Prophetic Theory, part I: Subject and Object: A Prophetic Think Tank

Prophetic Theory and Jesus

Reading as I do on the Internet the many detractors of the idea of fulfilled biblical prophecy, as well as its defenders, it has occurred to me that I have not put out there a unified theory of the prophetic phenomenon as it applies to soteriology and epistemology. I have always argued that knowledge grounded in messianic prophecy and its fulfillment in Jesus is the basis for the essential kind of faith for which Jesus argued, and its antithesis his only grounds for our condemnation. My purpose has been not to argue for the accuracy of particular fulfillments, even when I know that upon their accuracy the whole of the Christian faith rests. I do this because the work that has already been done and is so readily available is so magnificent and copious that it would be just reinventing the wheel to write my own.

The premise of the preeminent importance of prophecy for demonstrating the proof of the faith is generally not in dispute by orthodox scholarship. What I do instead is try to make us all honest about its indispensable place in faith. This is the one idea that is the most eminently biblical but also something we are rarely agreeable about, for reasons that are highly suspicious.

Therefore, I argue for the re-validation in the orthodox scholarship of what I see as a missing faith requirement, which has in it become a stumbling block in the same way Jesus was when he walked the earth, rejected in favor of naïve, essentially anti-revelational religious ideas.

Therefore, what could be more needful than an article that lays out why being primarily motivated in one’s faith in Jesus through messianic prophecy is the only real motivation, why God chose this method of salvation, and what is the subject-to-object view of messianic prophecy by the reader as a scriptural phenomenon that we are to take that is so different from one that is SOP on both sides of the debate now. It also may be that there is in operation a casual view of Messianic Prophecy itself that is part of the stumbling block that is in need of removal.

Briefly put, what is it about a mind that is both convinced and driven in his faith in Christ through messianic prophecy, and why is this resisted as standard and orthodox?

I won’t write a doctoral dissertation. This is more like a statement. A manifesto, of sorts. Just laying out my perspective on why this thing called the Oracles is not another thing, not the main thing, but everything.

I think that what distinguishes the kind of faith that is prophetically based from what I would call its antagonist, what I call a carnal approach to these things, everything else, is that messianic prophecy is simultaneously attractive to an honest, off-the-shelf rational affection, as well as one which is impressed with a direct conclusion of a transcendent claim. That is, it appeals to reason and intuition. Everyone justifies confidence differently, and it’s few people who have taken up the subject to form an opinion that would admit to being without any. What makes the prophetic faith different is that this faith is the same as that oracular, informational force which attracts, engages and inspires it, and it did not come from here. That is a faith that is the same and not separable from its idea.

That is, prophecy is so vital, or is should to be so vital, to the belief in Christ that this reason, this motivation for faith in Christ is nearly the same as saying you have faith in the object of that reason, which is Christ himself. It’s not another thing, it’s treated as the same thing, and they are both outside the believer. But what drives both atheistic and religious factual motivations is almost by definition personal, which then engages or employs certain rational and factual reasons to support it that are not in and of themselves of transcendent origin.

You may object to this, but the truth is that there is nothing that can be found to a naturalistic or theistic worldview that would serve as a fatal stroke to it which is outside of the ultimate nature of that view. This is because, even if we say our view is not held without being supported by some evidence, the fact is that it is the view of evidence that always comes and goes, not these worldviews. Evidence becomes different, the concept becomes redefined, and a thousand and one justifications for how it’s sliced, diced and presented and routinely fought over.

In our natural state, there is a certain bias in us that instigates its own survival strategies. The means of survival, or the preservation of our core and most cherished presuppositions about life, is internal and self-focused. The facts and justifications are then something else that is collected and brought to its service, which can be anything. Everyone claims that they are motivated only by the presence or absence of evidence. What I mean is that after this oracular phenomenon captures the mind and puts it in the corner of the author of those facts, you can never destroy an oracular kind of faith unless the oracles are taken out. This evidential base can only be the touted claim of any other kind of faith, evidence in a support role to something we want, an addendum, living only for itself.

Now I make this claim, but I need to support it. I say that the oracular faith is as little understood within atheism as it is in religion. So I will describe this kind of faith against the others as one who is firmly within it.

With this in mind, prophecy is not treated only as history, or evidence, as prediction, as a revelational method, a personal gift, as doctrine or as a kind of experience, as the claim of Jesus and the faith of the disciples, as an epistemology and deontology, but approached as all at the same time, in what is taken more as an articulated informational being. Any one member is dependent upon the others. Of course, it is important that any one member is to be allowed a member-based only upon the rules of its own category instead of another, but also by its influence on and effect of being influenced by the categories of the other members.

I will limit the discussion to these distinctions:

Prophetic Theory: Crypticism
Prophetic Theory: Transposition of Meaning/Object
Prophetic Theory: Prophecy as Faith Object and Person
Prophetic Theory: As Fact
Prophetic Theory: As Divine Art

This is just scratching the surface. To get more detail, just keep reading on the website. The message is that in this articulation of which I speak in this prophetic kind of belief it is not possible without who is believed is treated much the same as why he is believed. This is not some choice, some chosen theology, but because of the eternality and indispensability of the reason for faith, which remains the only informational revelation of that person.

The Messianic Oracles are not just something that is put in service for the justification of faith, it is the informational object of faith itself by its own power, by its own witness.

Prophetic Theory: Cypticism

We think of persons as only being capable of taking this role of faith object, but this is not possible when the knowledge of that person is the only thing left behind by him after leaving our presence. In that case, it is an “informational entity” that assumes his person to consciousness. That is, if we are to entertain an opinion about, say, the morality of that missing person, we can only use our memories of him, testimonies of him, facts about him that pertain to his morality that he displayed while present. We don’t just rely upon our own memories of him, but those of others and this is the only way when we are asked to believe something about him that we did not see ourselves. This information is oral or written, but most reliably written, historical. If the claim of this person is of a supernatural entity, then the information that stands in his place must be supernatural to support the claim. This means that the information is about the supernatural person and is supernatural itself, or, information that is not just some recollection of what he did but that which contains the proof that it originated from a source wholly outside human agency.

The more it attests to this, the more it must be taken as having greater importance than a mere moral claim and evidence for that claim about the man, because it remains in context with the extraordinary nature of the claim. This does not mean that it must represent better evidence, or, as skeptics demand, “extraordinary evidence” of an ironclad attestation, but only that the evidence must be demonstrable, extraordinary, remarkable, unexpected, unnatural, of utmost gravity and importance.

If it is an extraordinary claim and testifies that it indeed might have come from the outside personal agency it is almost by definition a kind of evidence that must have a cryptic aspect to those that encounter it; a challenge to orient our thinking so that it can be understood as outside the normal consciousnesses that view it. Since man is naturally biased against unusual and uncommon things in his environment, he will reflexively tend to, in a myriad of ways, resist or accept it as being remarkable intrinsically. To the others, this extraordinary thing that is examined, especially if it is a supernatural claim presented through a body of evidence, is then taken more like a parable, a code, something that presents at least an initial image of that missing person that requires some pause to examine. It does not and cannot state its moral claim directly, because the nature of the claim itself is not of direct appropriation to belief. Belief, not disbelief, is at a disadvantage, as belief tries to constantly recover its familiar, earth-grown grounds. This causes the impression of something that is ambiguous and having the great potentiality for clarity at the same time.

But would not this cryptic aspect also be the intention of the missing supernatural person as it is integral to the final apprehension of that Person? How could it be otherwise, if the supernatural is itself something really weird and something with which we have to work through with great honesty, patience, and care? In other words, would not an extraordinary moral exercise be as indispensable to its penetration on the part of the viewer as it is the intention of the supernatural Person entering the world? The whole idea of the transcendent entering space/time to the consideration of man is necessarily implying certain intention by its originator to penetrate mans own insularity, the entering into mans realm only carrying the intention of posing a question to man as to this originators existence and nature before there is an answer: a moral test, if you will. The extent that this supernatural act is taken for what it is will be the extent to which man connects to the mind of that Actor.

The cryptic aspect means that this information would be expected to produce a momentary disengagement of bias, or unmediated belief, before a decision is made as to its origin, rather than being a kind of information that is immediately or easily assimilated into a preexisting view or condition, the easiest and quickest to assimilate being the same kind of information that we use to support our natural biases or beliefs. When taken this way, prophecy is not simply a supernatural claim that either rises or falls on “evidence” when evidence is plastic and has rules subject to purely the carnal inclinations.

Some time ago I caught an article on the atheist website infidels.org that tried to skewer the prophecies of Daniel, called “The Failure of Daniel’s Prophecies.¹Now, it had been a long time since I had been exposed to these things, having OD’d on them before, reading such day and night along with the Christian objections when I first came to believe in Christ. I had forgotten how powerful Messianic Prophecy was in convincing me of the rightness of my choice, which, when I think about it, has a similar power to the arguments in affirmation of Daniel’s prophecies.

I remember initially in my evaluation expecting convincing put-downs, such as in the link above, and pretty conclusive evidence that all this prophecy stuff was just fluff and wishful thinking. But, to my surprise, I got a whole bunch of articles that had a lot of passion but, ironically, less disciplined and thoughtful arguments than the Christians.

The author of the above, and virtually all of them, going all the way back to Origen’s citations of Celsus, had this habit of grabbing any strategy to deny the fulfillment of the prophecies that he could, often arrogating to himself assumptions about the document against historiography which gives the benefit of the doubt to the document. I think its also a lot about the tone of them as well, which is more like a scream of ‘no, no, no, no no!’ about the whole supernatural premise than it is a dispassionate, informed, careful and reasoned scholarly analysis of someone that takes a certain position while first accepting the possibility of its antithesis.

In such an argument against, to paraphrase them, for example, in the prophecy of the 70 weeks, “it’s not clear that the weeks are years. It’s not clear what decree to rebuild and restore Jerusalem the writer was talking about. The apologists are rounding years, and the terminus date does not line up perfectly with 27 or 30 AD as is claimed. In Daniel 9:26 uses the Hebrew shaw-khath’, which cannot only mean destroy but “pollute” and “spoil.” The divisions of years are possibly not as the Christians see them. Messiah was Onias III, placing the text in the time of the Maccabees.”

It brought me back to a time when I thought my own agnosticism was guileless and motivated only by my idiosyncratic definition of evidence or the lack thereof. Every argument was an attempt to subject the document to not only the need for the mathematical exactitude of the physical sciences but that even to entertain a theory of supernatural agency it was necessary that the evidence is appropriated as absurd without any effort.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room of Daniel is that from the decree stipulated in Ezra to rebuild in 457, with the 483 years added of 360 days each, comes to 27 AD. The prophecy states that a Messiah will be killed at that time, and after this, the sanctuary will be destroyed “Pollute,” “spoil,” does not matter, the effect is the same. But this word is used overwhelmingly in the OT as “destroy,” as a casual perusal will discover. “Destroy,” txv, applies to the city, txv, and the sanctuary, vdq. This does not work historically for the idea of both being defiled. The Septuagint has φθερεῖ, which has the same meaning. In 1 Co 3:17, Paul uses this word twice, one for the temple and one for the person who defiles it. God does not defile a person, but he will destroy him for his defilement of the Temple. The choice “destroy” covers defilement, but “defilement” does not necessarily cover “destroy.” Therefore the NAS translation for “destroy” in both instances, and before a consummation takes place. You cant make it fit into any other time period, and the evidence of the age of the Book of Daniel and its place in the OT canon predates the time of the Maccabees, its date moving ever and ever forward being the perennial liberal version of wishful thinking. You can introduce doubt if you wish by continually moving the goalposts, but it does not remove the challenge posed by this prophecy.

The challenge is to draw together all the linguistic, logical, cultural, historical and logical evidence and make a choice not to a certain conclusion (atheism requires a feeling of certainty, much like the naïve religionist) but to a reasonable conclusion given what is before us. If it were otherwise then it would be a coerced kind of choice and a coerced kind of belief. This kind of thing can only be as much about overcoming the test of the text as it is overcoming who we are and what we want naturally, whether one who reflexively resists or naturally accepts the possibility of supernatural evidence. It’s really the same with any kind of belief in anything that takes some work, but when we get to supernatural claims we are as inclined to hate them as much as love them before they are examined, and both of these instincts are antithetical to the claim.

Prophecy rises or falls upon evidence to the extent that it must be true, but since it is about the foretelling of the supernatural morality of another, it ultimately depends upon the subjective morality of the examiner to initially be willing to accept it as possibly something much more than a claim and an evidence as we naturally or routinely understand them. Ultimately, that it is a little like a cipher in a kind of alien language, if you will, as it must be, of the Person who produced it, and the moral challenge to penetrate it by the viewer is only intelligible when it is put as the same as that kind of Person that produced it.

Now, when I say the information and the Person are the same, I mean to believe. This principle is something routinely violated by the unbelievers as well as the believers, and it is an attempt to force God or his non-existence into surety on our own terms, instead of working through the challenge his revelation poses for us as a moral one and transcendent one.

Prophetic Theory: Transposition of Object/Meaning

It’s a principle that has been lost.

I have touched upon it already, but it needs a short statement. When the object and subject of faith are taken by the individual as separate things in a process to derive ultimate meaning from a biblical symbol, we always default to object, giving it authority over the subject. Object here is not the thing under the eye of the human subject. “Object” is what is to be assigned meaning which is knowledge and subject is why which is knowledge, or that perspective, information, or belief that comes to it in order to confer meaning upon it. The Subject is the informational, constructed products of humans through which that separate informational object will be filtered.

Usually, in philosophy and theology, the subject is man and object is whatever man judges or views. We do this because we have a bias for things, not abstracts. When we are discussing something in the Bible that requires a meaning assigned, Object is usually a thing, a person, such as Christ. The subject is the person who views him. But the Bible puts the person as equal to his Word or his moral history.

When subject and object are transferred to one perspective against a proposition, for example, this relationship is transferred in both instances to the bare information or phenomenon, personal or otherwise, that we consider or through which we consider by our constructed perspectives. As I said, we have a bias for well-formed objects, and that means conclusions, belief statements, propositions, ideas. Natural things. The information object we view through them is composed of language, sentences, words, and their topographical meanings and definitions, which are both those which are culturally, doctrinally influenced and those which we are not so biased. That is, the object is our first impression of what we read. The subject before it is a sensibility, belief, context, history, cultural habits, theology, propositions, ideas, the overall topic being discussed. The Ultimate meaning of the informational object is the informational subject’s quarry, that requires some effort.

When we force Objects into only an object of information about things or persons, we prefer Object over Subject. When we force Objects into the information of human construction, we prefer objects of an informational subject. We first think that theology is about man before God, both conceptual objects, or about one view over another. What happens when the Object is a supernatural informational Object before the natural conceptual constructs of a natural Man? Then we are in a whole other ballpark. Where before one object only requires the subject as another object, which can be natural, now the informational object we introduce can only force a supernatural, not natural, subject in man in order to the object to be accepted as such.

We like to subject all or any of the Subject to our bias for what is basically a naturalism applied to linguistic forms: that, in respect of, for example, ideas, that what we see is what it is. It means nothing, or it means what it says, that there is no spiritual application, or it means something old and forgotten and not applicable to our age, or it means a popular theological formula. Not to say that these cannot be correct, but if we are looking at an Object that is presumably a transcendent artifact our first duty is to suspend all subjective constructions. We correctly intend to fuse informational subject and object or keep them interchangeable, or metonymies, linguistically (but not ontologically). This significantly narrows our choices for meaning that we come up with for the Object and tends to defeat bias because whatever subjective meaning for the Object we come up with now must be informationally consistent with that supernatural Object alone. If its a transcendent Object, and its information, then we have to change our natural way of looking at things or we won’t see it or won’t be able to accept it.

In our missing person analogy, when the man is absent, especially when he has died, what lives inside us about him is not supposed to be a dream, a fantasy, or some carefully massaged image of him. It’s consistent or aims to be consistent, with who he was and what he did. This applies to almost anything: what we think of something must correspond to reality. If it’s a supernatural person, then it corresponds to a supernatural reality. But the inclination of separating object and subject as we do means that we free ourselves from keeping them the same thing and encourages our baser instincts to take over the process of discovery between them.

Jesus, if made only supernatural Object Person, is then free to those baser instincts to be uncritically assigned an informational subject of mad Rabbi, zealot, political reformer, miracle worker, good-deed worker, the nicest man who ever lived, someone that came to give doctrinal bullet points and create a new religion, a man who never existed, or anything that is not itself supernatural. Remember, these are meanings, but there is nothing about them as meanings that require a positive supernatural origin for them without another argument. All religions have doctrine, all religions have a deity or wise person that preached morality. Doctrine and morality are common things, things that can be inspired by transcendence but are more likely to only emerge from the earth and from the mind of man. If you make the supernatural object that of an informational entity, then if you want it you don’t have this choice to use these things, but you are obliged to only use supernatural personal, subjective constructions.

If this supernatural objective person has only a supernatural attesting subject, the reason we believe in that Object is forced to obey a certain subject as primary, instead of being idiosyncratic. When the subject of Jesus is the words of the prophets, the fulfillment of the Word of God, the Object, this is the alignment of a supernatural object with the supernatural subject. The Subject is a consequence of the influence of the supernatural Object alone, making a very non-idiosyncratic one. Prophecy, of course, is present in almost every religion, but not the Hebrew prophets, and these religions never try to found the truth of their religion on prophets and the accuracy of their prophecies through history. Messianic prophecy is usually taken as the only information that is brought to the service of our religious opinions, which do not independently claim a supernatural origin, but messianic prophecy is both a theological symbol of supernatural information and the supernatural demonstration of its truth.

The subject is now self-attesting as supernatural, and whether you want to believe it is not the point. It is still the correct subject of the New Testament and the preaching of Jesus, his “informational entity” that is the only thing he left behind him that demonstrates his claims as “from above” (John 8:23). The two now become naturally transpose, such that faith in Jesus without his subject is not only illegal, but is the same kind of craziness that we would confer upon a person who lives in his own insular reality, where everything outside of him in the objective world is taken only as an indication of his fantasies, personal opinions, visions, paranoia’s, and theories.

You probably don’t like this idea, and its no wonder, because the world has hated it since the deaths of the apostles. Doctrine is important (even atheistic doctrine), but you have to take reality first as it is instead of how you want it to be. This especially applies to atheists, which is an extreme form of presuppositional object bias.

Coming next…