How Can a Man Be the Atoning Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 5. The Man and Symbolism.
Sin is “exposed” by God’s righteous original and that sin is simultaneously is “covered” by God’s righteousness.
This is a no more complete, substantive exposure of the full extent of sin as it is a taking on of the full extent of God’s literal righteousness. Of course, it means they are virtually exposed and hidden, imputed, counted as sufficiently complete to God, the man remaining in relation to God sinful but acceptable. But, again, we are talking not about imputation or exposure only in the sense of Divine operations. Do these not mean that corrupt ideas and that which informs Man about God, which are hopelessly broken and impossible to correct on his own but show proximity to the Truth, are given a Holy course-correcting starting place for their increased but never perfect advancement toward God propelled by Man’s continuing but reset love of Truth? Or, in respect to his understanding of sin, and ever-advancing but the never perfect realization of its nature, coming closer to God’s understanding of sin while at once never coming close? If so, we ask what are these “corrupt ideas and which informs Man about God” which is our point of departure?
You start with the fact that it’s not just that righteousness and sin have to be taken as a natural unit of a bad idea against another, perfect divine pair which will be given Man, a transcendent pair, but that you cant talk about the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to sinful man, or righteousness and sin theologically, only by God’s fiat. If not only by his fiat, then it leaves only by one other irresistible thing.
Why we resist that irresistible thing is to release man from any responsibility, first in the initial point of imputation and in his advancement by loving and knowing something specific. This has the benefit of our sounding pious, by giving everything to God and rat once releasing us from the haunt of our own true affections. And we have a whole line-up of heresies which are not any more fundamental heresies as we are counted by God righteous, to pitch our correctness, like Pelagianism. Yes, they are sins, but not fundamental ones. Fundamental sin is putting non-ultimate’s for ultimate’s.
If you do then Man, at least in time, is stripped of his duty to know some specific truth and morally judge the truth, and if so then the Truth, the knowledge of God in all this falls through the cracks and disappears in a theological definition of righteousness and sin which is in turn not responsible for knowing a divine reality, only a feeling that feels divine.
Do you see how, in view of the foregoing on symbolism, if we speak in an orthodox fashion of a divine “symbol,” one can put “Christ” in its place with no change in doctrine (unless under Calvinism)? I don’t think I have said anything which is heretical and unorthodox even once by going so far afield of the theological obsessions that we call Holy. But what we are beginning to expose here by speaking in this way is everything that our cultural baggage and corrupt epistemology have taught us that results in the putting out of our minds that which is inseparable from Christ. Let’s continue on this tack.
I repeat, the good symbol to God of moral man before this conversion by God’s righteous symbol, although effectively dormant with respect to transcendence, is not to say inoperable and not contributing. The whole of the fleshly body similarly could never occupy transcendence, but without it, there would be no point in God’s redemptive program. It’s dormant of effective divine expression until conversion, but not non-existent! The body is evil only by direct comparison to God. So is man’s spirit. But in the context of transformation, it becomes the instrument of God’s praise. Its divine potentiality before conversion rests in a person’s ardent and unchanging love and pursuit of spiritual truth, used by God so that the sinful symbol of him can be overwhelmed and covered by God’s symbol through which it believed and showed potentiality becoming imputed but Holy fulfillment.
What About Total Depravity?
Irresistible Grace and Total Depravity? What is Grace and in what manner is it irresistible? The question we will attempt to answer is if these concepts are Orthodox or a linguistic trap created by carnal object orientation by our theologians. “Grace,” God’s undeserved favor, is the fulfillment of the Prophets to the world by Christ, I hope you will agree, and I hope you will also agree that to someone who loves spiritual Truth, like yourself, it is surely irresistible!
To say that this symbol of man’s righteousness is entirely the result of an action by God in any crucial sense, where even faith is a prohibited “work” in man’s conversion, is the equivalent of the abolishing of man to an object of use in the transaction. It denies that man has a body or a spirit with essential grounds upon which God can turn attributable to his free will and love. The spirit, like the body, is not an empty shell, a form without its preexisting biological functions that give it health and animation, nor is the spirit a hollow ghost without personal content and moral function. Man’s spiritual symbol is not lost before justification any more than his physical one. Man’s spiritual symbol is has a positive but disabled potentiality. It’s not gutted until God fills it in its entirety, it’s like a prophecy by Man awaiting God’s fulfillment insofar as its one about the possibility of the existence and knowledge of divine Truth but made without the pretensions of making divine knowledge himself, of which only God is privy.
Calvinist soteriology is the result, again, of what happens when messianic prophecy is thought not compelling enough to carry all of our theological water, where its only replacement comes by the worship of religious ideas and words giving it the appearance of piety.
Predestination is the keyword in this. Along with Grace, it is an action by God underserved by what man “does,” by his “works,” defined as not restricted to the actions of the body but any and all action, even faith. Indeed, it is undeserved by anything that man does to earn it, but if this goes to the spirit of man in respect to any sense of “earn” then the gospel becomes only a way to insert machine code into a robot engineered to receive it and run by it unattended. If a man is free to choose something, in using it he does so freely and by some reason of his own. This is what is called here “spiritual action.”
Man accepts justification by the predestination of God, that God sets him as saved before he was born. This is quite biblical. But by physical works, not by spiritual works, physical work being that indicative, cursory symbol I have been talking about. But when the spiritual work of Man is in respect to the predestination of God and of himself, what kind of spiritual work, around what, are we talking about? If its no work of any kind, then it doesn’t matter what it is because man cant use it. However, “predestination” means, literally, “prophecy,” and if God predestinates he prophesies an event in the future and a person who is to fulfill it, namely, a salvation event.. its easy to see that God prophesies and what he prophesies must come to pass, but its not so easy to see how man fulfills it as well if he is but mortal. Well, the way he fulfills it is by taking his love of Truth and declaring God’s prophecy true, the spiritual action. The prophecy that God delivers for him and the prophecy that he believes to justification is one not only for salvation but the reason for this salvation, which is both Man and God’s agreement that the Truth which binds them is that Christ fulfilled the prophetic promises and man is set to be its publisher and explainer to the world.
Predestination is used corruptly by stripping it of its one informational center and restricting it to a divine act or operation. When you do this, like with any divine act, its placed entirely outside of man, either by his physical efforts or by any spiritual state of action. But only if its kept as a divine act. People can even be justified because they believe in God’s sovereignty before justification, which is the essence that Calvinist’s give predestination. But what happens when we introduce predestination as, for example, “the prophecy of the justification of a man, made by the exclusive power of God, where both love the existence of an ultimate demonstration of divine power by a local, objective agent?” When predestination becomes what it is, “messianic prophecy?” We then have a sovereign act by God where its only possible reason for existence is for a spiritual act by a man in affirming that no other example of the divine is more remote from us yet more wanting of exclusive attention. Changed essentially to “messianic prophecy” and predestination as God’s act and man is not possible but mandatory. It is evident that the Messianic Prophecy of Jesus of Nazareth is evidence of God, the only one, and if evidence of God it is meant only for man’s attention, handling, judgment, and dissemination, indirectly before it its known and affirmed, and wholly after.
You see, “predestination” does not really have the importance with Calvinist’s that they pretend. Without a demonstration by God and man, namely, the predestination of God through the prophets pertaining to Christ and the church, it’s just a worthless and powerless religious idea with no divine confirmation of being true. Neither is God or man then true irrespective of our desires and wants.
This doctrine of total depravity, the negation of free will, and pre-spirit, if you will, is the result of confusing the apostolic conception of “work,” which is conceived only as acts of the body, with the operation of the spirit. I have spoken much of this “spiritual action, ” but I will elaborate here.
Our theology, not just Calvinism, is obsessed with the conception of spiritual symbols like physical ones. The biblical writers never referred to anything the spirit does as work, and it remains sound that no “work” that it does mention can go to salvation, as a symbol, is of no power to create its meaning, only sign it. Yet, they also constantly speak of faith, belief, hope, love, choice, volition, and thought, and the preaching a gospel for the consideration, conviction, and righteous judgment. These are spiritual actions, “works,” which shares the “work” concept but not the word as the apostles used it.
It remains that no “work,” a symbol, does anything more than sign a signification of its substance, even a “spiritual work” as I conceive it. But there are more fundamental symbols that are closer to substance, and more competent to be spoken of as the same thing. And there are more fundamental significations of God, and more competent to be spoken of as the same thing, than that for our one and only conception of “work.” As I speak about this, I speak of “spiritual work” as a precondition of salvation as a sign of his true condition, not the cause. As a symbol to signify the state of man’s spirit which is set on and loves spiritual Truth which is possible, a state of love which is still attributable to a man outside of any spiritual tokening by his spiritual actions around it. If you’re going to use “work” at least use it to speak of the most basic and important kind, not an inferior kind.
You must differentiate and not confuse ontological content with containers. What is done is a container, the symbol. Why is content, within the container. The content is presented and controlled by the container. In conversion, God cant make contact and agreement with any container, symbols, but only what they represent, content, meaning, essence, a spiritual potentiality, a potential point of attraction to him, and a spiritual building block of attraction for his use. You do different things, but for different reasons. When reason’s change, your actions follow. The body is the body, not bodily actions or their motivations. But to say the spirit is the spirit, not spiritual operations and motivations, is to say that what makes it up is involuntary, essentially nothing. Because the spirit, if it is not motivations, attitudes, beliefs, justifications, judgments, volition, worldviews, loves, habits of operation and their accumulative results, then the reason why God gave you salvation is found entirely in a divine mystery. They then cant be the spiritual things of God that are exposable to that spirit and are exclusively emblematic of morality for its agreement.
One then has no moral responsibility to believe God for any particular reason at the point of salvation, nor though the subsequent process of sanctification. It is entirely God acting through the man that controls man’s spiritual actions, not initially attracting spiritual essences. Thus, the spiritual container, the symbol, is likened to the physical container, to what the body does. It is made entirely into an object of God’s sole possession and responsibility, and like a programmer inserting a piece of code into a machine man follows along without any say of free will of its own. It is very disingenuous to suggest that this is not the case. If you want to understand Irresistible Grace and Total Depravity any other way it’s through paradox by reason and a rather unstable and suspicious affirmation.
But the biblical message is that we cant credit ourselves in any way for our salvation not because we are automatons made by God to blindly follow. We cant credit ourselves because what we believe, Christ and the Work of God, the prophetic stream of Scripture, which morally replaces our own insular and selfish motivations with one that only God can do in his sovereignty. The reason that Calvinism must think that the spirit contains nothing essential to salvation before his justification that is a basis for God’s choice to save is that they think that there is nothing of true transcendent quality and agreement with God in that spirit prior to salvation, including this prophetic revelation.
Science, not the Bible, informs the corrupt view. Science also believes that there is no single, miraculous point of contact with God that can be known or compelling enough to act as a means of the judgment of man for its dismissal. They are, like the physical world, all mixed up in propositions and calculations and measurements of insular objects, and found slowly and messily only through a struggle through confusion.
Calvinists, and the whole of the Church, retreat into ideas of God. Since to them, faith propositions are the only possible Holy symbolic interface with God, while also knowing that these ideas of God are not demonstrably divine except through inference with biblical facts. They rightly conclude that man cant be saved through them because they suggest man’s work. And so he can’t, and so they do. But the biblical facts which demand them, which man must know, hold and believe for these propositions to have presence and power in the spirit, which are not symbols and are miraculously not a product of man, are acting as the presence of God himself in man’s spirit.
Science does not believe these biblical phenomena, these facts are worth a hoot, and protestants and Catholics and the rest don’t either, which is why science deals in the objects of matter and Christianity in the objects of mind. When the divine, or ultimate conceptions, are mixed with this carnal single-mindedness, it can’t but proceed to obliterate free-will, individuality, objective value, and God as it falls deeper and deeper into itself.
God does not save because of man’s works, he saves because of his, and man knowing and believing those works is not a work in the physical sense, and attributable to man, because what man believes is God, not himself. The question is not about what you think is “work” by propositional sentences and logic, but what God thinks is work, and what he thinks is work is not a concept, not a proposition, but phenomena of Himself in the world which finds love and a place in man’s spirit with the consent of man and God. If that is God saving because of man’s work, then it’s a kind that is as far from man’s attribution as man is ontologically from God.
