How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.
Wait! Jesus!
Wait. Aren’t we talking about Jesus? A mediator between God and man to secure a relationship upon which communication can move between them across impossible ontological boundaries? Someone that was here but for a brief time and then was not, leaving that desired real, fundamental, abstract symbol of himself, of transcendence, behind for this continued connection? A physical body that is no more, but resurrected into a glorified, spiritual body? Jesus, the Man/God? Jesus, the Divine and the carrier and demonstrator of transcendence, but at once a man? Isn’t He this symbol? Well, maybe, if he is not only a Person or an idea.
I remind you that a person, anyone, is not in himself a self-revelation of transcendence by his authority, but only by offering proof of his credentials. The idea that is in our minds pertaining to Christ is our own. There is a version willed by God, but basic morality is our forming of the True symbol of Christ by our love of truth and our spiritual activity which is guided by the Holy Spirit which influences us. We are moral only when the Spirit’s will and our spiritual products align. In the end, nothing of this is credited to us because nothing of our existence is credited to us, even our free will.
A person in consciousness is an idea. The idea needs positive confirmation of being originally in line with the divine will, not just touted by that person or another. Then, the idea is not the point, its what he means, and what it means can only be the personal concepts credentialing knowledge. The credentials, his knowledge, his information is his authority as a Person of transcendence to faith, especially if this person, manifested physically, should leave. It becomes him in his place and becomes the only signification of this personal symbol to the mind. If this is so, maybe what we are looking for is not a positive symbol between God and man, but a negative one. Not negative meaning “bad,” but negative in that the motivation of man that it represents and the work of God that it represents cant establish on anything that this world can produce and call its own, such as a “person” or any autonomous idea. It’s negatively immanent, not positively, being in our world yet obviously not from it.
That negative result is one that would solve the age-old (since the 18th century at least) war between secularists and religionists that there is no possibility of a satisfactory metaphysical knowledge of either ideality or reality.
One prefers a kind that must be real to the inner man and the other one that must be ideal evidence. One is not impressed by the conservative grab-bag of external evidences and the other is not impressed by the grab-bag of internal liberal experientialism. They both tout the ways in which Christianity is sufficiently said true or at least effective by one or the other when the truth is that liberalism and conservatism are each, by definition, problems looking for solutions either singly or together.
What they mean but do not say is that what is needed is the fulfillment of the demands of both results and motivation, the real and the ideal, the intellect and the emotions from one single informational, historical phenomena which is as transcendently real as ideal. In other words, what is needed but never said is neither liberalism or conservatism. The subject of such a missing object, if it existed, would swallow up conservative and liberal assumptions by one evidence and one internal experience of that objective phenomena. Overwhelmed by that which is not only capable of becoming God to faith but capable of becoming the ultimate moral judge of human consciousness in a single informational token. Experience is then God and evidence is then God, but not worshiped like the Person, but only supremely valued as the singular means by which he is known. The subject stands before the Beatific Vision in a view as close as can be obtained through a moral compulsion before the compulsion of death forces us before Him.
Why is it that the one most apparent choice that solves every single theological paradox is the one that is rejected and never discussed? Because this great symbol of God is nothing if identified not as messianic prophecy, and talking about that in the context of faith is talk about essential information and spiritual contact with God that few care about as awakener, magistrate, and maintainer of that faith. That makes us feel unsaved when we are not that much impressed by it, and that cannot be. But if this messianic knowledge is put by God as his sole power on the conscience, rejecting it as such is the rejection of God for what could only be human constructs.
There, I said it. But I won’t mention it again and will continue to talk around it so that you can see it for yourself.
Jesus, God and the Image of God
We don’t like to think that Jesus is a symbol of God because we believe this implies that he is not God, but a human-made and superficial token of God. But this understanding is about as far from the truth as I am the Messiah. This is the result not of a correct understanding of Jesus, but a bad one about symbolism as purely manufactured through the methods and resources of the world. Do we need to broaden our notion of symbolism somewhat? If you don’t, then the only way you can see Christ is divine a person, the symbol, not a divine knowledge that is the reason for that divine person. Wanting to avoid the thought of him as a symbol ironically dooms us to believe in him directly as the same superficial caricature of religion in which we secretly desire to approach him, a figure epistemically disconnected from his proof of divinity, that we thought we were avoiding.
A symbol is not only a synthetic, artificial means of communication as it operates between one person and another, or Man’s mind and God’s, its the content and consequence meaning itself. From God’s perspective, since he is not a symbol his emblem is the same as His signification until man enters the room, and then only for man’s benefit. the difference being that for Man the symbol is embedded in man’s contingency and can be conceptually different from its meaning by choice and then dealt with as an independent force on consciousness. It’s this choice that establishes morality and sin through the acceptance or rejection of fundamental meaning. Man is carnal, and ours is naturally a closed system, but a world in which the divine can in some way inhabit. But since God’s world is himself and nothing else, God’s meaning remaining fixed in him, when you talk to the symbol Christ you talk to God himself invading our world, manifested in another form, simpler, more comprehensible, to fit the human context and space. When this symbol of God who is a man does something, he makes other symbols of himself, which are in turn points of access to God’s essence, nature, existence, meaning, mind, and plan of God from different angles, but all of which are foreign to human experience and means. If Christ is not a symbol in this way then it encourages epistemic and emotional sin and seduction by insular influences, becoming easy to see why we can so easily form religions around personal ideas and deny the divine knowledge which either accompanies them or they die.
Man is a symbol too
Man potentially has one kind of potential symbol within him and one natural symbol that is the default. The first is righteous, natural righteousness, and one is sinful natural sinfulness. Between the two, the balance is corrupt because the standard of judgment is God’s perfect, righteousness in respect to transcendence, and to him, sin is the same perfect state against transcendence. Not first against those ideas, but against those ideas informed by their programmed divine meaning, their knowledge. That means its Mans’s potential symbol of real righteousness and sin is dormant without transcendent activation by exposure to this ultimate meaning through God’s symbol, but active when that knowledge is known through a view of that symbol.
I would like you to think about all this symbolically. Not just tossing around concepts in your mind, but with true symbols, those which are appearances and information together. If you handle one you handle another. If you talk about “sin” and “righteousness” you have to pair them with their ultimate biblical examples in a kind divine, revealed information. It is here, in the spiritual action, consciously or unconsciously, of honoring God by the most basic means, that God could possibly say that in any sense someone was righteous or, refusing, unrighteous.
The things man does and believes in his natural state remains a perfectly acceptable version of morality and sin in and to the world. That is, only to physical righteousness. This state of man is not competent to display God’s spiritual righteousness, the whole point of righteousness, neither of God’s antithesis, sin, unless activated by accepting or rejecting contact with the one that God prepared for his conversion to righteousness or conversion against sin. How does he then display this morality or its antithesis? What is this point of contact? Where is it found?
Man is still in sin before this contact, either in his affective and rational estimation of righteousness or sin and his regard for spiritual things, just not primarily in his actions. He is potentially, virtually sinful spiritually, but not through his body movements to its expression. If the man is “in sin,” it’s not Man “in sin” as in relation to a concept of sin, but in sin as being against or undirected by Christ/Divine Knowledge, the meaning of the symbol concept. When God’s righteous activation takes place, this corrupt sin and righteousness become “exposed” and “covered” by the symbol, the relative superficiality to this knowledge which nonetheless acts as for this purpose as its equal.
The result is that people are virtually in sin before contact as they are virtually righteous after contact, “covered” by a relative cursory instance of their spiritual state for its entire representation, but that which is either given by themselves or given by God. One is cursory in your cursory regard for spiritual things, your cursory morality, the other cursory in the relative difference between a symbol and its saving meaning. Underneath the cursory instance lies your spiritual reality, one, the reality of how dismissive and careless you are with spiritual things in general, dis-allowing you to go to specific, salvific ones of overarching substance. The other the reality of your opposite love, but here upon the mere contact with that specific meaningful one which overwhelms and subsumes all general categories. One is imputed sin through his superficial morality in an active and sustained display, in every thought, of a disregard of Truth, representing his entire moral substance. The other is imputed righteousness through what God considers his substantive morality, which is not in every thought, and certainly not in every action, but instantiated through his momentary exposure to a divine phenomenon which proves him real, the “cursory’ then standing for him in the representation of the entirety of his spiritual state.
The righteous version is a temporary and artificial solution by God, not only to allow Man to be seen acceptable or truly sinful but so that it remains open to Man the extent of the mystery and the distance Man is from seeing it clearly. It’s as much a solution as an incentive to one, but as much for the purpose that man becomes what he is not and what he does not know as it is to lead his love of Truth ever toward fulfillment of its vision, and therefore God’s vision of Man. Imputed righteousness is like a permanent and exclusive invitation and guarantee of its continued acceptance, which is an invitation to grow in the same knowledge which it is. Again, this is not only about religious rites and God’s direct actions, about His covering of our sin that happened somewhere in the heavens, it’s about our action of the acceptance of His revelation, and His by setting us on a course to know more of the same thing, coming into closer alignment with God’s substance than with his virtual aspect. Therefore let’s not talk about imputation like its only an act and not a miracle of knowledge to which man must be led and come to know. “Miracle” is God and his act, but “miracle” is also in a knowledge of his own that he gives to the world for such an act to take place. Without Man, without his awareness, affections, and choice, nothing any more takes place with Man as would take place by God on man’s behalf without Man.
