as hard for you to read as it was for me to write.
You can answer “what is Christian faith” all you want as “trust in Jesus” or “preaching the gospel” or “love and compassion to your fellow man” or “giving to the poor,” but it won’t change the fact that these are physical symbols and only possible spiritual ones. It remains to be answered, “trust in Jesus,” “preaching,” and “gospel,” and the ultimate kind of compassion for your fellow man. Only if the answer is the informational equal to God himself do you have the spiritual action “faith.”
Quickly put for spiritual states and phenomena are physical symbols, actions, and words that may not reflect them. Even when spiritual content is not physically aligned and concerned, they are incapable of being infallible spiritual indicators of a real spiritual cause that cause proves its reality, which only God does. We think that the only way to show genuine faith is to do something and say something and feel something, and of course, this is compulsory and essential for the transmission of faith to others, as well as a subjectively to yourself. But these without real transcendent content are incompetent in showing the reality of faith to God. The actual display does take place in the heart far out of reach of the eye and the ear, but only when compelled by the informational phenomena of God chosen by Him for that purpose. Any show of faith is essential, but it has to be shown to God first, and there is only one kind of show and one kind of spiritual financing of that show in the end.
Any false symbolic reflection, especially physical ones, taken as sufficient for showing the most important thing about a conscious human, is the result of treating spiritual symbols like physical ones, like a car. As I said, you can have a false spiritual reflector of faith in your beliefs, attitudes, and feelings as well. But our problem is overwhelmingly that of thinking that a physical and manufactured object, like a car, is a good analogy for the kind of revelatory information we need to engage in and show genuine faith.
You get in the car and drive it to go somewhere for your benefit. It gets you where you want to go without you having to know a thing about how it works. Even if you’re blind from birth, you don’t have to know what it looks like to get in it. Indeed, it is true that the stuff that we believe is supposed to drive us, and that we have to get in it and trust it before we do. Also, it is people who build up the belief motivation’s power to fulfill its designed function, to compliment the desire to travel, transferred to its driver by its casual use.
Bt when we think that statements like “Jesus is Lord” or “the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin” are like a car, that the spiritual state in which one becomes saved is like ending up at the store where you drove an idea. Like the car, the idea thought effectively used by minimal possession, handling, and engagement. We are now in la-la land. You cant drive these kinds of spiritual concepts by emotion, whim, independent reason, self, or any other physically influenced motive to a real spiritual destination. They are not operated by anything that does not refer necessarily, by way of demonstration, to a divine origin for the spiritual car. They are bare tropes, which can emerge and thrive encased entirely within Spatio-temporal reality, capable of independent existence and power without any spiritual cause of a transcendent God.
Driven by one Holy informational motivation is the real vehicle of faith, the exclusive vehicle for salvation. Unlike “Jesus is Lord,” it is not an idea, not a feeling, nor reason which can operate effectively independent of this divine knowledge, or a mental construct at all, but is that data which is as close to being God himself without actually being him. No one drives this car but God. We become driven in this car, and we get in it because we thought about it legally, morally, unhypocritically, and with due care, by authentic spiritual action, and honestly decided that it is what it purports to be. Without this, saying “Jesus Is Lord” and believing it is only your dream of moving to a destination that is spiritual in anything spiritual.
I rant over and over about concepts, like “Jesus Is Lord,” to try to bring home this fact. There is a tremendous difference between the idea “God” and God himself. But it’s fantastic the billion people who believe that their grasp of God is satisfied by holding the (true) concepts “God” or “Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of the World” in their hearts, like some Holy, supernaturally infused object, or God himself. But if you love a concept and not that knowledge which demands it’s existence, you love nothing, and if an idea informs you, you know nothing. What you are supposed to love is God himself. Since God is more substance and symbol, you need contact with something else of God, which is also not a symbol but is in the form of knowledge, and it must be very close to God’s substance. Only then you need a symbol, a demonstration, a reflector of that state, a spiritual sign, and what it shows is not you but him within which is you, in the same truth that you found him.
Faith is the result of a blend of God’s will in establishing his Word, which is his spiritual Symbol, and its agreeable meeting with man’s love and belief of it, becoming by Man God’s ultimate symbol. But only after man’s active, conscious, deliberate, thoughtful engagement of God’s essence in his informational phenomena, which is man’s righteous spiritual action. That symbol by man is either valid or corrupt, either informed directly by God or merely the idea “Jesus is Lord.” That is not a desire to self-benefit, or a desire to have confidence, or a desire to feel good about yourself, or a passion for intellectual puzzles and exercises, for love of tradition or informed by a feeling. It begins with an unadulterated and honest love for spiritual truth that animates the spirit to know the truth of things beyond the physical world. Love of spiritual truth has found its desire after God seeks you with it, and you allow it control over your search for it. You reach out to hold that revelatory hand of God because it has proven itself real. And no, it’s not only a subjectively benefiting and infinitely arguable “proof” that you prayed, and God healed your cancer. Prayer to God is either a prayer to an idea or a real Person. If to a Person, its communication with him through what informs you of that person. Only with God through what is biblical and positively affirming of him.
There is nothing that man can “use” in any of this, no concept by unconscious or passive engagement, any more than God uses something other than himself in the exercise of his will. Each party moves separately to fulfill his will and his love. They meet at a point of similarity and end and fulfill at a point of total agreement. The only thing in any sense used by man is the product that God makes for the attraction of your love of truth in his Word. This thing is nowhere near something that you can fix or change because it’s perfect and only for acceptance by moral-spiritual movement. And you can’t know how it works except by those processes which its maker has given to be known, because it’s not conceived, made and deconstructed by people.
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