In Regard to the Theme of this Blog

The theme of this blog must consist of two interconnecting parts.

First, “roused, readied, reaped” describes a story-arc that follows the structure of the Gospels’ treatment of God’s relationship with his creation.  However, the Gospels are merely lenses that present this arc in a constrained focus; the wider focus of creaturely experience follows the same arc.  I contend that the roused-readied-reaped story-arc is not limited to the Gospels, nor is it the creation of the Gospels or their authors.

Now, “roused, readied, reaped” is what happens in a special way to the Gospels’ Jesus—in a perfect way, as I would like to develop in subsequent posts.  I cannot demand that the reader subscribe to that contention of Jesus’ perfection, but I can expect the reader to credit my frankness in having stated it as a premise of this blog.  And now, of course, I am going to say that we, and all Creation, partake of the same story-arc.  We are thrown into the realm of experience; we are seasoned by our exposure to it; we meet our ends bearing more-or-less fruit of greater-or-lesser quality.

The inestimable genius of the Gospels is the declaration that the peril to our souls is not the danger of failing to meet some standard, but rather the dangerous temptation of exempting ourselves from the story-arc.  None of us could escape being roused—for that is by definition the basis of our participation in life—but we can certainly resist being readied (by insisting on burying our experiences under dogmas), and we can certainly resist being reaped (by insisting on defining the standards by which we will be judged.)

This tendency to insist on dogmas and standards is, as the reader is no doubt aware, the source of many of Jesus’ conflicts with his enemies—and of the conflicts he sees playing out around him.  The roused-readied-reaped progression reaches its fruition only when the moral agents involved will have it so; otherwise there is only deadly futility and despair.  And “deadly” has its ever-present connotations in the Gospels as in much of religion.  There are as many “deaths” in spirituality as there are spiritual experiences.

So that is the first part of this blog’s theme: the “Roused, Readied, Reaped” of the title itself.  As the above was intended to show, however, the “readied-and-reaped” two-thirds of the title cannot each be coequal with the first third: “roused.”  The “roused” aspect is not similarly at the discretion of the moral agent in question; the “roused” aspect is that which is entwined with the very roots of a person’s being.  So this will be the second part of this blog’s theme.

We can try to make ourselves “readied” for salvation.  We can maintain that we believe this or that, and we can work on our minds so as to bend them into the shape of our desired beliefs.  We might simultaneously think that we cannot ultimately control what we think, but it is only the experience of undershooting in that regard that we register; in the final accounting we may find that we have often overshot in self-indoctrination, to our detriment.  We have decided how we will be “readied.”  And here it will perhaps suffice to say, given the fantastic constellation of proffered religious “salvations,” that we have also decided how we will be “reaped.”

But the business of being “roused” cannot be so easily transacted.  We are roused at each instance of the story-arc—instances tumbling one upon the other—and in these moments of responding to moments before conceptual moments have passed—in those pre-moments, as it were—we have revealed to us the unyielding substance of our souls.  It is for the sake of that soul-substance, not the substance of our doctrines, or of our hopes in various salvation-plans, that we are right to beg mercy from God.

We must ask that our responses to the moments of life spill forth rightly from the seat of an inner being only God can know and only God can tend—as God  would will.  Nothing figures more prominently in the Gospels than the necessity of the inmost self—the primal self, the infra-cognitive self—being predisposed to lunge for the light rather than the dark.

The ephemeral yet ever-poised primal nature of the soul exerts itself more often than we can consciously acknowledge; indeed it is that very self of which our pitiful consciousness pretends to be master—a pretense that sends us on the quest for wisdom beyond understanding when yet we have decided that what we find will subject itself to our capacity, as we imagine, to understand.

It is as though we thought that salvation came from some doctrine written upon our souls.  Make no mistake; I am not talking some glib wisdom about how the scribbling of doctrine will not bring forth life in a dead soul so decorated.  I am talking about a dead, stony soul within each of us that will not be enlivened if doctrine is scribbled upon it, or carved deep into it by learning; or by experience; or by submission to some religious authority.  Neither might our souls be enlivened by drenching them in tears.

Our souls are thus unyielding because they are our true selves.  If we—as we must—assign fundamental importance to the status of our souls, then we must reckon that the status of any surrounding or countervailing reality (no matter how “real” in some objective sense) is subject to change.

We can see this all-important nature of the soul’s status demonstrated in some of the Gospels’ most harrowing passages:

In John 8 Jesus disputes with certain of the Jews.  (By “certain” I refer to the company of speakers and all those present who gave overt assent—the text requires nothing more.)  The Jews take exception to a remark of Jesus, and say:

“We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” (KJV)

In his response, Jesus says, “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.”

Before the exchange is over, Jesus has told the Jews—those contending with him in that place and at that moment: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”  (Some translations employ notions of “desire” or “preference” instead of “lust,” but the Greek does not lack connotations of passion.)

Jesus is describing what matters.  Theological niceties aside, being or not being a child of the devil is just about as bad as it gets.  Jesus is talking about the state of a soul wherein it lunges and lusts after the same things the devil does.  That the soul in question might at some point have been describable as a child of Abraham is a consideration that no longer exists.

To be roused—to respond without thinking—to moments as the devil would is, in reality, to be of the substance of the devil.  Jesus is not issuing a polemic, but a pronouncement.

Of course the concepts of God abroad among the crowd held that God is not only just but merciful as well, and the disputation, for Jesus’ part, does not conclude without him describing the grounds on which one might be restored as Abraham’s offspring:

“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.”

 Visceral, fleshy response, even to something describable in the most esoteric religious terms, is what reveals the state of the soul.  Without an understanding of this premise, readings of the Gospels are futile.  For example, there is the story of the widow’s mite:

“And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had” (Luke 21:3-4).

I must admit that I never understood what good the widow was doing anybody by casting in “all the living that she had.”  Surely Jesus is not commending her for throwing herself upon charity or for throwing her life away.  Inasmuch as we must assume that her motives are commendable—for what else would be the purpose of the story?—then we must understand that Jesus is predicating the story of the widow on the importance of her upwelling desire to contribute to the cause of God—on the importance of what seizes her when she is roused to the challenges of her meager life.

So we are given the story of the widow.  Attributing to the story no more than seems reasonable, we can take it that a woman—born, living, and dying as a pious Jew, never having heard or sought the teachings of Jesus—can, on the basis of her soul’s proclivities, be reckoned righteous in the sight of God.  That the foregoing statement is a rather amateurish expression of liberal religion, I will not deny, but I hope to contribute something new to the discourse.

I hope to practice the habits—stereotypically associated with conservative commentators—of methodical Gospel interpretation, but I can scarcely see how the roused-readied-reaped story-arc could lead to an affirmation of conservative Christianity—or of Christianity at all.  As I will have to show, I don’t think that Christianity has gotten the Gospel stories wrong; I think that Christianity has looked into the Gospels and gotten the wrong stories.

In Regard to the Meaning of this Blog

One of the most lamentable aspects of conventional Bible interpretation is the practice of purporting to demonstrate that a particular “salvation economy” is rolled out across the landscape of the New Testament.  Even just the short span of the canonical Gospels contains such a number of varying statements and episodes that, by emphasizing or ignoring aggregations of them according to some set of criteria—or by subsuming aggregations of them under some other Scriptural elements taken to be normative—any number of a broad range of workings-out of salvation theory can be conjured.

The most notorious of these “salvation economies” is “faith alone.”  Innumerable careers of talented and industrious interpreters have been spent attempting to prove that a gospel of salvation by works is delusional and futile.  Moody’s The Ryrie Study Bible (KJV) reckons that the following verses can lie at the heart of a passage “on discipleship”:

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?  Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works” (Matthew 16:25-26).

It is amazing that the plain meaning of a scriptural passage about salvation can be interpreted so as to refer to post-salvation “discipleship,” yet it is also drearily unsurprising.  It is unfortunate that the Gospels—and what is more, the Gospels under the shadow of the balance of the New Testament—can be construed as some one or another “story,” this story consisting of such elements and themes as the interpreter selects.

A layman like me cannot have a car radio tuned to Christian stations for very long without noticing the visceral energy with which preachers declare that this or that constitutes something like a “golden thread” through “all of Scripture.”  Few of such threads cannot be shown to be plucked out of an immensely more complicated fabric.

Therefore, it would not serve well, in light of the preceding, for this blog to attempt to provide another “golden thread” or to make contentions about the proper “story” to be seen in “all of Scripture.”

(Indeed, it would not be warranted to assume that an elucidation of the teachings of Jesus—if that be our goal—would necessarily involve, or be limited to, all the Bible or Bible-variants’ contents.  One might be reminded of the conjectures—before the hagiographers got to him—of Martin Luther about whether he might be required to discard the Letter of James.)

And so, if I am to contend that this blog has anything to offer, I must hope to provide something other than a story—or, to be more precise, less than a story.  I contend that the canonical Gospels—barring some scarcely-contested corruptions, errors, and interpolations—comprise not a story framework by which salvation through Jesus is presented, but comprise rather a narrative arc in which the ministry of Jesus is shown to be consonant with a primordial and inescapable proto-story of creaturely experience.

This universally present proto-story repeats endlessly, with endless variations and endless varieties of duration.  It is the basal experience the created being has with Creation; it is the infra-cognitive connection with the environment that provides the tangible experience through which a fleshed-out relationship with existence is gained; it is the coming-into-being of a consciousness that had being before it had consciousness.

It is the fleeting and ephemeral experience, endlessly to be grasped at, that Jesus describes:

“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein” (Luke 18:17).

This is also, of course, the substance of the “roused” element of “Roused, Readied, Reaped”—though in practice, as we shall see, it might be more exhaustively rendered as “Roused, Readied, Reaped—Repeat.”

In Regard to the Title of this Blog

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” is meant in contradistinction to “Conceived, Considered, Consigned” (or some such), the latter triad being what I contend is the generalized Christian conception of the life of human beings.

In Christianity, the life of humans as moral agents is invariably measured against some instantaneous beginning.  Believers who choose to subscribe to the salvation or damnation of single-celled organisms will fixate on life from biological conception; others will emphasize the moment of birth; still others will talk of some age at which the child or adolescent incurs moral responsibility.  The upshot in any event is the same: the person attains a status of accountability in an instant—the person as a moral agent is “conceived.”

It is my contention that, as opposed to being “conceived,” the person liable to moral accountability is “roused” to that state by a gradual process—as this blog will show.

In Christianity, the life of humans is invariably understood to be punctuated by instances of judgmental finality.  Either that judgment is pre-ordained—final in its solemnity and unalterable; or that judgment falls instantaneously, for good or ill, once for all; or that judgment knows moments of mortal sin or of absolution.  The person is, in the judgment of heaven, “considered” saved or damned as of any moment—and, crucially, as of the criteria taught in the respective sect’s theology.

It is my contention that, as opposed to being “considered,” the person is endlessly being “readied” to serve the kingdom of heaven—as this blog will show.

In Christianity, the life of humans is invariably described as ending with final and unalterable judgment—being “consigned” either to salvation or to damnation.  A state of being consigned to heaven or hell can—in the theology of predestination—exist throughout a person’s life, or, in other theologies, a state of unalterable salvation or damnation can precede physical death—a kind of living death.  Or physical death and the process of final consignment can occur together.

It is my contention that, as opposed to being “consigned” to heaven or hell, humans are confronted in life with the death of their innocent created natures, and in the living death of moral accountability are presented with ceaseless opportunities to forsake themselves for the enrichment of the kingdom of heaven.  They are “reaped” —as this blog will show.

What Is the Big Idea of This Blog?

In a way, there is none.  Genesis says humanity is made in the image of God.  Scholars know that the word for “image” used in that description is ambiguous.  It might well be interpreted to mean that humanity is brought into existence by the imaginings of God.

And of course, in any event humanity IS brought into—and sustained in—existence by the imaginings of God.  God not only exists in the fullness of any relevant concept; He is also the author and sustainer of all concepts.

Therefore attempts to conceptualize either Creation or its Author are imperfect recapitulations of His work or character, and have within them the germ of blasphemy.

The What-If of this Blog

What if a convocation of thinkers could be summoned in some hyper-dimensional state, suffering neither burdens of physicality nor pressures of time?  Human beings they would yet be, yet also free to ponder collectively on the basic principles they would choose to guide an ideal society.

Men have tried sometimes to approximate such a process, with varying results.  One might think of the men of stature who conferred with Job, or of the ancient academies, or of the American Constitutional Convention, or of the assemblies of the French Revolution.  All quite different, yet all concerned with the timeless question of how man should act, and how he might be constrained to so act.

Of course their answers differed, and the results of their mutual ponderings (such as were enacted) differed.  And of course they were limited in the constraints of their humanity in manners that would not apply in the idealized convocation described above.

But is there really a complex, multivariable nature to any analysis we might make of real-life attempts to conceptualize an ideal society?  We could choose to analyze any such an attempt according to how we felt it was conducive to piety, reverence, loyalty, order, justice, equality, prosperity, happiness, transparency, accountability, or any such list or combination.  Or, on the other hand, we could examine any attempt to conceptualize an ideal society according to the real-world constraints that bore upon the attempt’s participants.

The choice is really that simple, as is the choice of (almost invariably privileged) thinkers to conduct their deliberations in an attitude of humility—or not.  For while fallible humans might choose legitimately to consider, say, justice (or not) as an element of an ideal society, they are not at similar liberty to ignore their own limitations.

Nor can any attempt to conceptualize an ideal society ignore the flawed humanity of the society’s constituents; if the populace is considered perfect, then any fantasized society can be constructed from them.  There persists, then, an inescapable reality: no conscientious analysis of human morality has any claim to legitimacy that does not accord primacy to humility and its necessary complement—mercy.

As an element of how we must treat each other, mercy is not one duty among others—it is the context in which all other duties are made intelligible.

Earliest Scriptural Premise: Mercilessness, Not Sin

The declarations featured in this blog are derived from Christian traditions, but such traditions stripped to the core premises of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the presentation of his statements and actions in the standard four gospels, and the necessity of crediting his spiritual contentions if those gospels are to be taken as substantive.

In short, the Jesus of the canonical gospels existed, and he existed in the fullness of the divine.

In regard to “Earliest Scriptural Premise”, it is the premise of this blog that the thrust of Jesus’ ministry is aimed not at the problem of sin—so often taken as the root of humanity’s alienation from God—but at the problem of mercilessness. The earliest humans were not sinless, yet they were in communion with God. That communion was broken when Eve and Adam first began to exercise judgment—invariably imperfect judgment—against human beings. Eve and Adam, in other words, had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis—the first book of the Bible—is logically the presumptive Scriptural foundation of Jesus’ exhortation “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1, KJV)

Roused, Readied, Reaped blog description

Roused, Readied, Reaped blog description

Our lives last until the first moment we condemn a person.  For the rest of our mortal days, we choose between the salvation of wakeful death and the damnation of slumbering death.