How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.
Christ and Symbolism?
Christ is the act of producing a symbol of God’s righteousness only to give people access to his and its benefits. But since God is giving sinful and unrighteous people that access, the means of access is by faith in his righteousness through the symbol he produces of it, not directly to God. This operation is called mediation. Now, are we speaking only of Christ, the person as a mediator, or what he biblically signifies as well?
Now, a pause on this symbol thing. A symbol mediates meaning between one person and another person. It’s not the person or some cursory appearance, however, and it also not, strictly speaking, the meaning, but its the whole thing at once. It’s an abstract device, a strategy, and an event of information that gives the meaning of one person intelligibility, acceptance, and presence within another after its acceptance. The symbolic is the object and the phenomenon of its revelation. It’s the moment of the happening of the transfer of knowledge by something between one entity and another, which is the knowledge and the transmission. It’s the symbol and signification together as a mediator triggering a transfer of knowledge and an agreement over it. When this is applied to Christ, it only starts to become problematic when you single out meaning and symbol and apply either one or the other to him. But together, it looks a lot like a powerful entity of information an apparent and an abstract core, just as any person. It comes to accomplish a mission of revelation. Doing so, it leaves the scene.
Furthermore, not only does the symbol encompass something deeper among its parts. Every symbol is in a hierarchical relationship with other symbols that are more fundamental and foundational to its operation of getting the knowledge from its source of obscurity to clarity and effectiveness within another.
The Microsoft logo is a symbol, but only so in the sense of being a recreation of its real symbol, which is a vision and attitude and belief of the company specially tooled to give it power and presence within the mind as the company intends.
The company is a product, but also a distant, vast organization of many moving parts and people. The company aligns with the signification of its created symbols meant to summarize and token that organization in a simple form. Microsoft gets stuffed into a graphical shape and color. The intention of the graphical is to recreate in your mind the original fundamental “abstract” reality of the company. But the only symbol of the company in this is not physical.
This symbol, which is not material and which is in its original form, is the idea of Microsoft informed by that tangible symbol and everything you know about it. Such knowledge as your personal experiences, news article, gossip, exchanged opinions, and any other data. But, still, even that idea is not the original symbol for which an external, tangible one was created to influence and modify it. There is another one.
It is not there except for the nanosecond needed to open a hole in your awareness of that external company, the creator of the outer symbol. This opening is so that information will start to flow between them about Microsoft according to Microsoft’s wishes, and it’s tied to that event that began it, which is the real symbol, and real mediator here. A symbol is an object of knowledge and an event of the transfer of knowledge.
The merchant wants to tell you its there and its good. The consumer wants to know what’s there and is good. Microsoft creates the logo. It carries a particular emotion about what is extant and good for which the company wants association. To the extent that the logo already aligns with what you already know or can absorb about goodness, the conceptual symbol of the Microsoft of the extant and good, triggered by the physical logo, is re-instantiated in you. It’s transferred to your consciousness so your relationship with the company may positively be secured by a changed attitude about it in line with theirs.
What is first effected is your symbol of attitude by the knowledge of Microsoft that it is transmitting. But the new symbol that is changed and existing within consciousness by the external Microsoft symbol is one thing. The moment that this occurred is another, which is a fusion of the two lobes of the emblem, its form and its meaning — the fusion of the word of “Microsoft” with yours. Now, since symbols are in a hierarchy, and we believe that the hierarchy is external-to-internal-to-transcendent, this moment of communication, as well as instantaneous transference, is most importantly between man and God, then a man and himself and man and man. So what does this imply? To me, it looks a lot like conversion and evangelism.
First, don’t look for the symbol, because it’s not there except for a second, and it’s irreducible. The symbol is as much a phenomenon of connection as it is a carrier of information through which that connection it will pass. It is the real-time instantiation of knowledge, dynamically joining you to another, or you to your brain, or anything so obscure, big, complex, and confusing that it needs a means of simplification, summarization, and remembrance tagging. This strategy allows you to find and prioritize that information in a vast matrix of lower forms, collate, and make sense of it all. Recalled is the symbol, the connection made to that knowledge, and it recedes back into the ether after its work concludes. We know they all must exist objectively in the mind of God somehow, almost like spirits, and never destroyed, but everything else we call a symbol is only a copy, a facsimile of this real one. It’s not art, nor metaphor, nor word, nor analogy, nor any appearance, but a token, a second in time, a comprehensive and straightforward piece of knowledge and, by acceptance of another entity, an opening of worlds just before it retreats, having done its job. Everything else is a mere copy but a hard and inseparable link to it. It underscores again the truth about how far away we naturally are from doing this in our own power from the beginning. You can think you are the creator and destroyer of the fundamental symbols and meanings of existence. However, where God is concerned, a symbol is first a moment of revelation that is as unique and unreproducible as the proprietary Truth that it carries.
I think this symbolic fusion of knowledge and event into a person is a much more accurate picture of Christ, rather than to separate him in consciousness into either a physical presence and form, a person or an idea, or a mere collection of data and “truth” about him. It forces us to take into account the crucial importance of understanding that Christ is both Person and revelation. When he is not here physically his being is transferred to us in the form of an idea of transcendence linked to the specialized, revealed knowledge of him that he brought. That knowledge being paramount, with its exclusive personal idea a means of its spiritual control. The moment of the salvation of man instantiated by Christ is the same symbol understood as the moment of linkage, a moment where this Christ of God joins them because man’s spirit that corresponds with God’s. In return, God sees Man in his highest possible moral state and act of wanting that fusion.
Looking for the Transcendent Solution
I know, ill get to Irresistible Grace in a moment.
Philosophy has always been a blind squirrel that occasionally gets a nut, but it can only use the symbol as a vital existential and overarching phenomena as a basis for the ultimate point of contact with truth only when its a wholly human-made thing. When it accepts it as such, even then, it becomes the means of relativism and deconstruction, not of the means of bridging the gap between the ultimate subject and object. Transcendental realism. Transcendental idealism. Empirical idealism. Empirical realism. All try to reconcile within the mind the notion of immanence and what is beyond that is not self-contradictory. They accomplish nothing because this is attempted by presupposing that it is impossible except through scholarship and a mostly opaque, irrelevant, impractical, and artificial concept.
But here’s the kicker when we take this into theology: It struggles with the same thing. Theology, despite its pretensions, finds no singular necessary abstract object, which is a combination of immanence and transcendence competent to accept and carry man’s meaning and God’s together in a way that allows truly rational and emotional confidence in their connection and communication. The object is too man weighted, in which you get the extreme of God as a mere feeling, losing his transcendent objectivity. Or, also, God weighted, putting God as too strange and Holy to approach without a complete relinquishing of man’s will and conscious awareness. Propositional knowledge, primarily doctrinal statements, is in all theology set in the place of this missing object. They are symbols as ideas of the divine, but they do not self-identify as transcendent. Then there is emotion and intuition that are the main influence of an idea expected to grease the skids between man and God. However, it is also insular and still does not self-identify and demonstrate as objectively influenced.
The missing idea must be something miraculous, and evidently so, as well as mundane and very human at the same time, but what could it be? Perhaps pairing reason with emotion? Same problem. Lost in mystery and given an objectively false but effective reality in the subjective experience? Same problem. Maybe pairing the “bible” with “faith.” Same problem if “Bible” is the whole thing and anything, and if faith is just personal conviction about it. Not all of it shows as objectively demonstrative of God, and the “faith” idea is too broad in what is thought its legal influences. To fix this, you would have to find something particular the Bible which is independently miraculous and refine a definition of faith as one only of that very same phenomena. But how, when it is already determined that the Bible contains no one compelling, overarching moral reason to believe God, and faith is essentially ineffable and idiosyncratic, compelled by its own manufactured reasons?
What is a symbol which is at once a meaning? A symbol with an impossibility of separation from its meaning due to it not being another symbol but miraculous information? I am not looking for the symbol “existence is nothing but matter” nor “God created the universe,” where those symbols respective meanings point to information from the observable universe or subjective universe of objective objects or mental objects. This kind of representational token of appearance and knowledge involves only psychological or physical things. So there is nothing else but ourselves and our universe in which to become our knowledge and exclusively forces our belief expressions. What I’m looking for is a model for our expressive symbols of faith which is not in another insular mental or physical object, but a genuinely transcendent, proven one.
This Knowledge, this fount of pure spirituality made up entirely of Truth, sent out a simpler copy of itself, sent its symbol among the contingent objects of matter and mind, to which it will make the supernatural Knowledge understood and fulfilled. The subject, man, and the object, God, is, before this, a fought for, flimsy, precarious, and earned relation, always near breaking because the glue which binds them together is with the same dead material which is the subject and object. We need first a real transcendent symbol, and if it’s transcendent it points only to a transcendent demonstration. This, in turn, we emulate in our faith, a faith in that transcendent symbol informed exclusively by that conclusive evidence in a knowledge which is not from here or in here, but way out there.
But in our Church and in our halls of learning, where is the peace today, where is the meeting point, where is the mutual and moral and perfect agreement between man and transcendence? It can never be there continuing to look for it in “man” or in “God,” or directly between one idea and another, nor any combination or mixture of the two. Its there only in a divine symbol that only God could give of himself, which is equally imminent and transcendent, with a piece of information that is at home, for the brief moment it exists, in his world as in ours, but not found in either. It’s not to be said exactly alive or dead. It’s more like a manifestation, a shadow thrown by someone, speaking of something that is correctly understood and rational in man’s mind but is so foreign to it that it is just as readily rejected as accepted on moral grounds as a miraculous point of contact.
The symbol is much like a lubricant between two surfaces to eliminate friction or an electrical outlet between the interior wire supplying a charge and the objective appliance using a charge. It is the one giant and overarching idea of conscious existence: how two radically incompatible ontologies communicate and agree over impossible distances, but nevertheless over something that facilitates an intelligible flow of information back and forth. What could trigger means of an opening at the point of greatest similarity and agreement with respect to what is moral between incompatible ontologies? So self-resistant to replacement that your theology has no choice but to identify only as this equivalent of God, instead of something that is as attributable to the mind and the hand?
