Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, part 1
First Hint: What only God Can Do and What Man Can Do.
Christ is against that “world thought paradigm.” Nothing is startling about that kind of antagonism. That paradigm is just the common, culturally influenced way of understanding the world and using language to communicate it. But that is the real problem that the statement hides. Since we as Christians believe that his antagonism in this is not entirely borrowed out of the fevered brains of wandering tinfoil hatted conspiracy theorists, but supernaturally transmitted by God, I think I am compelled to think that a transcendently communicated problem should be as unique and remarkable and unexpected as the mind and person of its alien origin and to who it is meant to address as an influence of alien origin. Is “the world is against God” supposed to be taken as a great revelation that man would never have obtained without God’s special intervention by the incarnation? Is “have faith in God and you will be saved” supposed to be an example of the ultimate teaching and warning of God that waited thousands of years until Christ came? Is “we are saved by Christ’s work on the Cross” or “a person is saved by works and faith,” where “work” is, well, what Christ did by dying and a “faith” which is, just, umm, faith, supposed to be revelatory, startling and utterly impossible to have come from the minds of unenlightened men?
We don’t have that strangeness and unexpectedness upfront here by the expectations of a certain opaque and common and man-made and motivated hermeneutic, but if we begin thinking about it as a potential for meaning in the service of a real revelation, our hermeneutic is controlled by a divine source, not our puny brains.
Christ is against the world thought paradigm, but “Christ” and the “world thought paradigm,” if they are themselves examples of that world thought paradigm, are not gateways to our understanding of Christ, and then gateways to what really constitutes the “world thought paradigm” of ambiguous or optional meaning, either. The power of autonomous ideas and those ideas, which defines that paradigm, need not have originated exclusively by an objectively, transcendent Christ and outside of the world thought paradigm. The ideas are potentially converted to meaning, but if converted only by an act of pure choice and not guided by a compelling transcendent influence they are by definition only symbolic reflections only of a human conversion ability and priority. If there was any idea unexpected and foreign enough unsuited to that insular kind conversion, the act of conversion itself would have its character that is a reflection of the unusual as well. But on its face, neither the task of conversion of symbol-to-meaning that is being asked to perform is any more transcendent than what is being asked to convert. Unless, of course, we presume the conversion of idea to meaning is being asked by a demonstrated, revealed Christ of history entirely outside of mans’ natural noetic influences.
We are talking about hermeneutics? Take the word “anti-biblical” in my theodical problem statement. Do I mean the Catholic version, the Protestant version, or the Jehovah’s Witness’s version of “anti-biblical?” The Universalists and the atheists also have theirs. Am I speaking of the pedestrian or academic sensibility on the general subject of theodicy? Why would we automatically assume that they are in error or not only by comparison to one of the other operational and accepted modes? Because they are all sufficiently transcendentally opaque, prosaic and innocuous so that nothing of unexpected lethality jumps out from God at us. They are our world. What man has come up with, the choices he has presented us, are everything we have to work with. There are no alternatives but what our consensus says there are.
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