The True Source of Authority
The True Source of Authority
It is becoming increasingly obvious that our culture has a crisis of authority. The response to Covid-19 by the regime demonstrated this. So, where does authority come from?
Prayer “possesses a conductive power.” Without prayer, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers become more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.” Ernst Jünger 1
“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams." Acts 2:17
Some insights take a long time to come together fully. You have all the pieces within you, some of which you have used and worked with often over the years. Then you come across a writer, a book, or an article that is the final key to a complex puzzle, the one insight that brings everything together, showing you the full import of all these other seemingly tangential bits and how they fit together into a cohesive whole. The author in this case is Augusto del Noce, and he has shown me the political import of ideas that heretofore were “merely” religious and theological, perhaps a little philosophical. With our society’s secular/religious divide, these ideas would seem the most comfortable today in the private realm of one’s personal faith. In my efforts to bridge that divide, I have discussed them cautiously in my Substack with the hope that a wider audience can grow more at ease with the idea of thinking theologically about the world.
But once the full import of del Noce’s insight began to settle upon me, it imposes a demand that this this public/private split be smashed down. In his book “The Crisis of Modernity” (which I just lent to a friend, so I will be going from memory…no quotes from the book) he takes a step that few have the courage to take, and he is often sly and understated when doing so. Lots of authors, Christian or otherwise, talk about the “the Transcendent” or “the Divine” or even “God.” They will even do so in specifically Christian ways. You will hear talk about “metaphysics” or of “Being.” You will hear people discussing “the creation order” or “natural law.” All of these have long, respectable, academic traditions. You will even hear non-Christian, and even some Christian, authors talk about “re-enchanting” the world. But, in many ways, one gets the sense that it is somewhat academic, a step removed from us. If you don’t want your Christianity to be stuck in some Bible thumping ghetto, some Pentecostal revival meeting, you learn pretty quickly how to discuss the Christian faith in “respectable” ways that don’t get too weird, to tinged with the dangers of “enthusiasm.” Del Noce throws that all out the window. When he talks about the “transcendent” he frequently accompanies it with another very loaded word: the “supernatural.” While he is very much an academic, he makes the point that what he advocates is not an abstract understanding of transcendence, but rather, one that is visceral and real, something you actually experience. You don’t just talk about God. You actually meet God. His fundamental argument politically, is that people who actually meet God, who interact with the unseen spiritual world of metaphysics, creation order, natural law, angels, demons, and yes, God himself, represent the biggest threat to the power of the regime which is based largely in its opposite: atheism and materialism.
Materialism and Immanentism
The various essays by del Noce gathered together in “The Crisis of Modernity” delve deeply into this notion of “modernity” and its implications. He confronts a world consumed with atheism and materialism, a world in which God is dead. Or if he is not dead, then he is an immanent force working in history and society. God is the face of Progress. God is the builder of institutions and the righter of social injustices. Immanentism, del Noce argues, is the attempt to make the transcendent at home in a world in which God is dead. To do this, the church must become more “relevant” to the world. On the one hand there are those who keep to traditional forms of morality, but then do things like emphasize the Bible more as an end in itself, than as sign which points to something greater than itself. One conforms one’s life to the the perceived content, the rules of living, contained therein. The Bible ceases to be a mere instrument in the pursuit of participating in the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). The Bible is a book of practical insights showing you how to live the good life, build a strong marriage, manage one’s family, handle finances and so forth. All of it is horizontal. Church growth is the same. The measure of success is the growth of the institution. There is a whole industry of management guru style books focused on growing your church. Is it a wonder that most churches today are indistinguishable architecturally from a corporate headquarters or a research park?
On the other side of immanentism is those that focus on accommodating the sexual mores of the dominant culture, embracing the sexual revolution in the name of social justice and creating a welcoming environment to the unchurched that way. What began as a response to issues of poverty within society quickly transformed in a post-Nietzschean world into the social gospel. Or, in its more radical forms, into liberation theology: the attempt to meld Marxism with Christian teaching and practice. To fully grasp the moment and understand the full import of where we are today, regardless of the feathers this ruffles, is that much of the church today is immanentist. The church growth and praise and worship movements which seek cultural relevancy for the purpose of reaching the unchurched are but one side of the coin of which the other side is that of woke churches who seek cultural relevancy by harmonizing its morality with that of the secular culture.
Both streams, the one corporate and technical and the other moral and sexual, are attempts to give the Christian faith a home in a post-Nietzschean world in which God is dead. Even when not embraced in its most radical forms, most of us today function as if we live in a materialist and atheist world. Philosophical materialism makes the argument that there is nothing but matter. There are no spiritual realities, no God. There is only dead inert matter. Those of us who are Christians are a lot more influenced by this way of thinking than we realize. Of course, we believe in God. We genuinely do believe in God, a personal God. That being the case, we often live much of our lives like materialists.
Here is quick way of thinking about it: when you get sick, what is the first thing you do? Do you call your pastor to gather the elders to come and anoint you with oil and pray over you? Or do you book an appointment with your doctor? There is nothing inherently wrong with doctors and medicine. But such a question is designed to get us to think of all the countless ways that we live moment by moment, day by day as if God does not exist. We use the language of God, but our lives often tell another story.
One of the ways in which philosophical materialism affects our thinking is that if there is no God, then there is also no transcendent moral order, there is no underlying supernatural fabric to creation binding it together giving it meaning. In a world in which the transcendent and the supernatural are very much real to people, then meaning, order, truth are all out there in creation to be seen and discovered. The world is filled with meaning.
This is an immensely important divide and it is vital that we grasp the full import of its significance. In a materialist world, everything around us is just dead matter. It has no meaning of its own unless we as human beings give it meaning. We determine truth. We determine the significance of things in the world around us. When we hear people talk about being true to themselves, finding their truth or being authentic, we know that they are operating in world that is dominated by philosophical materialism.
This places us as meaning givers at the center of the universe. History is our story as human beings. The events of the world, the events of my life, your life, have no inherent meaning unless we as human beings give the world meaning. It is up to us to create the world we want and be heroic enough to shape the world after our will. This places a tremendous burden upon us. We are now called upon to figure out for ourselves the meaning of life and the purpose of our existence. Nothing tells us who we are so we must figure it out. Many, most of us, are not up to the task. We wither under the burden. This makes us vulnerable to the demagogue, the propagandist and the advertiser (who is, in the end, a propagandist). Overwhelmed at the thought of having to create our own world, overwhelmed by the idea of dasein, of living on the event horizon, a fully self-aware, authentically self-creating being, we collapse and beg the demagogues and propagandists to tell us who we are. Some of us assemble a somewhat coherent identity out a mish mash of education, career attainments, brands, ideologies, fandoms, associations or orientations. Others collapse under the weight and slip into alternate realities created for us by the masters of mass media, video gaming or social media.
The Implication of Transcendence and the Supernatural
But what if God is not dead?
What if there is a real unseen order that binds everything together? What if this order, even if we cannot perceive it directly provides all the categories by which we understand the world, not just materially, as in physics and chemistry, but morally as well? What if it gives us more that this? What if this structure reveals itself in and through human behavior and interactions? What if there is a kind of archetypal programming which reveals itself in and through story and symbols? What if it is more than this? What if God is intimately involved in the moment by moment governance of the universe he created? What if this order, the stories and the symbols are not things distinct from God himself, but are bound up in God himself ? What if God was aided in this task by a whole host of unseen created beings whose task it is to help in the moving of the winds and growth of plants? What if people, in their ignorance, worshiped these beings as divine, and these beings, in rebellion against their Creator stole that worship for themselves rather than giving it up to God himself?
Del Noce wants us to open this whole set of problems. Transcendence and the supernatural. It is people who are deeply connected with the transcendent in a real and meaningful way who are the biggest threat to the secular regime. He argues at length that it precisely these people who are in the crosshairs of the regime. The goal is to stamp out Christianity or make it fully accommodated to a “God is dead” world.
He is not talking about some kind of make it up yourself syncretism. He is not talking about some neo-pagan revivalism. On the contrary, he spends significant time working through the idea of “tradition.” Del Noce argues that unlike post-Nietzschean mythological revivalism, or the past utopianism which inspired the Fascists, modernity is not something that is axiological, in that the past is not closed off to us. He argues that there is a living tradition which can be tapped into, a well that can be drawn from. What he is talking about is a re-engagement with the supernatural within the boundaries of the living Christian tradition and thus under the living authority of that tradition. We are not merely trying to give life to something long dead, nor are we trying to Retvrn to a mythical past utopia; rather, we are tapping into and submitting ourselves to something which is still alive, even if deeply wounded. While essential, this quest can be dangerous. Many of the unseen beings are malign and evil and want nothing more than to deceive, enslave and destroy you. This is why it is essential we do this rooted within the Christian community and within Christian tradition.
Engaging the transcendent, that is the Triune God of Scripture, the Fathers and the living Church, in its full supernatural import, means first of all making a shift from us as human beings at the center of the story in which we give the world meaning, to us being immersed in a grand divine drama as well as a web of order, rules, archetypes, spiritual beings, God’s Wisdom, as well as God’s own presence. It is the realty which surrounds us all the time, ordering and informing our lives, even if we don’t see it. One of the tasks of the spiritual life, of the spiritual journey is learning to “see.” This process of “seeing” is at the heart and core of making our salvation “in Christ,” not merely something we believe in without any lived experience, but rather is something experienced first hand, even if only in part. Paul says to us that we “see” now as in a mirror dimly. Even if experienced only in part, a partial participation in the divine nature is no small thing and goes a long way to reverse the alienation we experienced as a result of man’s disobedience.
Our supernatural experience of God and the fabric his creation order is a direct challenge to the materialist and the atheist. They will do all their power to cut us off from and blind us to these realities. They will argue that God does not exist. They will tell us that we have killed him. They will try to convince us that all of our needs can be satisfied materially. They will try to embarrass us into silence. Only “backwards” people actually believe all that superstitious stuff. But our actual living belief, our lived experience of the supernatural transcendent God is proof that the whole worldview of modernity is built on an empty lie.
Instead of a life built on vain falsehoods, our life gains meaning and purpose when we align ourselves to God, his truth, his patterns, his archetypes, pregnant with meaning, all around us.
The Spiritual Mode
So how do we come to see this reality? How do we become “see-ers?”
First of all, we have to note that all of us are born with the capacity to “see.” I loosely subscribe to Herman Dooyeweerd’s understanding of humanity and the world around us, that there are a number of intersecting realities, or aspects, which make up both humanity and the world. Each aspect of the world and humanity has its own characteristics, its own mode of expression and understanding. These modes intersect and mix with each other, while at the same time retaining elements incommensurate with the other aspects. There is the physical, the aesthetic, the juridical, the historical, the linguistic, the political, the mathematical among others. It seems right to me that there is spiritual or mystical aspect to our humanity, a capacity within all of us to “see” and to grasp not just metaphysical realities, but also things like the natural moral law as well as archetypes and even actual spiritual realities like God and other created beings. Just as with other natural capacities, some of us are born with more capacity than others. Like the ability to be physically in shape, you can be fit, but not all of us will be elite athletes. Even if we are athletes, not all of us would compete in the same sports, nor are we built to do so. A right tackle is not built the same a wide receiver. Just because you can run, does not mean you can catch. And just because you are faster than 80% of the population, does not mean that you are ever going to stand on a podium. In different ways, you can enjoy sketching and pottery class, but it does not mean that your works are destined to hang in the Louvre.
While this innate spiritual capacity does intersect with other aspects of our being, it also is something unique unto itself. We can talk about the spiritual and the supernatural to a point. Eventually, though, we reach that limit where language, or art, or music, or even the legal for example, can no longer communicate what we are sensing or experiencing with this capacity. As with other capacities, it can remain stunted and out of shape. In the world of Western culture, this is generally the case. The West has been built by maxing certain aspects of our human capacity while neglecting others. We have advanced scientific and technical capacities, we have advanced rational learning, and we have advanced the economic aspects of life at the expense of the moral, the legal and the spiritual. Not only have we allowed some of these capacities to wither, but we have upended the proper hierarchy of these aspects. We have placed a lower aspect, the economic, for example, above the interpersonal, the moral and the spiritual.
The upending of this hierarchy has resulted in a gradual erosion of the true source of authority in society, a topic which del Noce dedicates a significant amount of energy to understand. During the Late Middle Ages new forms of learning and new forms of economics were confronting a world in which the traditional forms of authority had grown corrupt and sclerotic. In hindsight it is completely understandable that they would reject these older forms of authority, the king and the church, in favor of science, technology and money. There was tremendous power in simply asking how things worked. People found out that they could make things work. They could harness the power of the natural world. This new learning lent the air of authority, but without its substance. Just because science and technology could make something work, it is incapable of telling us whether or not we should make it work. Many have tried to formulate a new “horizontal” framework for morality, but all have failed.
This is the great failure of the Enlightenment itself. It cannot provide true authority, the kind of authority which flows from God and the created metaphysical order. In their desperate attempts to replace this authority, they have now settled on credentialism and managerial policy produced by means of “good process.” I have been coming to see the emergence of Anons into the mainstream commentariat as an attempt to renew and revive our connection with true authority, even if they don’t know that this is what they are doing. They are willing to pull from all kinds of new sources of esoterica in an effort to find some re-invigorating force. This also explains the furious efforts at gatekeeping. We can’t trust Anons. They lack proper credentials and the PMC stamp of approval for “reasonable” opinions, even in the so-called mainstream right.
Because we have grown so accustomed to Christian stories, we fail to see their true import, their truly radical nature. In ancient storytelling, telling of a tale once within a larger narrative is significant. Telling it a second time is a clue that this is story with more importance than others. But when it is told a third time, or more, it is your clue that this is a tale of true gravity. One such is the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. His direct encounter with the risen Christ while on a journey to persecute believers was decisive for the future of the Church. Paul refers to this event again and again in his letters and leans upon it as the source of his authority. Paul often seemed like a lone ranger doing his own thing. Yet, he also went to Jerusalem to submit himself to the other Apostles. This is also why the theology of apostolic succession is so important in the choosing and ordaining of leaders within the church. Here is one of Paul’s telling of the story as recounted to us by Luke in Acts 26:12-18:
12 “On one of these journeys I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. 13 About noon, King Agrippa, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. 14 We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’
15 “Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’
“ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. 16 ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me. 17 I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18 to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’”
What is interesting about this passage, other than the theophany Paul experienced, is how it frames his task, and thus the task of the church. Paul is not engaged in a horizontal mission to plant and build churches. Paul is a foot soldier in a supernatural war. The curtain, the veil, is being pulled back (as also happens in John’s Apocalypse) so that we are able to see the true supernatural import of what we are doing. We are opening people’s eyes. We are helping them to “see.” What? Their true spiritual condition. Their need for salvation. But also just simply to see. We are at work helping Christ to liberate people from their bondage to Satan. As a side note, there are just two categories of people: those who are “in Christ” and those who are in bondage to Satan. And, yes, that does include even the “nice” people who are not believers.
Gaining Our Sight
Because the ability to “see” the supernatural is an innate part of our humanity, we must also recognize that this ability can be exercised within and outside of a relationship with Christ. People who are in bondage to Satan can also “see.” And this is generally the easy way to gain supernatural sight. The Devil is quite willing to lie and deceive people so as to corrupt and enslave them. In a world of sin and evil where there are real malign spiritual entities out there, this is dangerous ground. But if we walk away from it because of these dangers or because it attracts oddballs and wierdos, we are basically ceding this ground to the evil one and cutting ourselves off from true divine authority. For your average rationalist or scientifically minded person, we are probably several bridges too far at this point. In essence, we need to listen to the God appointed seers when they impose limits upon us and tell us, “no.” Much of what ails us in Western society is that we have not just allowed our supernatural capacity to wither, but we went the next step to deny and cut ourselves off from the supernatural altogether. We bear the fruits of this today. Just look at what happened during Covid in a world without real authority. How did “follow the science” work out for us? The credentialed have set themselves up as gods. But they can’t be the voice of God because they deny such things.
With that warning in mind, how do we regain the use of our sight?
Let’s turn now to the Biblical material and get a glimpse, an introduction to what is going on with spiritual sight and seeing. Once you start to pay attention to this “seeing” thread with the Bible, you discover that it is pretty much everywhere. Even when it is not spoken of directly, this idea of God informed sight is often at work in the background and forms much of the backbone of wisdom and wisdom literature. John describes Jesus as “the Word,” that is the living embodiment, the fulfillment of wisdom, of the seer.
We still use the language of seeing and sight today in our modern atheist and materialist world, but we often use it in a way that they didn’t really use it in scripture. We still talk of “visioning.” Some of you are probably cringing and wanting to roll your eyes. How many of you have been through failed “visioning” processes, especially in a churched context? The term “visioning,” of course, was borrowed from biblical, wisdom literature and then transformed by our modern and post-modern materialist culture so that it became part of the secular, technical, corporate planning processes. Instead of us seeing the actual spiritual realities out there, as good materialists we place ourselves at the center of the process. We ourselves try to forecast, predict, or even visualize a future that is not there that we can then make real by developing a plan, marshaling resources, and harnessing technology and systems to make this a reality. This is the essence of technique and the technical planning process. See the future you want. Set goals. Establish the steps to get there. Realize the vision. This is the materialist version of “seeing.”
We as churches have then borrowed back our own language of “seeing” and “sight” but now it’s used in a way that tries to sanctify or spiritualize a kind of materialist five-year corporate planning process with God language. Even the way we talk about vision and visioning is often backwards. It is centered on us and our needs. Like all who live in our materialist, “God is dead” world, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary actors in the story. We are at the center of the story. We want God to give us a “vision”, a plan for us and for our future. The center with most of our visioning processes is us. We want a vision—from God—or at least we want to believe we got it from God.
If we are brutally honest with ourselves, it is about us. We want God to make us feel special by giving us a special plan for the future, a special “vision.” We then apply this vision, and we then shape the world. In much the same way, I want a vision for my life. We want a vision for our church. It’s about me, it’s about us. The whole “visioning” process is focused on us and our wants, our needs, our future, our purpose, our meaning in life. Even though we cling to a belief in God, we want God to fill the needs that our godless materialist world has created in a way that is in harmony with a godless world. We want God to give us a sense of meaning that we can then use to order and give meaning to the world around us. We have placed ourselves at the center of the picture and we want God to validate our lives, our church, even our society, by making us feel like we have some special vision from God for our future. Bottom line is that in many ways we as Christians have also bought into the self-centered attitude of a materialist world, but we have glossed it all over with biblical language.
And this is why so much of what the churches do today is often so ineffectual and has so little impact on society. It has it all backwards. We use the language of seeing, but we don’t really see. We no longer see the transcendent and spiritual realities all around us, so we adopt PMC corporate vision-speak and call it “Christian” or “Biblical” when it is just another form of immanentism. It is a church compatible with the modern materialist world. This is essentially Jesus’ message in John 9 where he says, “for judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” And to this the religious leaders of the day got offended and asked, “Are we blind?” To which Jesus responds, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin, but now that you claim to see, your guilt remains.” Unfortunately, we live in a time where everywhere we look, our religious leaders are telling us they see, that they have religious vision. And one gets the sense, far too often, that we are being led by the blind who don’t even know they are blind.
So, what is this “seeing” thing all about? What is God informed sight?
I think the first thing that we have to “see”—there is that word again—the first thing we need to see is how intimately spiritual that sight and seeing are. It is deeply bound up with our journey with God by being “in Christ.” It is woven into the journey of faith and the ways God can challenge us and test us through the sacrifices he demands of us.
Unfortunately, most of you can’t read Hebrew, and because of this you are at the mercy of translations. Even good translations are a kind of interpretation that imposes certain traditions and conventions on a text. And even good translations sometime obscure the language of the original. In English we like to vary up our word choices so as not repeat the same word over and over again. Hebrew, other hand, often conveyed meaning by repeating words and using the same root consonants. Hebrew is built around three consonant roots which are then given different vowels, suffixes and prefixes as needed. A lot of meaning can be conveyed in a story when you hear the root or even a similar word with similar root used together. The poetics of the language happens often at this level word choice and sound. And we don’t really listen to the stories anymore. We analyze them. We take them apart and try to figure out what they mean, what the theological principles are. In Western parlance, we usually work to distill from every story its propositional universal truth that we can then carry around with us context free and apply to new situations as needed.
But these stories are one of the means by which we access the unseen world of metaphysical order. They are one of the ways in which God and his creation order are revealed to us. Like we talked above, the subjects of these stories are like the Olympic athletes of participation in and revelation of God and the archetypes he has imbedded into the world all around us. Through them we are able to see in lesser ways the ordinary revelation of God in and through the world. We become fully who we are by participating in the same archetypes in the same way, but generally with less boldness and intensity. Because of the vivid way these realities were seen in these personages, these archetypal tales were told and retold. They are the vehicle by which supernatural and transcendent realities become revealed to us. When we conform our life to them, when we live into these stories ourselves, we participate in their meaning and our lives gain meaning through them. We don’t confront these realities directly. They cannot be measured with instruments, but they can be seen through the story, and these stories then give our life meaning as they order our consciousness and we are able to live into them, conforming and adapting ourselves so as to become the story. This orientation is the diametrical opposite to that of material world were we generate meaning for all the dead inert matter all around us. We live in world rich with stories and symbols, giving us access to an unseen realm which can only be accessed obliquely.
In some sense the point of the story is the story. The point of the symbol is the symbol. One of the goals of the story is to reveal, but another goal was to have the story itself live through us, to pull us into it so that our life is shaped by and adapted to the tale. The hero’s experience was meant to become in some way our experience. We become more of who we are supposed to be as human beings by living into and becoming the story. By living into the story, the patterns of creation shape and order and give meaning to our lives.
The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac is one such story. It is a story that has a degree of subtlety, where the point that the author is making is told at the level of language, through word choice and the layering of different elements of the story, so that it can unfold as you hear the story again and again. Seeing, sight, faith and intimacy with God are all woven together. It is the path by which we gain our sight.
Let’s read the story from a translation that follows very closely the original Hebrew. I have tweaked it a little just to bring out and highlight some of the things which would have been more obvious to your Hebrew reader:
Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he answered, “Behold!” [that is: “Look at me!” or “See me!”] And He said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” So early the next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He set out for the place which God has told him. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there; we will worship and we will return to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the firestone and the knife; and the two walked off together. Then Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he answered, “Yes, my son.” And he said, “Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” And Abraham said, “God will see to the sheep for his burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them walked on together.
They arrived at the place of which God had told him. Abraham built the alter there; he laid out the wood; he bound his son Isaac; he laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. Then an angel of the Lord call to him from heaven: “Abraham! Abraham!” And he answered, “Behold!” [again: “Look at me!”] And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.” [notice the confluence of the angelic presence with the presence of God himself] When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burn offering in place of his son. And Abraham named that site Adoni-yireh [literally: The Lord is Seen], whence the present saying, “On the mount of the Lord there is vision.” [that is: seeing]
So, you have this dynamic at the beginning of the story where Abraham demands to be seen by God. Notice me! Look at me! Here I am! See me! He wants God to really see him. He wants God to be close, to see, to see who he is, his inner character. When God does get close to Abraham and looks at him, God makes the impossible demand: sacrifice your son. Go where I will show you and do this thing, terrible, evil even. Show me your obedience. Show me your faith. Do you trust me with the promises I have made to you?
Abraham is able to look out and see the place where he will meet God and be tested. He sees the place God is showing him. He trusts God and goes to the place of testing on the mountain. He sees the path ahead, the test that is coming, and undaunted, he continues forward. When his son asks the natural question, “Where is the sacrifice?”, Abraham expresses his confidence in God, but does so in a way that places confidence in the seeing of God, that is, the wisdom of God. God will see to it. Then, just at the crucial moment, when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, God calls out to him again and again Abraham demands that God look at him. “See me God, see how I have been faithful. See how I have trusted you. Look at me.” The Lord acknowledges the faith of Abraham, and it is then, in the moment of acknowledged faith that Abraham “sees” the sheep caught in the thicket. And as with many Old Testament stories, Abraham tells us of the importance, the significance of the place by naming it Adonai-yireh, “the Lord is seen.” The reason for this is that on the mount of the Lord there is vision.
The Lord showed Abraham the place he was to go and the sacrifice he was to make, and Abraham went, and he was tested and in the middle of this test he saw the Lord deeply. He saw the character, the heart of God. And God saw him. In the end, it was not so much the content of what he saw in God, but the reality that he saw God and was seen by God. It was in this crucible of testing, the sacrifice he was asked to make, that Abraham was able to come to truly see God and as a result he gained his sight, he gained wisdom, the deeper meanings and structures of the created order lay open to him. It is not so much that Abraham had or possessed anything, any new knowledge. But now he was seen, and he could see.
In many ways this is the difference between biblical thinking and modern thinking. We are always looking for knowledge, as in “knowledge is power.” For us we want to learn things, know things, that will enable us to manipulate objects, build things, harness energy, organize people. It is scientific, technological and technical, it is organizational. With knowledge we can make, do, build and organize. We have power.
But with the Bible, wisdom is a very different thing. Wisdom is God inspired seeing. It is the journey of Abraham up the mountain. My long time readers will recognize this next passage, one that I have used a couple of times before to illustrate this point. Proverbs 26:4-5:
4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you yourself will be just like him.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.
So, what is it? Do you answer a fool or not answer a fool? And this pairing unfolds the essence of wisdom. With wisdom, you don’t have the answer to that question. There is no knowledge. There is no rational content. But in the moment, when you see the fool, you will know. You will use your God informed sight that you gained on the mountain like Abraham, and you will see the correct path to walk, you will see the correct choice.
And this is who we are supposed to be, but especially this is who our elders and our spiritual leaders are supposed to be. This is the fount of authority that del Noce talks about. Our society tells us to “trust the science.” Our society demands that we bend the knee to the Harvard grad. But what we truly need are men who have been up the mountain like Abraham and can see in the fullest sense of the word. They have the earned spiritual authority. They have wisdom. Men who in the moment will see the correct path to take with their God informed vision.
We are seeing—there is that word again—a picture come together. It is a subtle concept, and I think that is this way on purpose. It is not meant to be easy to gain sight, to go up the mountain like Abraham and see God and be seen by God and to gain your sight. It is the pearl of great price.
But there is another layer that we need to add, and it is Jesus, the Word, Wisdom made flesh in a man, who adds the final piece. We turn to the Gospel of John. This is not by accident, as John, more than any other author, draws out for us this theme of Jesus as the living embodiment of Wisdom, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us.
John 5:19
19 Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.
This is the essence of how it works. The Son can do nothing by himself. The Son of God has no plans or projects of his own. He can only do what he sees the Father doing. So, Jesus looks out around him and with his God informed vision, looks and sees God the Father already at work. God is doing things. The world is filled with the move and actions of God. Whatever the Father is doing the Son is also doing. Jesus says that I look, and I see what God is doing and I join in. Jesus, knows, trusts, that the Father loves him. God shows him what he is doing. And then Jesus joins him.
This is very much the opposite of how we approach the “visioning” or planning process. We generally begin with ourselves. We begin with our lives as individuals or as a church. I want to know God’s plan for my life. We want to know God’s vision for the church. We want to know a politician’s plan for the country and it’s problems. It’s almost like a kind of fortune telling. We want God to reveal our future to us. We want God to give our lives meaning. We want God to give our church purpose. We want God to give our society meaning. We act like materialists living in an inert world of dead matter who are asking for some secret gnosis from God that will enable them to feel special, to feel like there is some meaning. But they are looking for God to give it to them so that they can then use this special gnosis to give meaning to the world and to their lives. It flips everything around and makes us the center of the universe, the main actors in history, even as we call upon God to give us vision. We don’t really want to see. No, we want to have a plan that we can then use to order and give meaning to the world. It is all about me, about us. We want God to make us feel special, to give us meaning, to give us purpose. In this empty materialist world, we want God to give us what we need so that we can then give this empty world meaning.
For Jesus it was not about him, it was all about the Father. Jesus “saw.” He used his God informed vision to look out around him and see where God the Father was at work; then he joined in with what the Father was already doing. God is all around us already at work. God: supernatural, transcendent, he is all around us doing things and working. We are called to “see” what God is doing and join in.
As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
It is the Spirit who leads us into the heart of God, it is the Spirit who leads us up the mountain like Abraham to see God who gives us sight. All we have to do is use our God given sight to see what God is doing in the moment and join in. The Spirit led man is the one who is able to see God. This is the role of the Spirit.
But this passage, and another from Jude, mention a different type of person, a ψυχικός, the psuchikos, the unspiritual man, the person who follows “natural instincts” and does not have the Spirit of God. Paul says this of them as few verses later in 1 Cor 2:14:
14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Jude says this of them:
19 These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.
This is our problem today. This is the sickness of our society as a whole. We gained the knowledge of science, the power of technology and the wealth of the market, but it was largely at the cost of our souls. We gain all of these things by casting aside our ability to see. We are a society of the ψυχικός, led by the ψυχικός.
So, how do we go about regaining our sight? The good news is that this is really one of the prime tasks of Jesus. He came, lived, died and rose again to overcome our alienation with God, each other and the creation. Part of this task is helping us to regain our our sight, so that we can see again. Thankfully, he tells us how to begin. In Luke 11, Jesus tells us that the Father promises to give us his Spirit if we ask him. God will give us everything we need to “see.”
5 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7 And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
11 “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Basically, we begin by asking God. Jesus tells us that the Father wants to say yes to us. Just ask him. But that request is just the beginning of the journey. Even when God pours out his Spirit into our lives, the story of Abraham tells us that this sight does not come easily. It takes time. It takes struggle. We have to go up the mountain like Abraham and we have to be tested. The Spirit guides and leads, yes, but the journey is still Abraham’s journey. We still have to be tested. We still have to make the journey. We want plug and play. Give me a pill or a supplement that will do the same thing.
And this is why so often, far too often, the church is so ineffectual today. We put our trust in our ability to plan and administer. We trust in our ability to be “relevant.” We trust that we can make Christ’s teachings “practical for daily living.” Much of the cringe Christian Nationalist stuff we see falls into this category. We want to sidestep the journey up the mountain that Abraham took and think we can lead the church, lead the people, without that journey. And then we think that we see. But we are all the more blind because we think that we see.
The community of believers was meant to be led by men who were led to the heart of God by the Spirit, men who truly see, men who have taken Abraham’s journey, have been tested and can see. Men who know in the moment whether to ignore or correct a fool. Men who see God at work and who have the courage to join God in what he is doing. The call is, if you have not taken that journey up the mountain of God like Abraham did, is to take that journey, be tested by God and learn to see. Ask God to lead you up the mountain. Ask God for your sight.
Let the Spirit guide us to the heart of God. Let the Spirit open our eyes. Look around. See. See what God is doing. God is at work all around us and among us. And when you see God at work, learn to join him in his work. I truly believe that when we as church learn to participate in the work God is doing; instead of begging God to bless the things we are doing; when we join God in his work, that is when the church prospers and flourishes. But also, politically, this is when we become the kind of threat to the regime that will bring true reprisal, true persecution, because we will have a kind of earned authority that our atheist materialist leaders with their credentials will be unable to match.
As quoted by Aris Roussinos in his Unherd piece: Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy