Unsettled by the continuing lack of meaningful concern and action over disunity in the body of Christ I have set forward the same arguments you’ve been reading from this site since its inception into proper print format. The House that Stands: Seeking God’s Kingdom and Unity in the Body of Christis now available in print and as an e-book from Amazon.
Christians of all stripes have worked on meaningful solutions to all kinds of problems we have encountered in our time on this earth, but unity with God and with one another is not one of them. We pay tribute to the reality of the global church or even perhaps the church that transcends life and death but cannot grasp that most believers are nothing like us, and yet we are called to be as one with one another and God as God is one with Himself. The House that Stands attempts to guide the reader’s thoughts towards these foundational truths with medium to short chapters probing the depths of unity in the body of Christ as it relates to the Kingdom and House of God.
I’ve grown tired of lip-service calls for unity among the people of God without the hard theological and philosophical work of determining what the underpinnings of that unity are and if we can continue much in the same way and yet somehow do life together or if we need a fresh start. What I’ve written is a start towards those ends; contemplations that will be familiar if we’ve talked recently as they have been my focus for some time now. Some of it will be difficult to understand and other parts perhaps too simplistic, but none of it is meant to be read once and ticked off the list of reading material. These are my ever-present meditations, and I offer them for you to meditate on as well. The chapters are medium to short in length and while deceptively short, they should have you thinking along the lines of how exactly we are supposed to be as one with one another and God as God is one with Himself in our lifetimes.
NEARHISM (NEAR-ISM); –HEBREW: “HE MAKES HIMSELF KNOWN”: THE EPISTEMOLOGY WHICH CLAIMS THAT KNOWLEDGE IS, IN EVERY INSTANCE, A REVELATION TO AN INDIVIDUAL BY AN OUTSIDE ULTIMATE SOURCE.
Nerahism posits that revelation precedes experience and rational thought in the order of events that take place in knowing. Experience or rational thought without revelation puts the cart before the horse and are both instances following revelation and are not in themselves indicative of learning and knowing nor accurate measures for distinction between justified belief and opinion. The scientist who studies a subject is flooded first with what is unveiled before them; data they record which they then attempt to deduce an interpretation and which, only over a long and distinguished career of experience, can they be said to be the expert in their field. A good scientist is first, an expert of the senses.
The theologian and apologist as well must be experts of the senses–not that the things of God can be divined by human senses but that all of creation testifies that there is an eternally powerful divine one (Rom. 1), that all of mankind is made indefensible from the belief of this being’s existence (Rom.1 and 10) , and that those who are wise acknowledge with childlike certainty that He exists and as a result He rewards those who diligently seek Him, presumably with more revelation (Heb. 11). Having this statement before us, we can then rationalise that if these things are so, then at the very essence and core of belief is the revelation of God’s existence to us by the rest of creation. That He has made Himself known is the first and primary revelation for which we are indefensible for not believing. This is not to say that acknowledgement of God’s existence is salvific by nature, (Jas 2:9 is quite clear on this point) but that one cannot justify belief in Jesus as the Christ before they have acknowledged that God exists. The gospel without context is airy fairy nonsense. One cannot experience salvation apart from revelation, nor can a person by way of rational thought convince themselves of salvation without revelation.
Revelation from God concerning His existence met with childlike acceptance and the faithful stewardship of that seminal revelation results in the further entrusting of revelation to the individual by God until the gospel of reconciliation with the Father through the Son is entrusted to and accepted by that person.
The knowledge of God does not pass from revelation to experience or rational thought at this point as Paul rebukes the Galatians for this same diversion from the essence of the gospel.
11 For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel.[c]12 For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
Galatians 1:11-12 English Standard Version
The new trustee of the gospel must continue as they began in this back and forth of listening for God to reveal some new aspect of Himself to them through creation, believing it with childlike certainty and stewarding what they have been entrusted with until they are entrusted with the next revelation from God. This is not to say that the Scriptures are unnecessary in this back and forth. Reading and studying the scriptures realigns our own hearts and minds to be mindful of how God has revealed Himself to past generations in their time and situations and therefore how He may be revealing Himself in our time.
It is unreasonable to assume that the scriptures contain every instance of God revealing Himself to every individual to which He has ever made Himself known. The scriptures are, instead, a cross section and amalgamation of significant instances in which God repeatedly revealed Himself to each generation. These instances together provide us a standard for interpreting our experiences and our rationalisations. They provide a cross reference for discerning the origins of a revelation as being from God, a human, or something else entirely (1 Jn 4). They are, as Paul writes to Timothy
…breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God[a] may be complete, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 English Standard Version
The very existence of the scriptures is evidence that God reveals Himself gradually by degrees to each individual not relying on either past experience or their own rationalisations to fill in the blanks but constantly discounting human experience and worldly wisdom as being altogether useless in the pursuit of God. While the scriptures are sufficient, they are not all that God speaks through. God is the master of redundancy. What we miss in the scriptures is revealed to us in creation and what we glean from the scriptures is revealed to us again in life. Otherwise, it could not be said that “faith without works in dead” (Jas 1). The stewardship of revelation results in becoming a co-revealer taking up our place along with the rest of creation to reveal the existence of the eternally powerful divine one. Having come full circle, God has made himself known first to us and then through us to reveal Himself to the world.
Writer and Editor of Ammi Ruhama Community Christian Union. Also published on Baseline Christianity.
Daniel L. Bacon
ARC Guide Level 3 Ideal for those well acquainted with our thought process at Ammi Ruhama Community.
How the immaterial kingdom which God has established in Christ is tied to the material household He has called us to live in and the necessity that we should not divide the two.
The Divided House
Modern day Christianity is punctuated by church splits. From The Great Schism that split the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054, to the Protestant Reformation in 1517, to the innumerable schisms, divides, and dissolutions that followed thereafter and to this day and highly likely tomorrow as well. The lack of meaningful unity in the body of Christ is the worst kept secret ever. As the children of God, we grow more estranged from one another as time pushes us further on and apart from these events. At times we have even taken up arms against one another such as in The Crusades, The American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I and II, The Troubles in Ireland; we could continue and expand but the evidence is sufficient; we are a house divided, and unless we can unite, we will fall.
24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
Mark 3:24-25 English Standard Version
Let me be clear, God is not divided against Himself. His Kingdom remains strong and immovable, but by dividing the house of God we have effectively ensured that the Household of God remains divided contrary to God’s desire that we should be as one with one another and God as God is one with Himself. Increased recognition of the unfailing unity of God’s Kingdom will result in the unity of the Household of God. In the same way, increased division in the body will result in the continued downward spiral of the body and House of God.
Ecumenical-Lite
Ecumenism is the belief that meaningful unity in the household of God means being under the same umbrella organisation, the same preacher, the same theological statement, the same code of conduct, and the same marketing strategy for the gospel. Yeah, it leaves a bad taste in pretty much everyone’s mouth. Whenever anyone starts talking about unity among the people of God, there is a certain group of believers who let out an audible sanctimonious groan. Unless the kind of unity being written or talked about is the kind where we are one with ourselves in our own respective local churches, we get antsy that what is being preached is ecumenism. To put our minds at ease, material ecumenism is not biblical unity, nor what I am calling for in this examination of the Kingdom and Household of God. Understand however, that this means that if we think Biblical unity looks like pockets of isolated ecumenism in our respective local churches then we are still miles off from what the Bible teaches. If I claim any aspect of the flesh as the unifying factor for unity with my brothers and sisters in Christ, I have put something in God’s place. This includes proximity, mission statement, experience, and any other material thing. In plain words, Biblical unity may not be material ecumenism as we have just detailed, but neither is it the ecumenical-lite that we currently have where, “If you’re under my roof you’ll obey my rules”.
Meaningful Unity & The Mind/Body Problem
When we do not take meaningful steps towards Biblical unity among the people of God, we enshrine meaningful practices which maintain and protect the divided household of God as the ideal in its pragmatism, if woeful in its Biblical authenticity. By contrast, each step we take towards Biblical Unity is away from pet peeves and pet theologies; those grey areas we love to hate that keep us divided as the body of Christ and our own private interpretations. It has been said that, “doctrine divides,” but I tell you that true doctrine is revealed only by the Spirit of God through the Word of God and that Biblical unity is in love, faith and hope in the gospel of Christ. This should not surprise us as the kingdom that Jesus came to establish is not a fleshly kingdom, but a spiritual kingdom; therefore, Biblical unity is a spiritual reality with physical implications.
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”
Jesus to Pilate, John 18:36 English Standard Version
The King of all creation crucified that day said that if the Kingdom of God was of this world, then we would fight to win the Kingdom, and fight to defend it through acts of the flesh. But you may say, there are physical commands for us to do in the scriptures. If the Kingdom of God is not of this world; if it is a spiritual reality, a spiritual union, a spiritual ecumenism, why meet physically at all? Why have physical commands at all? This, my friends, is the misunderstanding of the century. As born and raised materialists who flirt with idealism, we tend to believe that the material gives birth to the immaterial. That the body gives birth to the mind–that acts of the flesh make one spiritual–this is not Biblical thinking. The immaterial always precedes the material in the Word. God speaks and creation comes into being, He calls David a King when he is yet a Shepherd and it comes to pass. On the inverse side of immaterial becoming material, hatred and lust feature as repeated themes in the Word giving examples of the immaterial as a seed bearing the fruit of the material.
For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
Proverbs 23:7 New King James Version
24 Whoever hates disguises himself with his lips
and harbors deceit in his heart;
25 when he speaks graciously, believe him not,
for there are seven abominations in his heart;
26 though his hatred be covered with deception,
his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.
Proverbs 26:24-26 English Standard Version
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.
Proverbs 26:24-26 English Standard Version
21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother[a] will be liable to judgment; whoever insults[b] his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell[c] of fire.
Matthew 5:21-22 English Standard Version
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Matthew 5:27 English Standard Version
The implications of this are that there is no mind/body problem in the Word of God. We are seen not as two-in-one but as one. We are immortal, immaterial souls with mortal, material bodies for use as interfaces of communication with God and with one another. What we think in our minds becomes our reality, so much so that to entertain thoughts of hatred and lust is seen as the same as planting a seed in the ground with the inevitable outcome of producing after their respective kinds. Hatred is the heirloom seed of murder and lust the heirloom seed of adultery just as surely as sowing the Spirit produces love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness, and gentleness and self-control. Immaterial produces material. The fact that our feeble minds fail to grasp the whole sense of its mechanics doesn’t come into the consideration of whether it is true. God breathed into our nostrils producing a spirit and we became living beings.
then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
Genesis 2:7 English Standard Version
As immortal, immaterial, beings we inhabit physical bodies, as previously mentioned, interfaces that support intersoul-communication with God and with one another. However, as I have written inIntersoul, the interface is broken. It is our life’s work to continue Christ’s ministry of reconciliation; to repair the interface and bring everything and everyone under the rule and reign of Jesus. This brings us back to the question at hand. If I am an immortal, immaterial soul, why are there demands on my physical body in the Word? Surely the body is superfluous or purely sinful and, if so, ‘to Hell with it!’ This is what some early thinkers thought and produced Docetism; a heresy that has successfully kept Western Christians afraid of idealism for centuries. (I will address this a little later but a defence against Docetism is outside of our scope). If our bodies are interfaces for intersoul-communication, then when we communicate with others we communicate in the body and we fulfil our purpose. The body is meant to communicate the best news ever to one another. Remember that the interface was not always broken. We, through Adam and Eve walked and talked with God with no secondary interface between us. We were naked before Him and without shame. Only after the fall did secondary interfaces become necessary for communion with Him. The best news today is that we can again appear before God without a secondary interface as God the Son has become our intermediary before God the Father and God the Spirit the interpreter of our innermost hearts. This is us individually. Gathered, we become a megaphone declaring the goodness and mercy we have received from God via the unity of one voice coming from one mind in one Spirit. Where one of us is a defiant candle–a pin prick of light in a world of darkness, collectively we are a city on a hill whose light pollution can be seen by the world for miles around.
Unified in Our Hope
It is necessary to understand and to contemplate, (while we make the connection between God’s Immaterial Kingdom and His Material House) why we meet in the physical world and not through some ethereal meditative, “soul casting state,” in which our souls could hypothetically commune with God and with one another, since we are citizens of a spiritual kingdom. Again, we are not preaching Docetism–the body is not inherently sinful–it is broken by us through sin. When Pilate asked Jesus if He was a King His answer is that if He was a King of a physical kingdom then his disciples would have fought to establish and maintain it, but that they didn’t because His Kingdom is a Spiritual Kingdom. So, if God is the King of a Spiritual Kingdom, what are the physical aspects of that Kingdom? If immaterial gives birth to material, then perhaps it is simply our understanding, that as immaterial beings in material bodies and simultaneously citizens of an immaterial kingdom, we accept the rule and reign of God in the immaterial, which gives birth to material fruits (fellowship, unity, love, commitment to one another, fields we did not sow, houses we did not build etc) and that we are then to use this to bless our neighbours. Do we do this as if we were preparing some earthly throne for Him to inhabit one day? No! His throne is in Heaven and will not be on earth until heaven meets earth. So we are, in effect, waiting for that event to take place. It is our hope for that future that keeps us going. This fact is, one of the most difficult to accept about Christianity. There is no world to save—that work was completed by Christ through the cross. There are no noble acts of gallantry to be performed by us in the name of God and Country–we will not outshine the work of Christ. The battle is won–Christ is the victor, and the retreating armies of Hell are fleeing the judgement to come. Will we set mortal flesh free? It will be enslaved again and usually by its own will. Should we save a mortal life and not share with the soul within them the good news of eternal life? Should we stand in the way of someone who has chosen another life and not place the choice of Christ before them? For some, this may seem like a meaningless life. What is life if there is no grand quest to fulfil? And to that I ask, will we fight evil in Eternity? Will we retain our resolve with a non-existent enemy at the gates when we are reposing in the glory of the Son? What is Sabbath living, but life lived as if our hope was manifest before our eyes. Life lived as if we would never hunger or thirst or be in dread again? It is in the quiet, contained life where we live at peace with all people and answer for the hope that we possess, that we acknowledge our confidence in the rule and reign of Christ our King. These may all seem like individual pursuits. But what is a Kingdom of one citizen? All who call on the name of the Lord are citizens of this Kingdom and, I am sorry to say this, but none of us are, ‘in the lord’s army,’ in this case. The war is already over, and the rebuilding has begun. We are the emissaries who go from town to town to spread the good news of Christ’s reign, rebuilding what was damaged in the war and using the vast treasury of our new King to do so. The fighting has ceased; what rebellion remains now, is fighting a lost cause that would see the old feuding kings re-established. We do not all believe that the war is over however, and some, instead of moving from town to town, have set up defences against the bordering towns thinking the enemy should be holed up within them. They use secret passwords and handshakes to show loyalty to a King who requires no such protection from His subjects. If time is the landscape of the Kingdom of God, then the Apostles started at the King and went out from Him to spread the good news of the mercy and love of the cross to all His subjects across time and space. Our distance from the King, then, is not a matter of material distance but immaterial. If it is immaterial, then we are in His courts even now while we expand the message of his rule and reign in our given time and space. The implications of this are incredible. Consider this passage from The Revelation. John writes,
9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Revelation 7:9-12 English Standard Version
Consider this, that every tribe; tongue and nation will be present on that day. Every single one! This was and will be from the beginning of time until the events of the revelation of Christ at the end. This will include every grouping of people that has been formed or separated; those still to be formed or contemplating to be formed. Every iteration and collection of clicks, whistles and words, every form of government will be standing before the throne of God speaking with one voice the glory and praise of the Son. If you thought I was going down a rabbit trail let me assure you that this is biblical unity. This is identification with the Son. This can never be the result of having been the same in the flesh. Is there any continuity in the flesh that John gives us? Perhaps that we are all perceived as human in all our brokenness and that while we have all received mercy from God, we should be standing in His presence shouting aloud His praises, and not be looking around to see whom we think should not be there. I guarantee that there will be people standing before the throne of God who will be just as surprised to see us as we are to see them. One or both of us may have lost everything in the all-consuming fire of the day of the Lord but we ourselves have been saved. So, what prevents us from shouting His praises together before we get there? What organisational values enshrine our division? What precepts of purpose perpetuate such a travesty against the precepts of God? The immaterial has given birth to material life in Christ and we sit denying it based on our organisation in the flesh. As I have written previously–this is to our shame. We who have been called by the Spirit of God into the Spiritual Kingdom of God which spans time and space are so full of pride that we believe that our iteration of Christianity will be the only one present on that day. I choose to believe the Word when it says,
For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
1 Corinthians 2:11 English Standard Version
Paul says this considering the Corinthian division thinking themselves to be special, when all that they had received in Christ was given to them. There are vastly more divisions today. Perhaps if we had listened then, it would not be so today and because of our unity we would have presented the world with the truth that the Son was sent from the Father and they would have believed. Some believed anyway because they saw examples of unity in their own context, but these, my siblings, were the exception instead of the rule. Remember, however, that even if we had, we are not preparing an earthly throne for Christ to sit on. He sits on a Spiritual throne in our hearts and the day and time of His return is kept by the Father until the end of days and every generation that He has ordained to exist has existed. There is no quota to meet and fulfil, but only a life lived in service and obedience to our King who dwells in unapproachable light.
Flaming Hoops of Failed Glory
If we read the Bible in the light of God spreading the news of God’s established Spiritual Kingdom through His people, then we no longer read it as if it says, “this is who to exclude,” but read it, as it often explicitly says, “why did you think you were special and exclude them from my Kingdom?” The first step towards organising ourselves in the material according to the Spirit is to re-ground ourselves in the Word of God and take note that we are not special. There were no flaming hoops for us to jump through when we received the gospel that means that we have a corner on the market of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we are the people of God, then we have received mercy for our shortcomings in glory and there is nothing of ourselves for us to boast about. Not our education, our pedigree, our governance, our economics–nothing. It is a Spiritual Kingdom with material fruits, and any of those material fruits that come to pass are because of the work done by God and not by us. By recognising that we have received everything we possess in and from Christ we can then identify what we have received in Christ, who He has made us, and the rights we now possess as heirs of God and His Spiritual Kingdom.
Further Reading
I have written about the rights of the people of God inThe Christian’s Bill of Rights and in other posts marked under the same category, but the topic is nowhere near exhausted. Every generation will have to have this conversation with itself. There is no distinction in Christ. The wildest of derivations of our hearts and intents do not preclude us from being included in the Kingdom of God if we call on the name of Jesus to be saved.
Conclusion
To conclude, God’s immaterial Kingdom is made manifest in His material household. Increased belief in Spiritual ecumenism will result in increased physical ecumenism under God. This is not due to the homogenising effect of modern day Judaising, but rather that we all love and obey God, identifying with the Son of God in His death, burial and resurrection and look forward to His coming return. Maranatha.
The truth sets us free, but what is truth? It is more than abstract factual correctness. It is the fruit of which tree we are grafted into; the very language we learn from our Father upon our new birth.
John 8:31-32
31So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 8:32-33 English Standard Version
The Context
In the ramp up to his crucifixion, Jesus engages the Jewish leaders in a rather volatile exchange that nearly results in His stoning. Jesus is teaching in the temple testifying about Himself saying that He is light of the world, the Messiah and says to those who believed in Him that if they abide in the words He has just spoken about Himself then they are truly His disciples and that they will know the truth and the truth will set them free. The Jewish leaders take exception to the suggestion that they are not in fact free. They cite their political and heritage status as proof of their freedom but Jesus maintains that those who practice sin are not free but are enslaved to sin, and walk in darkness. Jesus cites their hatred of Him and desire to put him to death as proof that they walk in the footsteps of their murderous father and are indeed the offspring of the devil. This is what moves the elders to take up stones but Jesus disappears into the crowd to avoid death before His time.
What is Truth?
The Truth sets us free, but what is truth? It is more than abstract factual correctness. It is the fruit of which tree we are grafted into; the very language we learn from our Father upon our new birth. The Jewish leaders were not speaking a factual lie when they said that their ancestor was Abraham, nor that they themselves were not slaves in the social hierarchy. However, they were not speaking the metaphysical truth that Jesus was discussing. Jesus says that the one who claims Abraham as their father and yet walks and talks nothing like Abraham is a liar as Abraham walked and spoke by faith and the Jewish leaders walked and spoke by sight. Jesus likens this deep self deception of claiming to be something other than what we are, to claiming to speak the language of our so-called fathers and yet not speak their language. To say, for example, that we are Chinese, yet when a born and breed Han from China walks into the room and greets us in Mandarin, we don’t know the language and get angry at them for not greeting us in English! We are exposed as fraudulent in our claims. In the same way, if we do not know the voice of the Spirit of God and are offended when He speaks because we do not understand, then there is a good chance that we are not born of God. But, knowing this, the truth can set us free.
Free from Sin for Freedoms Sake
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Galatians 5:1 English Standard Version
It would be very easy, reading a verse like this, to think that what Paul means is that since we have been physically set free we should not bind ourselves to a physical or political yoke of slavery. We need to remember that Jesus says that the one who sins is a slave to sin or to their flesh. Other verses say a slave to our passions; that is to the unconscious visceral reactions of our bodies to any exterior stimuli. When compared with other imagery in the New Testament we find that what Jesus means is that the one who sins is a slave to their own body. Paul, on the other hand flips the situation on its head. The New International Version gives us a vivid image of disciplining the body.
No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
1 Corinthians 9:27 English Standard Version
In Paul’s analogy, he is discipling his body for a race or a fight. He trains others to run and fight, but would be a sorry excuse for a coach if he himself could not run or fight. What Paul and Jesus are saying is that either we are slave to our bodies or our bodies are slaves to us! We are either controlled by the flesh and the things of this world, or we submit to the Spirit and make our flesh the servant and slave of our minds. The idealists (of which I am one) are wont to remind us to take back our thinking from our bodies and to give it back to our minds–this I think is the idea behind freedom. If freedom is a state of being–a state of mind–that results in a physical reality then the Spirit unleashes our minds from our bodies and we can then understand the sayings of Jesus in regards to food being for body and not the body for food, only perhaps we will slightly adjust to say that the body is for the soul and not the soul for the body. Both are integral to the interface, the body is the primary interface; the slave, but the soul is the one who communicates through the body. The body may be in chains and the soul free, but if the soul is in chains then so will the body be. When the soul is set free the body will not be far behind.
No one who is master of their body enslaves another in body or mind to do their will; they are perfectly capable of doing the work themselves and indeed say to themselves regularly, “if you want something done right, do it yourself”. However, when ‘like minds,’ meet they spark genius between them and move mountains by the power of two or more souls who were masters of their own bodies and therefore of their environment. These are the truly free ones. They are not, necessarily, marked by wealth or status, or ascetism or poverty–they are those who tell their bodies to behave a certain way and obey.
The Spirit is Willing But the Flesh is Weak
However, the interface is broken. No matter how masterful we are over our environment it is still marred by secondary interfaces that, over time, have weakened us. We attempt to tell ourselves what to do, and end up crying out in frustration with Paul,
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Romans 7:24 English Standard Version
Every action done in the flesh leads to death and every action done in the Spirit leads to life–Paul concludes that Christ saves us from this body infested with death. Belief in Christ as the light of the world sets us free, as Jesus testified about Himself. Not free as in separated fromour bodies of death but free from the control of the body, and indeed freedom to enslave the body to the soul to be used once again for intersoul communication.
The State of Affairs
Our bodies exude self absorbed death when they are in control and as a result we drive people away from us, whether they be controlled by the flesh or by the Spirit. People come together in the flesh when there is a common goal to legitimise, provide for and protect one another’s bodily well being. This is so engrained in us, that we all just thought, “well, what’s wrong with that,”. What’s wrong with that is that what or rather whom we are protecting one another from are other primary interfaces controlled by secondary interfaces. We fail in our common goal of intersoul communication and settle for the compromise of interbody cooperation.
People controlled by the Spirit, however, are not concerned about their own legitimacy, safety or provision because it does not rest in other people, nor even in themselves, but in the Spirit. They speak the words they are told to speak, they go where they are told to go and do what they are told to do without fear of alienation from their source of value. Those controlled by the flesh look on them as if they were the hyper-individual, but that is their own failed eyesight. If they were to look on them in the Spirit they would see that they are one with the Spirit and with all those who are also one with God; but again do not derive their value from one another nor their association with one another but with God alone. There is a deep love between them because of their deep love for God, their is a deep unity among them because of their indescribable unity with God and the ones who live by the flesh but claim to be redeemed are driven from their presence because the Spiritual ones don’t need those who walk by the flesh as much as they think they need to be needed by other people. This is the clash between the flesh and the Spirit. This is the battle for freedom that rages in the heart of every man, woman and child. The flesh cries out to more flesh for legitimacy, safety and provision and the Spirit rests full of value in the person of Jesus.
We who would be free and would tout ourselves as free in Christ, would do well to pay heed.
To help us illustrate what Paul has been teaching the Corinthians let us look at what exclusive human power and secondary power structures do to people.
In the time of the Judges in the Old Testament, Samuel was the last ruling prophet and judge. He had eight sons in his old age and he made them judges over Israel but they were wicked and corrupted justice for bribes. So the people protested to Samuel to anoint a king over them; an exclusive ruler to legitimize them among the nations, to keep them safe and to ensure provision for the future. God tells Samuel to capitulate to their demand for a king and , curiously, tells him not to get too emotionally involved or to think that they are rejecting him personally, but that the people were rejecting God and His legitimacy, security and provision for a face they could look on and appeal to directly, a sentiment that Jesus later echoes to His disciples. This is the warning God and Samuel gave to the people before asking if this is what they wanted:
10 So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
1 Samuel 8:10-18 English Standard Version
“Hold on,” I hear you say. “A governmental change has nothing to do with how the people of God organise themselves. It’s completely different,” and to that I say, “That’s not how God saw it.” Keep in mind that these are the people of God who have received mercy at the time; the nation of priests to declare God’s glory to the nations. God saw the people’s call for a king as a personal affront to Himself and so gives the above warning about placing an intentional secondary interface between God and humanity. He says that the king will eventually be an unfaithful steward of God’s people and tax them, extort them, pull them into wars that are not their own and make space for the world in God’s Kingdom ultimately thinking that it is their kingdom and in that day they would cry out to God whom they have rejected as their king but He will not answer them.
This event is juxtaposed to when God was going to give Moses and the people into the land of Canaan but leave them there. Moses responded that if God was not going to go with them then they would not go either–only at this time the people cried out louder that they should have a king.
Today we no longer ask God for a king, instead, we ask God for a Chief Executive Officer but the warning stands.
The work of repairing the primary interface has often been referred to as building rapport, which can get a little lost in translation as rapport tends to be the word used for an singular individual and does not carry with it the weight of our more familiar term commonly used for larger groups of people; faith. People usually talk about how their faith in humanity has been lost and restored by either the great moral decay of a school shooting or the kindness of a block of neighbours who support both the victim’s family and the perpetrator’s family. When I talk about repairing the primary interface, this can only be done person to person, and when a great number of people are in concert to repair the primary interface they too must be an integral, in person part of that repair work; not just as a part of the group but also, and most importantly, as an individual. There are many things in this life that we can outsource to other people to accomplish but the work of repairing the primary interface is the one personal and irreplaceable responsibility in our lives that cannot be shirked or outsourced lest we fail to communicate the love and mercy of Christ.
How we live our day to day lives communicates our normality to others; the things we are used to doing, saying and being on a regular everyday basis–at least in the context we are most usually found. The same can be said of our environment. What we find to be normal we make no effort to change, even if it makes us miserable. Misery itself can be normal. Disease can be normal. Struggle can be normal. If you are like my 8, 3/4 year old, a messy room can be normal. Anger about not having a, ‘normal,’ sister can be normal. Stressful car journeys can be normal. But, thankfully, so also can an innate desire to refine our normal, be normal.
Cleaning House
I have started practicing meditation with my eldest daughter before bed. So far as I know the way we do it is unique to us as it was born out of necessity and so I want to describe it for you. Please someone tell us if we are practicing by accident some already codified practice.
We first prime the imagination by closing our eyes and thinking of a white circle in our minds and then change the colour from white to blue to green to purple and finally to yellow. Often she has to physically say, “white circle,” to imagine a white circle in her mind and the same for each colour after that, but increasingly she is getting faster at the priming stage without speaking.
After this we go through the rooms in the house where she spends most of her time. Tonight we did the living room, the kitchen and her bedroom. I give her a reference point and ask her to describe the room as she sees it in her mind. She will then describe in full detail what she sees as a clean room from each of the prompts I give her.
The Conversation
An interesting conversation took place after we “cleaned,” the living room and kitchen. I told her to open her eyes and she said,
A: “Daddy we did my room last night,”
Me: “Yes we did”.
A: “So why isn’t it clean? Does it happen automatically?”
Me: “No, honey, your room isn’t clean because you didn’t clean it. To you, this is normal.”
A: “No…”
Me: “Yes it is. If this wasn’t normal then you would have seen the state it is in and said to yourself, ‘this shouldn’t be like this,’ and done something about it. This is why we clean the house in our minds, so that we can change what is normal to us and so when we see that it is messy we will clean it.”
She paused for a moment and then asked,
A: “Can we meditate again but on this room (her bedroom)?”
And so we did, and again she knew exactly the details of her clean room in her mind and described them fully and without pause except to be prompted to move on to the next area.
The Work We Need to Do
It struck me later that we need to do an awful lot more, ‘house cleaning,’ in our minds if we want to change what is normal to us so that we do something about the messes in our lives. I could force my daughter to clean her room, incentivise her with an allowance and remove privileges from her if it isn’t done, but I would far rather have her change her vision of what is normal and so bring it about in real life. This is my daughter learning to repair the interface in her own life, and so must we all do the same.
It can be tempting when not wanting to speak nonsense to our neighbours to swing the other direction and rock away on our front porch and say nothing–to disconnect from the conversation all together. It is true that there are some conversations that are best to hold for another time; perhaps when both participants have matured a bit more. Remember, however, that the point of life is to communicate, so giving the cold shoulder because of a known disagreement, even in the case of what seems to be a vitally important conversation is puerile, in direct conflict with our life’s purpose, and ultimately putting too much down on one horse. Our go to ‘wisdom,’ generally comes from Thumper the Hare’s curiously absent father,
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
Mr. Hare
I would amend his statement to say, “if you can’t say something nice, say something altogether different,” keep the conversation congenial and don’t let your pride get in the way of your mutual life’s purpose of repairing the primary interface enough to communicate the best news ever. If you have to share an uncomfortable truth about what you believe that you’re pretty sure is going to be in diametric opposition to your conversation partner, take a long time to give the truth its proper context laying the foundational work of relationship first. Remember that it isn’t our job to convince anyone of anything, but to communicate plenty. We may not have all of the answers and, indeed, may be wrong on a few of the finer points, as we often are when speaking out of our blessed assurance, but remember that the point isn’t to be right and the absolute authority on all occasions. The point is to communicate the love and mercy of Christ.
These instructions will be nonsense to those united in enmity; who think that all things are fair in love and war and that the only people who are with you are those who have allied against the same enemies. The life purpose of communication does not tolerate enmity as the source of unity. All enmity with the world and with God must be done away with and the source of unity be the love and mercy of Christ.
We need to make some difficult connections when it comes to what we do and say on a day to day basis according to our new found purpose in life. Our purpose is not a new action, a new career, the care of a specific type of person or a resolution to start or stop anything, but a renewed passion to communicate. To be seen, felt, heard and understood and to see, feel, hear and understand a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and to derive value from one another in such a way as to sustain one another by fulfilling our mutual life’s purpose.
If the whole point of life is intersoul communication then the stuff of life takes a back seat to accurately and effectively communicating ourselves and our message to one another. In order for this to happen, the message must be our own and cannot be talking points from some institution or symbiotic organisation to which we belong. Otherwise we put a secondary interface between of our senses and theirs and end up speaking nonsense to our neighbours because they don’t know how to read love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control from the big red sign we are holding that says, “Abortion is Murder,” or, “God Hates Fags,” or “Don’t you see I just finished mopping the floor? Get the f*ck out!”
My question to help us make these connections will always be to ask what the point of life is. If I am thrown into a tale spin because I cannot control a situation or an outcome, or footfall on my newly clean floor, then I, perhaps, have not fully believed that the point of life is to communicate the best news ever. If I did, I would be more diplomatic and put my best foot forward. I would make a concerted effort to be crystal clear in every instance, and act and speak in a way that shows my primary interfacial care and concern for people communicated directly to them person to person. Let me be clear here, the point of life is not to, ‘be the adult,’ or to have clean floors or to be necessarily right, but to communicate. If I am convinced that I alone am right then my goal is not to communicate but to dictate as the god of my area–it is a subtle difference with massive outcomes. I can communicate who I am and what I believe without dictating to others when I fully receive who they are and what they believe and interface with them in a meaningful way moving the conversation forward without the use of what the Apostle Paul calls “well thought out arguments”. The point of life is not to control people but to love them, and serve them by the communication of the best news ever until they believe it not only by our understandable language but by our actions of love towards them because we have brought nothing but Christ and Him crucified. This is not only in terms of witnessing to the lost but to one another. We can deny Christ by denying our purpose to communicate the love and mercy of Christ in our day to day interactions. The goal is then not only that we would love and serve others and offer them the mercy of God which we ourselves received but for them to love and serve us and others around them and offer them the mercy that they received–this can only be done when we are not speaking nonsense to our neighbours.
In episode 517 of The Holy Post Podcast, frequent co-host Kaitlyn Schiess challenged the Christian community to write about human flourishing and how that impacts the way that we live in community. I considered this challenge and have decided to accept and expand the idea of the pursuit of human flourishing beyond what I believe is currently taking place. It is first necessary to recognise a distinction between pursuing abstract flourishing and pursuing human flourishing. Is the abstract flourishing of all created things the sufficient and consistent ideological end of Christianity? I believe it is certainly a part of it; perhaps the by-product of a more deserving end goal. Humans objectively flourish in certain environments of love and community which we know can and have been created on a one to one basis and even in a small community such as a family unit, but how does the abstract pursuit of flourishing scale? In this introduction, we will examine human flourishing as the by-product of the maintenance of intersoul communication.
Intersoul Communication
Human Flourishing is an objective end goal. Everyone wants to flourish in their own way, and ultimately we all agree about what flourishing looks like. When we consider the abstract objective of human flourishing, however, we do not consider that there are ends greater than my individual flourishing even if it also contributes to the so-called flourishing of the wider community. We will see that this kind of flourishing is always at the expense of our own humanity and the humanity of those least valued by the community. With the option of flourishing or communicating I would much rather communicate. Indeed, this is the example we received in Christ.
Jesus: the Great Teacher
We must reclaim Jesus’ example as the greatest communicator who ever lived. Consider that if Jesus was flourishing by anyone’s standards in heaven then, by comparison, he most certainly was not flourishing on earth. He gave up that which caused him to flourish, face to face communion with Himself, not to ensure the flourishing of those around Him; indeed, His closest followers were put to death for His sake just as He prophesied. He gave up that flourishing to re-establish the primary interface between the Father and His children. In the course of re-establishing this connection, Jesus demonstrated how to re-establish the primary interface with one another which resulted in human flourishing. By their faith, they walked and saw and spoke and were healed and ate. Jesus did not set up a secondary organisation to do this for him or shotgun heal or feed a whole crowd–he did it personally, one by one, in order to communicate through and repair the primary interface. When He had repaired his disciples sufficiently, He gave them the Holy Spirit to do the same things and they went and personally did the work that Jesus was also doing. This, I believe, is what Jesus meant when just before He was about to die he prophesied,
12“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. 13Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14If you ask mee anything in my name, I will do it.
John 14:12-14 English Standard Version
When Jesus re-established the people of God, it was a community of people who were doing exactly this. They were doing the same work and a greater work, by Jesus’ own estimation, of re-establishing peoples communion with God and with one another than Jesus was able to accomplish in his brief time with us. We began to fail this vision when we institutionalised the people of God and symbiotic organisations grew up and took over in the form of the church. We traded direct intersoul communication resulting in human flourishing for indirect flourishing. We considered that if flourishing is the direct end of all things then people don’t need to be communicated to, they need to see and hear and speak and eat and flourish in every way possible and in as efficient a way as possible. This resulted in a ‘sit down, shut up and listen to your Bible story, and then line up and get your gruel and sit back down’ message being communicated by the secondary interface. By neglecting to continue Jesus’ work of personally repairing the primary interface and establishing reconciliation with God and other people, we also neglect the work of seeking human flourishing.
Conditions for Flourishing
People do not flourish unless they are effectively communicating with God and with one another and this cannot happen unless we shed our secondary interfaces and communicate with people through the primary interface. People are the primary interface for intersoul communication. If I interact with anyone on the basis of my acting on behalf of anyone else or being over them in any capacity, be they my children, my employees or a public servant, and not as an interpersonal interaction, then I act upon them in an impersonal manner. If I am impersonal then I have communicated that it is better to forgo both my humanity and yours in the pursuit of our collective abstract flourishing than to take the time to repair the breach and temporarily sacrifice my own flourishing in pursuit of re-establishing communication with people as part of the primary interface. This will result in far greater and more widespread human flourishing than the impersonal seeking after collective flourishing via a secondary interface.
Communicate and Flourish
It is therefore my conclusion that it is not consistent with the Christian faith that we should seek flourishing through secondary interfacial institutions at the expense of our humanity, but rather that we should seek to re-establish the primary interface of soul to soul care and communication resulting in human flourishing according to Christ our example.
James 1 Lit Test
If our main individual pursuit and purpose in this life is to commune with God and with one another then we cannot effectively run after those pursuits if we continually outsource that responsibility to those we think can do a better, more efficient job. We will fail at both our own flourishing and the flourishing of others if we fail at personal intersoul communication. We will not effectively communicate our love and mercy nor the love and mercy of God if our foundations feed a billion people in the third world next year. This is not because God doesn’t want us to feed a billion people in the third world, but because we were not the ones to do it. We had a plan B. We didn’t give our last mite to do it, and ultimately those people are so far removed from us that we think we achieved our purpose when really we met a dead-end. World hunger would be over tomorrow if those who were hungry helped feed one another. The world is not divided into have and have nots, but into care and care-nots. If I gave up my flourishing in my food supply chain to help those around me who were hungry to eat then I would be doing the work of removing secondary interfaces and repairing the primary interface between myself and those I help feed and between them and God. I would learn their names and professions and call them to walk after me–not for the purpose of collectively filling our bellies and flourishing in that capacity but to learn to repair the communication lines between God and ourselves; that we would live as one with God and with one another as God is one with Himself.
Ammi Ruhama Community 