Catacomb Resident Blog

Creeds and Labels

30 August 2023

It's not enough to recognize that Jesus was a Hebrew man. We must also understand that He doggedly sought to pull His nation back to a far more ancient version of the Hebrew culture. He often referenced the times of King David. His Sermon on the Mount referenced the morals of people more ancient than Abraham. This had nothing to do with human technological advances, but the change in orientation. Virtually every argument He had with the Jewish leadership referenced a far more primitive moral and intellectual orientation.

But it was by far a more powerful moral and intellectual orientation, rooted in the Person of His Father. How often did Jesus disparage "the traditions of the elders"? It was a reference to the Hellenized reinterpretation of Moses that was already three centuries old in His time. Yet it was a radical shift from the more ancient Hebrew assumptions about reality, and this is the substance of every dispute recorded in the Gospels.

We cannot ignore this in claiming to be Christians. That word "Christian" means following Jesus, and His teaching was consistently a renewal of the ancient Hebrew ways. Once you place His words in the context of this cultural and intellectual shift, you begin to see the full meaning of things we all have learned from the New Testament. To follow Jesus is to become more Hebraic, and that includes being more mystical and otherworldly.

How do you explain an intellectual position that does not trust the human intellect? The basic assumption of the Hebrew culture was that the mind is only a servant, not a ruler. In the human soul, the heart is the only proper throne room, because it is the place where God's Presence rests. He does not speak to the intellect, but to the heart. We must subject the intellect to the moral awareness of the heart. Judaism was the reverse of that, dragging the vast weight of ancient traditions into an alien atmosphere, deconstructing them and perverting their very purpose.

While Jesus faced a heavy load of Judaism as a departure from Moses, we face modern American Christianity as our "tradition of the elders". It's a radical departure from the faith of Jesus, the elephant in the room. Much of what we say of necessity is a reaction to this well-established approach to religion.

For example, I hope I've made it clear that I do not adhere to any traditional trinitarian doctrine. There's nothing wrong with using the language of trinitarian belief; most of it is, after all, using the words in English translations of the Bible. The problem is the very substantive dispute over the meaning of the words. The Early Church Councils and Creeds are loaded with very silly debates over words. It wasn't simply the fast-n-loose interpretations of dissenting teachers, but that the established leadership allowed themselves to be trapped in wrangling over semantics.

The whole point of having a spoken and written language for the Hebrews was what it could accomplish, not the thing itself. Almost every Early Church dispute was rooted in arguing over the meaning of Jesus as the "Son of God", and the trinitarian doctrine in particular.

As a doctrine, the Trinity simply goes too far, trying to nail God down in human terms. I reject the notion of Three Persons only because of that insistence on trying to capture Eternity in concrete words. Fallen humans cannot possibly understand what this is all about, and any attempt to pull it down to our level is inherently evil. The biblical meaning of that label "Son of God" is not in the words; it's in the practical application of them.

I don't object to the terminology itself. I use the terms myself: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It's that I don't invest them with the same rational content that most Christians do. In the Hebrew language and in the biblical Hebrew mind, those are functional labels, not ore carts of intellectual content. We cannot use the English language without the underlying assumption that it is a string of ore carts bearing factual data for processing. But we need not be trapped in that paradigm to understand this Hebrew religion of Jehovah and His revelation.

Thus, the Radix Fidem way does fit the label of "non-trinitarian" but I would suggest we don't fit the label "anti-trinitarian". We aren't denying that Jesus was both God and man; we are denying the intellectual distinctions that church leaders load into those words. We reject every historic Creed, not because of the words in them, but because of how creedalism itself is a trap. Any statement of faith we might make is anti-credal in itself. Paul warned about wrangling over words. What we seek is a changed heart.


Comments

Fun and Prophet

Liking the metaphor of "ore cart" for words and concepts. Some things can be carried off, rattling along the track, to be sorted and re-constituted at the foundry; but not Reality, which can only be met, or married.


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