Why do we assume that God must know everything and do everything in order to be God?

Think beyond the canned responses of our severely conditioned (read: diligently propagandized and brainwashed) fellow Christians…responses that are really non-answers, meant to curtail humanity’s natural tendency to organize the world into reconcilable assumptions.  Meant to curtain man’s reason.   The very thing upon which man’s life utterly depends.

Let’s look at the idea of the conditioned, orthodox Christian.

Why it is that Christians for the most part are only willing to take their thoughts so far?   It seems as though they are outright fucking terrified to think through their doctrinal conclusions because I contend they realize that ultimately the doctrine implodes under the weight of its own contradictions. Thus, they ALWAYS revert back to the standard playbook of orthodoxy, no matter how often the horror of that particular belief system smacks them in the face with its cold, dead hands.  If the discernment blogs have taught us anything, it is that Christians can be abused to the point of physical and psychological damage, sometimes destroying the entire scope of their lives, and yet will recoil in rage and panic and hysterics at anyone who dares to question their traditional understanding of God and His church.

This is the conditioned Christian.  This is the Christian who has been afflicted with doctrinal Stockholm Syndrome.  The spirit is destroyed, and yet the obligatory answers and slavish devotion to the tyranny of their gnostic ideas remain.  They are satisfied that the very perfunctory doctrinal posits which have ruined their lives are sufficient for bringing peace to them; for healing and soothing, as though ideas which are purposefully designed to destroy and nothing else, are equally efficacious for life and happiness.

But this is what they have been taught…this is all they know.  And, like a dog to his vomit, it is to this they will return.  Because, unless you  make it a point to specifically address doctrine; to specifically reject the canned answers from the the “orthodox” feed bag which hasn’t been filled with anything new for literally thousands and thousands of years, then you are doomed to walk right back into the same meat grinder which just spit you out like so much psychological sausage.

Exhibit A of this trend, this revolving door of Reformed orthodoxy, is the discernment blog, http://www.wartburgwatch.com. Here you will see first hand the abused storm out of the edifice of “sound doctrine”, do a little dance, throw a little tantrum, call CJ Mahaney a bunch of appropriately pejorative names, spit on the side walk and then…brush themselves off, straighten their ties and corsets, and walk right back inside, full of stoic resolve, where Wade Burleson and his wonderful hair are holding the door open for you.

The catalyst for this irrational behavior is the refusal to question the doctrine.  Why?  Because the doctrine is not based on reason, you see…for that is precisely how they define “God-breathed” and “inspired”.  These terms mean, specifically: NOT according to man’s epistemological capacity…meaning that what YOU think is true is irrelevant (i.e. NOT true, by definition).  They mean that you never really get to say whether you concede their–that is, the Priests in the Stead–interpretive premises or not.  Your existence doesn’t matter, because you are wholly inadequate to understand what is ultimately the product of an omnipotent Being who transcends everything about you; because He is infinite and you are finite, and there is no way to logically, ever, reconcile these two metaphysical positions.  What is INFINITE can ultimately, and again by utter definition, have nothing whatsoever to do in any actual way with what is finite.  That’s pure logic…Reason 101 stuff.  How do you reconcile that which is endless to anything else? You don’t…because you can’t.  Because any coupling of infinity with anything else automatically contradicts infinity.  If it isn’t everything, then it isn’t infinite.  And that’s why God is not “omnipotent”.

I will get to that point in more depth in a moment.

The philosophy of their thinking, and all their interpretive premises, and all of the roots of their “sound doctrine” have nothing to do with you YOU insofar as you ability or outright need, for the sake of rank survival, to rationally organize and integrate what your senses absorb.  Ultimately, all “real” truth is wholly revealed by God, completely outside of man’s existential or epistemological essence.  In short, man has nothing to do with truth, so what you think or feel or understand or notice is entirely irrelevant.  Your comprehension of things which define your SELF and your environment and your life are categorically usurped on every level, right down to your very essence and existence, by a God who can do and know everything.

Hmm…

I’m starting so see why “omnipotence” and “omniscient” are such useful tools in the belt and harness of the spiritual despot.

And this leads us to another absolutely necessary tool of the successful tyrant:  Propaganda in the form of a systematic theology.  Present a codified, cohesive framework from which to address all of the concerns of the critics and detractors.  The answers do not have to be rational, they just have to smartly appeal to a source of “intelligence”–a source of “revealed knowledge”–that transcends the mind, on the metaphysical level, of the inquisitor.  That is the key.  Present a systematic philosophy which has the ring of intellectual fortitude and then root it ALL in the appeal to divine “wisdom”.  This satisfies even the most analytical among us.  The rigorous philosophical system allows the tyrant to appease the learned concerns of the more intellectual classes…assuaging fears by assuring people that their concerns have been thoroughly vetted by and integrated into the construct.  For the concerns the construct cannot address, because the logical conclusions are ALWAYS contradictory (and the “authority” knows this if they are worth their salt as respectable tyrants) it claims divine mandate of “truth” as its bulwark.  The discerning citizen is thus comforted by the nod to the intellectual cohesiveness the philosophy presents, and is further and most importantly comforted by the fact that it–as the propagandists will readily and willingly concede–doesn’t have all the answers.  And why do they take comfort in this?  Because it appeals to their inherent sense of superiority, I submit.  It appeals to their insatiable desire to have and lord TRUTH over everyone else…to prove that they indeed have been grafted into the divine wisdom; which is, after all, that which gives credence to the sum and substance to their own assumed intellectual pedestal.   I mean, what good would a “perfect” and “perfectly revealed” philosophy of God be if it had all the answers? Surely there must be some mystery involved.  We serve the Almighty, after all, they say.  We can’t expect to understand everything, right?  God has to reserve some things for Himself…things the “finite” human being isn’t capable of understanding.  And this intricate, beautifully organized and constructed and comprehensive systematic theology is just what the doctor ordered.  A perfect philosophy that leaves the logical conclusions open-ended, allowing for God’s infinite capability to both DO and KNOW everything. 

This naturally gives the mystics a get-out-of-culpability-for-abuse free card.  They can preach their destruction and compel by force and violence, blackmail and intimidation their Will to Power disguised as “spirituality”, and then when the shit hits the fan and some disgruntled and “prideful” layperson refuses to be placated any longer by the usual appeals to the “good of the church/state/collective/tribe/monarchy/race/party”, or “God’s will”, or “I was not given the grace to perceive” (thanks, CJ!) because it was his or her daughter that the seventeen-year-old psychopath repeatedly raped in the church bathroom, the spiritual “authorities” can always be absolved by punting the entire fucking systematic philosophy into the great cosmic abyss of God’s mystery.  Obviously God is in control.  Obviously He knows things we don’t know.  Does things we can’t do.  Of course our understanding of the world MUST recede under the mighty corpulence of God’s omniscience and omnipotence.  You must simply trust that only God can really understand, guided in “sound doctrine” (the very doctrine which spawned the abuse) by the skillful hands of His priests…who are the keepers of all of God’s divine mandates.

Think of the power this gives the priests!  They are NEVER accountable for any behavior; for anything they perpetrate upon or demand of the masses over which God proclaims them stewards.  Their systematic theology allows them an almost invincible two-pronged defense, depending on the situation.  They can either appeal to their own fallen, depraved humanity…the “we are all just sinners saved by Grace/but for the grace of God go I” defense; or the “I am the keeper of the keys/God has tasked me with standing in His stead to be God to you” offense.  Truly, it is almost a thing of beauty.

*

Okay, fine.  We understand the usefulness to tyranny of “omniscience” and “omnipotence”, but WHY?  What are the root assumptions which underlie the notions?  What is it about God…what is it about His metaphysical nature, His rote existential being, which drives the belief that He does everything (or “can do” anything, which is the same thing; for you cannot proclaim this without a frame of reference, which is that God, somehow, actually DOES everything), and knows everything?  Hence, my original question:  Why do we assume that if God is to be God, He must be omnipotent and omniscient.

First, we must understand that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive; that they are, in fact, inexorably tied.  It is a simple bridge of logic to say that if God can do anything, and does everything, then He must naturally know everything.  For how can one who does something–that is, organize the environment/reality towards a specific objective– do it without knowing how?  And if God can do anything, and anything then must extend from one edge of the universe to the other, in all dimensions in all times and places, from the greatest to the least, then doing everything must necessitate knowing everything.  For I submit that not even the neo-Calvinists, who declare God capable of doing the impossible (which is a total contradiction in terms, because if it can be done by anyone, its not impossible…but hey, the Bible says it (no, it doesn’t), so it must be true, right) will concede that He can do something whilst at the same time not know about it.  This would naturally contradict their own assertion of omniscience.  And furthermore, strictly speaking, knowing is doing…so, actually, to state that God is both omnipotent and omniscient is rather redundant.  All one really needs to assert is that God is omnipotent.  Omniscience and omnipresence are to be logically assumed from such an assertion.  For if we define omnipotence as the power to do everything and anything, then knowing and being, which are perfunctory extensions of doing, are implied.

But redundancy, irrelevancy, and contradictory logic have never stopped a good neo-Calvinist from blathering on and on every Sunday morning and then some, whilst procuring a handsome salary for doing so.

But here is the real problem in the logic of “omnipotence”, not to mention “omniscience” and “omnipresence”.  The problem is that omniscience and omnipresence are direct functions of omnipotence; that is, they are ACTING as a direct function of God’s ability to DO (act) anything.  But the train of conciliatory thoughts does not stop there.  For omnipotence–the power to do anything–is a direct function of God’s very existence; His very being.  For BEING is DOING. To be.  To be is a verb.  It is the verb.  It is the infinite action of anything which exists; any agent, and any object…it is that object/agent’s very SELF.  So “BEING” itself is the beginning and end of anything which exists.  And therefore God’s ability to DO anything is a direct function of His ability to BE.  And if we proclaim that God can DO anything then this “anything” must extend to the very root, the very core, of God’s existential SELF.

Do you see where I am going here?  Can you connect the dots? Can you follow the bread-crumbs of logic all they way back to the very start, where nothing comes before?  Can you find your way to the edge of the universe…through the trees, to the field, to the sea, and beyond to where eternity goes no further?

What I am saying is that if God can DO anything and indeed DOES everything, and it is from this that he can know everything and be everywhere, then it follows that this must include being what is considered to be NOT God.  In other words, God is not only God but He is all that is NOT God, as well.  Which means that if God can do everything this must include the ability to BE everything; for his power of omnipotence stems from His being. BEING everything is the source of God’s omnipotence.

So if God is omnipotent then God is everything which exists.  For the ability to DO stems from His ability to BE.  And so if God can do literally EVERYTHING, then His being, from which His doing proceeds, must extend to the very existential root of Creation.  Which means that Creation doesn’t really exist.  It is all God.  There is nothing which isn’t God.

I say that God is not omnipotent, because I declare that God cannot BE what He is NOT, which means then by definition that He cannot DO everything or KNOW everything, since DOING and KNOWING extends inexorably from the infinite BEING of anything which exists.  And by that I proclaim the free will of man to relate to and define God; and I proclaim the free will of the devil and his angels, and I proclaim that it is this which allows for God to absolutely and justly judge them and condemn them. And so I am declared an apostate and a heretic…worthy of death of the most barbaric kind; and in the dark ages of the hell of Reformed history I’d be guillotined at sundown after a five minute kangaroo court at best, surrounded by a crowd of feces and spit hurling hoards.

And yet declaring that there is no metaphysical distinction between God and His “fallen” and “totally depraved” Creation, thus making God the author and essence of those who engage of the worst kinds of sin and evil–abuse, theft, lying and deceit, rape and murder, child exploitation, rank barbarity, blood lust, and idol worship–is given a pass by the mystic overlords and their fawning crowds in the name of “sound doctrine”.

The hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by the Divine.  Calvinists and Reformers, collectivists and moral equivocators, I can assure you of this.

Stay tuned for part three.

In the comments thread of the last article, commenter “Lydia” shared a video of George C. Scott explaining (in character…it’s a movie clip) what Calvin’s TULIP acronym means.

I had seen this clip before and thought it totally egregious (naturally)…for the fact remains that there is nary a shred of truth to ANY point of TULIP whatsoever.  It is a complete farce from front to back.  But something else caught my attention this time.  I started replying to Lydia, and, as often happens, by the time I finished there was too much information for a comment.  But a perfect amount, as it turns out, for a new post.

What caught my attention was a reference George C. makes to God’s “omniscience”.  God’s “knowing everything…that’s why He’s God”.  Since you all likely–by now–understand my categorical aversion to and rejection of determinism in any form or under any label, no matter how pretentious, I couldn’t help myself from railing once again at this most egregious of theological posits…and unfortunately, one of the most universally accepted.  For try as I might, I cannot seem to shake peoples’ assumption that God doesn’t actually have to be “all knowing” and “all powerful” to be God.  And indeed not only is it not a requirement that God be able to do everything and know everything, it is not even possible.  What I mean to say is that the truth is,as usual, the complete opposite of what Reformation theology–in its most devious and destructive manifestation as today’s neo-Calvinism movement–teaches.  That is, if God really is God, then He cannot possibly do anything or know everything, because in order for us to make the assumption that there are agents (like man, for instance) in the universe which are distinct from God–are NOT God–we must assume that there are things then which are given for those agents to do and to know, which if God did and knew them…well, then they wouldn’t actually exist as themselves.  They would merely be manifestations of God, Himself.  If there is a distinction between God and the rest of whatever exists then the rest of whatever exists must do what IT does, which means that God cannot do those things for it; if He did, then they could not be known as metaphysically (nor even physically) distinct from God.  God cannot do everything and anything because God cannot possess what is not Himself.  Which means that whatever the universe does, IT does, not God.

You see?

Maybe?

I’ll explain.

No matter how humble it may sound…no matter how reluctant you are to deny it or to break from it, you MUST understand that ideas like “omniscience” and “omnipotence” are merely euphemisms for God-qua-Determinism.  There is nothing different between God able to know and do everything and the theology of Determinism.  Period.  Full stop. If God is able to know and do everything it must presume that God actually has a direct frame of reference for such an ability, which implies that he actually DOES everything and KNOWS everything; which means that what you and I do, and everything in the universe does, is not really us or the things of the universe doing them, or knowing them (if we are self-aware), it must be God.  Which means again that everything is merely a direct extension of God; which means that nothing else exists, and that everything you or I see or think or do is not really us, but a pre-ordained version of God’s very Self.  Indeed, this is precisely what R.C. Sproul is arguing when he says that God must be in control of every molecule or he is not God.  If God is in control of every molecule, we must assume absolute control…for how is it control otherwise?  If it is only “partial” control, then there is some substance of the created thing which is operating on its own utterly apart from any divine manipulation or sustenance at all.  And I can assure you that this is not what R.C. is conceding.  And even if it was, he would be left with the unanswerable question which utterly undermines his irrational premise which is: where is the line between the SELF of God and the SELF of the object?  If it is not a distinction that man can observe, then man possesses no capacity for assuming that there is any control whatsoever.  Objects are objects which do what they do and know what they know (if the object in question is self-aware, like man); they are NOT God.  Which means that God is not in control of them or their thoughts, which means that there are things that God has no frame of reference for, like BEING an object which He is not; in which case, the assumption that God is “able to to anything” is a lie.  Incidentally–and I know that this doesn’t wash much in the Reformed camp that adheres to “penal substitution” whereby an innocent man is tortured and put to death for a group of totally depraved humans who cannot be held culpable for their sin because it is not a function of choice, but of nature, which makes it not a sin at all, by definition–yes, incidentally, this is why God can reward and punish humanity justly, without being a hypocrite.  He does not proclaim that He is in control (read: possession) of humanity’s thoughts and actions.  Which is why the divine rewards and punishments are actually just.

Here are some waders. Hoist them up high as you can.  The neo-Calvinist, neo-reformed bullshit just keeps getting deeper and deeper as the ticker tape of theological madness and mystic oppression roles on and on with ever fancier propaganda.

My wife says my posts sound angry.

You bet I am.  I’m sick and bloody tired of being lied to by people who think that other humans exist for no other reason than to affirm their own subjective, asinine, irrational assertions about God and the world and everyone else.

Omniscient?

Really?  Well, I submit that Reformation theology is proof that God doesn’t know everything.  If He did, Calvin would have been a milk maid and Luther would have been hit by a bus on the way to post his 95 Theses.  Because Reformation theology removes God as far from His Creation as it does man from himself.

Now, finally, here is my response to Lydia:

Lydia,

Yes.  I’ve seen that before.  What caught my attention this time is…the woman says:  “Then it’s all worked out; it’s fixed.”  And George C. says, “More or less.”

LOL…how could it be “less”?  If God is “omniscient” then everything, certainly not “more or LESS” than everything, would have to be “worked out” by definition.

Why?

Because you of course understand that the implicit reason God knows everything, according to the Calvinist construct, is because He determined everything…which means that everything you think and do and say and feel, and that of everyone else, too, is merely part of the determining force of God’s “omnipotence”–from which his “omniscience” stems.  For the truth is that God cannot “know everything” unless He DID everything, Himself.  Which means that you don’t exist, nor do I, nor anyone else.  Everything is simply a direct extension of God.  And God is likewise an extension of the determining force.  And, incidentally, people always seem to miss that little, but infinitely (literally)  important, extension of the logic.  For even God, if truly everything is determined, must also be determined.  Determinism is absolute…it can have no beginning, by definition; for determinism cannot be a function of that which is NOT determined.  If everything that happens had to happen the way it happened and could not have happened any other way because God absolutely determined it, then God, Himself, must also have been determined to determine those things to happen exactly as they happened.  By definition of determinism, He could not have determined them to happen any other way.  So, again, as we see, even God is a victim of the determinism implicit in TULIP.

It is “all worked out”, as George says in the clip, because it couldn’t be any other way and still be determined so that God can know it ALL perfectly.

And, furthermore, what does “know everything” mean?  What exactly is knowing everything there is to know?

First problem:  human beings have no frame of reference for “knowing everything”.  Therefore, for a human being to claim that God can “know everything” when that human being can never, EVER, by existential definition, be in a position to even define “everything” is  antipodal to rational thought.  How can humans know and define this specific attribute of God when that attribute utterly eludes their apprehension?  The problem is that “everything”, outside of a specific context, which then must exclude “everything” except as a completely conceptual (non-actual), qualifier, cannot be given a set value.  Everything is simply another word for “infinity”, and infinity has no measurable value, by definition.  What is the value of infinity goes the answer-less question.  The value of infinity is infinity…infinity wholly defines itself.  There is no actual value to infinity which man can observe and thus apply efficaciously to his own context…his own existence.  Which gives infinity a practical and functional value of…you guessed it.  ZERO.  Which means that functionally “everything” is really nothing, because everything has no practical nor applicable value with respect to man’s context.  Which, if you are a human being, is the only context that is relevant, not matter what the neo-Reformed say.  They cannot argue their way out of their own existence.  They forfeit the debate as soon as they open their mouths to speak.  Because ALL their speaking and thinking will always and can only ever be from the context of their own SELF.  So they lose immediately.  And we, the rationalists, win.  As usual.  Which is why no one on any discernment blog or physics blog will debate me.  As soon as they concede that everything starts with SELF, they realize they forfeit.  Existence is the inescapable axiom…and yet man has been denying it for years.

(Hence the mad scramble by physicists to find the “God particle”, and now, since they have found it, to scramble to explain it in a way that doesn’t simply lead them further down the inevitable path of the Standard Model, which is infinity; this has been the whole problem with the Standard Model from the very beginning.  And not to sound arrogant, but I could have saved them the trouble and told them that without an external observer (i.e. God) simple logic dictates that all matter must reduce down to an irreconcilable “dimensionless” infinity, which is why scientists spend so much time scratching their heads the further down the path they go.  The realize that the path doesn’t end, and yet when they arrive at a place where it they think it’s supposed to end, but doesn’t, they are absolutely fit to be tied.  They never realize, in the forest of their Platonism, that it is the OBSERVER who mitigates infinity.  For without an agent who is aware of SELF as distinct from OTHER, then OTHER is utterly infinite.  There is no end to that which cannot be observed and realized to be NOT something ELSE.

And this is where atheism also always ends up:  unexplainable infinity, and irrational theories which attempt to reconcile infinity in a way which doesn’t include the only thing which is capable of doing this:  God as a distinct SELF.  And this is also why I reject Objectivism (which is a self-proclaimed atheistic world-view).  For all of Rand’s brilliance–and she was brilliant–her Philosophy winds up down the valueless road of infinity just like everyone else’s.  And so she eventually must concede the very philosophies she rails against.  Her premise is the same, whether she realized it or not:  you start at nothing, and nothing is what you get.  Which means…who cares what philosophy rules men at the end of the day? Man’s very existence cannot be valued against any objective plumb line at all.  And thus you have the weird irony of Objectivism.)

So we blithely proclaim, in our ignorance and false “humility”, in an effort to make ourselves sound so pious, that God knows everything, while at the same time not knowing what that could even possibly mean.

Stay tuned for part two.

“Hello Argo,

Sorry that I am commenting so late but I have down with a nasty bug for the last several days. It’s tough to comment when sleeping 20 hours a day.

I am going to have to study your ideas on context a bit more because the central tenets of it still escape me. Very abstract stuff and not intuitive for me.

Of course many leaders in historic “Christendom” have used inerrancy to acquire power for themselves. This isn’t too surprising. Men have been using any excuse to gain power over others since the dawn of time. Confucians, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists have all shown the desire to gain control. Just because something is abused isn’t proof that it is bad.

Okay, you won’t agree with I am about to say and I am not able to defend it. I know I am leaving myself open but what the heck. I have thought a lot about where the freedom in the United States came from, what is the “fountainhead?” I believe it is directly related to the Scripture becoming available to everyone without being filtered through a priest or pastor. The RC Church rightly feared the bible being translated into the native languages of the unwashed masses, they knew it would destroy their monopoly on power. I also know that Luther and Calvin were no Boy Scouts, they had no problem killing dissenters. When the people could read scripture for themselves it put limits on how far Christian “leaders” could push their power grabs. The ability to study scripture for oneself, and have confidence in it, is truly empowering. The U.S. took this farther than any other place on earth and I believe it shows.

I also don’t believe that enlightenment intellectuals were a source of freedom as many contemporary atheists claim. The French Revolution was the fruit born of the Enlightenment tree and the blood flowed, there was no freedom. Ditto for the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, etc.

I do believe in the inerrancy of scripture but not the inerrancy of creeds, popes, priests, reformers, or anyone else. I’m running low on energy right now. I look forward to your next post.

Glenn”

 *

Glenn,

Sorry to hear that you have been unwell!  I hate being sick.  It is the worst!  I am wishing you a speedy recovery.

Please do not feel any obligation to this blog or to me.  I appreciate your comments and I appreciate you reading here when and if it is convenient and pleasurable for you to do so.  Beyond that, I have no standards by which I judge anyone’s participation.  You are always welcome to comment and read when you feel like it, and only if you feel like it.  You owe me neither excuse nor explanation.  I am sure you already know this; I just want to be clear that my expectations for when and why anyone comes here extend no further than their own desire and time to do so.  I appreciate all your participation thus far.  Any more is just gravy.  🙂

*

With respect to your answer to my question, “What is your standard of TRUTH”…I prefer not to think in terms of “rebuttal”, as it were, but in terms of the general “discussion”.  Rebuttal to me sounds…hmm, antagonistic, and that’s not the vibe I’m going for (well…not in the comments section, that is LOL).

It would be reasonable for me to begin with this; for what follows is not nearly as concise nor poignant, I don’t think:

Without man, Jesus Christ is wholly irrelevant.  Man’s life gives Christ meaning.  Christ is Savior.  Savior of whom?  Of man.  Which means man’s life, man’s existence, is the prerequisite for Christ.  Unless man exists first, Christ cannot exist.  Further, and more viscerally, Christ was born of a human woman.  And without the humanity of Christ, there is NO CHRIST.  So to me, Christ as the Truth is the same thing as declaring MAN as truth.  And since all men are individuals, the logical conclusion is that human INDIVIDUAL’S are TRUTH…or, more to the point, they are the standard of TRUTH.

Incidentally, this is a nod to your third question “do I define man individually or collectively.  I would argue that there is no such thing as a “collective”.  The only salient, material and actual objects which comprise the “collective”, or the “party”, or the “government”, or the “people”, or the “workers” are individual human beings.  The collective then, like any other idea, can only be good and consistent with truth when it is subject to the absolute standard of the individual SELF.  The individual human is actual.  The “group” is conceptual.  Non-actual.  Thus, the group is always subservient to the right of the individual to BE him or herself absolutely.

In short, without man, there there can be no Christ; there can be no “Inerrant Word of God”; there can be no God defined as God.  This is a truism which Christians constantly reject, and this is why Christianity has been, for centuries upon centuries, an enemy of life. And why governments predicated upon the idea of Christian doctrinal “authority” have always liquified civilizations…dissolving them into rivers of blood.  You thrown into the pot the French Revolution as the fruit of the Enlightenment?  And I will raise you every other war which claims Europe as its epicenter, from the Crusades to the Cold War, as the fruit of Augustinian and Reformed “orthodoxy”.

*

WHY is Jesus your standard of TRUTH?

It is well and good to say that Jesus Christ is the truth, but what is the root assumption(s) which leads one to accept that? What foundational premises are satisfied when Jesus becomes the yardstick by which everything man integrates cognitively via his senses is judged as “good” or “bad”, “true” or “false”?  What is it that Jesus Christ, as the absolute standard of all TRUTH, ultimately validates as absolute and infinite, perfect and perpetual, to the exclusion of ALL else?

The answer is:  Himself.

And that is a problem.

Because if Jesus, Himself, alone, is the standard of absolute TRUTH, then the standard is by definition outside of man.  Which means that your life, my life, are no longer relevant to the equation of TRUTH.  This means that there is no logical line to be drawn between human life and TRUTH itself.  And if this is the case, how can man ever be in a position to know and thus confirm the TRUTH?  We have just conceded that the standard by which TRUTH is known as TRUE is NOT man.   We just conceded that the standard of TRUTH–that absolute by which anything is affirmed or denied–is completely exclusive to his very existence.  Which includes his mind, which “knows” and “confirms” ideas.  This is utterly in perfect keeping with the Reformed Primer on Spiritual Tyranny.  Man is never in a position to apprehend TRUTH by his very existential nature.  ALL of man is beyond truth.

Thus, the only incentive left for man to live “righteously”, since it cannot be reason or knowledge, is fear.   Fear of violence.  Or, more precisely, fear of the ecclesiastic divine mandate to violently punish–to steal from, to blackmail, to murder, to banish, to torture–those who do not obey their “authority”.  And of course there are examples upon examples littered throughout bloody history of God’s “chosen people” committing all of those atrocities in the name of absolute “truth”, and then some.

If Jesus is the absolute standard of TRUTH, then humanity and TRUTH are inexorably separated.  That is, you are only “true” as a human being insofar as you conform to the standard of TRUTH.  But of what relevance is man’s conformity to TRUTH then?  The standard of TRUTH is that which defines what is true and what is false…and, by extension, what is good and what is bad.  If man is not the standard, then man’s “truth” is not defined by his own SELF, his own existence, but by something outside of that existence.  But since man’s existence, man’s SELF, is the only context he has by which to know anything at all, man’s entire epistemology (how he knows what he knows) is irrelevant.  Man isn’t the one who gets to decide or concede or reject or refute, for that is solely the prerogative of the STANDARD.  Man can think and do what he thinks and does, but NONE of that contributes anything to his morality or his existential worth value (his truth).  Man is wholly at the mercy of the standard of TRUTH.  That standard reserves the sole right to determine who is true and good and who is not according to itself.  What you DO and THINK is immaterial.  YOU don’t get to declare anything at all with any reasonable expectation that what you believe and profess is true or good because what is true and good is nothing that you, within the context of your own SELF, can possibly recognize.  The standard is the only thing that gets to say what is good and true, and since YOU–that is, your existence and the context of your SELF–is not the standard you can never be in any position to declare anything true or good at all.  Nothing you think matters; nothing you profess matters.  In fact, all you think is automatically void as non-truth because YOU don’t get to say what is true.  To pretend that you can observe reality from the point of view of a standard that you concede is wholly outside of yourself is the apogee of pride and damnable arrogance. You become nothing more than a mindless extension of the standard…only true and only good insofar as the standard says; and whether or not the standard changes its definitions from moment to moment, or seems to contradict itself and its own declarations, or becomes the very epitome of rational capriciousness as a rule, cannot ever warrant your criticism.  Once the standard which defines TRUTH is proclaimed to be beyond the context of man’s own SELF then man forfeits his mind and his reason and utterly surrenders his epistemology to that which claims ownership of him by claiming the sole right to decide between right and wrong, good and bad.  Whether or not the standard actually judges correctly is completely beyond your own senses and thus your ability to say.

So, yes…what I am saying–and this would have gotten me burned at the stake a thousand years ago…heck, more recently than that–is that it is MAN who ultimately gets to observe and thus claim Jesus Christ is TRUE.  MAN is not subject to Jesus’s plumb line of reason; Jesus is subject to MAN’S.  But here is the catch:  only if man’s plumb line is reasonable.  Meaning, only when man’s definitions of TRUTH and GOOD are rooted in an absolute objective standard of TRUTH which man can rationally define according to a context which is utterly knowable and categorically and infinitely undeniable.  That context of course is the existence, the very being, the IS, of the individual material (read, actual) SELF…his or her life.  Man is only in the position to rightly define and know and describe and worship God when man can claim that his understanding is efficaciously vetted according to a wholly and absolutely reasonable standard of TRUTH.  And it is this fact which does NOT make the TRUTH of God’s Holy and magnificent SELF a product of human epistemological and moral relativism.  You declare that Argo is saying that man gets to define God, God does not get to define man.  And you are correct…that’s exactly what I am saying.  But I am also saying that in order for man to define God without blasphemy or ignorance man must defined Him according to reason…NOT according to the fickle vacillations of man’s philosophical subjectivism.  For the TRUTH is indeed objective, and thus is God’s great power and glory, but only when the TRUTH is vetted against an objective standard.  That which can and indeed MUST be infinitely and observably TRUE by each and every human being alive (those that are not cognitively compromised, that is).  And that, again, can only be man’s SELF.

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If you declare that the standard of TRUTH is outside of you, and thus is not something that you can grasp within your own existential frame of reference (which is absolute…you are always you), you are never in a position to either confirm or deny that the what the standard declares is actually true, or not, or is actually good, or not.  You can no more confirm or deny what the standard declares as truth and goodness than you can BE the standard, itself.

Only the standard gets to to qualify and/or quantify anything according to truth and morality.  And to pretend that somehow you can be true and good by being “conformed” to the ontologically external standard of TRUTH is ludicrous.  You cannot be conformed to the standard of TRUTH, you can only be defined by it.  And as I said, the definition of your moral worth and the truth of your existence from moment to moment is never something in which you get to have a say.  All YOU are is that which the standard declares at any given instance.  You are never in a position to cry “fair” or “foul” according to your own insufficient and existentially deficient judgments.  Remember, the standard reserves the absolute monopoly on truth and the absolute right to declare it according to is own utterly self-contained understanding.  You are never privy to its definitions because they are a direct function of ITSELF; and since you are not it, you can’t possibly understand.  Only the standard understands itself, because its understanding IS itself.

*

The instant individual man is declared subject to a standard of TRUTH outside of his own SELF, man’s existence becomes a contradiction to TRUTH; a limitation to its “absolute-ness”. Which makes man an anathema to it, which makes the destruction of man the greatest moral good.  Man by his existence is an affront to TRUTH, because he is utterly outside the standard.  Destroying man then clears the way for all TRUTH to reign. For how do you integrate man into a standard of TRUTH which is absolute and perfect only when it EXCLUDES all else (because in order for anything to be absolute, it cannot, by definition include anything else)?  The answer is that you do not.  You destroy man in service to that TRUTH which cannot include him.

So then what are we to make of it when Jesus says “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  No one comes to the Father except through Me”?

The first thing we do is jettison any irrational interpretations such as “absolute TRUTH is outside of man”.  Without man, Jesus Christ is wholly irrelevant.  Man’s life gives the Christ meaning.  Christ cannot give man’s life its meaning because, God as the Christ, existed only AFTER man was already established as a completely separate agent from his Creator.  So, strictly speaking, without man’s efficaciously defined existence, Christ could not exist.  It is logically impossible to say that that which comes AFTER man is the source of man’s TRUTH.  Man’s TRUTH had to be established first before Christ, Himself could have any meaning or relevancy.

The second thing we do is establish a rational and therefore legitimate standard of TRUTH.  Which can only be individual human life, as I have said, ad nauseam.  For what is the one thing required above all for anything in man’s life to be declared true or false, good or bad, or given any kind of qualification/quantification at all?  It is man’s LIFE; man’s root existence as an absolute and self-contained SELF which is innately capable of discerning between what is SELF and what is NOT SELF (OTHER).

In other words your very existence is the prerequisite for ANYTHING you observe, hear, feel, touch, and thus integrate into your canon of Knowledge.  Therefore if anything is claimed as TRUTH which does not require first the existence of the human being (the agent to whom everything which has been revealed is revealed) then it cannot possibly be TRUTH, because there can be no TRUTH which does not require the existence of man in order to be known by man as TRUTH.  Any truth which does not require the existence of man is an irrelevant truth…and an irrelevant truth cannot be defined as “true” at all. What is true can only actually be true if it can be efficaciously and practically observed to affirm the standard by which all things are defined.  “Irrelevant truth” is thus an oxymoron…a contradiction in terms.  What is irrelevant can neither affirm nor deny any standard, therefore it is wholly outside of any reasonable definition.

Further, how can man know what is true if he doesn’t exist first to know it?  And if his existence is required for all TRUTH to be known as TRUTH what then must the standard be by which all things are known objectively and rationally and efficaciously as true?

Man’s life.

Man’s life is the only verifiable and rational standard of TRUTH.  The absolute need for individual human beings to exist before they can claim anything as being “true” means that the standard of the TRUTH is the individual SELF.  The absolute of the human SELF is the only absolute which man can reasonably known.  Existence is the very means by which all people know God.  This makes existence itself the plumb line for how we know what is good or bad, true or false.  Therefore any doctrine which proclaims that man must be subject to an “authority” which claims the right to define him and to own him must be rejected.  And doctrine which claims that man is the material fruit of depravity and thus is incapable of doing good as a function of his innate and inherent nature must be rejected.  Any doctrine which claims that man is inherently incapable of apprehending TRUTH and GOOD must be rejected.

Lydia, this is for you.  🙂  I refer specifically to your comments in the last thread.  What struck me is how you said the discernment blogs helped you stay sane as you were going through a journey of faith and a breaking of doctrinal ties with your old ways of thinking.

Do I have that right?

By the way, if I am off base in any of this please call me out.  This is just what I have been thinking…if it doesn’t speak to you or your situation at all, then I would like to know.

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But, you see, to me, I don’t understand how discernment blogs can keep anyone sane, really, because when you parse down their thinking just like we parse down the thinking of institutionalized tyranny like SGM and the SBC, they all still concede the exact same premise: the doctrine is fine, and no real evil is being perpetrated.  This makes all the “abuse” and the “abused” they dramatically wax on about on the blogs just as meaningless as it is in churches these people go to (or went to).  I would think the very fact that so many of these people on the blogs (I submit) still go to the same church is evidence that they don’t really think there is anything wrong with what goes on there. Further evidence is the bald-faced Calvinist masquerading as the benefactor of all the abused on a certain discernment blog with a resident “E-Pastor”.  You say cognitive dissonance?  I give you that circus.

My enlightenment about the discernment blogs mirrors my enlightenment about Sovereign Grace Ministries, of which I was a swaggering, neanderthal dickhead for, for over fifteen years.  After observing and thinking, I saw the exact same kind of tyranny on the blogs, just in a different form.  But regardless of the form, it was always in service to the “doctrine”.  In SGM, the doctrine was whatever CJ said it was.  And you know what?  On these blogs, it’s STILL whatever CJ says it is.

What I mean is that in neither place is the Reformed/neo-Calvinist doctrine considered a problem.  This implies that these blogs do not believe IDEAS really drive actions, which means that actions of people are driven by something OUTSIDE of themselves. Which means that people can’t help being the depraved despots they are, and abuse cannot really be rationally defined as abuse because abuse necessitates an efficacious human apprehension of an epistemological dichotomy of “good and bad”,  which of course is impossible if we concede that ALL that happens is God’s pre-ordained Will.  And this precludes the ability of “victims” on these blogs to claim that they are, in fact, “victims”, or for critics of Calvinism to be anything other than hypocrites.

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I will say it again.  Unless the assumptions reconcile, the outcomes are always the same:  subjugation of man in service to some external absolute; to some “idea” that only certain “priests” are privy to.  As I said before, the “discernment” blogs, when you get down to it, are really only places which serve up seasoning for people’s hypocritical “righteous” indignation.  They hate those who abuse them, and yet they AFFIRM the doctrine (assumptions) which their tormenters appeal to as the authority for their despotism–their mandate from God, Himself, to do such things-as absolutely GOOD.  Which makes them twice the hypocrite as CJ and Piper, in my opinion.  The moderator on one blog criticizes Piper, yet lauds her E-Pastor, when there is virtually NO doctrinal difference between these two men.  She does an article on “sin and suffering” and goes in logical circles, arriving nowhere, just like every single Calvinist I’ve ever met.  Even the person running the vitriolic anti-Calvinism site I referred to in my last article (and I don’t mind the vitriolic part…at all), when you examine his ideas, is still, I submit, a Protestant purest.  Just today he declared on his blog that people who are saved are saved before they are born; and almost immediately prior to this he said that “he doesn’t know where he stands on the whole “election” thing”.

Huh?  Those two statements are completely contradictory. He JUST SAID that the saved are saved before they are born.  If this isn’t election then what is?  But it is okay with this person because he declares that this is NOT what the Calvinists believe.  They don’t believe in “election” as he defines it (and he is wrong; they sure as hell do believe in election, unless he wants to say that SGM and CJ Mahaney isn’t Calvinist). So, effectively, what he is doing here is assuming the right to perpetuate an irrational, utterly impossible and inevitably destructive idea simply because it isn’t Calvinist as he would define it.

Sigh.  And this is considered a “good effort”, even among some of the people I respect most, if not THE most.

Sigh, again.

See?  Who cares what we call the false idea? Calvinist.  Biblicist.  Catholic.  Shrug.  It is still destructive.  But people don’t care about individual human life, they only really care about proclaiming that THEY have the monopoly on divine “truth”, whether reasonable or not.  And that blogger’s definition of election explicitly means that you are saved before you exist.  But how in the world can this be a rational basis for ANY faith?  If salvation occurs not only in spite of man, but with man literally out of the picture, as in, categorically non-existent, then how can he reject ANY crazy idea, even a Calvinist one, without being a hypocrite?  If God determines all there is, which is what his definition of election demands, how can he criticize Calvinists?  They are no less determined by God to do what they do than he is.

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If I may be so bold…

You went to the discernment blogs, not to save your sanity, I submit, but to convince yourself of something you ALREADY knew was true:  that you have every right to be YOU; which means you get a say in what goes on in your own life. The discernment blogs showed you that there are Christians who engage their brains; that you weren’t alone in this.  But the issue really wasn’t your sanity…you already knew you were right because you already knew that what you were hearing wasn’t reasonable. Ergo, you couldn’t be the insane one.  But knowing you were right terrified you, because if you were the only one then you were on the outs…you were alone, and that has epic psychological ramifications.  You were scared of being alone, not of being insane because you couldn’t accept the metaphysical rape pouring forth from the plexiglass podium.

In other words, you weren’t afraid that you were insane. You were afraid that you were, somehow, the ONLY one who WAS sane.  And that was something that, in the Calvinist theology you had conceded for so long, couldn’t possibly be true.

But you knew it was.  Hence the personal dilemma which sent you on your journey.

And once you found relief in knowing that you weren’t the only one thinking, via the discernment blogs, and that you weren’t alone, you quickly realized that it isn’t thinking which is the problem.  It is WHAT people think that is the problem.

And the thinking of the “discernment” blogs bears no functional difference to what you learned in church.   And that?  Is not sane.

Ever.