The most tragic weakness in modern evangelical churches is a crippled understanding of the Two Realms. It's true we can find a book about that from a fellow named Augustine, but we can't forget he was a creature of his times. Many things he got quite right, but it was mixed with several mistaken notions. This spiritual schizophrenia was typical of his day, so soon after the last Apostle passed. We don't have space here for a detailed analysis, but the general issue is he unknowingly ends up using the underlying intellectual assumptions of the system he condemns. He suffered from the twisted outlook of Hellenism, as did most bright academic minds among Christians around the Mediterranean. So while Augustine did seek to explain the differences between the spiritual and the worldly, it was off the mark in many places because his complete frame of reference was off-center. Modern churches are even farther removed from the more ancient frame of reference of the Bible.
Hellenism is a fancy word drawn from the Greek word for the Greeks themselves, based on the old legends of Hellen of Troy -- the Hellenes. It also is the name for a cultural intellectual tradition with which we associate the ancient Greek philosophers, in particular Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. If you really want to know the nitty-gritty details, you'll have to examine the differences in the field of epistemology. Here we note, in essence, the Hellenists insist man is the measure of all things; what man cannot logically reason out does not exist. To be reasonable, every logical step must be fully exposed for analysis. Augustine accepted this underlying assumption, as did almost everyone else among the Early Church Fathers, without realizing it came out of the materialist assumptions of Hellenism. This is virtually the entire scope of Western Civilization, in particular the intellectual culture.
It is all too easy to show how Hellenism slipped into the church, in particular as a shift away from the Ancient Hebrew intellectual culture. The first church in the New Testament was entirely Jewish, and most churches during the Apostolic Era included a powerful Jewish influence. That was a good idea, because the God of the Old Testament went out of His way to construct the Hebrew culture as the best means for revealing Himself. The problem is, by the time of Christ, the Jews had been Hellenized for at least a couple of centuries. You can read a more detailed explanation of it here. The problem Jesus faced daily was calling His listeners back to the Ancient Hebrew perspective. Hellenism led to a corrupted, mostly literalist viewpoint of the Law of Moses, which Law was thoroughly symbolic in nature. So while Jesus and His disciples taught a return to those ancient ways of thinking, it was no simple matter, and most Jews never quite made it. So most Jewish Christians brought this with them into the churches, and by the time of Augustine, the drift was significant.
It's not as if the Ancient Hebrews didn't understand purely rational human logic, but they knew it had limits. It could only address what could be proven to the intellect. That's fine if your spirit is dead, but Jesus came to bring spirits to life, because that's the only place the Holy Spirit could live. Once that happens, you have this input from God Almighty coming into your spirit, and it needs to trickle through into your conscious mind enough to inform your decisions. We have a fancy word we use to describe something about God: "ineffable". It comes from the Latin effari, which means to tell of something. The in prefix negates the idea. God cannot be told, because the Ultimate Truth of all things cannot be put into human language. Language collapses under the weight of the task. Ancient Hebrew intellect accounted for this by adding a step in the process of analysis which was utterly outside the realm of reason, in the sense of human intellect. Jesus addressed this when He spoke of the necessity of using parables, and parabolic language. You can't describe truth, only indicate what it demands of you.
Nor should we suggest any Ancient Near Eastern mind was somehow superior simply because it was used to including a little mysticism. There are a whole range of mystical sources which aren't from God. But only a spiritually alive person can tell which is which. The good that comes from having an ability to work with non-rational, even mystical forms of logic, is the spiritual fertility of the soul. A mind raised up to Ancient Near Eastern ways of symbolic logic is fertile soil for the gospel truth, while the Hellenized mind is more like sterile sand. It will still grow stuff, but it takes a lot of work to change it (Romans 12:2) so that spiritual truth can be handled properly. Most Christians understand the necessity of faith as a non-rational element in their considerations, but they still cling so tightly to Western rationality, they keep trying to make faith reasonable. Let's get one thing straight: Faith is eminently unreasonable in its demands. If we expect to make grace and faith logical so lost minds can accept it, we are utterly without hope. Accepting faith requires a spirit come to life. God alone can raise up a dead spirit, and everything else is what man can do.
What makes it so hard for us is not realizing we shouldn't ask folks to be born again, because only God can do that. We ask folks to repent from their sins as the only path to the birth of the spirit. None of us is permitted to look into the Lamb's Book of Life, so we can never know the spiritual state of any soul. All we know is the strength of their repentance, and their commitment to continue letting repentance reshape their lives as demonstrated through conduct and words. We know there is a powerful correlation between living right and a living spirit, but we surely realize they aren't the same thing. One is a spiritual truth, while the other is an earthly manifestation. We operate along earthly lines for a divine purpose, but in the end, we can't possibly know of a certainty, in the same way we know facts on this earth, what's going on in the spiritual realm. We know spiritual truth in a way which leaves the intellect behind.
Let's examine some ways we have mixed the Two Realms in our ministries.
By Ed Hurst
26 October 2009
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