Prophetic Theory, part IV: The Art of God
The Art of God and Prophetic Theory
This is an article in a series. Please read the previous articles first.
Prophetic Theory, part I: The Re-unification of Jesus with Meaning
Now, to continue, of course, what I am describing is something more akin to art. Just alien art, and that for the purpose of saving people from a coming apocalypse.
Alien art must be God’s representative, his mediatory device, as well as the proof of his existence and nature since it was conceived and originated outside the world in his. This makes any kind of faith in the originator of this art as coming to look the same as that in this his product since its power must overwhelm, push aside, and throw down all insular and competing art, speculations and priorities. Let me try to break this down.
Listen, don’t give me a headache. If you don’t feel this way about messianic prophecy, but instead think its a sham and a lie, it’s not my job to convince you otherwise, based upon this definition. Take it or leave it. But, if you claim to be a Christian, don’t even think about leaving it.
“Alien” just means not from this world, and not from a human. Not spacemen. God.
When I say “art” as applied to the Bible we think of the “Bible as Literature” movement in hermeneutics. It conjures certain presuppositions that go to its nature as an exclusively private human idiom and a private human appropriation of a certain meaning or impression. It works against the Bible as a claim which is either true or false since art is from the essential intention of the artist, in which he may or may not care if it shared by the viewer. For the viewer, the mind of the artist is almost never an influence in his enjoyment of it but instead tends to depend almost on him not knowing it, since this would replace the artist’s intention with that of the many probabilities for kind of viewers.
In liberal theology, this is exactly why the Bible is likened to art, because, like their wanted view for the Bible, it is given to the world for it to do with as it sees fit, having no absolute meaning all its own with which he must deal. But its also made for the viewer and seems here to work with the idea of revealed religion, applied to a revealed document, since art is something that is real and open to inspection, not something that can both originate and be actualized within the human psyche alone. The artist may not care whether the viewer “gets it” or not, but the artist certainly intended for his vision to be seen and experienced by others.
When we inject its necessary aspect of coming from an alien source infinitely above the human into this, it changes both functions: as an external revelation, to it functions as a pointer to a real God-artist of a transcendent realm, and changes the idea of message to being of absolute meaning of the God-artist, since anything that displays God that is attributed to him is by definition that which is intended for a purpose. This God-art is something as extreme (or “ultimate,” which encapsulates God ontologically) in its idiosyncrasy to the very non-human artist as it is in its extreme as an expression of his intentionality. Like art, it is not essential, but this only applies to its application to physical life, since its physical life that is intended to be overwhelmed and transcended. Like art, its meaning is something very personal to the artist, but this only applies to those viewing it who, as with the insularity of the physical world, can only deal with it as interpreted personally. Only to an audience which seeks physical transcendence can it be seen and experienced as the true hybrid of physical and transcendent realms, since the viewer is much like the revelation he is being asked to believe: his present carnal nature is as certain, without the intervention of intelligence outside the world coming into his present one, as his genuine longing for genuine spiritual truth, comprehensibility, and clarity expected to exist in that alien mind, instead of only that of his fellow humans.
How This Would Effect Our View of Fulfillment
There is no literature on this topic, so we are going into a territory that is not traveled, but one I believe is not traveled because what lies at the end is not to our liking. Of course, it leads to an absolute necessity for historical fulfillment, but in the context of a kind of revelation that is taken as one kind or the other where both are the wrong kinds.
Fulfillment is the central issue of prophecy, which goes to the question of it being true as a historical phenomenon. But let’s just experiment and transfer the above about art to an overall view of prophecy: as not merely evidence, or a story or a myth which inspires certain insular and purely human affections. A hybrid alien/human thing that is more like something that is supposed to be as honorable to the intent, feeling and nature of the person who produced it as it is for that certain person who will receive it and be transformed by it for what it really is.
Proof is experiential. This is the basic concept that is expanded into an assumption of our contact with the Transcendent. Proof establishes causes from effects. The extreme forms of fundamentalist scientism of our day take this as a pointing exclusively with a precisely measurable phenomenon, which is thought to be the only means of obtaining a reliable result. The problem is that it does not work, and does not claim to work, for obtaining the causes from effects that cannot be classified according to known types of measurable physical phenomenon. Therefore, the results of the identification of causes have diminishing results pertaining to an overall understanding of the nature of the universe after what is determined to be the most foundational kinds of physical laws and phenomena are identified.
If, for example, our instruments indicate that the size or origin of the universe cannot clearly imply a particular cause which is that of the universe itself (the Big Bang), then all subsequent discoveries, since they use the same means and rules of discovery, are by definition taken as serving that conclusion instead of being a means of a potential breakout. This describes both the state of science and theology today. Science is progressively descending into the service of enhancing our knowledge instead of expanding and challenging it into unexpected areas, and Christianity has also since it has taken the same view of evidence being primarily that kind which is justified by measuring and confirming.
Theology is increasingly unable to provide new insights since it has long ago decided that a particular opaque view is its greatest insight. Prophecy has a vital element of historical measurability to causes, but that is not, as in art, its only epistemic one. Its other is that of an ultimate scriptural authority out of which comes the entire theology of the religion, much as a collection of artworks, however, limited, as a description of the essential creative and ideological spirit of the individual who produced it. Christianity has accepted the first, but never the last insofar as conceiving of the prophetic as the distinctive, demonstratively revelational part carrying the whole of the revelation. This latter assumption, as applied to a view of the prophetic phenomena, is not entirely a result of the former, but is the conscious or unconscious requirement of a certain kind of individual and collective person.
Virtue ethics in deontology comes to mind. But being “good to the core” as in contrast to obedience to a Devine command hardly clarifies anything with precision. What man follows, the command, is identifiable precisely, but when ethics is discussed without the command in first place we only seem able to identify precisely what man values, to what he is observant, and why, by way of some expression like “good to the core.”1
So, what is he supposed to value? If its moral in the way we would expect such a thing to be which is remarkable by its disclose of God’s mind, his intent, nature, and his existence, then its morally attractive to someone who needs and seeks them both: of one who needs proof but also certain insights of the nature of the unknown.
When these two are combined in one book and in one kind of historical person(s) they initially moderate each other, but less as time goes on. The revelation and the person are both works in progress…a progressive revelation. On the part of God, this book is prepared for those who are able to receive it in the period of spiritual maturity in which it is given. For those persons to whom it is given, it reaches the purpose in which it was intended by God according to the place in history that it has accomplished its function of replacing carnally based paradigms of spirituality. This means that the prophetic in earlier periods will be expected to have the same vision of the future but given in different periods in such as way as to reflect the gradual change from a possible sympathetic, human self-focus (Psa 22) to that which can only be applied to an eschatological King Messiah alone (Jer 23:5, Isa 53, Zec 3:8). It, therefore, provides a progressive adherence to historical fulfillment in the future chronological sense from one of the fulfillment of its service for the religious ethos of the time, while retaining its claim of giving a true vision of the future. It should then be expected to move less from a symbolism that could be taken as having a purely carnal assignation (Gen 3;15) to one of a more direct statement that receives ambiguity only from its application to one religious application or another in respect to the time, place and persons in the redemptive history (Isa 7-9). Accordingly, as respect to ambiguity or the accuracy of historical fulfillment, the certainty of fulfillment remains, but, again, decreasing in its ability to apply only to the time in which it is given.
Of no less importance, but easier to see the gravity of, is the question of who is expected to be fulfilled in this kind of Divine expression. Not only about how fulfillment is expected, but we have missed what fulfillment itself means. We think that the Word of God that which is claimed fulfilled so that we can, in turn, claim that faith is extended to something or someone else, that what is fulfilled is not to be taken the same as who fulfills. We can then say that arguments for faith are fundamentally something different and to be segregated from who one has faith in. But fulfillment and faith are about being in the prophetic as well its person. When we realize this we realize how wrong about it all that we have been, to the most catastrophic of consequences.
Since the what and who are inextricably connected, fulfillment is to both prove a personal object and prove and qualify the only epistemic challenge through which man must deal and make a decision to be accepted by that object. Our practice of faith starts and primarily involves the practice of knowledge and sincere confession about the extent of that personal object’s connection to this his revelation as much as it is about the identification of that object.
Is the prophetic revelation perfect, unambiguous disclosure? Does it render absolutely results with mathematical precision? No, and if it did it would not be proper to compare it to a person who must deal with man’s dissimulation and evil in expecting such perfection, a standard that he refuses to apply to everything else he believes in which is of a relatively trivial nature. The prophetic revelation has amazing precision, but it is not uniform across all prophetic speech. God’s question to man, like that of “who do they say I am,” is if what you don’t know is going to be allowed to overcome and dictate what you do know, including what kind of knowledge is of most important about the question of God.
Paraphrase of John 10: Transposing the Person with His Word
Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, pt 4:
