Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral part 3: Red Flags

The fallacy is also found in insular experientialism, as with the New Age, the Occult and many charismatic groups. We now use “Truth” for “meaning,” a personal independent power of talismanic quality to fire and inform the intellect and emotions that do not need a justifying means outside of the person holding it. Extreme subjectivity destroying its dependent and revered spiritual subject, where an extreme objective state is the only result, leaving them as mere bodies/minds with entangled and contradictory feelings and beliefs only for the benefit of that particular body/mind.

Both essentially start and end in the same place: here in the world. However, in the biblical revelation, as we will see, when Truth is an appearance of God to the physical or noetic senses and also the method of its elucidation, hermeneutics becomes locked exclusively to the divine mind both methodologically and meaningfully. It’s not given up to humanly contrived systems that can break down are misinterpreted. The result is that the subject is entirely controlled in the entire process of understanding and illumination by the active invasion of that mind by a divine objective object which is, in turn, the equivalent of that mind.

Noun Flattening

This tendency to make truth a method and method truth outside of this theophany, which I suggest must exist in a real revelatory document, is what I call a kind of noun flattening. As I said, used in biblical hermeneutics this is deadly, and that is why Christian hermeneutics is being destroyed, because it’s not Christian, it’s secular dressed up as Christian, yet is nonetheless the world interpreter of what Christian meaning means.

As I continue to describe this noun flattening or noun norming as uncontextualized or qualified uses of theological keywords in our theology, I don’t mean that the theologian is not using “Faith” or “God” or “love” while not having in mind a particular kind which is real, or that he is not going to explain them later. I mean the destruction is happening because of casual use of them in sentences without qualification. When they are not qualified as to a specific biblical revelatory device, it is guaranteed that they will be subsequently thought of and used as having independent propositional power, as in a secular understanding of Truth, and never qualified at all. The scholar’s work will then essentially be an argument or description of the power of understanding and meaning through discussion, reason, and ideas, not through this appearance of God of which I speak.

When we study hermeneutics, we often find goals and methods (conclusive concepts and directional concepts) generalized, used with operational terms used to only categorize crucial concepts. The reason why we do this is because “meaning,” supposedly the ultimate goal of hermeneutics, has lost “meaning” because “meaning,” our keyword, is itself become a flattened, or uncontextualized concept, as has “Truth” and “Method.”

Now, this is fine, except for Christian theology. Why? Because before any one or a number of key theological words, meaning is already supposed to be qualified conceptually by a presumption about the ultimate nature of reality, the ordering force behind it and the revealing of that force.

We are are not talking about getting meaning from your insurance policy, Moby Dick, or Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s is a little different writing about only natural things since he assumed God was behind everything, but his discussion is about physics, not God. There is no threat that the reality of matter is something that will have to be argued for and either won or lost. So, if a flattened concept like “inertia” is used it is a certainty that it will be understood properly as long as matter is not seen as fiction. It emerges to explain matter and, if it dies and falls out of use because of the discoveries of science, science is not degraded but is perhaps refined and improved with a clearer view of reality as matter.

But you cant treat theology like science because, well, our natural reflex is not necessary to disbelieve that there is a God, but that there is an indispensable revelation him that we are as responsible for in our theology as we are of “God.” If you use “faith” without qualification when there is a biblical one, then “faith” becomes, in this reflex, defaulted to “God,” the idea, and then to nothing, a feeling, a comfortable delusion, the result of a conscious and controlled calculation, or to our insular selves and a mere a ideational plaything. Hermeneutics is supposed to be, however, “Christian Hermeneutics,” not “Hermeneutics,” and Christian Hermeneutics literally means “the study of meaning within those who take it from the revelation of Messiah.”

Lose that fact and Christian hermeneutics becomes a discussion of methods, errors, histories, and arguments for meaning like science does its unqualified nouns, without any necessary reference to its controlling authorities and its meaning first.  This results in time to the death of theology, not its improvement.

Outer-Space, Inner-Space

To illustrate this, let me give an analogy of which I am fond.

Imagine all existence in the perception of man beginning as a big house, with outer, surrounding space and inner space. Everyone is born into the inner space. No human created the inner space. We are only living there. The only thing that is changeable is the paint and anything that was in this interior room before, and then what is made by the occupants out of what was there before.

There is also an outer space to this room that is inaccessible. The outer space is imagined existing because there is a small window built into the inner space on the side of its outer perimeter, without which an outer space would not be possible to thought. That window is blackened from the outside. Like the walls, this window can be boarded up but it can’t be removed. There would be pitch-black darkness in this inner space were it not for the light that man himself produces by work, such as from a fire.

Think of the inner space as mankind’s natural epistemic state in relation to transcendence. He starts out with only his body, mind and matter in what seems to be the only area of existence. But there is a compelling and inextricable portal in the conception of existence to another one, of a reality where everything we know is its contingency, controlling and living far beyond him and his exhaustive understanding. The occupant is dependent on matter, food, water, gravity, light, air, his body, others. Like mankind to his circumstances, he is transitory and dies because he needs something else other than what he knows to stop it over which he has no control. This suggests the existence of that which is not contingent and that which is, yet produces this space in which man can live.

But it’s only a compelling idea. It is thought about and many books are written on some version of this analogy (axiomatically, Plato’s allegory of the  Cave), but no one knows really if such an outer place exists. It could just as well be a trick of thought. Mans dependency to a force or thing which was before man and lives long after him is only an analogy to outer space, but this is not proof of such a space.

But this window exists and can’t be removed, even if it could be, without dire consequences because without it even the thought of improvement would only be limited only to a more efficient avoidance of pain. This window is what even Hegal might have called the directionality of history in the achievement of human freedom. The positing of “the Good” and the whole concept of morality by Plato. The presumption of eventual complete disclosure of the processes and forces of nature through the scientific method and our release from the confines of nature thereby. Hope that things will get better if we take a certain course. That there is an authority above us to which we might go.

Without the window, there is no basis for philosophy, science, religion or thought unnecessary to immediate bodily survival. The idea of “spirit,” “consciousness,” “will,” “dimension,” “contingent-eternal,” “hidden and disclosed,” “symbolic and substantive,” “body and mind,” “cause and effect,” “subject and object,” “known and unknown.” Everything begins with present human perception and then a state beyond matter, in the mind, which is itself not limited to matter,  but in its weakness is constantly changing and pulled by what it is not, can’t be seen, what is obscure and arcane, undiscovered, coded, superior. The window gives consciousness upward movement, improvability, and hope beyond the circumstance.   There is something beyond us and something close, and what is beyond us might give us some of its perfections and eternality, and leads us toward it, allow us into its space, without which there is no such movement except to eat, sleep, dream, have sex and die in the same conditions as in the beginning.

What happens one day is that through eons of living in this inner space and building great systems of faith and philosophy pertaining to this outer space, within many manmade partitioned rooms, a blinding light comes out of that window. This makes that structural crease between outer and inner no longer just a matter of a foundational symbol of transcendence that moves the occupants of the inner space to an unknown and foggy improvement of knowledge compelled only by a powerful, fundamental analogy. The light means for the first time that there is a real outer-space to conceptual outer-space, and someone maybe just turned the light on.

The light is the most significant event in the history of the inner space and has profound implications. For the first time, it sets the bar for the standard of speculation about transcendence. Now, serious thought about it cannot only be a matter of feeling, desire or idle and unfounded speculation. For the first time there is light coming from out there, and now an insistence on a present and public demonstration of this outer space before any serious talk about an outer-space.

But you still don’t know for sure. Maybe there is nothing out there but light, and the light is light but seemingly carries no content.

What happens is that the light is too strong. Yes, it lights every corner of the inner space, making no need for man to create improved light sources, but it’s just too bright. It hurts. Unable to know anything more of this transcendence but that now there is light, most of the occupants start to make partitions for study, partitions of great philosophy, science, and theology, but now with a deep debt to this light, which made Truth perhaps possible, objective and non-speculative. But because the partitions are not tall enough to sufficiently block the light and return the room to pe-light conditions for which their eyes are adjusted, they tear down the old partitions and make new, higher ones, moving deeper into the inner space where the light is not as strong. But then, since the light is not as strong, they have to make their own light sources, like electric lamps of various light colors, shapes, and intensities to replace the loss.

While all this is going on, there a few people that stay on the perimeter of the inner space at the window, because the appearance of that light had a deeper effect on them. They stare as long as they can at the window and try to train their eyes to handle the light. Perhaps they can see through it and come to see who or what is producing it. What they come to see through the intensity is not only the person who turned the light on, and other beings as well, but many things inside that outer space. Everything they see there is analogous to what is in their area, yet imperishable and original, making its contingency to us clearly not possible, but ours to it.

The theology of the inner partitions, however, have been under their lamps for so long they have developed their own language, even after millennia since the light first appeared. They know very well what this light means and from where it is coming, and can’t ignore it, yet have learned to think and write in a way that, as before the light came, puts it back into a dependency of people, when only the imagination and personal choice determined it. The way they do this is to use the words that imply the light yet use sentences that don’t refer to transcendence as its exclusive dependency, which makes them open to the one known only under artificial lighting. This allows everyone within the inner rooms to justify their existence there when they should be at the window.

But here is the judgment of these people who have been standing at the Window to those locked away in their man-made inner rooms of scholarship:

• You’re not supposed to say “window,” as they do, you should say “Window of transcendent light.” Otherwise, “light” can be some kind of man-made or voluntary light.
• You’re are not supposed to say “person,” but person seen in the transcendent light.” Otherwise, the person could be a chimera, a bare concept, someone “enlightened” within the inner space or anyone for that matter.
• You’re not supposed to say “being” but “being seen in the transcendent light.” Being could refer to the philosophical concept of ontology, an ultimate human person that comes from years of technological or emotional improvement, not necessarily revealed only in that light.
• If what is seen through the window is a table of some kind, you don’t simply refer to it as “table,” but that it is the “table not in the inner-space.” If not, “table” will be any table.

This is noun flattening. It’s a very sneaky way of being an astronaut that has all the clout of a pneumanaut. It forces or gives the ability of the reader to limit all things within the inner-space in which we have become ultimate explorers.

When a thing loses identifying speciation it can only be spoken of in terms of genera or family, and later as an Order, then as a Phyla, and then not at all if that insular thing is falsely proposed as an ultimate and essentially foreign thing. It does not matter if the word is used in a context that is right for it, and its speciated in later sentences. If it’s used casually and disconnected from its particular referent which is predicting and eternal, the writing is at least unconsciously operating under the assumption that concepts alone transmit and contain Truth. The apostles could get away with this, using the words that implied something special and transcendent, and take it for granted, but we cant in an age where even the ideas of “truth” and “reality” is under assault and destruction.

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