Confessions of a Heretic

Claiming that Scripture itself is revelation is a non-scholarly idolatrous position, for such an assertion places one’s faith in the text itself, which was produced by human beings, rather than in ‘God’, that which is revealed. But, as argued in Volume One, if ‘God’ is, and if ‘God’ is ‘God’, then ‘God’ is necessarily Creator, and therefore all that is, all of creation, is a revelation of ‘God’. I will address the issue of revelation below, but the point is, revelation is not self-evident, or a given. A text can mean something “to me” that cannot be supported by scholarly analysis, but scholarly analysis does not then delegitimate the meaning of that text “for me”. But likewise, and more importantly, what a given text means “to me” does not and cannot refute the scholarly analysis. There can be non-scholarly insight into a given text, non-expert insight into a given text, and those insights can expand and deepen the scholarly analysis of that given text. One, though, cannot claim that a given text is that which it is not. Again as argued in Volume One, a text, in and of itself, is a thing, and as such has no inherent Meaning; meaning is ascribed to Being, and the question then becomes, on what basis is meaning ascribed to the Being that is a text? And there are various levels of meaning as well. It all becomes ever so complicated. I am not attempting here to offer the final interpretation of revelation, or of given passages of Scripture. The question then becomes, what are my interpretations based on? There are two primary basis for evaluating scholarly interpretation: 1. The scientific and scholarly analysis of the “thing” itself, the artifact that is a text; and 2. Logic, argument, and knowledge of context, which includes the history of the interpretation of a given text. Yet no single, absolute interpretation is the one and only “right” or “correct” interpretation. There is a spectrum of “right” or “correct” interpretations, at least there are so within our temporal world, that cannot access atemporal, absolute Truth, even if there is an atemporal, absolute True interpretation of a given text. We seek the Truth, even as we know we can never find it. In this light, my analysis in what follows is an account of my own seeking, even as I do make claims of the ”rightness” and “correctness” of my analyses and arguments within our relative, temporal world. And as such, I adopt the role of theologian, which, as I have already argued above, is one of tragedy, of being compelled to do that which cannot be done, with which even expert theologians find themselves confronted. It is simply the existential tragedy and desiring to know The Truth, of yearning for The Truth, while realizing that we can never achieve such knowledge—except for ourselves, with respect to our own s-iR. And here again we run into the issue of relative absolutes, which is simply the condition of doing Theology, for denying what might seem to be a contradiction, is to fall, or fall further, into idolatry. In this light, in so many ways, we are all heretics. Recognizing the relative nature of our absolute assertions and truth-claims is what prevents, or should prevent, us from indeed burning heretics and seeking to impose our understanding on all others, and to do so by force if needed. We too could be wrong, even as we must assert the certitude of our own individual beliefs, based on our own individual analyses and experiences. We cannot put ourselves in the place of ‘God’, even as we so often have and still do. We are all seeking, even if many are only doing so unknowingly, The Truth that is ‘God’. Yet so often we do so not by seeking the Truth that is ‘God’, but our own Truth that we equate with God, which ends up being simply our own pleasure and feelings of power, and perhaps most of all the continued accumulation of wealth. This is idolatry in the gross form: making a god for oneself rather than seeking the ‘God’ that is, if ‘God’ is, and if ‘God’ is ‘God’. Making the leap of faith that ‘God’ is, and that ‘God’ is ‘God’, is here in this volume the point of departure; the leap has already been taken. And that leap entails that if ‘God’ is, God is not. And yet, that doesn’t answer very much at all. The question then becomes, o.k., given that ‘God’ is and that ‘God’ is ‘God’, and that we are creatures of ‘God’, instruments being played in ‘God’s’ Divine Symphony, so what? What does that mean for us in terms of our understanding of our own relationship to and/or with ‘God’, and consequently, our relationship to our atemporal reality, or as Augustine put it, to our final, merited ends, namely, Heaven or Hell? And given that ‘God’ is, how are we to live our lives coram deo, in the presence of ‘God’? Once we get beyond trying to use ‘God’ for our own purposes, to fulfill our own will and desires, hopes and dreams, including that of “salvation”, how are we to live? That is the question, and that question, then, necessarily brings in religion, and thus the relationship between theology and religion. But it just gets even more complex from here on out, and some of that complexity, though by no means all of it, is what I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, starting from the visceral recognition that Theology is the problem.