Our Present Situation Part Two

I will try to continue describing what I think to be the correct belief system of the Gospels. I know my talents are very small, but I will not fail to mention that I believe the task before me is very large.  So many people are so much invested in the prevailing modes of Gospel interpretation.

My decision to pursue the matter through the Book of Hebrews came when I read a Think Theology blog post by Matthew Hosier (“Believe Jesus: The Perfect Man,” Tue., April 2, 2013.)  Hosier, like the author of Hebrews, pursues the matter of interpretation of the Gospels through the matter of understanding the relative situations of Jesus and of the rest of us.  However, on both counts I think both authors are wrong.

Hosier, to begin with, starts off on the wrong foot.  He refers to Hebrews’ use of Psalm 8, which says, “When I consider thy heavens….What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” but the psalm also says, “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.”  Hosier gives his position all the best of it, conveniently describing Psalm 8 as “a psalm that describes the smallness of man”—surely an oversimplification.

Hosier does not appear dishonest, but is nonetheless intent on working only one side of man’s situation.  He says, “The reality is, that for all our global dominance, on a cosmic scale we are nothing.”  One might wonder if, to the psalmist’s “sheep and oxen…beasts…fowl…and fish,” our cosmic significance is all that negligible.  This is more than a quibble; physicists are never ceasing to test the bounds of the infinitesimal, or of the dimensions that define such things.  The psalmist is not going about minimizing man, and there is no profit in using a regard for God’s largeness as a lever to make a rhetorical point.  After all, is the God of Jews and Christians a God who defies dimension, or one who is just really, really big?

As I said in my previous post, the psalm is evocative poetry.  It is a precarious business, to employ such things in logical argument.  To realize this, it is only necessary to test any Scripture verse’s applicability to various logical (or logical-sounding) arguments.  I am reminded of the endlessly overworked passage in Daniel 12:4, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”  That passage has been thought for ages to mean that the end is just around the corner, and small wonder.  Let any supposed End Times crisis period be an era short (and long) enough to span the lifetimes of a man’s father and his still-living son, and you have—from the ancients on down—scarcely a moment in which it could not be portentously said, “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

A similar point can be made about Psalm 8, with its descriptions of man and how his God has “crowned him with glory and honour” and “madest him to have dominion.”  If Psalm 8 had eschatological implications, or was employed as such in Scripture (rather than as in Hebrews), is there any doubt whether doomsayers would be saying that man’s dominion (negatively-cast, of course) had been established to the hilt?

It is of no greater comfort to realize that the author of Hebrews has misused Psalm 8 in the opposite direction.  The matter is as simple as I said in the previous post.  Psalm 8 says Creation is subject to Man; Hebrews 2 says it is not.  There is nothing in the text of Psalm 8 (or in its quasi-textual attribution to David) that allows for any other interpretation.  The author of Hebrews would have us believe that a poet of the cruel and tumultuous Davidic age would employ the rare skill of literacy—to say nothing of rare and precious writing materials—to produce no more than a few copies of a fragile manuscript that he would then have to entrust to notoriously sack-and-lootable libraries—all so that the faceless author of Hebrews could look at the psalm and say, “Well, for a start, at least we know this isn’t true.”

To be fair, Hosier does his duty by Hebrews.  Hosier presents the notion (extracted, I contend, from Christianity’s well of wishful thinking) that “everything under their feet” was simply “God’s original intention for us.”  Hosier’s defense of Hebrews is not surprising, though it might be less surprising to contend that “God’s original intention for us” was possession of a coherent body of Scripture—and possession as well of the ability to clear-headedly delineate the Canon.

This brings us to the next point.  Hosier has not dodged the issue:

This actually becomes a gospel-testing question: If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?  Thankfully, the scriptures also provide an answer to this question.

Hosier’s reference to “an answer” is the easy part to counter.  To put it bluntly, the scriptures do not provide an answer; the scriptures provide other scriptures, and any desired answer can be obtained by taking any one or a few of those scriptures as normative—the more scriptures to choose from, the better.

To distill Hosier’s question: “If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?”  To distill the answer: No.

(Curiously, Hosier says, “If scripture says we are meant to have total rule….”  That is incorrect; the psalm says we actually have what Hosier terms “total rule,” not that we are merely meant to have it.  I don’t think Hosier intends deception, because intentionally rephrasing the psalm as merely God’s plan would obviate his question.  Again, it is inescapable: Psalm 8 says Creation is subject to Man; Hebrews 2 says it is not.)

The answer is still “No”—Hebrews does not comport with Psalm 8.  As I wrote in the previous post, Hebrews, with its “raising to perfection of an always-perfect Messiah,” conflicts with the Gospels.  And now we come to one of the silliest parts of scripture study, typified though scarcely invented by Hosier, when he poses the question from above:

This actually becomes a gospel-testing question: If scripture says we are meant to have total rule, but we don’t, can we trust the scriptures to be true?

Why does this have to become “a gospel-testing question”?  Can’t we just take it that we have four canonical Gospels?  So now we have to test the Book of Hebrews to see if it is “gospel”?  I know, of course, that “the Gospel,” as a name of long usage for the New Testament salvation plans of various descriptions, is not about to go away.  However, it is not therefore necessary to refrain from each and every reminder that there lurks an element of presumption in any denomination’s pronouncement about what constitutes “The Good News.”

One might think that four “Good News” editions would be enough, particularly since they seem not to have had enough copy without sharing.  The whole business of Christian theology being delineated through Acts and beyond gives the purveyance of Jesus’ message a grubby cast, as though Jesus is a superannuated company founder tolerated briefly at board meetings before the real business is attended to by sharp young types.

And so the ostensibly simple message of Christianity—Jesus being incarnated to explain and effect salvation, presented so by the denominations when it serves—is tinged with a mixture of fantasy and fraud.  One would think that the Christian divines somehow knew that the disciples were given advance copies of Paul’s letters, to pass back and forth as they walked with Jesus to Jericho or wherever.

However, the most important point I must make, which I can touch on only briefly now, is something I must contend that I have never heard before.  It is for a good reason that I mention this now; if I were merely agitating for the four Gospels without the rest, I would have to answer two thousand years of backward-reflection of the Epistles onto the Gospels.  That is not what concerns me now.  And that is not the most important thing about our present situation.

The author of Hebrews describes a salvation plan.  One of the most exasperating things about religion is the fact that—obvious as it is to say this—there can be very little discussion about whether Hebrews is more or less right.  It is sort of an all-or-nothing thing.  And the subject matter of Hebrews is by no means light.

Hosier grasps rightly what is at stake,

Death is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life and the claim made by the writer of Hebrews is that Jesus suffered death in order to deliver us from death.

Embedded in Hosier’s statement is a reference to the most important thing about our present situation.  It is not the second part of Hosier’s statement…

the claim made by the writer of Hebrews is that Jesus suffered death in order to deliver us from death

…though it is on that score that the centuries-long debate has been held.  The most important thing about our present situation is encapsulated in the tiny word “us” in “deliver us from death.”  The whole business of salvation—Hebrews or no—operates with the intention of saving somebody.  Theologians will argue until doom about the means of salvation, but it is all in vain if we who must be saved do not adequately understand ourselves.

I intend to deal with this more fully in the next post, but I must introduce it now: the “us” that must be saved is not the “us” that we arrogate to ourselves—it is our primal “us” that we foolishly imagine we perceive rightly.  It is this misperception that inhabits the first part of Hosier’s statement:

Death is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.

What inability?  Sure, we die, but we live on. (Some unpleasantness might be involved.)  The trick would be to ever be rid of life.

No, Death is not the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.  Inability to control ourselves is the ultimate demonstration of our inability to control life.  Our present situation is one in which we do not even grasp the essence of the inner person who must be restrained.

That situation, as we will see, is addressed only in the four Gospels proper.