An Apology, a Long Explanation, and Starting to Take My Own Advice

Fair notice to my readers that my life direction is up for adjustment now, in consultation with my church. The post also explains at length where I am now. This applies to me the advice I gave in my last post!

First, I must apologize for writing way too much yesterday.  The first four paragraphs of what I wrote were on topic with the text, John 10:14-16.  After that, I strayed quite a long way into my own theory of what the church should be, in ways that are not directly supported by the text I quoted.  I believe, or at least, I “see” (as I’ll explain in the rest of this document), that they SEEM to be supported by the Scriptures generally AND by my own experiences in many churches over the 53 years since Jesus found me.  But it remains possible that my vision of what the Church should be is, in fact, only a grouping of delusional visions of “things that are not now, nor could be.” 

But, as I write this, I’m beginning to take my own advice from the last article. My main service for many years now, outside of a recovery program, has been writing this blog and its predecessors.  I have known all along—because God has repeatedly told me—that what I have been writing will have very little influence during my lifetime.  After I am gone, others will pick up what is written here and use some of it to great effect.  The content will be effective, but I will be forgotten except by God, for reasons not too dissimilar from the reason King David was given all of the plans for the Temple but then not allowed to build it.  I’m glad to do it—God will remember—but recent events have prompted the question “is it time to move on?” 

If it is time to move on, move on into what?  I don’t think it’s time to move to the cemetery yet, but what should I move into?

So I’m taking my own advice to ask the church about it.  This document will be posted on my blog and will be the last thing posted until I know clearly what I am to do.  I do present it for comment.  I will not be doing anything in secret here.

But I’m preparing this rambling summary about myself and the direction of my thinking mostly to start a conversation with my pastor—who already knows me and knows some of what I’ve written here—about the next way to go.  It may be to keep going the way I have been going. Or my way of thinking may prove to be too exotic a plant to thrive in the church, so the new direction may be to give this up in favor of cleaning the church bathrooms once a week (I actually did that at one church!)  I don’t know what it will be yet—or even where it will be. But I’m open.     

I first became aware that I “see”—and often this takes the actual form of a visual perception—things in a way most other people don’t in a class called Organic Chemistry in undergraduate college.  The class was studying stereochemistry—the different ways chemical processes can arrange themselves in space—and specifically the two different ways nucleophilic substitutions can be made for good “leaving groups” (often halides) attached to a carbon atom. Being able to predict which mechanism will predominate is important both because it affects the rate of the reaction (and what needs to be done to increase or reduce that rate), and because one mechanism produces products which have entirely the opposite stereochemistry from that of the substrate, where the other causes the stereochemistry of the product to be randomized, producing “racemic” products which are usually less useful.      I could—and still can—literally “see” the two different processes occurring in my mind’s eye, so predicting which orientation would occur was easy for me.  But my lab partner—who went on to a long career as a clinical professor of medicine—was totally baffled by my explanations.  I quickly learned from her that most people studying this area of chemistry have to rote memorize rules that predict whether any given reaction will proceed by a S_N1 or S_N2 mechanism.  They can’t “see” what I “see” at all.

This appears to be a very general problem, or blessing—I’m often not sure which—in my mode of thought.  I have a tendency to “see” processes, ranging from the small scale of stereochemistry to the very big scales of the whole universe and whole blocks of history.

I can vaguely “see” a representation of the universe as a 4-dimensional fluted hypercone with a real time axis, except at the extremes near its point of creation and temporal end.  But I also understand that this representation is only a projection of a (probably) 24-dimensional Octonion space in which each of the three octuples  defining a point is an element of a momentum vector.   So what is fundamental is not mass, time or space, but ordered motion, which must in turn be driven by information that gives order to this motion.

  I think I inherited this way of thinking from my maternal grandfather’s family, as my grandfather’s distant cousin John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) appears to have thought in the same kind of big pictures I do.  Wheeler’s name isn’t very well known today outside of the modern physics community—he worked collegially and fairly quietly.  But he was the man who coined the term “black hole” (in 1967), and he and two co-authors wrote the massive book entitled Gravitation (1973) which is still the mathematical starting point for nearly all more recent work on gravitational and dimensional theory, and, increasingly, quantum mechanics.  Stephen Hawking once described the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a description of quantum gravity Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt published in a paper in 1967, as the “wave function of the Universe.”  So I suspect that I got my huge-picture way of thinking from his part of the family, even though I was never able to develop it as far as he did.

Some people can’t see the forest for the trees.  I often can’t see the trees because my attention is riveted to the whole continent in which the forest lies.

I’m saying all of this because I’m trying to reason through whether this gigantic-picture view of reality, which sometimes gets me in trouble, is a blessing which should be developed or a delusional way of thinking which should be ruthlessly suppressed and/or medicated out of existence. Or maybe I should just leave it alone?  I do note that I’m an ordinary retired church member, not a prominent academician like John Wheeler.  Therefore, I don’t have institutional permission to think so far “outside the box” as he did.  I’m much more likely to be burned as an heretic than honored as a great thinker. 

Now, moving on to my view of history, which spilled over into my last blog post’s unsupported assertions about how the church should operate, besides the Scriptures my big-picture thinking is based mostly on concepts I acquired from four sources:

1. My high school History teacher, Henry Ford Hildebrandt II.  Mr. Hildebrandt taught real History, and how to think about History, during a time period during which social indoctrination (“Social Studies”) had replaced History in most schools.  His approach was fairly simple—to understand what was really happening in any important historical event, one must first look carefully to see who won and who lost wealth or power as a result of the event.  This will almost always provide an adequate explanation for the reason the event occurred without giving any consideration to the actors’ declared ideological excuses for their actions.  Though he was a devout Catholic and a lay catechism teacher at his parish, Mr. Hildebrandt applied this principle without deviation to church history.  He said more than once that the two worst things that ever happened to his church were the Donation of Pepin and the Coronation of Charlemagne—the first because it gave the Pope land to rule as an ordinary king, and the second because it gave the Church the power to make and break kings for the next 600 years.  He also opined—probably correctly—that it was these two events that led directly to the Wars of the Reformation, in which European princes used Christian doctrinal differences to excuse a redistribution of wealth and power away from the Catholic Church (even in the parts of Europe that remained Catholic).  But the real historical process was the redistribution of wealth and power, with Christian doctrine only providing a convenient excuse to keep the masses inflamed enough to fight.  It is also widely agreed among historians to this day that the Wars of the Reformation, and the distributions of power that resulted from them, were determinative in both the formation of modern nation states in Europe and areas colonized by European nations and in the formation of the political and religious ideologies that have largely controlled thought to the present time. So I got this part of my historical thinking from a Catholic teacher in high school!  
2. My study, during a course on Historiography in graduate school, of the how several 3^rd through 5^th Century Christian writers approached history.
3. The French Reformed philosopher and historian Jacques Ellul—who was also no slouch as a theologian.  Ellul developed ideas similar to those of Mr. Hildebrandt much more exhaustively and on a Reformed theological foundation.   Ellul believed that the true kingdom of God consists of people who have voluntarily come to him for grace and now gladly live under His rule. He also wrote of a “false kingdom” which acts on the same assumption of arbitrary imposition of human power as any other human political entity does.  Ellul also applied the idea that, from a fairly early time, the temptation to seek earthly power to coerce unbelievers to (falsely) profess Christian doctrine and submit to church authority had corrupted much of the organized church. The collapse of the Roman state and the pagan Roman civil religion (which existed for the benefit of the State) during the “Crisis of the Third Century” gave an opening for the early Catholic church to replace the Roman civic religion and restore order (as happened under Emperor Constantine I).   Ellul also believed—I think largely correctly—that those who adopted worldly power as a means of advancing “the gospel” mostly did so innocently, not realizing that they were buying into a lie, but as a result they caused even very critical doctrines to be rewritten to support their perspective.  Even current theology carries forward some of these doctrines that were rewritten to support Christianity as a tool of political power.  He also discussed various ways in which this explains much of Western history from the Fourth Century on.  Ellul wrote a lot, and is not easy reading, but the books to start with to understand his thinking about what happened to Christianity are The Appearance of the Kingdom, The Subversion of Christianity, and The Humiliation of the Word.
4. The American Christian philosopher Dallas Willard, who provided a way to move forward in his thinking about the kingdom of the heavens, best expressed in his book The Divine Conspiracy, though his other books are also good. They are also MUCH easier to read than Ellul! 

I’ve been gradually developing the ideas of Willard and Ellul, taken together, on this blog since it began, and in other forums for years before that.  Thus far, I seem to go farther than either Ellul or Willard on several important points:

1. The question I was beginning to explore in the most recent series is whether I am correct when I understand literally Jesus’ statements that, in Him, I am God’s child and Jesus’ friend, and that he will talk to me, directly, and give me direction if I will listen.  It has become traditional to say that the apparent promises of friendship (in this life) and of two-way conversation are only metaphorical—and mean only that God will “speak” to me through the Bible (if it speaks directly to my present decision, which it often doesn’t seem to), through representatives of the Church, possibly through Church tradition (depending on what denomination is speaking), or through circumstances, but NEVER, NEVER directly!   And, at last in the Evangelical branches of the Church, we have substituted having a “personal relationship” with Christ for the concepts he used himself (friends, Father and children, shepherd and sheep, King and subject, commander and soldier) in part to avoid any necessary inference of a two-way friendship with real conversation and in part to let each church or denominational group define what “relationship” was intended.  But get real—Judas Iscariot had a “close personal relationship” with Jesus for three years, then betrayed him.  We need to go back to the relationships Jesus spoke about and understand them.  And , yes, God DOES speak to me directly sometimes.  Sometimes I wish he hadn’t!.
2. On the subject of the creation of one human male and female, my view differs somewhat from that of everyone whose work I have ever read.  Capsule summary: God has been straightening my theology in this area over a period of years, though I didn’t recognize it clearly until after the personal “earthquake” this last February, when a lot of things became clearer.  I’m writing about this first, and at more length than  some of the other topics, both because it has been a source of great trouble in my own past and also because I sense that some of the big-picture historical patterns I identify below flow from it, at least in part.  In Genesis 1:26, God is talking to himself, telling himself “let us (plural) create man (singular) in our image.” Do you understand the Trinity—how God can be three, yet one? I don’t. Not with my mind, at least. But he gives me a picture of it in the way I was made. The next verse says that God “created man (still singular) in his own image, in the image of God he created him (still singular), male and female he created them (now plural).” This implies that male and female in humanity reflect something that is in the nature of God. The difference is a part of his image. Important details are added to this at the end of the next chapter of Genesis. God made the first man, who also had the female within him (the rib), recognize he was not complete. Then he brought the female out of him, to help him see God! The word used for “helper” (‘ezer) in Genesis 2:18 and 20 is the same word David used to describe God in Psalm 70:5: “You are my help (‘ezri) and my deliverer.” God is my helper, but is also sovereign, definitely not my slave. And the word (neged) translated “appropriate” or something like it in most translations comes from a root (ngd) that means “to make or to be plainly visible, conspicuous.”  This, by itself, implies that the difference between male and female itself is intended to show me—to make plainly visible to me—something important about God.  What it makes visible is how God can be three, yet one. So, God made the first woman out of the first man—and, before they sinned, they were only one person, male and female, in two bodies—to make it clear to them what he is like. They only needed to look at each other to understand. I should be able to look at, or interact with, any woman and see the other half of God’s image in me.  Anything that invites me to think of a woman for a different purpose will distort my view of God himself, and that is what is dangerous about it. 
3. This also implies that my view of marriage and of sexuality is somewhat different than any I’ve ever read. Historically, Christianity after sometime in the 2^nd Century had a very negative view of sexuality—it was thought of as a necessary evil, permitted within marriage only to propagate the race, but truly holy people were those who strictly avoided it.  The problem with this position is that sexuality within marriage is the best physical picture in existence of what the Gospel is all about.  When God came to me and made me his own, what did he want?   Jesus prayed for what he wants:  He wants to make me, and all who follow him, one with him, in the same way that he is one with his Father, “I in them, and you in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that you sent me and loved them, even as you loved me.”  John 17:20-23.  My relationship with God isn’t mostly about forgiveness of sins and going to Heaven someday to be with God.  It’s about God becoming one with me in this life, which then naturally carries over into eternity.  It doesn’t wait until after my death.  Compare this to the words of Adam and God’s comment after Adam saw Eve: “The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of Man.’  Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh.” Genesis 2:23-24.  To this, Jesus adds: “so they are no longer two, but one flesh.  What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” Mark 10:8b-9.  Paul then explains, from a negative perspective of sexuality misused, “don’t you know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? May it never be! Or don’t you know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? For, ‘The two’, he says, ‘will become one flesh.’  But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” 1Corinthians 6:15-17.  So sexuality in marriage is a picture of the Gospel message itself, something good and not to be avoided.  It is also for this reason that marriage itself is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the Church, with which he is becoming one, Ephesians 5:22-33.  It follows that misuse of sexuality between persons will  make it difficult to understand the Gospel, and, within the Church, it will block unity (which will become an unintelligible concept). 
4. Because centralization of power in human organizations was the most important driver of the part of church history that started sometime in the 2nd Century, and, historically, nothing is more disruptive of entrenched power than a true prophet, the whole idea that God still can actually—not merely metaphorically—speak directly to or through ordinary believers had to be firmly suppressed early in that history.  Witness the suppression of the Montanists, and the attempts to control native Berber Christianity which later led to the Donatist controversy, even before Constantine. This was true even though being able to converse with God, in a real, two-way conversation, appears to be absolutely necessary to being His child and friend.
5. The idea of direct communication between God and individual believers also had to be suppressed because, once the Church adopted the acquisition of power as a method of propagation, it had to start accepting many unbelievers as “members.”   And, after Theodosius I declared all Roman subjects to be under the jurisdiction of the Church and expanded it to include the idea that all members of the community were now within the Church, this became even more urgent.  If any pagan now declared to be part of the Church, but not having Christ or the Holy Spirit, could now say they had heard from God, who knows what crazy things they might (and sometimes did) say!   As Elul points out at length, this tension led to the rigidity of the clergy/laity distinction, with only the clergy now alone being called “members” of the Body of Christ and the laity receiving grace from them sacramentally merely as clients attached to the Church and under its jurisdiction.  But Ellul does not seem to extend this to explain the suppression of all claims of a real, direct relationship with God.
6. The Church became the substitute for the pagan Roman civil religion, requiring a shift in emphasis from individual repentance from sin (internal rebellion against God) and toward punishment/expiation of sins (individual wrong acts, as defined by the Church).  The pagan civil religion had existed for the explicit purposes of supporting the power of the Emperor, upholding the existing social order (in a society in which at least half of the people were slaves!), proclaiming divine disapproval and judgment on the disobedient and immoral, and assuring divine approval of the actions of those in power.  Hence, what constituted “a” sin often had to be redefined in terms of these objectives, and the response of the Church—and God—had to be brought into line with the worldly judicial principle that every individual wrong act as so defined had to be paid for severally, piecemeal.   This, of course, led to the sale of forgiveness piecemeal through the sacraments and prescribed penitential acts, to which the Reformers properly objected.  But it also led to an almost exclusive emphasis on managing “sins” which often continues in Protestant churches today (Willard devotes a whole chapter to “Doctrines of Sin Management”), when the correct emphasis should be on developing intimate friendships with God which will displace the desire to rebel against him.
7. At the same time Christianity was being substituted for the Roman civic religion, Emperors were becoming actively involved in the Church Councils that wrote what are now the accepted creeds and, in some ways even more important, the disciplinary canons that defined Christian behavior, the clergy/laity distinction and membership in the community.  Substitution of church-defined theological terms of art for scriptural words in the creeds facilitated the gradual growth of the ideas that Jesus, though (technically) human, was not a human LIKE us at all, that we therefore need human (living or deceased) mediators better than us to approach him on our behalf, that our sins are the real issue between us and him, that, though each transgression needs to be separately paid for, he did not make the full payment to release us from the whole penalty (hence, a need to continually obtain more grace by doing the right things), and that he can have no real, direct contact with us. 
8. While I think Ellul gets the influence of later, 10^th through 12^th Century, Islam on Christianity correct, he seems to miss entirely the influence of 6^th and 7^th Century Christianity in southern Arabia and its neighbors on the development of Islam.
9.  Muhammad, who I believe to have been a real, historical person, clearly knew quite a bit about Christianity from oral traditions. This can be seen in multiple passages in the Qu’ran, which at first appear to be referencing Bible stories or sayings of Jesus, then go off on unrecognizable tangents.  It is known that the uncle of Muhammad’s first wife was a cleric—either a priest or a monk—of one of the Syriac-speaking (now) Oriental Orthodox groups that had splintered off from the Greek church, and that he had many conversations with this man.  One of Muhammad’s later wives was also a Coptic Christian.  But a big communication problem existed: as of the 7^th Century, no one had bothered to attempt a translation of the Scriptures into Arabic, the language of the “backward” Arabs.  So what Muhammad knew of the Scriptures, he would have known from oral traditions transmitted by Christians who may or may not have had the Scriptures, but if so not in a language Muhammad could understand.    Muhammad then understood what he wanted to understand of these traditions, and corrected the Christians’ insult against his Arabic culture by producing a whole new body of supposed words of God in “pure” or “clear” Arabic. See, Qur’an 16:103; 41:3; 41:44.  And from then on, followers of Islam believe that the only true words of Allah are those dictated by Muhammad in “pure” or “clear” Arabic, though they are allowed to use good “interpretations” in their own language if they can’t understand Arabic.  Lasting lesson:  it is always dangerous to slight a culture in the presentation of the Gospel!
10. Christians in Muhammad’s environment went to war with each other—and with others—over doctrinal issues, and he was well aware of this.  See, most pointedly, Qur’an 5:14, in which Muhammad accuses us collectively of forgetting the “better part” of what we were taught—love for each other? John 13:35—and of Allah therefore putting enmity between us as a judicial punishment.  Although it is unlikely any 7^th Century Arabian Christian would have been aware of the writings of Augustine, most of them would likely have justified violence against “heretics” on grounds similar to Augustine’s theory of “just war.” Muhammad took this corruption of Christianity and absolutized it as a main tenet of his religion—the necessity of jihad.    He would also have been aware of how Christians in Arabia—and in the East generally—treated the women among them.  This unscriptural view of women, which was paired in Christianity of this period with an almost entirely negative view of sexuality, arose directly from the adoption by the organized Church generally of a primary purpose to maintain the existing social order.  Muhammad appears to have borrowed and absolutized much of it.  These are only two examples of the effect of corrupted Chrisian ideas on Islam.  There are others.  Then, as Ellul points out, later Medieval Christianity borrowed much of the theory of holy war and the misogyny of Islam back from Islam.  But he misses that Mohammed seems to have gotten both from corrupted versions of Christianity in the first place. 
11. The final problem that it appears Islam borrowed from offshoots of Christianity, developed, and then Christianity tried to borrow back is the most fundamental of them all:  the concept that originated with Plato and his followers, not the Bible, that the One behind the Universe is completely “simple”—indivisible, even in concept—and so completely “other,” different from everything he created, including us, that he can have no real direct interaction with us.  Various early Christian groups attempted to reconcile the Scriptures with Neoplatonist Greek philosophy on this point and were subsequently labeled as “heretics” and exiled from Roman territory. Some of these fled to Arabia.   There is a good chance that Muhammad picked up his very strong form of monism—which declares absolutely that God’s simplicity excludes any possibility that he has children (Jesus or us) and his otherness excludes any possibility of direct contact with God (even their Prophet only heard messages from angels)—from one of them.  I haven’t fully investigated this, but the Islamic position sounds a lot like a Greek philosophical concept, even though Muhammad himself would not have had any direct contact with Greek philosophy.  In any event, as Ellul points out, when Europe received Latin translations, mostly translated in Toledo and Córdoba, now in Spain, of the Islamic commentaries on Greek philosophers in the 12^th Century (and after), and tried to reconcile Christianity with them, it caused all manner of trouble, which continues to this day.  Greek, or Islamic, philosophical monism truly is completely incompatible with thinking of Jesus, and ourselves, as God’s children, with whom he speaks and shares his life.  And you can forget about the Trinity!
12. I now return to the two questions that bothered John Wheeler toward the end of his life, because he could formulate them but considered them unanswered.  They have theological answers Wheeler would not have been able to accept.  Wheeler’s first unanswered question is this:  if the universe is made of (or from) information, whose information is it?  To me the obvious answer is “God’s information.”  Specifically, God spoke order into his creation:  “The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” Genesis 1:2-3.  “By faith, we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which are visible.”  Hebrews 13:3.  And God has given humans, alone among his creation as far as we know, the ability to speak and to understand speech, a capacity which is a very important part of God’s image in us.  And we can know God only because he speaks to us!   This leads naturally into Wheeler’s second unanswered question.
13. I here note that the answer to Wheeler’s second unanswered question is also a solution to theology’s predestination versus free will conundrum.  Wheeler observed that quantum mechanics implies that every time an “observer” observes a system, the very act of observing the system changes it, even if the observer does nothing else to change it other than merely observe.  But when this is generalized to the whole cosmos, with billions of observers observing every part of it while living in it, this implies that we all “participate” in creating reality—simply by observing it, even if we do nothing else of our own volition to change it.  And, of course, we all act volitionally to change things in our environments as well, in addition to merely observing it.  So, Wheeler asked, if there are billions of observer/participants who are each, independently, participating in creating reality, why is there only one reality?  Why aren’t there billions of distinct, disjoint realities, a separate one for each of the billions of participants?  (Or, viewed from a different perspective, how can we say that another person, who is an equal participant with us in creating reality, is hallucinating or delusional because they do not observe the same reality we do?)  The answer lies in the source of the information that puts order into the ordered motion at the heart of reality, that puts order into everything.  Yes, we all participate in creating reality, and are, within limits, free to act.  We can even choose to do things that locally, in our own time and environment, oppose God’s will.  But God’s spoken Word, the information that puts order into everything, stands above time (which is not fundamental, motion is) and directs the movement of everything—including the outcome of our rebellion—to the predetermined end.  We are free to act, to create reality, only within the bounds of the order God speaks into it. 

Whether I am the one who is now to finish what I’ve started on any of these subjects, and, if so, where, how and under what conditions, is all up for redetermination.

I’ll close these ramblings by quoting the last verse from Thomas Kelley’s hymn “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him,” which was commonly sung when I was young but seems never to be sung today:

 Then we shall be where we would be,

then we shall be what we should be;

things that are not now, nor could be,

soon shall be our own.

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Index to the New Series / Índice de la nueva serie