Hurst - Gospel red herring spiritualizing the text

By Ed Hurst

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 by Ed Hurst

Copyright notice: People of honor need nocopyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where creditis due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. Ifyou are of the latter, please note what Moses said aboutdishonorable behavior be sure your sin will find you out(Numbers 32:23)

Permission is granted to copy, reproduce anddistribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains inits original form.

Cover Art: Rural church in Bavaria,Germany; public domain image.

Other books by the same author include ThePractice of Christian Mysticism,A Course in BiblicalMysticism and Biblical Morality.

If something grabs your heart and drives youbeyond all reason, it may well qualify as a word from God foryou.

In that moment, you realize that God takes youseriously and you feel driven to return the favor. The world fadesinto insignificance; at the same time, you realize a significantelement in that drive to please God is a deep compassion forothers. Perhaps you realize that most of the world will not takeyou seriously, but you cant let that stop you from pursuing Godsglory.

In the midst of this, you will also findyourself driven to take the Bible seriously. If the God of theBible touches you, its obvious you need to draw closer to theBible that tells us of Him. It wont much matter whether you takeany other literature as seriously as you do Scripture, but youwont be able to treat the Bible with contempt. The difficulty,then, is making sure that you find Him there, not some false imagethat blinds you to the meaning of whats written there.

It should hardly surprise you that those whowrote that material were deeply worried it would be taken wrongly.So far as we can tell, the Apostle John penned the final words ofthe New Testament that closed the canon of Scripture. HisApocalypse is loaded with sadness tempered by joy at the final end.Most people catch the sense of sorrow at what his flock was goingto face, particularly when he was gone, the last living apostle.What most people fail to grasp is the broader context from whichthis particular morose element arises.

The First Century church leadership struggledagainst the Judaizers. This was a group of teachers representing amovement that hoped to recapture for Judaism those who hadconverted to Christianity. These teachers ranged from pushy,overtly Jewish Pharisees to some very crafty folks pretending to belong-time followers of Christ, but they all had an agenda to bringthe church back under Talmudic Law. A primary mark of thepretenders was teaching, either openly or slyly through unspokenassumptions, the same legalistic literary analysis used by thePharisees. This was the influence of Hellenism and a drasticdeparture from the Ancient Hebrew way of looking at Scripture.

In essence, Hellenism is an appeal to objectivetruth as discoverable by human sensory data and reason. They neverclaimed it was necessary for every individual human to explore theentire realm of all that men could know. Someone who had done someexploration could save others time by abstracting, summarizing andteaching what they had experienced. This process was formalized infounding schools and collecting philosophers to teach others. Thewhole thing presumed a collection of rules for reasoning so thatresults would be fairly consistent. Eventually men would be able topoint to an established body of human experience and reasoning astrustworthy, or so the theory goes. We could then devise ways totake advantage of this body of truth and build a better life, solvehuman problems, and obtain some golden age of humanenlightenment.

This was the propaganda by which Hellenism wassold by the likes of Alexander the Great. It wasnt mere conquest,but he was spreading a truth that would save mankind from all ills.He was doing everyone a favor. A significant result of his effortsto sell this outlook was the death of mysticism in all forms. Italso meant trashing centuries of human study based on a mysticaloutlook. This gradual shift in intellectual assumptions also meanttossing out the entire intellectual background upon which Scripturestood. Alexanders conquest was some three centuries before Christ.It took awhile for the Jewish scholars to buy into the Hellenicapproach, but by the time Jesus was born, the older HebrewMysticism was a quaint relic, nearly forgotten. The Pharisees wereseized by the thrill of reason and logic, without noticing that atthe very deepest level, the one thing that made it so delicious wasthat it placed man in control as his own god. Man could decide forhimself what was good and what was evil. They forgot that this wasthe primary point behind the story of the Fall, that Adam and Evesurrendered to the temptation to be like God, reasoning forthemselves what was good and evil.

While Jesus didnt bluntly say it, His disputeswith the Pharisees was a call to denounce Hellenism and return tothe Ancient Hebrew approach that placed man in utter subjection toGod as the Creator and Judge of what was moral and right.Everything He said was inherently based on that ancient way. TheHellenizing influence had, in essence, allowed the Jews to developsuch an alien image of Jehovah that it amounted to idolatry, onlyit was the idolatry of human reason over revelation. Thats becauseGod had intentionally created the Ancient Hebrew culture andintellectual traditions as a critical element in His revelation.Placing analytical reasoning and human intellect in the driversseat was the root element of the Fall itself. Thus, our Westerntendency to regard the Ancient Hebrews as somewhat primitive andbarbaric is a senseless rejection of Gods ways. Systematicarrangement of biblical teaching by analytical arrangement is notsuperior, but strips away the organic approach for which Goddesigned us.

While the Apostles strove to resurrect thisAncient Hebrew intellectual approach in their teachings, they hadto contend with Judaizers slipping in and knowingly underminingthat effort. The Talmud was the result of Hellenized reasoningapplied to the Books of Moses. Without the Hellenizing assumptionsabout the primacy of human reason, the Talmud would fall apart. Itwas all about the control, the elitism of understanding the Talmudthat seemed so incomprehensible to others. They could point to itas a manifestation of objective truth, as if that were God, andbash people over the head with it. Having made their rationalunderstanding their god, the Jews could not afford to let thiscompeting message exist, not even among those who departed fromtheir Jewish identity. Having a large population using the sameScriptures with an entirely different message was a serious threatto everything they thought they had. Accepting the idea thatHellenism was wrong meant that their entire Talmudic structure wasalso wrong, and that Jesus could only have been the Son of God, andthe Jews His murders. So long as they used the analytical processof Hellenism, they could deny the validity of the Christianmessage.

John in his last days saw clearly that theJudaizers were winning. He saw that the broad sweep of historicalshift favored the rise of this Hellenized cultural orientation andwhatever came with it. He might not have understood why God wasallowing this, but John placed the question in a much broaderprophetic grasp that Satan was going to have his heyday before Godcrushed his works one last time. However, John was using the Hebrewapproach and pointing out tendencies and influences, not offering aprecise predictive narrative. Since those days, there have beenbrief flashes of scholarship recovering that ancient intellectualapproach. I wont pretend that I represent any significant elementin Johns prophecy for his future, but I do hope to at least raisehis lament one more time. I say lets reexamine the commonassumptions of mainstream Christian religion by reclaiming the vasttreasure of Hebrew intellectual heritage.