Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, part 1
The Hermeneutical Death Spiral
I have a problem: I’m a Christian. As a Christian, I am constantly being compelled to silence by those who are religiously attached to a world and a kind of thought that is violently opposed to Christ.
Now, that does not seem to be a very good problem statement for an article with the stated intention of bringing to light unaddressed ones. Nearly every Christian worldview apologetic you will read will speak about, for example, the various solutions to the increasing passivity of believers against and increasing certainty of the street that the Christ is losing to science. Although on the surface my complaint seems the same, mostly about the Church having to function righteously despite an ever-increasing onslaught of anti-biblical theologies, it’s not. Here, it’s not in the same way as Christ intended it to be, silenced in the static of meaning that is the world’s language that can never speak of it. Lost in its meaning of “theology.” Lost in its understanding of “world.” Lost in its avatar of “Christ” which is now everyone who is well-intentioned, loves cats and wants to save the rainforests. Anyone acclimated to the world’s default modes of communication will take for granted as true the accepted ultimate definitions of its keywords.
Those ultimate definitions, however, if they are framed within the cultural ethos, are no so ultimate. If one can accept that how something hides most completely is in plain sight, in hermeneutics the rules of meaning are defined essentially as lying within a statement, a philosophy, an opinion, an intuition. Hidden and waiting to be fleshed out. Not defined by the very perspicuous attractions of the human heart which make mundane things exalted and exalted things mundane.
There is my introduction to hermeneutics. It’s everything. Its the battle for meaning, yes, but as a Christian, it should be the about the war fought against the powers of obscurity, culture, intellectualism, human organizations, the love for strife, puzzles, and industry. Hermeneutics in Christianity is supposed to be the establishment of what has been given to us, not made by us, concerning meaning. But we have become absorbed into the flotsam and jetsom of LifeWay Christian Store consciousness. Have you ever heard the phrase “we’re screwed?” This is about how “screwed” we are, because of our fallen hermeneutical method.
My opening problem statement is about Christianity and its hermeneutics, which is the story about its establishment and fall, and a fall in which we now live and call Christian and don’t know it because it has no meaning, no hermeneutics. It’s about what is now our fierce fight not against poor spiritual vision in which we must constantly strive to improve, but a striving for a world with a permanent dark glass in which we are to see that beatific vision, keeping it locked in only imagination and possibility. It’s not about the unbelievers, this hermeneutics in which Christianity has agreed, but those “religiously attached to a world and a kind of thought that is violently opposed to Christ” whose method of meaning deludes them into thinking they are his champions.
My message is that nothing you can believe about anything and disagree or agree with another about has anything to do with whether who is true or false, or whether we are true or false in our hearts, by what is being said, but true or false by whether what is being said is informed or misinformed by one unstated fact and phenomena that the NT writers took for granted and which alone frames the spiritual context of all meaning. Say something wrong and it can be changed and made right. But get the main thing wrong and nothing but a special and miraculous act of God can be done about it. How ironic and unexpected, but strangely appropriate, that in our hundreds of years in writing libraries of books on Christain hermeneutics, sure that the problems and solutions to the correct reading of the sacred texts have to do with bad procedures, attitudes, and presuppositions, all along the problem and solution was not there. It was in the meaning first of the fundamental, biblical ground to the meaning of “Christian hermeneutics” which we have rejected, and which subsequently tainted, fatally, every attempt to get at transcendent meaning.
Meaning, and real Christian hermeneutics, has been hiding in plain sight. We have missed it because obscurity is our true love, not Christ, and because of that fact, not in spite of it.
The Divine Trickster
The Greek god Hermes represented many things. The trickster. The master of boundaries. Of trade and sports. But if you were to settle on one it would be something like “divine trickster” in his role as messenger to Man from the God’s. The Greek word hermēneuō means interpretation or translate. Hermeneutics is usually spoken of as around biblical texts and retains this original meaning in an assumption that there is an upper, immediately comprehensible layer to the text and a deeper one which requires an application of hermeneutical rules to reveal and understand. This is because it was written in another time, language and culture by a certain individual. But no less because of the belief that if God were the author and meant the Bible for all times, he both bridged the cross-historical problem and then used his sacred symbolism as the bases on which to reunite all those who search for the truth to agree on it once it is found in that symbolism. We will see that in time the meaning of “Hermes the divine trickster” came to be understood much like Christian hermeneutics: far more locked into a past, little understood, antiquated and spiritually ignorant culture than an example of how God’s hermeneutics, not man’s, is the first order of business.
Hermes brought the word of the gods to man, but this part implies something that we have entirely lost in the highest notion of what it means to interpret and derive meaning from another if both parties are ontologically, radically different. In the case of both man and God, the reason that rules of interpretation are codified is that one understands himself much easier than we may understand another. Hermeneutics stresses listening to another, and whether man or God, this other is a foreign source for which we are required to exercise some care, reflection, and effort to fully understand if we care, and not operate under naive assumptions about him. The Greeks could stop here in their efforts to understand the gods because the gods were so much like them. Not in Christianity and Judaism. Here, hermeneutics is not in the service of men to other men or supermen, or even man with respect to “God’s word,” since that phrase is constructed in a way that makes it just as fraught with divine but ultimately false conceptual gods. Hermeneutics is supposed to be about finding first what God ultimately values and his chosen method of communication, God’s hermeneutics, which he expects man to find, accept and learn through some level of effort in a display of a love of Truth.
I want to speak of Hermeneutics in a way that has been implied but never taken seriously and worked: Hermeneutics in our first responsibility of grasping what God’s rules of meaning might be for us, by which we are obliged to know, before we start talking about what are our found rules of meaning for understanding God. It’s a lot like a talk on sacred symbolism: are symbols only man created objects, creative, finite, perhaps “unreal,” changeable and cursory, or are they not fundamentally something that God creates, like the physical universe itself, for us to understand him? Doesn’t hermeneutics have to be something God created and revealed, something found and applied before it is something that we make and apply? And doesn’t it have to be a fact before it is taken seriously and forms the basis of a theory, a method?
If we were still in the time of Homer, our divines of present and past could be excused to remain like the Oracle at Delphi, who, by enveloping themselves in the sacred smoke of the bottomless pit before them, would fall into an ecstatic trance and begin babbling incomprehensible messages from Zeus to be translated by an accompanying priest. Something perhaps about the outcome of a war, whether good fortune would be the result of a business trip or whether a certain woman would be a good wife. Our hermeneutics could be justifiably locked into the same pattern, out of which we gain nothing but confidence that our carnal affairs would in the future be in order, but we are not supposed to be so helpless today. We are supposed to have a real, testable message from a real objective God, not one out of the very rich imagination of man. The need for the babblers is supposed to be over, replaced by a divine hermeneutic in the minds of honest men from which to resolve all meaning that matters, a meaning which is supposed to be much more compelling to the mind and heart than denounced and discarded.
The black hole of Delphi is covered and graded, and a barbecue pit and cabana set up over it. The smoke is, if it appears at all, would only be an artistic expression of praise and prayer in what is a quiet place of contemplation. That is, to us that are Christian who know and believe that a real revelation, not a fantasy, has been given, which makes symbols cursory carriers of meaning and not meaning itself. To the others in the church, the struggle, the naivete, the Mysterium, the hermeneutic of darkness can never be allowed closure when the Oracle is still in full operation and continuously expanded into a spiritual theme park, where each worship ride even ideas are represented, alongside one for rocks, feelings, reason, and Zeus.
The purpose of this article is to establish what is fundamentally wrong with Christian theology, what is wrong with ourselves, what we have thrown away that God thought essential, and by such action why we have become sure that a spiritual empowerment of ourselves has taken place while it is really more like drinking a slow poison. Hermeneutics is at its heart, and especially the biblical idea of “fulfillment.” This is our theodical starting point. Everything else is a mere side interest.
Words Mean Things. God’s Word Means Things Higher.
What I mean by “anti-biblical theologies” and “thought violently opposed to Christ” is by no means henceforth revealed in my initial problem statement. It requires some hermeneutics because it’s designed to imply more and surprise you when my intended meaning is revealed. But what is supposed to be more surprising is not necessarily my meaning, but the way that we carry around an almost unbreakable assumption about having to favor how the world expects us to think of the highest possible value instead of favoring what is before us that is quite obviously of an infinitely higher value. Of course, I am not speaking of communication in mundane affairs, but language meant to communicate what is expected to be the great questions of existence. Not “what is the best interpretation for greasing of the spiritual skids of a cultural ethos.” Nearly all of that aims not for a view of the spiritual except through the cultural lens first. But for a religion that is supposed to be transmitting a message from an alien world and Person, taking “Jesus is Lord” as “Jesus is master, sovereign, the decider of men’s souls,” or any statement that that could come exclusively from culture, is a religion promising heaven but giving only what the culture could produce on its own.
“What?! You’re saying that Jesus is not Master and Judge?!” Oh my no. I’m saying quite the opposite, that his mastery and means of judgment go far beyond the natural and disposable implications of our understanding of “master” and “judge.” Its hermeneutics, you know. It’s all about hermeneutics.
You may think I’m shooting blanks so far, but what I have just done is shown the root of the problem of evil. Simply, it’s hidden in a divine parable, exposable only by divine hermeneutics, because we deliberately hide it from ourselves, addicted to anything except that which exposes us.
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