Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, part 1
Who is the Word, Them or All of Us? The Theodicy of Ideas
It’s time for us to face the fact that every single problem we have, far from our number of opportunities and a dearth of clever men to tackle them, is that although we claim to use biblical ideas because they are found in the Bible, we do it in a way that is not exclusively dependent upon a demonstrable transcendent, biblical premise to give those errors their final resolution, and one that is quite remarkable and unexpected, not prosaic, not common. Because of that we, hermeneutically, are part of the “world thought paradigm.” Christ is against the world thought paradigm, and to the extent that Christ can be shown as a transcendent fact and not a dream, the world thought paradigm, the evil that opposes him, is all of our horrible “starts with an idea, not with a premise” approach to theology that renders every biblical notion we put our hands on bromidic, of general definition, and puerile. Face it, we have fully come to believe that we will be saved or know God by the worship of insular and idiomatic ideas, not through the inspiration from miraculous historical facts that could only have been made by a Supreme Being outside space/time.
Please be advised that when I say that the real Christian thought is not convertible to something common is not to say that it is a reality so compelling that it can’t be denied or reused for something counter-purpose. I mean an original transcendent idea makes it uniquely inefficient to fuel a mundane converted use. We don’t have one, at least not one in common use.
Our problem with this puerile and opaque use of biblical ideas, like a “faith” which means faith in theological statements, conclusions and propositions, and Christ who is the Son of God but not necessarily exclusively through the prophets, but through a vision, a dream, or any reason we so wish, goes back to the Greeks and beyond into the pagan talismanic religions. We are obsessed with the independent power of concepts that can originate exclusively out of the human mind to transmit true knowledge, thinking of them as having an independent existence, such that the power of the idea alone is sufficient to carry whatever content it holds. It was, in fact, necessary and understandable for a long time in the absence of a real revelation, a real demonstration of an objective divine being, but, as I have said, it’s not supposed to be after the Cross if, in fact, we believe that the “Cross” is not convertible to a purely human concept of prosaic understanding like “love,” “death,” and “sacrifice.”
Atheists can say the same about Christians, putting themselves as the light bearers in a dark world in which theism reigns. My opening sentence need not exclusively imply the problem of a good God and creation in which evil exists, making it subject to conversion for the use of anyone who might take “God” and put themselves in his place and take “evil” and put their antagonists. The entirety of the thought may be so coopted because of the way the words used in an unqualified sense. That is why you can’t use it, or anything like it, to lead an investigation into Christian hermeneutics. It’s a non-transcendent language.
But ideas are not the problem. Its autonomous, creative, self-indulgent, unmiraculous ideas. If I accept, for example, the seemingly counter-cultural idea of a theodicy where the evil that kills the good mind is necessarily grounded in the independent power of the concepts “God,” “goodness”, “evil,” “perfection” and “people.” Well, their definitions are not the problem. Ideas are no problem. Using them is not a problem. The evil religious object of use is the ideas, and the evil idea, that is so because it is not beholden to anything but us.
If the “good” is, however, not the autonomous concept, but could otherwise only be an autonomous divine demonstration which demands and projects those concepts into the world for its mere representation, then this is the theodical solution. If not, the whole theodical question is irrational if we expect one. This implies a theodicy based on the good and evil of fundamental divine ideas, where the divine is not imperfect in the sense of a being, and evil is not evil in the sense of physical phenomena, but good and evil in the sense of truly good divine ideas which do not dictate but serve what has been divinely dictated. We might then rephrase the theodical problem like this: why do good, divine ideas suffer by the presence of evil tyrannical ones, or, if there is truth out there, why does it seem so hard to find, keep unmolested, and challenged by what seems so many attractive mundane alternatives?
The subject of theodicy is not why do bad things happen to good people, which is a philosophical statement. It begins with “bad,” “things” and “good,” which concepts make up the statement. And, no, I am not about to say exactly what true concepts ground the statement, because concepts themselves are statements. That would be asking to define a concept by another concept. I would ask: what grounds presumably divine concepts in divine premises? Whatever they are, these are the true masters of “bad,” “things,” and “good.”
Now, if you’re writing a book on Christian theology or church history, what better ground to the subject of the outworking of its errors than addressing the issue of what is driving the cultural, rational and systematic forces that encourage them? The persistent theme of the solitary pilgrim in a hostile world, rejected by the crowd, crying in the wilderness for righteousness, persecuted by the world but beloved of God, is not a significant direct point of contact with what is supposed to fundamentally inform our search for theological truth in that world because they are not divinely qualified, but only have a potentiality of divine starting place.
The right assumption is that the world, defined as the vast majority of the working modes of theology, is in a state unconverted by revelation and hostile to Christ. It would be best for us to start at the point of skepticism about our commonly accepted fundamental working ground instead of jumping in to build on the shifting sand (Matthew 7:24-27) of religious ideas. But we don’t. We are not these theological pilgrims, but something else entirely.
When we read this, as fully acclimated residents of this world, we are inclined to automatically make certain unconscious assumptions about what is a Christian, who is Christ, what is a Christian in a secular world, who are supposed to be his champions and what are the faith’s true systems of thought. This is where my problem begins: our chosen working assumptions and their motivations, not the belief that results from them that we like to call “doctrines.”
Where do our assumptions about genuine Christianity, and its antagonists, really come from? What qualifies, in the true Christian worldview, as the secular world and the spiritual world of Christ? After all, if I say I have a problem being a Christian in a world violently opposed to Him, I think the most crucial question for me before saying that my irritation is grounded in reality is whether my informed affectations driving it are not more rooted in allegiance to the oppressor instead of the truly oppressed. It’s not only about consideration of “presuppositions” as a general rule of hermeneutics because presuppositions are also the result of both premises and conclusions. It’s more about what specifically prior and foundational loves and key biblical phenomena which are thought not exclusively the product of the human mind compelled a general presupposition about my condition. Indeed, telling ourselves that the quality of our “presuppositions” is at the root of our delusions or clarity is to little effect in telling us anything about whether we are right or wrong unless there is true, revelational and specific content in our general “presupposition” container.
What if our working understanding of Christian thought for the past 1800 years, and therefore anti-christian thought, is its conflation with whatever the zeitgeist thinks it is, with the resulting dysfunction of the Church being its increasing detachment and alexithymia toward the original consciousness of its founder? I’m not talking about the content between the general categories of “Christ” and “Antichrist,” “sin and “righteousness,” “faith” and “unbelief,” “power” and “weakness,” “rich” and “poor,” “hate” and “love.” But it is hardly controversial to say that since “Christ” is a singular entity, of a single transcendentally transmitted document, then no matter how much we use general categories to lead us into discussions about their nature and importance, if these are also generally grounded in essentially philosophical categories then we can’t possibly use them as starting points to reliably lead us to anything specific about Christ or what he is trying to tell us which is not philosophy, but essentially showing us transcendence. If we could, we would be those within the secular zeitgeist, not without, and therefore the oppressor, not the oppressed.
I might restate this here: The problem is simply that here, in the physical and philosophical conceptual world into which we are born, there is a great amount of personal reward gain by engaging some belief which starts with a fundamental belief, not a fundamental premise, where “premise” is not rooted in that which is not of that world and could never come from it. In our opaque philosophical world here, where all ideas are only products of the mind and therefore can benefit that same mind which loves only insular things, the work of truth is wrongly defined as that first of “subject” and then to “object,” man to the world, man to idea, of person to his desire, attraction, need and want, or benefit. But the good and not corrupt version is the antithesis, the notion of what is true to truth.
This fallen belief is set up so that the first clause represents a person or fact (subject) who is in moral and qualitative relation to a material or intellectual world (object) which intrinsically has its same moral or qualitative potential, a person (subject) which is a state of being equal to what it most supremely loves (object). This idea is supposed to be impossible for theology since the presumption of Man seeking, finding and confronting transcendence is that the world is a real and current state unsynchronized with an ultimate idea state. Sure, how can we imagine it not the case that a subject that is essentially a present and demonstratively transcendent one is something that could never reveal or be revealed by anything evidential which is not of its same quality? How then are we to assume that a non-transcendently based subject is to demonstrate his ultimate integrity by a subject that is the same as himself? If the Bible, we believe, at least in practice, is a document in which there is no specific, scripturally perspicuous ground acting as this divine “subject,” and not one vital, incorrigible theological vital center, only declarations off a dizzying number of possible and general ones, such as “faith,” “ righteousness,” “zeal,” “work,” “covetousness,” “God,” “Heaven”, etc., all of which are worthy of our attention or not only through a lot of mental work and equivocation as we search to fill them with any scriptural content we can glean, by what justification are we claiming the Bible to be a revelation from a personal God? We must, in our twisted estimation, begin with a two-dimensional proposition that is capable of independent emergence within the same opacity as what it will hold and present.
Here is the unstated Christian idea put yet another way that is never asked: When are people not essentially the equal of what they inhabit, but are morally obligated to reject, and when are they are obligated to adopt that rejection as the greatest conceivable rejection of a claimed truth? Part of what is being rejected here is also paired with a choice about what is ultimately important and what we think is our essential positive equal that we are to go after instead.
This Christian idea is supposed to be that people are not essentially food, clothing, atoms, galaxies, concepts, philosophies, logic, and beliefs. I think that this is a theological universal and a true one. That we are the superiors to ideas, containers, but not concent or meanings, which are to demand representation by the concept that we control as a moral act. The moral act is forming ideas, which competently represent meaning, by a superior to the idea, which is not another concept and not its unfulfilled meaning. We are supposed to be made for higher but hidden things, its identification, and love, from which we are to be obedient in forming good ideas that hold meaning. The ideas are supposed to be made so they look as much like this our superior as we are. We command ideas to fall in line with us, but since man is himself an idea awaiting the fulfillment of meaning “us” is not an “us” alone and unfulfilled in a world of confusion and death.
If we did not believe that ideas were not essentially our equals or betters, they, not meaning, would be human consciousness’s only real dictators to whatever superior spiritual content of meaning humans should choose to make for them to hold, and this is our theolidcal condition of our own making. Subject made gods and God made a subject, but with respect to hermeneutics. If ideas were otherwise and we were their subjects, the decision of content would be made for us, not by us, by what they are assumed to be the equal of, which is from where and from whom they came. If not God, then they are cruel masters indeed, as so are we their cruel subjects.
We are the masters of ideas, but depend on them for meaning even when we know we really worship them as gods. It’s an uncomfortable habitation, a confusing state, a state of constant uncertainty, pain, and work. It’s a deathtrap that guarantees that the parts of the person that inhabits it as an equal or even as a superior will not survive. It’s not supposed to be a state that we love, who take up an industry that seeks to make it comfortable and long-lived, ameliorable to us.
You may disagree with the principle of objective, basic morality, or you may be instantly inclined to interpret it in such a way as to think, far from the root problem of the Christian mind, that Christians are the only ones that affirm its truth. I don’t care. It is my task now to “red pill” you as to the true state of the Christian problem with biblical epistemology and hermeneutics, how we still live in a theological container of our own making but which we value more than God, and how it is that we can call ourselves Christians while confidently, boldly and without conscience read the Bible and essentially declare it it a cookbook for various curry recipes by which practice has made us spiritual master chefs in a transcendent Indian (or French, or British, or Thai, et al.) cuisine, with our salvation coming by eating its exclusive consumption. No, this is not hyperbole, as absurd as the analogy might appear. The extent to which we misunderstand Scripture and call it understanding is the precise distance this exact belief is from the true biblical message of evil in the world that afflicts the good, the spiritual consequences of that misunderstanding being deadly and final.
I have a problem. I’m a Christian living in a world that is anything but. The irony seems to be that it is also not a world without brilliant minds, millennia of work, great ideas and compelling narratives of amazing heroes of body and mind. It’s not a world without choices. It’s not a world without reasonable choices. On the contrary. But it is still deeply, violently, irredeemably antichristian, especially the Christian version, a world where, as the King James so eloquently renders, “judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth, and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment.”
Please see these articles:
Head and Heart: John 14:1-12: Having Jesus In Your Heart But Not In Your Head
What is the Word of God?: A Prophetic Think Tank
