Unworthy

Re: ACCM

Dear readers, this is partly personal. The more I consider this task, the more I realize how ill-prepared I am for it. This thing is huge and daunting. Just because I am somewhere up the road ahead of a few of you doesn’t mean I’m there.

Every day I’m slapped upside the head with the realization this problem is vast. Yeah, it’s the foundation of all modern life as we know it, and I’m fighting that. I’m sitting here using one of the most popular results of Western Civilization — a personal computer — connecting to the vast virtual space of the Internet, and I’m pressing a view of reality that would appear to suggest we destroy such things.

But then I remember all the times I wrote from the realization that narrow and difficult is the path to truth. Still, writing something that describes that path is truly a huge task. I sure do wish some of you would offer some form of input, because this shouldn’t be a one-man show.

Pray with me.

Real and Moral

Re: ACCM

Morality = reality; it works both ways.

Reality is whatever God says it is. Sin is arguing with what God says. For me, the Bible is sufficient source for what God has to say to us all. His Holy Spirit working in my spirit is sufficient source for God’s message to me directly. All of this presumes an intellectual outlook consistent with that of the Bible.

We have a tough time with Hebrew writing in Scripture because there is virtually no other Hebrew writing from before the Hellenizing of Judaism. It requires going way back to the late Stone Age and Abraham’s time to extrapolate a bit of flavor from Ancient Mesopotamian literature. That is, we know it’s not the same, but there are some shared underlying intellectual assumptions. You could suggest a bit of Egyptian influence, but it would appear that was minimal. Besides, we aren’t really all that sure of the literature from that far back in Egyptian history. All our chronology of Egypt stands on a house of cards prior to around 500 BC. On top of that, the Hebrew people didn’t seem too worried about dating precision until rather late in the game, so that we can’t reliably date anything much before David’s reign.

If you think it matters that much, you are missing the point anyway. The Hebrew Scriptures were aimed at explaining reality-morality. It’s not so much how we got to this place, but more about what we face now that we are here. It’s not as if the twelve sons of Jacob didn’t exist and didn’t do what the narrative says, or that Abraham was just a mythical figure. He was legendary, but the outline of the narrative focuses more on his background and experiences, then his calling and battles of faith, until he arrived at the point of passing it on to Isaac. We are left guessing and estimating what sort of man he was. His character we can get, but his educational background is a mystery. Yet it is also a critical factor in shaping what eventually became Hebrew culture.

We find ourselves in the place of trying to guess what the Hebrew people took for granted was common knowledge, an issue that continues up through the New Testament. The various writers, not least that of the Letter to the Hebrews, keep referring to an oral lore we don’t have. Should we trust modern Judaism to reliably report it, given their blatant departure from the Hebrew intellectual foundations over some centuries starting before the Babylonian Exile? Most of what I propose in my teaching is only my best guess on a lot of things.

This is part of the challenge for the proposed project A Course in Christian Mysticism (ACCM). At any rate, we are left with the necessity of developing an openness to the Spirit of God leading each of us in our own individual paths to serving Him. The very nature of mysticism is not having a large body of prescribed thought. There are some pretty obvious assertions, but they cannot be implemented without the proper mystical frame of reference. We are obliged to build from a sketchy history of previous events and a body of prescribed behavior which applies directly only in a narrow context. We are supposed to extrapolate how that body of law and ritual would exemplify broader concepts hard to put into words. The most important product is not the shape it takes in your soul, but the very existence of a sense of moral imperative.

ACCM won’t attempt to answer all the questions, just eliminate impertinent ones.

Ancient Truth: Minor Prophets Published

Cover art for the book Ancient Truth: Minor Prophets

It’s done. The cover art depicts a Torah scroll, largely because the entire prophetic message of the Old Testament is founded on the urgent need to return the Covenant. You can get your free copy here.

The next book will be the novel which arose from the Of Angel series.

ACCM: Brainstorming

Re: Proposed A Course in Christian Mysticism (ACCM)

Brainstorming is grabbing every idea which might be in any way related or simply driving your concerns. We pray over the mixed collection of ideas, then organize them into some recognizable pattern. The pattern itself often tends to eliminate things which simply aren’t suitable to the project. In other words, we can’t cover everything because the reader would get lost. You can always put the extraneous stuff in another project if there’s enough and it fits together in some way. However, our process must not lose sight of the eventual goal: Building the sort of logic which no longer requires such strategies. Mysticism is not the antithesis of rational organization; mysticism is not reliant on reason. Mysticism seeks truth which reason cannot contain.

Our task is to tame and train the intellect, to harness it to serve the Spirit.

The brainstorm is where I crave your input, dear readers. Here’s what seems apparent to me initially:

This will be an academic level study. It’s not for the casual reader without the level of intellectual development necessary to attain at least a bachelor’s degree. It’s not going to be a huge book, but a study guide, a sort of syllabus.

Western Civilization is based on myth, falsehood, a damaged worldview. It is not consistent with reality as God revealed it.

We’ll have to talk about where we are as Westerners, and outline what it means to be Western. I maintain the capstone of Western identity is the Enlightenment, the final welding of Greco-Roman culture with Germanic culture. We have to talk about what those two inputs are and how they dominate the very structure of thought. We’ll include an outline of the history of this process. Sadly, the Western Church was a primary player in building this mythology.

I will probably need some good references to Aristotle, especially good summaries. I’ll probably include something like Beowulf; it’s Old English Norse literature, but captures the soul of Germanic tribal mythology. It reflects the cosmology and anthropology, two key elements in worldview.

The nature of Western thought is one issue; the nature of Western Christian thought is closely related and slightly different. The dominance of another bastardized worldview is a major problem: Judaism. We’ll trace the shift from Hebrew Mysticism to Hellenized Judaism, which is easy for me to explain.

Much more difficult to explain is where I get my ideas about Hebrew Mysticism. So much of that comes from readings way back in my academic training starting forty years ago. I absorbed it, but didn’t formally organize my thinking until much later. I don’t have any good footnotes or even good authors. Most of the references I know about agree with Judaism; they embrace the Jewish claims about what it all ought to mean. I can justify rejecting that approach, but I can’t easily reference the material to replace it. I sense in memory getting little bits and pieces here and there.

Perhaps that is the task itself of mysticism. This may be the approach we propose in the study course. Each reader needs to build their own internal frame of reference so that, when they read the Old Testament, they get a powerful sense of their own purpose and calling in analyzing what the text means.

What do you think?

Proposal: A Course in Christian Mysticism

I am a true Christian Mystic.

That should not be taken as a suggestion everyone else is false, but that I obviously disagree with just about everyone else promoting Christian Mysticism. If you understand anything at all about mysticism in general, you recognize that I rely entirely on force(s) beyond the human level to back my declarations. I rely on that same force(s) to draw your attention to what I say, or to turn you away from it. I am proclaiming only my personal experience with Truth; I can’t do any more than that.

As a fallen human, I struggle to invest my limited talents and resources into a proclamation that puts some measure of my experience within your reach.

I am highly disappointed at the current academic output in this field of study. Yes, there is a massive volume of work in the field, but much of it is impertinent to my experience. I read only a small portion of that work, and the more I read, the more impertinent it became. There are brilliant flashes here and there, but I sense it would save folks a lot of time if I could distill the results of my exploration. I cannot promise it will bring you the same overwhelming sense of personal peace it has brought me, but I simply cannot remain silent. The peace itself becomes a burning flame I cannot hold within.

While I hope to emulate some measure of solid academic standards common to Western scholars, the whole point is that such standards are inherently wrong. That is, they place a barrier far short of what can and should be revealed. They miss the point. I’ll use that approach only as a sign post to call those who have some internal question seeking better answers.

As with The Mind of Christ, this will be an open source project. I’m only too glad to receive input and play editor. You’ll be credited or not as you wish. It is utterly necessary to cite external sources to help Western minds begin the journey. I’ll nudge my way into Western academic territory but the anchor remains in the Ancient Hebrew tradition of parabolic and spiritual references that can only be confirmed fully by the individual reader reacting with the Truth for himself. Thus, anyone who can tolerate my biases can have their words added to this project. Or you can be inspired to write your own competing approach, and that’s just dandy with me.

The general idea is to help folks transition from their Western limitations to the Ultimate Reality beyond those limits. It will serve as a more readable approach to explaining how I got where I am, in the hopes you’ll start your own journey. It seems a significant portion of those who comment here, or discuss with me in other ways, keep requesting footnotes, references, etc. I’m hoping to create a condensed reference. Not a justification so much as I want to offer an explanation where I’m coming from. It’s not hard for me to frame a contextual reply every time, but it seems it keeps leading to wider and wider questions when someone is actually interested. Maybe I can reduce the workload a little.

So I’m going to compose a course in Christian Mysticism as taught on this blog and in my other works. I solicit your input. At the same time, I offer a warning this is where I’ll be investing a lot of my time in the near future. There will be posts on this subject; the abbreviation is ACCM (A Course in Christian Mysticism).

Minor Prophets Redux

I had completely forgotten about the Minor Prophets study series. I drug out my notes and began formatting for the next book in the Ancient Truth series when I realized I had never posted it to my static site. So if you are looking for commentary on the Minor Prophets, it’s here. It will also be the next book as I format and read it through again in the next few days. It could well be ready for publication by the end of next week.

Ancient Truth: Daniel Published

Cover art for the book, Ancient Truth: Daniel

The next in our Ancient Truth series has been published, Daniel’s Prophecy. You can get your free copy of the ebook here.

Daniel Rewrite Finished

In a few days I’ll format Daniel for our Ancient Truth Series of ebooks. For now, the updated commentary begins here.

Propositional Folly

It ain’t happening.

I keep hoping people will understand when I attack Aristotelian epistemology and European tribal mythology. I keep hoping they’ll recognize all those unconscious assumptions about life, the universe and everything. I pray that they learn the very different approach necessary to understand the Bible. More than that, it is the necessary intellectual approach to understand life, the universe and everything as God revealed it.

Apparently there are educated people out there who read my efforts and it just doesn’t happen. Somewhere between my keyboard and their brain is a short circuit. I confess it could well be I lack the writing talent, but I’m not sure what I can do about it. There are plenty of folks for whom the whole thing is simply over their heads. Scary to me is how many there are. As someone who once worked in public education, I understand all too well why there are so many like that. Public education in America is designed to make them that way. I keep praying God does something to give folks a chance to break out the intellectual bondage so they can serve Him as full participants, as shepherds instead of sheep.

It’s good we have people who recognize that the Bible is not a science book. It’s good we have a smaller number who realize the Bible is not a history book, either. Big as it is, the Bible is actually pretty minimal. It’s just barely enough for a human to begin training their intellect to obey the Spirit of God.

So if you read the Law of Moses, you understand from the narrative that it can’t possibly cover every detail of life a human is likely to encounter just in the context in which is the Law is revealed. There were lots of questions because real world situations don’t always fit the rather simple declarations of God’s Laws. The Law included provisions for selecting wiser heads and prophets to help clarify things. Moses was taught by his father-in-law not to assume he was the only one who could understand the Law. Moses and his readers were supposed to wait on God to raise up folks who could read the text and see between the lines what it was God was trying to convey, a truth about life on this fallen plane of existence.

The Hebrew mind, if it worked well at all, assumed truth was impossible to reduce to mere words. Truth was the Person of God Almighty, and our best hope was something in a written narrative could give us a clue. There is no matrix of truth the mind can plumb with logic; there is only the Person of the Living God. The mind is supposed to extrapolate based on underlying moral truths too difficult for words. Try as I might to contrast this with the Aristotelian expectation of defining an objective body of truth, I still run into people who read my stuff and demand I adhere to Aristotelian forms of expression.

There are people out there who will read this very blog post and still do that.

The Hebrew Scriptures do not address every question likely to occur in our minds. It didn’t address every question likely to occur to Ancient Hebrew minds, much less our Post-modern Western minds. A critical element is in the question: Why state the obvious? If everyone is expected to believe a certain fundamental truth, why need we mention it? So very much of Hebrew Scripture was a reaction to falsehood, not an organized attempt to catalog a full discussion of reality. For us, there are huge gaps in the Bible narrative. The purpose of putting the Old Covenant into a written form was not so you could analyze and know, but so you could obey.

It’s no different in the New Testament. There are lots of things Jesus never addressed in the Gospel narrative. Maybe He did address some of those questions in real life, but we have no record of it. Instead, we have a record of things He said and did in reaction to the concerns of the day and time of those men who wrote those narratives. Our job as scholars is to reconstruct the context of the narrative as much as we can, but surely the rest is simply resting in the Holy Spirit.

We take it as an article of faith that God would not leave us high and dry on essentials, and that the Bible must be enough. Whatever it is we really need must be there, somewhere. And it is, but if we approach with the wrong frame of mind, we are sure to get the wrong answers, because we’ll ask the wrong questions. Aristotelian minds want information for analysis, something they can harness under their human logic. Such minds presume to own the data as masters of understanding, rather than be owned by it. The Hebrew Bible calls that demand “fallen nature.” That is, the very assumption truth can be held in human intelligence is the very nature of what happened with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating the Forbidden Fruit — it was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That word “knowledge” implies one who makes executive decisions as if he were the designer. We want to see the plans for the universe on our level. God said, “Nope. That’s above your existential level.”

The Bible teaches almost nothing about the knowledge of being, and very little about doing, because it is all about morality. It teaches moral understanding.

We look back upon the record and we see a small handful of amazing people who worked from even less of that written record than we have, yet they had the most amazing depth of insight. And then they were commissioned to either write or edit the writing of more of that narrative. They weren’t necessarily brilliant linguists; some couldn’t even read or write. They were morally brilliant. Jesus was morally precocious. Such was the single distinguishing human character trait He carried — maximum human moral genius. If there is one thing on which we ought to focus our searching, it’s not rules and principles, but moral apprehension. Not formulating moral principles, but learning the moral fabric woven into Creation already as a living thing. Moral truth is a reflection of the character of God, insofar as He requires us to know Him.

A Hebrew writer would never write it like that, because writing it that way comes from a question that would not occur to him. Only by careful hindsight do we recognize that most of what Jesus said in His disputes with the Pharisees was over this very problem, in that the Pharisees were too Aristotelian. They had made a god of their logical system for understanding Moses, and it was not the logic of Moses by any means. The Pharisees insisted Moses was propositional truth (without using those words), and this was a clear departure from how the Hebrew intellect approached things up to the time when Hellenism was sold to them around 300 BC.

The Bible was intended for reading with the power of the Holy Spirit, not with the power of mere human logic. It was not intended to produce uniformity of thought and action, but unity of commitment to Jesus Christ. Don’t confuse them. The unifying power of the Spirit cannot be expressed in terms humans can understand, much less control. If you try to squeeze from Scripture a theology and practice by which you command others to obey as if unto God, you are not bringing glory to the name of Jesus Christ; you are still just another Pharisee.

So I’m obviously not a Fundamentalist at all, and not really an evangelical, though my choice of words sometimes sounds like them. And I am certainly not any kind of liberal by common definitions. I’m a Christian Mystic, an ultimate primitivist. I don’t do propositional teaching. I’ve offered here adequate explanation why not, but I’ll be glad to elucidate further, if you want it. Just ask.

Somewhere out there, someone’s going to read this and it will cross his mind to demand I answer all his questions with propositional statements. It ain’t happening.

Bits and Pieces 11

It’s not straightforward to install, but VMWare Player for Linux works very well on RHEL 6 and clones (I’m using Scientific Linux 6). However, XP does not work properly as a client, and you may not get it running at all. I had no trouble with Win2K once I got SP4 and the final rollup installed. Without those, you can’t install the VMWare drivers to make Windows run right. With the drivers installed, it’s fully integrated with the host system desktop and allows me to run a lot of software that WINE cannot handle. For security reasons, I don’t allow the VM to connect to the Internet, but it’s easy to share folders between the host and VM once you set it up. Now, under Windows 7, VMWare took quite a bit of power and was pretty slow. Under SL6, it takes some power to load, but then runs about as quietly as if I were running Win2K itself. I haven’t tried the built-in KVM because kernel level stuff is simply not necessary for this and way too complicated. The other desktop VMs seem more difficult in the descriptions so I went with what I knew.

Capitalism is bad. It’s a cruel and heartless economic system. Socialism and Communism are also very bad, and Fascism is worst of all. All of them are very bad because all of them are inherently materialistic. Each of them treats material goods and creature comfort as god. Humans become no more than a resource, rather than the whole point of things. God said we are designed to live under a tribal government with a family economic system. The modern secular state is one of Satan’s major accomplishments on earth.

In this real world, the American political system and culture are so horrifically evil from the very start, no economic system will work. Places like Europe are socially more boring, but the politics avoid the extremes of what people can tolerate, for the most part. Their governments and economic policies have a human face, where ours is all fangs and hatred. But socialism works out tolerably well there, compared to the idiocy of our welfare-warfare state system. Honestly, if I had the means, I’d rather live in Europe somewhere, but not the UK. I’m sure that leaks out in my writings.

My current fiction series will end with chapter 11. I already have a part 2 ready and I’m working on part 3. Same characters, similar geography, etc., but the core mission becomes steadily more obvious. I’ll keep posting it here, so if this fiction bores you, you’ll probably lose interest in this blog. Right now, this is something really important to me.