28 November 2022
This is rather long, and may be hard to follow.
I've said that my position on politics and social policy is nowhere on the left-right scale. If anything, I'm a reactionary, and an extreme one at that. I believe we need to set the calendar back about 4000 years when it comes to understanding philosophical questions like that.
Sometimes I refer to the Ancient Near East (ANE), the region including Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as everything between and out on the periphery. However, it's less about the location and more about the intellectual assumptions those people had in common. I want you to notice that Moses was raised in Pharaoh's court, and so learned the Egyptian stuff quite well. Then he spent 40 years in the wilderness with Jethro, a priest who worshiped the God Moses later came to know as Yahweh (in English, Jehovah is acceptable). Jethro's background was Aramean, a nomadic people. On top of this, Moses' own nation descended from Abraham, whose background was Mesopotamian. Knowing this, we can easily detect in Moses' writing elements of all three.
This is the educational background God used to shape the Chosen Nation. It included a wealth of culture and intellectual training utterly foreign to us. Their basic assumptions about reality were quite different from that of the West. In that sense, we would say the Hebrew people arose with a very different epistemology.
The ancient Hebrew language was inherently metaphorical (or we could say "parabolic" -- using parables). It's not that you couldn't say things in Hebrew with a literal meaning, but that doing so was the exception, not the rule. Almost everything anyone had to say was based on drama and symbolism, common expressions that rarely could be taken literally. This was frankly common across the Ancient Near East. If you found a housekeeping document, a simple inventory of stored items, even that would be peppered with non-literal expressions. And if people ever sent letters, they were almost entirely symbolic language. If you weren't familiar with the culture and language, you'd think it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo magic spells and so forth.
Hint: The Old Testament is written that way. Most English translations are too literal. The whole debate over whether this or that translation is "conservative" or "liberal" often misses the whole point. Churches do a really crappy job of helping their members understand the figures of speech. Instead, they focus too much on either passing judgment on the text because they don't want to obey the moral boundaries, or they try to read it literally and miss the point. Translators generally have an impossible task.
Oh, but it gets better. The Ancient Near Eastern scholars shared the basic assumption that discussions of life required you be aware of multiple realms of existence. This world is fairly obvious, but they uniformly believed in a very real spiritual realm. Further, where the two overlapped was another realm, which we could refer to as the moral realm. One could not discuss in literal terms anything spiritual. They assumed it was impossible, so they used symbolism to discuss. Further, moral truth required symbolism most of the time, because they knew instinctively that moral truth for those living in this world was generally imperceptible with senses and reason. They would have said you can perceive and grasp moral truth only in the heart. They very much believed the heart was superior to the intellect.
So, when you read documents from the Ancient Near Eastern cultures, you must bring with you a strong sense of all three levels and how they interplay. You would have to be familiar with how all of this works together in the different written languages. We seldom see the Old Testament taught that way in churches. I've been censored in a few churches for trying to introduce the idea. Instead, we have a very heavy practice of injecting various ideologies into the teaching process. It's as if there's a conspiracy to ensure no one finds out what the Bible actually says. Oh horrors! It might invalidate our American cultural and political ambitions!
No, I'm not a conservative or liberal. I want no part of American ideological religion. Those people would be shocked at what the Bible actually requires of them. For example, Americans have a standard obsession with what something is and what it does. In the Bible, everything rests on the question of what role any person or thing plays in your life. Does it bless, or does it hinder your peace with God? You don't need to understand it in any other terms; the moral question is what you are supposed to do with it, if anything.
Scripture tells us the majority of humanity never rises above it's fleshly awareness of intellect and emotions. It's always just a few who engage their hearts in the question by moving their conscious awareness there (it was taken for granted in the ANE). However, we are warned in Scripture that the Elect is a relatively small share of the human race at any given time. And since you cannot know intellectually anything at all about election, the Bible tends to talk in terms of moral awareness for almost everything.
In Romans 8 and 9, Paul does refer to spiritual birth, but then talks a lot about how it enables you to live. The emphasis is how we face this fallen existence in faith. Late in chapter 8 he talks about the purpose of predestination: to conform us to the image of His Son in this life. In 9 he starts off warning that the fleshly identity as an Israeli doesn't mean much; not every Israeli was a child of the promise. Then Paul gets into the impossible question of how God decides who is Elect, without saying much about those who are not. But he does mention that some are hardened during this life. It has no bearing on whether Pharaoh could have gone to Heaven, but the whole issue was how things turned out for him in this life.
And then there's that famous passage in Ephesians 2, where he finishes by hammering on the purpose of predestination again: We are created for good works in this life. And if you back up a few pages in Galatians 3, you'll find Paul perplexed by the false question of works versus faith. Fleshly performance means nothing; that's not good works. But obedience that comes from faith is the fulfillment of all that the Law was intended to do as our tutor. And in Galatians 4 he again talks about how those born under the Law were not children of the promise. In chapter 5 he warns again that the presence of the Holy Spirit demands those good works that the flesh cannot do by its own power, with or without a law code.
The distinction between law code versus faith is artificial to the ancient Hebrew mind. It's an obsession that was common among those who had come into contact with Greek philosophers -- like the Pharisees and most of the Hellenized West -- but it turns the Old Testament upside down. The root of Moses was a heart committed to a feudal Master, not a code of conduct. The code was built on that fundamental allegiance. Against this was the intellectual reasoning of the Pharisees that made such a mess of things, substituting reason for God. The conquests of Alexander the Great, and his evangelistic zeal for Hellenism (featuring the philosophy of his teacher, Aristotle) destroyed the mysticism of the Ancient Near East. It gave birth to legalism, and reduced moral questions to mere intellectual reasoning.
How many of you realize Aristotle taught that this world is all there is? He explicitly denied the existence of a spiritual realm and divine revelation; he denied that humans were fallen. The only redemption possible in Aristotle's world was through better logic. If there were gods, they were confined to this world and suffered the same passions and flaws as humans.
The Bible assumes you understand that this world is a prison, that we are confined to a status like the other creatures, that we must suffer the mortality of everything else around us. The Bible assumes you would want to escape mortality. Unlike Aristotle's notion that "eternity" means endless time, the Bible points to Eternity as a qualitatively different existence unconfined by time and space. Further, not all of the human race is equal; God plays favorites. Some are Elect and most are not. But since you cannot possibly know who is which, we are taught to treat everyone as potential spiritual family members.
Meanwhile, Scripture demands that we discriminate between those who are covenant family and those who are not. It has nothing to do with what those people are, but what role they play in our lives. Moral questions bear little resemblance to logical analysis. It requires seeing and discerning in the heart, not in the head. It means seeing things in terms of defilement and blessing, not in terms of what they are or what they do.
The psychology of this is not simple. I'm not going to suggest you can just reprogram your brain to be more like the Hebrew philosophical outlook. What I will tell you is that becoming aware of the differences will give God room to reveal your convictions in a different way. You are most certainly going to make mistakes along the way; that's part of the Curse of the Fall. A passion for the Lord can easily get ahead of His actual plans for you. Some issues that come to your attention require an immediate response, but most things can rest a bit until you have time for His Spirit to speak through your convictions.
Now that you know, you are accountable for it.
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