27 June 2024
You are probably aware of the so-called Church Creeds and related documents, considered at least somewhat sacred by a major portion of organized Christian religion. That documentation still binds the hearts and minds of an awful lot of church people today.
Even the evangelicals make it part of their divinity curriculum. I got a ton of it at an evangelical university. But I can assure you that Big Eva remains ignorant of the Old Testament equivalent. I'll grant you that many non-evie churches include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, and the higher academic degrees include that stuff, but Big Eva generally ignores all of that. They keep asserting that the gospel is "sola scriptura" when it's obviously not.
I've already noted the silliness of Big Eva clinging to the Masoretic text of the Old Testament when it's painfully obvious that the New Testament writers almost uniformly quoted from the Septuagint ("LXX"). The academic branch of Big Eva is aware of this, but it never seems to seep down into the churches.
Yet, even the academics seem to ignore the unpublished oral lore of both Old and New Testament. We know it existed, because there are too many references that make no sense unless the apostles sat down and discussed things without leaving us the minutes of their meetings. Even in Acts, Luke summarizes the thrust of things and quotes very little, probably third hand. John warns that the bulk of Jesus' oral teaching was never written anywhere.
This is part of why academics like Heiser shock the common folks in the pew, along with a good portion of seminary graduates, with his reconstructions of Paul's "mystery of the gospel" with all the references in books like Unseen Realm. Surely it would be obvious that Paul and the other apostles taught this stuff orally in churches, no?
And surely you now realize that what is commonly referred to as "orthodoxy" is mostly nonsense. We have a very long way to go in recovering a genuine New Testament teaching of the gospel message.
The one thing we still stumble over is the western obsession with pulling Heaven down to the human level. The western cosmology is all wrong, and it most certainly does not reflect the New Testament teaching. Rather, it's read back into the Bible. Western minds demand to bolt handles on Eternity so they can put it where it makes most sense to them. They can't allow it to stay outside of human grasp, which is where the entire scope of the Ancient Near East believed it was, and where it should be.
Heiser said in some of his lectures that "salvation" in the New Testament refers to loyalty to Christ. It is the Covenant relationship we have with Christ as our Lord. It is not eternal fire insurance. It's not a status, but a state of being. I realize that it may be hard for some readers to grasp the distinction between those two, but it's there. It's a matter of identity; it's who you are in Christ.
The Doctrine of Election and Predestination is the same way: Folks in the Bible didn't think of it as a status, but an identity. It means you are rooted in Eternity, that you were so rooted before you were born. You simply play out that role in time/space, while everyone else plays out their own roles. There is a sense in which God alone knows who He rooted in Eternity, but the whole reason for doing it was so that we could let everyone else know.
Do you struggle with the meaning of Hebrews 6:1-9? The Bible is morally consistent across the board; the Covenant is everything. The writer refers to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- spiritual birth. If the Covenant can't call your name and awaken election, then nothing can. If you can walk through the initial gospel teaching and then walk away, there's nothing anyone else can offer. This is where the powers of the Age to Come are sampled in this life.
So the writer is saying, "Don't leave people there where they can play games with simplistic teaching. Challenge them with the more difficult requirements of the Covenant. If they don't stick around, if that drives them away, then there's nothing you can do for them."
Big Eva is really good about the basic stuff, but they refuse to move any farther. We will have to leave them behind.
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