Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II

This is an article in a series. Please see below the first part on church history,

Church History: What Went Wrong? part 1
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part III: Allegory
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part IV: Allegory
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus: part V: Male and Female
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus, part VI: Politics and Religion

Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery?

Just by that heading alone, I have alienated just about the whole of my audience. Everyone, whether they identify as liberal or conservative or not, operates on the assumptions of one side or another. Everyone has at least tagged these concepts as having either a regressive or subversive tinge, and it’s rare when you find someone who rejects both and also does not operate under them. But that is where I want to go.

The series takes the concept of what is and is not a revealed religion as the basis of where we are and where we have been. Here we continue to try and describe what is revealed, starting with what is not revealed.

Ever try to nail down what style of thinking characterizes our age? The question certainly does fuel the academic industries of History, Philosophy (Hermeneutics a  big part), religion and politics. Of course, you may not admit to there being a different one for each age, but to me, I think there is one kind common to all: one that sucks.

I think its a kind of thought that has a fetish for constant reclassification, a dependence on changing fashions,  a need for understanding the world through some man-made, artificial device or method rather than something old and thought as having worn out its welcome. And, yes, part of our expectation of the best and most beneficial kind of thought one that this world gets tired of.  Whatever it is it must be replaced.

One of these insists upon constancy, tradition, and the familiar, but dead set that what they are constant, traditional and familiar with its not going to be something that is too close perfect or else the rest of the world would not like it. The rest of the world, the other half, wants change and freedom from anything and everything, but what can never be perfect as they prophesy because it would come out of that which is not.

But, thinking about it again, maybe its not even a style of thinking at all, but the whole thing is better described as something like what the Bible speaks of as “sin,” which is the organic, indelible, and careless thought process of mankind, to which he is fiercely loyal, that makes it always a certainty that everything he does and thinks in an effort of self-improvement or enlightenment will be futile. If so, that kind of thought that sucks is liberalism and conservatism.

Those are pretty loaded words that carry a lot of historical baggage. But let’s go for now with the assumption of a marriage of two perfectly compatible styles of evil, and that these are the ones and test the hypothesis according to the original Christian view.

If you have been reading this website for any length of time, you can pretty much expect that my take on liberalism and conservatism to be something rather unexpected. As usual, I don’t accept uncritically the culture’s reflexive definitions as axiomatic of these paradigms any more than the Church’s one of “faith,” “righteousness,” “sin” and  even “Jesus.” In fact, I am biased uncritically against their kind of bias for left/right thinking, their bias which I take as the human condition of the unconscious pre-understanding that solving of our problems is only done positively through the use of a human left/right paradigm, except in an effort to know what dysfunction really is and how to run from it. Stay tuned, as I think you will find this article one of the most instructive and useful you will find in sorting out the difference between how the world thinks and how Jesus does, and therefore how our theology continues without remedy to get just about everything wrong.

The Beginning

What is really going on in Genesis 2 and Genesis 3? I think we have to admit that it’s pretty weird. A person being created out of the side of someone else, a talking serpent, sin that plunged the world in chaos as the result of eating from certain fruit,  nakedness, fig leaves, and animal skins? But I think it’s important to start with the assumption that, whether Moses knew it or not, if God inspired it He is not giving this for the purpose of a purveying of the kind of human values that hardly need a revealed God for them to be known and become the preoccupation of Man’s religious (or anti-religious) life. So let’s just get wild and crazy for a second and float the possibility that the Creator wanted his highest creation to come to understand from the heart that God created him so that Man would think of Him as more than just the creator. When you think about it, it is this difference between Creator and Person that best exemplifies how the world continues to think of God. When just a Creator, the God of the natural world, seen there without any or too much effort, of age-old religious platitudes and bromides, of neat little nuggets of wisdom or truth claims, of doctrine but not necessarily of evidence. Certainly not someone that would refuse to let his downgraders in on intimate, proprietary secrets about him that they would be interested only in downgrading as well, but instead forever make them available for those which are to be his fellow Persons.

Everyone wants the truth but only a relative few want it like it really is. It’s so boring when it comes pre-packaged, fixed and unchangeable, and something you cant play with, and especially something foreign to the world and reverse engineer. So how could God be fairer and more living than giving them only “truth,” the idea, a human construct, since Truth the reality is verboten? Well, how he could be fairer is if he gave them Truth, the reality, but turned the tables on man. Since man covers things up by his selfishness, God gives Truth and covers it by Love, a covering only to be lifted by those that really want to do the lifting.

Its called parabolic speech, my friends. God conceals and reveals in the same speech, taken by the human spiritual faculty on the one hand as an astounding revelation, showing us things that we could not have possibly known otherwise, and in another person about the life-giving revelation of the Sunday School story, the literary masterpiece, the proverb, the homey aphorism, the creedal list and the that pure, living water the “doctrine.”

God, on that last hand,  gives the world the means to think they are like him, that they can by degraded and impotent means come up to where he is. What happens is that, if these religious people don’t want to believe in what God has given the world, they will only be used to serve those who do.

The religion of the academy and the pulpit immensely benefits and widely moves a certain people and a certain revelation that they claim to propagate and revere but don’t. The result of this is the ongoing but temporary preservation of civilization and the basic spiritual instinct that assures that it will available for the others, to start on a path to eternal life those who are compelled to think of God as a little more intelligent and guarded, a little more revelational, than Pope Paul, Billy Graham, Madame Blavatsky, John Smith, Thomas Aquinas, Nostradamus, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and all of the other heroes. That God has revealed and hidden, both a blessing, but hidden only to those that are not all that interested in a true revealing, and would not be too impressed with it if it was. Thus, the conclusion is that those that don’t want the truth but claim to, God will disclaim them, never tell them, give that Truth to others and put them unconsciously into their service of Truth.

What I am saying is that parabolic speech is also prophetic speech, don’t mistake this being stuck in this opaque left/right method of discernment to apply this symbolic method only to what we want to classify as parables. Old Testament prophetic speech is any portion of scripture which speaks of the future, which was considered a mystery and something that must be cracked, accomplished only by its literal fulfillment (Isa 45:2-3, Pr 1:6, Psa 78:2, Mat 13:35, Eph 6:19) by a Divine hand. This includes all those innocuous and pithy Proverbs we think are only about being hardworking, honest, frugal with money, and faithful to our wives and husbands. Literal fulfillment, perfect understanding,  pertains to the consummation of the Messiah, the time of the Messiah, the future of the world under the Messiah, by Messiah. The Parable is a prophecy that has an interpretation locked mystery, resolved only by loving Truth and its Person, and tells of the future progress of the ground that God will cultivate for him.

With this in mind, remember that Genesis acts as a parable and is a prophecy. It’s not only a narrative of something that happened but its a story about something that will happen. It’s about Leftism and Rightism causing a Holy mess, and becoming the preferred way of world operation, against another Holy standard which was rejected.  Genesis describes what happened to a perfect world and predicts a coming world plunged into darkness for a preference for this corrupt paradigm and abandoned to this paradigm, but that original Holy standard is to finally be restored by the Messiah.

Genesis 1

Far from it that Genesis is only history, or, far worse, that it is not even history but an allegory in the service of the priorities of some religion or philosophy.  Even the most innocuous statements of Genesis are parabolic of a spiritual rule and priority. The rule is that whatever the world considers prosaic, plainly stated and of only some religious or apologetic value, but is also a portion of scripture that receives a lot of focus, it is likely parabolic. This is because the whole parabolic conception itself, as a vital truth that is encoded by a transcendent being, is against natural thinking and desire, and therefore whatever is quintessentially and ultimately not natural thinking is Divine parabolic thinking.

Genesis 1:1-2:  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

•  Knowledge is essentially about an ultimate person and the fulfillment of his will in a medium other than himself. But this which is other than himself is not made with the ability to know it and deny it except that which is like God by having the ability to know and deny. This is then the deliberate creation of unclaimed space by God. The extent to which that space is also claimed completely by God is the extent to which those who it is or those who occupy it agree that it is, therefore that “noetic space,” if you will, voluntarily making the decision to give God all of it his rightful space. But because God is fundamentally different and not comprehensible by this creature and is mysterious, and he is himself something that must be resolved. God is a symbol to man’s faith, and therefore man must gain knowledge of God and faith through symbols as well, which is fundamentally language. That language must itself be primarily parabolic, prophetic, to give Man this choice.

That doesn’t sound like I addressed Genesis 1:1-2, but I did. There is a ton to unpack here, but let’s draw out, for now, the most salient thing about the creation story in line with this:

Genesis 1:3-4:  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Genesis 1:6:  And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. v. 7: “and if was so.”

Genesis 1:9:  And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

Genesis 1:10:  And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:11:  And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

Genesis 1:15:  And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

Genesis 1:18:  And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:21:  And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:24:  And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

Genesis 1:25:  And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:27:  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Please first note, regardless of what God created, that in this sequence what stands out is that God willed, God in effect promised, and, then, “it was so” or “it was good.” This is prophecy.

This part of Genesis is first and foremost the telling of the fulfillment of prophecy by God, thus setting of the entire type of biblical knowledge that is foremost and, most importantly, that kind of symbolic knowledge which is the only kind ordained by God through which man must choose Him in order for man to be God’s fulfillment, man being God’s prophecy in flesh that yet awaits his own kind of completion.

This is why God called Man an image (צֶלֶם)¹. This is a symbol. The symbol implies a hidden signification, a mystery, here a meaning that awaits realization through the passage of time and struggle. Any Divine symbol that is designed for resolution through time is by definition prophetic. Created was Man as an image of God. This is Man’s intended symbol, not fulfilled in the Garden of Eden because nothing pertaining to Man can be fulfilled until man voluntarily accepts his fulfillment, God then claiming all space, even that which can deny him. “Our Image” is a prophecy of millennium of rebellion and its eventual triumph.

God also created Man male and female, when he had the choice to make a hermaphroditic species or make reproduction operate in an infinite number of possible ways. He did not say that his creation of Man was “good” in the moral sense or even “it was so” to indicate that is was fulfilled. So, we ask, is this “male” and “female” merely saying that they were biologically male and female, or is this perhaps a description of the spirit of Man and a vision of his future in respect to his working with the knowledge that would go to this completion as an image of God.

To be continued…

Please see these:

What is the Word of God?: Passing by Nehushtan

When I Survey the Wondrous Nace, part 1: Passing by Nehushtan

Romans 1: Apostasy of the Gospel General Revelation

1. Strong’s: “from an unused root meaning to shade; a phantom, i.e. (figuratively) illusion, resemblance; hence, a representative figure, especially an idol:—image, vain shew.” ↩