The Ear Tests
May 7, 2009“The ear tests words as the tongue tastes food” – Job 34:3
How does one that will die have faith, and to what effect does he imagine this faith to have. Life as test, trial, or testimonial is ingenuine and incomprehensible outside of theoretical jargon. We must be alive first and foremost. From that we should arrive at any ethic, even a faithful one.
Faith cannot, and mustn’t, spit in the face of a life genuinely living. A faith that abandons the body and its goods is ultimately incompatible with our existence. Man as flawed, as embodied, as contradictory, as ignorant must be taken into consideration. Not to remove man from this turmoil but to help him understand it. We are here to understand humanity, to understand our self, to know ourselves. This can be the only conclusion drawn from our continued sense input. In a faith system this means that something, someone, somewhere out there, wants us to experience this, for a reason.
To say that the bible is the word of God is to say that the world is not the word of God. To say that Jesus is the only son of God, is to say that we are not all children of God. To say that the law is the only way to live is to say that natural law is inadequate and the law of our consciousness cannot lead us to God who graciously put such a soul within us. To say we need a savior is to say that God’s grace needs physical action in order to be fulfilled – that he is imperfect without this nitty gritty world. Or, if not imperfect, at least inadequate.
We must take all of this into the matter of faith. When we believe something must be, we preclude and limit our understanding of God. Yet, we mustn’t be afraid of these conclusions. After all, this world can be hard to understand, and undoubtedly it’s hidden God is a complex one. But we must understand what we are inherently sacrificing when we believe. Too often we focus on what we are believing IN, rather than what we are believing OUT. That is to say, the things we can no longer genuinely believe IN because it contradicts other things.
I urge us all to reconsider this system of belief. I urge everyone to keep the faith.
“To say that the bible is the word of God is to say that the world is not the word of God.”
Not necessarily, remember Augustine says there’s two books of revelation, the scriptures and the natural world.
“To say that the law is the only way to live is to say that natural law is inadequate and the law of our consciousness cannot lead us to God who graciously put such a soul within us.”
I would cite St. Paul but we all know the prejudice there, rather perhaps Jeremiah 33…
“To say we need a savior is to say that God’s grace needs physical action in order to be fulfilled – that he is imperfect without this nitty gritty world. Or, if not imperfect, at least inadequate.”
Remember we are made in the image and likeness, and that image and likeness is one of the dust of the earth infused with the breath of life. Complexity beyond our feeble principle-of-ID understanding does not entail imperfection.
“undoubtedly it’s hidden God is a complex one”
Thus we must be careful in finding god when proceeding from our understanding upwards and not the other way around.
“Not necessarily, remember Augustine says there’s two books of revelation, the scriptures and the natural world.” – If so then why do we need the bible? Why are the sense that God gave us not enough to view the world that God gave us? Theology can pretend to make these two statements make sense, but in the end they simply do not. Faith must come before and above theology – also, faith and reason can come before theology without being caught under an umbrella labeled theology.
“Complexity beyond our feeble principle-of-ID understanding does not entail imperfection” And the inability to understand cannot be a scapegoat any longer, such is the point of this post. We cannot simply say that Jesus is grand because he is not understandable, or that he is nor understandable merely because He (or God) is grand. Its a shortcut to a genuine understanding of faith. He must be graspable entirely through either faith, reason, or both. Or he cannot be grasped in entirety, which for me makes for a rather imperfect savior – especially one who is supposed to bridge the gap between the hidden God and Man – not just keep the same mystic distance while throwing some half-meaningful gesture toward man for “salvation”. Wasn’t the idea to bridge the gap and make God understand man and man understand God better? Not just add a new lair of incomprehensible “divine mystery”?
As for any quote from St. Paul or Jeremiah, I would agree that this problem is outlined in the bible, that is precisely from where I draw my critique. A good Christian or Jew will say that the bible points for a necessity of texts outside the bible.
“Thus we must be careful in finding god when proceeding from our understanding upwards and not the other way around.” There is no “finding” God. God chooses to hide, or to be revealed. Our “finding” of Him is an outdated metaphor that cannot truly reflect the darkness of our modernity.
my two essential points:
1.)God and or God’s self revelation, need not be a singularity to be perfect. In fact, we choose to understand Him in this manner, 3 in 1.
2.)Approaching transcendence is a two way thing. You have the thing which is transcended and the thing which transcends. Hence, when beginning with our understanding and moving that statically upward to the divine, yes we encounter unreachable mystery. From the other way, moving from the untouchable divine to immanence results in things which seem to not always line up perfectly or perhaps are best understood in multiple ways.
There is a breakdown in equality when an absolute from either end is extended to the other. I would not propose either ineffable mystery nor complete necessity to fit in our minds. I think the problem does go beyond faith and reason; these in themselves are actually inadequate. We exist as limited creatures, in our finite perception of the divine, also in out essential ties to time as we are beings in the world. To approach the completeness of God’s self revelation through Jesus Christ, we need to approach it for what it is, and not what is not. And that’s a very complex thing.
(the Jeremiah reference: the law is written in our heart. For the use of ‘finding’, no crap, look at what I imply and not whether a word is the absolute best particular symbolic understanding of something quite complicated to talk about…)
I simply don’t understand what you are even implying by that statement… so I apologize for the ‘crap’. I don’t know whether you meant understanding, conceptualizing, or even loving, knowing, or believing in – I simply do not understand your implications, so I went with word interpretation, and it didn’t seem like ‘finding’ a God was that far away from what you were saying – but more importantly, it is what MOST people outside of our particular group DO MEAN when they say “find” – they actually mean you “find” God. So I attack the idea not the person, not for your good, or our good, but the good of any other person that stumbles upon this debate and thinks you really do mean “find”. Again, I apologize.
1.) God certainly doesn’t NEED to be a singularity to be perfect – I make no claims to what God needs to be. But our understanding should reflect that paradigm. We should wrestle with the idea that our current conceptualization of a God-in-man points to some sticky and even dark conclusions about the nature of our divine. It is more about the nature of our relationship, and less about His being. Perhaps our understanding of the 3-in-1 trinity doesn’t at all fill the gap that was between the Jews and God, simply made it different. Hence, Jesus’ sacrifice didn’t offer any more additional salvation than any previous God ordained order – it simply applied a different process. It shouldn’t surprise you that this post is A.) Not really directed at someone with your deepness and complexity of faith, and is probably more influenced by you than any other and B.) A defense of Judaism’s paired relation to Christianity.
2.) I agree with exactly what you have said. I simply don’t believe that this answer is a particularly theological one – it is in fact beyond theology. A movement that I believe is necessary and beneficial based mostly on your teachings through (obviously) my lens of beliefs. This movement is what this post is pointing toward. It is, in fact, a Holmesian conclusion. =P
I think we’re on the same page, key to all is the struggle?
hahaha… as usual… I think we are.
See, now that’s where we all mess it up…to qoute my son Theopilus..” we are made in the image and likeness of God”..and au contraire…got the pic yet? It’s fort fuckin knox.
“To say we need a savior is to say that God’s grace needs physical action in order to be fulfilled – that he is imperfect without this nitty gritty world. Or, if not imperfect, at least inadequate.”
There are other problems here but i focus on the above. He is imperfect without this sacrifice? or inadequate? Why Him? Why not Us? The sacrifice of Christ is perceived by Christians to be the ultimate *perfect* sacrifice for our imperfect, lawless, disobedience. This says nothing about God’s inadequacy but only our own.
mmmm… as images and likeness of a God we then do mirror the same limitations. You are very astute… and human centered? I have never needed to elucidated on our own limitations – they are so numerous. Perhaps I should, in the spirit of this Judeo-Christian metaphor. Though I would disagree with it saying “nothing” about God’s inadequacy. That’s a little extreme in the other direction. For all we can know of God is our own understandings which are inherently limited, which means any idea of God we have is limited. This of course leads many weak-willed individuals to atheism, but it should merely probe the curious to ask more questions. Perhaps God is perfect, but that really says a lot more about ‘perfect’ than anything else? Eh?