08 December 2023
Genuine faith is beyond words. We should be striving for a gospel commitment that uses whatever culture exists, but does not depend on it. What mankind can generate is just the context. Faith comes from God.
We are dealing with a paradox here. It is our duty to understand as much as possible the context God used to reveal Himself. Within that packaging are some elements that, for all practical purposes, are moral absolutes. The Radix Fidem Bible Lessons keep demonstrating how some bits and pieces of Moses are not just for that people, time and place. Following Christ means sifting through the history of His nation to find things that will far outlive that nation.
Among those things is the particular outlook of the Hebrew people -- the metaphysics and epistemology. We can be sure that was being taught as part of the gospel message; it's the background for the whole New Testament. Everything Jesus said and did rested on that approach, and it was far more than just a matter of Hebrew culture.
We are staring down two different problems.
First, the early churches wasted no time after the passing of the last apostle (John) in abandoning that Hebrew outlook. The Early Church documents are loaded with a very obvious shift away from that Hebrew viewpoint, farther and farther into Greek rationalism. And it just kept going, until the official church leadership quite consciously abandoned it in favor of the politically "smart" tack of embracing the Germanic pagan outlook. This was the foundation of Western Civilization.
Yes, you might suggest that they simply weren't aware of the implications of such a fundamental philosophical shift. I'm not sure that's true. I can say that Jews were aware of it when they first ditched Hebrew mysticism for Greek rationalism starting around 300 BC. It was a conscious choice, but then again, that in itself was the tail end of a long series of choices as the Hebrew nation drifted farther and farther from their roots.
I suppose it would be a lot easier if Jesus had somewhere stated that it was a sin to choose a foreign philosophical outlook, but He was being true to the Hebrew roots. That is not the kind of blunt comment Hebrew wisdom would make. He kept using parables for that very reason. The history of God's dealing with humanity is loaded with instances where He said things in a very subtle way, because if you can't get it that way, you aren't going to get it at all. If you truly submit to Him, He will guide you to the right answers.
At any rate, our first problem is that we have buried the Hebrew outlook of Jesus under a pile of cultural crap. The meaning of the word "Christian" (AKA, following Christ) today is a very long way from the life of His disciples.
The second problem is that, having wasted 2000 years chasing nonsense, we are not in a very good place to do it right. It's an awfully long journey traveling back to the day Jesus walked the earth. And then, we still have to strive to identify those moral absolutes through which every culture must be filtered. Faith changes culture, not the other way around. I mentioned in yesterday's post about a genuine indigenous Christian religion that wasn't loaded down with western nonsense. We can't even get started down that path until we first make the long journey back to Christ.
For example, we could not propose a genuine Chinese Christian religion because we are still struggling with just knowing Christ in His own context.
If you survey the footnotes in Dr. Heiser's books, you'll realize this whole business of a genuine Hebrew understanding of the Unseen Realm was not born from his work, but much of it was already there in bits and pieces, scattered among Christian scholars. All he really did was put it together in a coherent vision. We need more of that, and we aren't getting it. Instead, we have vast resources wasted on extending our American church culture farther along the same broad highway of destruction.
Pray that the Lord raise up a better standard for us.
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