7 September 2023: added a note to the section Establishedness and
the Cross.
22 May 2023: changed link from Twitter conversation to archives
of Twitter conversation in preparation for me deleting my Twitter
account.
Epistemic status: contains innovations on past ideas
of mine which I may not have thoroughly thought through before posting
this, so there's an element of provisionalness to this. (And new, even
more provisional ideas.) Also, tries to say something about parts of
the Bible, when ideally I should have read the whole Bible with an eye
to the themes in here.
I suspect that there are details which are poorly explained or
contradictory somewhere in this. If you are confused about something,
let me know in the comments so I can address the problem.
This is the long version of this post. It's about as long as a book.
The short version is here.
I am not entirely proud of this (as a writer), but perhaps that is
fitting, as you will see. Realistically, I think it's the best version
of this that I can produce at this time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
Part 1: Initial Thoughts
1.1
Introduction
1.2
Why Firm, Consistent Governments Can Be Good
1.2.1
They can have good consequences
1.2.2
Governments may look like gangs, but they don't have to
1.3
A Person Might Not Want to be Told What to Do
1.3.1
Maybe all of this pales in comparison with whether we love God
1.4
Summary / Keeping Score
1.5
Kingship and Individual Liberty May Not Have to Conflict
1.6
King as Legislator Yields Libertarian Kingdom
1.6.1
My Church of Christ background probably connects to my views
1.7
What is the Real Issue?
1.7.1
Is it "How should government look on earth?"
1.7.2
Is it "How should we relate to the ideas of kingship and law?"
1.7.3
Which is better for developing trust, hands-off, or hands-on government?
1.7.4
The danger of wealth
1.7.5
The value of poverty
1.8
Closing Section
1.8.1
More considerations of wealth and establishedness
1.8.2
Conclusion of Part 1
2
Part 2: Judges, Saul, David, Solomon
2.1
My New Wine Background
2.2
Synopsis
2.3
Episodes
2.3.1
Note on translations
2.3.2
Gideon (Judges 6 - 8)
2.3.3
God Says He Will Abandon Israel and Then Doesn't (Judges 10)
2.3.4
The Judges System Isn't Working (Judges 17 - 21)
2.3.5
The People Choose to Have a Human King (1 Samuel 8)
2.3.6
God's "Regret" (1 Samuel 15)
2.3.7
Uzzah Tries to Save the Ark (2 Samuel 6)
2.3.8
David's Census (2 Samuel 24)
2.3.9
Solomon's Impressiveness (Temple, Wealth, Wisdom) (1 Kings 5 - 10)
2.3.10
Solomon Falls Away (1 Kings 11)
2.4
Overall
3
Part 3: Subsequent Thoughts
3.1
Introduction
3.2
Notes
3.2.1
Philosophy
3.2.1.1
The truth and orthodoxy
3.2.1.2
Establishedness is trust-producing
3.2.1.3
Ambiguity and mixedness, definitions
3.2.1.4
How to be a Christian given mixedness
3.2.1.5
"Unlackingness": Perfection or Reality
3.2.1.6
Mixedness does not prevent altruism
3.2.1.7
Some things ought to be permanently
3.2.1.8
The mixedness of bringing to justice
3.2.1.9
God's trustworthiness despite his disestablishedness or less-established approach to relating to us
3.2.1.10
Trust vs. physical survival
3.2.1.11
Disestablishedness is established
3.2.1.12
Being is personal and therefore partially disestablished
3.2.1.13
Trust
3.2.2
Psychological, Social, Spiritual
3.2.2.1
Belonging to a group may inhibit intimacy with God
3.2.2.2
If we don't value poverty sufficiently, we lose the ability to benefit from it
3.2.2.3
Seeing by fighting
3.2.2.4
Mixedness of upbringing
3.2.2.5
Relying on others to shield ourselves from reality
3.2.2.6
Fans seek establishedness
3.2.2.7
Danger of bad establishedness
3.2.2.8
Kinglessness, spouselessness
3.2.2.9
Good and bad establishedness
3.2.2.10
Rejecting establishedness as protest
3.2.2.11
Political fights
3.2.2.12
Kings obey laws
3.2.2.13
Becoming yourself is a natural but dangerous move
3.2.2.14
Valuing the firmness of true establishedness
3.2.2.15
Law and king prevent petty kingships
3.2.2.16
Disestablishedness in growing up
3.2.2.17
Relying on other than God
3.2.2.18
David, more fortunate
3.2.2.19
God is king means... ?
3.2.2.20
Going from disestablished to established is spiritually fortunate
3.2.3
Political
3.2.3.1
Political disestablishedness must be worked for
3.2.3.2
Is this Christian anarchism?
3.2.3.3
International establishments
3.2.3.4
Politics emphasizing relationship with God
3.2.3.5
Collective identity of Jews in Captivity as trustworthy for political establishedness
3.2.3.6
The Northern Triangle may be worse than Judges-era Israel
3.2.4
Personal
3.2.4.1
Personal scale kings
3.2.4.2
Fighting Evil
3.2.5
Mourning
3.2.6
Monasticism
3.2.6.1
Worry when temptations cease
3.2.6.2
Monasticism as institutionalized disestablishedness
3.2.6.3
Celibacy as establishedness in the desert
3.2.6.4
Asceticism could be a disestablishedness that causes you to love and trust God
3.2.6.5
Monastic disestablishedness of watchfulness
3.2.7
Current Events
3.2.7.1
A truly Christian nation would be less established
3.2.7.2
Not voting because I'm okay with disestablishedness
3.2.7.3
Climate change will disestablish but there's likely a time after that
3.2.7.4
That a disestablished world can be valuable makes anti-abortion sentiment sensible
3.2.7.5
Fraternity of disestablishedness
3.2.7.6
Recall Day
3.2.8
The Cross
3.2.8.1
Refounding with the cross
3.2.8.2
Establishedness and the cross
3.2.9
Church
3.2.9.1
Dangers of establishment Christianity
3.2.9.2
The spiritual danger of there being a scholarly consensus on the Bible
3.2.9.3
Can New Testament and Old Testament vibes coexist?
3.3.9.4
Progressive and Conservative Christians are both humanists, in a way; there's such a thing as theism
3.2.9.5
Church as a safe place for danger
3.2.9.6
The church could be like Solomon and be a bad establishedness
3.2.10
Conclusions
3.2.10.1
Eternal lack and fullness as good disestablishedness
3.3
Conclusion
4
Appendix: notes from Bible reading
I had a Twitter conversation with Susannah Black
(@suzania).
It got to the point where I felt like I wanted to reply with a
blog post instead of trying to work with Twitter's format, so I
wrote this.
(Apologies to my interlocutor (Susannah Black) for how long this
took me to write. This first part I finished in a day or two and
should be seen as more or less what I would have said in conversation
on the day of our Twitter exchange, while the following parts reflect
later thinking. I considered rewriting this first part to make it more
presentable, but decided not to, other than what was necessary for
clarity. Also, this post grew to be long -- at least it will not be
as long to read as it was to write.)
Here is the context: Black quote re-tweeted someone's take
about libertarians (governor of Florida is apparently being a libertarian
by being more or less laissez-faire about COVID). That take referenced
a Washington Post article which was paywalled for me, so I didn't read
it. I replied to Black mainly based on the object-level of her tweet,
but I can see that she may have read into me some sort of support for
the governor of Florida (or similar people or ideas), given that I was
in some sense pushing back against something that she said in response
to people like the governor of Florida. I don't support the governor
of Florida, nor have much of a sense of opposing him. (I have been
vaccinated, and I don't mind being masked or even being under lockdown
(mostly) so those preferences and actions may show that I trust the
values that oppose the governor. But I don't feel like I oppose him, or
even whatever it is that he represents, of which he is only the visible
instantiation of the day.)
Here are the tweets [or archived from Twitter:
1
2
3
4
5
(6 is the tweet from someone else in case you want
to account for all tweets replying to the original tweet)]:
And here are two branches of the thread:
(I could have made those images look better, but it may not be important,
as the reader may see below.)
I will try to reply to Black's question
Q: does "kingship" seem like a bad thing to you? Does "firm,
consistent government" have the flavor of "bossy tyranny" when you hear
it?
Also I will consider what value there might in less "firm, consistent"
government and in libertarian or liberal values. Then I will consider
what the nature of kingship could be or ought to be: king as direct leader
vs. king as legislator and facilitator? Hopefully this all will address
most of the issues raised in the tweets.
I don't think that "firm, consistent government" has the flavor of "bossy
tyranny" to me. I don't mind authority, personally. In many ways, the
relatively firm, consistent government of the United States makes many
things possible for me. In a sufficiently chaotic world, I might not be
alive today, to be able to write things. I've been reading [had read and
intend to re-read] A History of Violence by Óscar
Martínez to learn about the Northern Triangle (which comprises the
countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras). Gangs like MS-13 are
very powerful there. There are something like 10,000 MS-13 members in the US,
which, if you read the book, you realize is more than enough to do a lot
of damage, but the ones who live here generally don't make the national
news, probably because our government is "firm and consistent" (has the
resources to enforce its laws fairly well). A failed state allows horrors.
I don't think libertarians want Northern Triangle-like situations, and
they don't think libertarianism would inevitably lead to them. Libertarians
can be minarchists (or something like that) who prefer a strong state when
it comes to enforcing protections of liberty. But they are perhaps not
the most libertarian of libertarians -- anarcho-capitalists are, perhaps.
[These are the libertarians who might be assumed to be most against "firm,
consistent" government.]
You could push back against an anarcho-capitalist and say
"why wouldn't anarcho-capitalism turn into the Northern Triangle?" MS-13,
Barrio 18, Los Zetas, and other gangs seem to be independent firms doing
what they want -- some even take over some government services. The
difference between a gang and a government is somewhat fuzzy. Do you
need one big, authoritative gang that is able to squash the other gangs,
so that there isn't so much gang warfare? That may be what liberals have
in mind. (Set up the messed-up thing that limits the even more messed-up
things.) And libertarians, with that dark view of the reality of
government as it actually gets established, want less of it. They seem
to think that darkness comes from government itself, since governments
can be dark.
Black is affiliated with the "post-liberals" / "Christian humanists".
From a bit of a distance, it looks to me like their approach is to say
"there is a good version of things and we can have it on earth". So there
is a really good government. And we can have a really good government
on earth (maybe). (A really good army? A really good police
force? We're not talking about a really ideal world, if there still needs
to be an army or a police force.) Certainly if you remember that there
can be a really humane world, and you believe that it is realizable, you
may be able to have it, which is less true or not true at all if you are
certain that there can't be.
Maybe if we did not have the dark, cynical, desperate, fragile,
poverty-stricken worldview of the liberals, if we just said "no, things
can be good, we can be good people", then, if we truly understood
that and implemented the changes in behavior and institutions that are
downstream of that, we could have good governments.
So it may be that it is as though the Christian humanists (Black?)
could be saying "government is good -- or it can be good -- that is,
kings are good -- good kings are good, at least -- that is, Jesus, the
king, is good". So that would be the rejoinder to a libertarian, who
thinks that kingship / government are inherently dangerous and evil.
However, as (perhaps) Black points to, another dimension of
pursuing libertarianism is out of a love of not having anyone else tell
you what to do. Is there any validity to this impulse and are there
any dangers to it?
[This will connect to the validity of self-determination:] Maybe
there's a validity to the faculty that people have of caring about
things. It's not absolute, but we could say that it is prima
facie valid. If you care about something, you should care about
it, unless there's a good reason not to.
I read a book a number of years ago which has stuck with me, by
Sheena Iyengar, called The Art of Choosing. I'm not good at
remembering exactly what books say versus what I think of occasioned
by them, but either way, I was left with the thought "what I really
care about are the things that I want to be able to choose myself"
["what I want to choose myself are or relate to the things that I
really care about" is a clearer way to express what I meant].
There's a correlation between caring, finding valuable, and wanting
to make sure things turn out according to your caring.
In much of my life I don't have strong preferences, but at the time
I read the book I realized that the freedom to think about whatever subjects
I needed to think about was really important to me, to the extent that I
couldn't get married and have a family, because I couldn't risk being
committed to a high-paying job (to support them) that would monopolize
my thinking. Iyengar was raised as a Sikh and raises the prospect of
arranged marriage in the book. I discovered, while thinking about the
book (working through an exercise in it) that I didn't mind the thought
of arranged marriage in itself. (If somehow it didn't threaten my
"freedom" of thought!) [It looks like I make demands on reality: freedom
of thought.]
I put "freedom" in quotes because I am not really free. My thinking
is as constrained as anything. I don't choose the things that
speak to me. They speak to me. It's because my thinking is
constrained by something that is not legible to society that I need
freedom from society. I understand that it's fair for society to
ask me to not make trouble, in exchange, so generally I do abide by
basically liberal ideas of "my rights end at the point that I want
to constrain other people's liberty". So given all that, I am happy
that I live in a relatively liberal setting (the people around me
generally give me space, and I am free to be an individual
and not get caught up in a group's undertow.)
I don't think that is quite the same as the potential strawpeople
who say "I don't want the government to take my guns and make me use
a vaccine". But I can relate to people like that. I want to be left
alone to be myself. It's an understandable human desire, and it's prima
facie valid. If you've never had the misfortune to have someone
close to you try to tear down who you are, it's like having someone
reach into your brain and put their fingers in it, breaking the
interlocking parts of it, re-engineering you when you express who
you really are. Even if someone is wrong, tearing down that wrongness
at all costs tears them down as a person, just like even if someone
is living in the wrong house, setting it on fire to smoke them out
could kill them. We should have defenses against other people trying
to change us.
(In a previous post, I brought
up the idea of "ego-respect" vs. "survival-respect". "I deserve respect"
in the "ego-respect" sense can be the sort of thing gang members say
to justify killing people over (some meaning of) honor. But in the
"survival-respect" sense, it can be what abused people can say to justify
getting away from their abuser. It can be a little bit unclear sometimes
if a given case of respect being called for is ego-respect or
survival-respect, and being too good at clamping down on ego-respect can
threaten survival-respect (maybe being too supportive of survival-respect
can feed ego-respect?). Similarly, there could be an analogous
phenomenon of ego-freedom vs. survival-freedom.)
God creates us (and makes us) to be who we are -- so to an extent,
that is not something that is anyone else's business.
However, it is true that people are not born loving God with all
of their beings. Obviously we do have to change. And perhaps the
libertarians or anti-vaxxers, in distrusting change as it comes from
leftists or liberals, are really distrusting change of themselves in
general and therefore are at risk of shutting out God's voice.
A lot of what I've said above seems a bit orthogonal to what really
matters (for instance, it's not clear to me that my preference for
thinking my own thoughts -- if it is not a constraint that I don't choose
-- is necessarily better than being caught up in a group's thinking, nor,
at the same time, that being a member of a group is better than
being an individual). But this issue of potentially not trusting change
itself [change in itself] seems to directly connect. People really could
be setting themselves up for not connecting to God, through politics.
Whatever they prefer over total commitment to God is an idol, and whatever
prevents them from connecting to God, whether they understand that
that [that preventing] is what is going on or not, may further idolatry or
prevent full love of God. (The thing to watch for is, when we go to tear
down other people's idols and set their temples on fire, that we aren't
trying to shoo them into our temples to worship our idols.)
A lot of what we talk about is orthogonal to whether we love and
trust God, or only somewhat "at-angles" to
it.
I have trouble staying on topic sometimes, so I will try to take
a moment to keep score. Let's say that the topic of "does 'kingship'
seem like a bad thing to you?" is the point of this post so far.
I said that I can see value in firm, consistent government in terms
of its ability to suppress violent gangs, who seem to be the default
rulers when there is no government. (Maybe this only seems to be true
and isn't always true?) This is in line with what libertarians
want, since all (except the most radical) accept some kind of state --
perhaps a firm, consistent one.
I claimed that liberals and libertarians tend to have a dark view on
life (particularly on power and the concentration of power), while the
post-liberals / Christian humanists tend to have a not-as-dark view on
life, power, concentration of power. By having higher expectations,
post-liberals / Christian humanists could actually bring about a better
government, proving their expectations valid and showing that kingship
(even as a case of the concentration of power) can be a good thing.
Then in the next section I considered whether libertarianism (or
liberal values in general) might be valid, and how they might be
dangerous. I said they might be valid as expressions for protecting
the integrity of individuals (the prima facie validity of
caring about what you care about and being yourself). Also, God
has rights over people which trump the social order. However, a
danger of liberal / libertarian values (or of protecting who you
are from the interference of others) is to be unwilling or unable
to change at all (to not value change in general) and thus to be
unable to listen to the voice of God.
I realized at that point that much (or all?) of the discussion
preceding the recognition of that danger didn't necessarily matter.
People prefer this, or that. But the really fundamental issue
is whether people connect to God.
That is a good point to remember, and I should return to it
later. But for now, I'll resume my discussion of the value of
kingship (in light of alternatives to it like libertarianism).
Maybe kingship and individual liberty (or even libertarianism?)
are not in conflict, or are not as much as one might initially suppose?
I have defended some of what liberalism ostensibly defends [individual
freedom], and that's how I can appreciate liberalism. But a king doesn't
have to constrain people in any kind of absolute or granular way -- and
historically, even earthly ones hardly could have, given their
resources. Maybe they could have within their own courts? But that
is them acting on an interpersonal level. (Ironically, for me, I may
not care so much about the government, as I do about the social order
[like the king acting as just another member of the royal social circle,
the scene of humans relating human to human, rather than as wielder of
vast state power], and yet my experiences with the social order might
inform my (mild) appreciation for the possibility of libertarianism.
(Or my lack of outrage against it.))
That's a practical reason [limited resources] why kings do not
constrain liberty even if they want to. What if kings just decided that
they weren't going to constrain their subjects' liberty? Is it that
simple? I'm reminded of a vivid image from the effective altruists.
One AI safety researcher (Buck Shlegeris):
[Context: illustrations of the principle "problems solve
themselves".]
Another one is: "Most people have cars. It would be a
tremendous disaster if everyone bought cars which had guns in the
steering wheels such that if you turn on the accelerator, they
shoot you in the face. That could kill billions of people." And I'm
like, yep. But people are not going to buy those cars because they
don't want to get shot in the face.
(source)
Aren't humans reasonable? Don't we want a nice world? Don't
we not want to shoot ourselves in the face? Or even make things that
could shoot other people in the face? Won't we want to design systems
of government that work, or raise up people to be in positions of
government who don't do a bad job? So why can't kings just not
abuse their positions of power? Obviously they do sometimes. But they don't
always, not maximally. And arguably kings (or whoever is in government),
start their lives wishing to do the most good, but when in office
have to deal with "realities" (like violent gangs which are hard to
imagine controlling without violence, or the Molochian
dynamics of having to maintain a strong (capitalist) economy, in order
to support a strong military, to keep other countries from invading).
If we zoom out and squint, humanity as a whole is good, full of well-intentioned
people. And this is even true of people in government -- as long as
they don't forget who they really are.
Those are some ideas about how earthly governments (even kings) could
just not in practice use their authority to be abusive. [Reasons why] if
we are consequentialists [if we are considering consequences], we don't have to
worry about the spiritual reality of authority leading to abusive outcomes.
I am unsure whether post-liberals want to restore monarchy on earth (I don't
know enough to say either way), but it is not their most obvious emphasis.
I would guess that they are more into being culturally non-liberal more so
than legally or politically non-liberal (granted that "political" might be
hard to separate from "cultural" sometimes). [So I don't know how likely a
literal inauguration of monarchy is, given their ambitions. Still, I can
allow that in practice, kings do not have to be abusive.] However, the
important topic to consider is "is kingship [as a value] bad, and how does
it fare against alternative values?" and the specific occasion for all of
this is "What about Judges? What about Jesus' kingship? What about kingship
seen through a spiritual lens?" [What aspects of kingship are good or
bad, not just from a secular or humanist perspective (the "abusive" above)
but from a radically theistic perspective?]
I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world which is, from a
human's eye view of how the world works, libertarian, but in which in
fact Jesus is king. The thing that allows for authority in the absence
of external coercion or direction is an internalized law (and whatever is
epiconceptual / episcriptural / "epilegal" to
that law). That's more or less what I had in mind when I first replied to
Black ("maybe libertarianism is the best and we are not worthy of it").
The king writes the law and we keep it -- no need for police forces or any
kind of coercion. I think libertarianism (in an idealistic form) may long
for a world where people are free to do what they want. And I think that's
a good thing, just so long as they are keeping the law.
So I could reveal myself now to be defending a position of "laws are better
than direct involvement -- the king is more legislator and facilitator
of adoption of legislation than he is direct leader". I am unsure that
I want to defend that position so baldly, that I should define myself
as taking that side. But for now I'll say it's my view -- certainly
I lean toward it.
This emphasis of mine on law and hands-off kingship has a lot to do with
my upbringing. I was raised in a Church of Christ (a somewhat unusually
free-thinking and moderate one). The Churches of Christ are very American
in some ways (for instance, they have no denominational structure), but
also very un-American (they like obedience and law). They are
hyper-Protestant (Sola Scriptura to the point of rejecting theology) and
also anti-Protestant (they are fairly okay with saying "salvation is by
faith and works" and believe that undergoing a physical act (baptism) is
a necessary part of salvation). One of the classic Church of Christ
doctrines is that the Holy Spirit's actions on Christians are solely
through them reading the Bible that he wrote, like if you had a
pen pal whose sole actions on your mind were
through writing letters or emails.
Most of the really "pungent" Church of Christ doctrines were not taught
or emphasized in the church I grew up in, but when I discover them later, I
think "yes, I like this emphasis". Perhaps I am genetically Church of
Christ (plausible since both my parents and three of my grandparents
are/were members). However, I am not sure I would want to be dogmatically
in favor of all the points given in the previous paragraph. Notably, I
don't think the Holy Spirit's actions are only carried out through us
reading the book he left behind. However, I think that's a good dimension
to consider, that the Word of God -- not just in some mystical, spiritually
empowered, supernaturally gracious sense, but just the (relatively) plain
sentences that we can understand like we can understand a pen pal's email,
is the action of God on us, is God's presence and power. This view leans
toward "God is your friend" rather than "God is great and powerful" (which
I think follows from the polar opposite view of the Holy Spirit, which
would be like a hyper-Pentecostalism (that is, the view that the Spirit
is only tongues of fire, rushing winds, prophecies, and whatever else
the Pentecostals restored and which the cessationists deny. I would
guess that there aren't any real hyper-Pentecostals, that Pentecostals
all acknowledge the quieter voice of the Spirit.)).
"God as friend" connects (in my mind) to the idea that God is kin, and
that we know him by kinship. So internalizing his values is more valuable
than being ruled over by him. I doubt Black would object to that idea,
so maybe if there remains a difference between me and her, it could be in
something like "how should government look on earth?" or "how should we
relate to the idea of kingship?" or "how should we relate to the idea of
law?"
At the time of writing this, I don't know that I have a strong preference
for any given government on earth. (Maybe against abusive ones, but not
for any particular non-abusive one -- some idea of what I mean about abuse
being given earlier in this post. [For instance, abuse as violating the
integrity of an individual.]) I suppose the ideal earthly government
would be one in which all the adults were holy people with God's interests
first in their minds and actions, and the only challenge remaining being
the education of young people to become such adults, and maintaining
physical sustainability. A non-coercive government would exist to
coordinate large-scale resources. It wouldn't have to be coercive because
everyone would of one mind. The only coercive government would be that of
children being ruled by their parents or teachers, and only to the extent
necessary. That sounds fairly libertarian to me, although maybe it sounds
like some other label if you take it vaguely enough. However, the ideal
earthly government may never be possible, and in the meantime I don't have
a strong preference -- for instance, the US government is pretty good in
many ways, but it may not be the best.
My vague vision of ideal earthly government does not sound like one
that falls out of the bounds of Christian humanism (as I understand it),
and I guess that it is not a sticking point between me and Black. Again,
I don't have a strong preference and would be willing to live under
different governments, likely whatever else could fall within the
bounds of Christian humanism.
This leaves the questions of "how should we relate to the ideas of
kingship? and law?" I don't really know Black, but I'll give some
different perspectives on kingship and law that occur to me, some of
which may (or may not) happen to apply to her. These are probably
strawmen to some extent. (These are guesses and are likely not the
full picture.)
One reason why kingship could be emphasized is to keep humans down.
Humans need to know that they must think small and keep perspective that
they are not God, they are not king. Because there is a God, they are not
God and because there is a king, they are not king. Keeping humans down
is a good thing (maybe) because humility is the chief virtue. Humble
people are the most beautiful people and we can trust them interpersonally.
The real danger in the spiritual life is pride.
Keeping humans down is a very attractive view -- humans seem to like it
a lot. I don't think it's really Jesus' main emphasis. I would warn
Christians away from it to the extent that it keeps people from using their
talents to the full, and places humility even above the love of God among
the virtues. If we are maximally humble (at least for an obvious meaning
of "humble"), how can we claim to know the truth? So humility could
alienate people from God.
But a more steelman version could be "Jesus as king tells us not to keep
ourselves down, and because he's king, we obey." I guess you could say
that laws also keep humans down / humble them. [Kings and laws can both
support and undermine "keep humans down".] So that's not the real
sticking point between me and Black. But maybe if laws are emphasized,
it could become the case that humans don't need the king-relationship as
much, that while God is king, that's not really something that God
regards. It's like if your dad was really good at something, and you knew
you'll never be that good at it no matter how long you lived, and he knew
it too, and he would never put you in the position to do his job, but he
didn't really care about his own competence and it barely came up because
he could talk to you so freely, given all the things you have in common
because you grew up to be like him [law teaches kinship (sonship /
daughtership)]. In your relationship with God, his kingship is less
relevant to both him and you than your mutual kinship. (Perhaps a good
illustration of the phenomenon of unlike people being kin
comes from Ursula K. LeGuin.)
Another reason why kingship could be emphasized is because humans need
a power-figure in their lives, and God (as king) represents one.
Pentecostalism is very popular in the developing world, and from the
little I have seen of it online, it seems like there can be a
desperation for the power of God, because people in the developing world
are often desperate. I wouldn't want to get in the way of what allows a
desperate person to function. So there's a prima facie value to
the psychological support given to people who (in a sense) need a power-figure
-- maybe really need it at that time of their lives.
(Later: maybe "people in the developing world are often desperate" is
less true than "sometimes desperate"? Also, do I expect that this post will
never find its way to someone who (apparently or really) needs to consider
God to be a maximally powerful being in order to hold their life together?
If I think it could, how would I contextualize all of this to make it
somehow not too destabilizing? More details may perhaps be found below,
but I could say, briefly, that as long as you are true to God, no matter
how bad things are in this life, you will someday participate in his rest,
and God is always present in your life. No matter how bad things are, you
can always love God. There are other bad outcomes besides what may
happen to you -- other people may not remain true to God -- but they
are not under your control, are not your responsibility. They belong to
God. Your responsibility is to obey God. If someone else is lost, you
may mourn, but you will be okay, overall. Your mourning will not
overwhelm you, and you will affirm it out of love, rather than be
subject to it as a slave to automatic emotional reactivity.)
One of my tweets claimed that trust in God
was aided by a more hands-off approach. I think the lived lives of people
(in developing countries or in ours) is that, if both our
theism biases and atheism biases aren't
dominating how we see the way things plainly look, sometimes it looks like
God is hands-on, and sometimes hands-off -- sometimes his intervention in
the world in which we are forced to care ("lived life") is present, sometimes
absent (absent to the point that we doubt that he exists sometimes).
Which produces more trust in God, when God is hands-on, or hands-off?
Trust is complicated. It is inhibited by
betrayal (the fruit of a hands-off world). But it is also inhibited by
satiation and perfect safety. If things worked out okay, we wouldn't trust
as deeply. We wouldn't trust as deeply, we wouldn't be as alive
to trust. Trust is connection as well as acceptance. We have to care in
order to trust the most. So we have to engage with reality. All
that to say that some mixture of hands-on and hands-off is needed and that
"king" versus "judge" are at different points on the same scale. "Judge"
(or, God as king as in the days of Judges) says "more hands-off", while
"king" (or, Saul/David/Solomon(/Jesus?) as king) says "more hands-on".
(Or for "hands-on" we can also add "more firm and consistent" and for
"hands-off" "less firm and consistent / less established".)
Unlike developing-world Pentecostals (as I understand them), the
spiritual reality that has been my problem has not been poverty or
powerlessness. Rather, fakeness is what has driven me, which I think
connects to the ideas of satiation and perfect safety inhibiting caring
and therefore trust and life. I suspect that in some ways, I'm living
in the future, in the hyper-developed world. So to me, becoming real
has been a kind of life challenge, and to internalize a law (plus its
epiconcept or "epilaw") allows me
to become real. The danger for a developing-country Christian is to be
weighed down by poverty (and perhaps from that despair and turn away
from God) or to turn to sin out of desperation and then maybe come to
love it (a real danger for narcotraffickers), but for me it is to [be] turned
into a spiritually dead person by wealth. I don't think about fakeness
anymore (although I think I would if I tried abandoning my values), but
instead I am concerned that I won't be true to my values, that I will
sink into a state where life is nice and I don't deeply care about
God. A God who was too hands-on would prevent me from being hungry
for him, would allow me to become numb through ease and pleasure. So I
desire poverty in general, and this can connect to the poverty of
not having a king (or of having a Judges-era God as king rather than
one more like Saul, David, or Solomon), of having a worldview in which
the ideal government is not firm and consistent, so that instead I rely
on God.
Could a king decree "you are real!" and it would be so? The related
questions of "Could God decree 'you are sinless' and cause you to be seen
that way by him?" or "Could God zap you and make you in fact sinless?"
could be (or maybe have been) big controversies in Christianity. I
think most Christians think that God can zap you and make you sinless, or
at least that seems fitting with the Christian culture I've seen.
Otherwise how could anyone go to heaven? And I agree with the existing
Holiness movement (as I understand it) that we receive holiness from God,
that it is God who makes us not have our sinful habits. But, that's
only part of the story, because we have to repent of our own sins
ourselves. We have to acquire the values of God, and that's
something he can't do for us, or else it would be he who valued
them. Our sinful habits may keep us out of heaven and be something God
can deal with unilaterally, but our misaligned values are something only
we can do anything about, so that it is we who [come to] love God.
So a king who wanted kinship (someone as real as him) would do better with
laws than with direct intervention.
Though I said earlier that the ideal earthly government is one which
is sustainable and focused on education, that situation sounds fairly
stable, calm, and thus psychologically wealthy, a temptation to no longer
deeply care. So I think for such a government to seem trustworthy to me,
though in itself it may be stable, calm, and functional, the culture around it
would have to emphasize the insufficiency of
wealth, to mourn the loss of poverty, to feel the lack of lack. Even feel
the lack of chaos, terror, and horror, saying "When we were afraid, we
turned to you with all of our beings, but we are no longer afraid. How
unfortunate we have become." (Or which may be the case for many of us
"When we were afraid, we had the opportunity to turn to you with all
of our beings, but we did not take it, and now we are no longer afraid.
How unfortunate we have become.") Poverty is hunger, and hunger cares.
I think a natural rebuttal to poverty being needed to value God is
to bring up gratitude. When we are wealthy, we redeem it with gratitude,
by being thankful to God for how good our lives are. Maybe with gratitude
we can turn to God with all of our beings. I don't think it's as natural
to as deeply turn to God out of a sense of gratitude than out of fear (what
I think of when I think of "deeply" touches on a different part of a person
than gratitude does). I think of the closeness that a child might feel
with his or her parent after being comforted after a serious upset. But
maybe for other people it's different, or could be different in an ideal
society where we are trained to interpret things properly. However, even
in heaven there's something missing, something lost, if we want to get a
lot out of the verse that says "Greater love has no one than this, that
someone lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13). In heaven we
can no longer have the greatest love, a casualty of everyone remaining
having been completely saved. So, along with the lost who will never be
alive again, God could mourn the loss of part of himself, part of love
itself.
(Also, true gratitude may necessarily be a form of poverty as deep as
that of turning to God in fear, and many (or all?) of us may need the lived
experience of poverty in order to develop it.)
So if kingship is an attempt to have an established government that
prevents psychological poverty, or if a love of kingship is an attempt
to make that true in the space of one's own valuing life, then it might
be better to value less-established governments, "judge-like" (like the
way things are when God is king, rather than the way things are when
humans are king).
In the above, I tried to say that God would prefer to relate to us
as friend and father, and that by means of law (hands-off kingship /
king as legislator rather than direct leader) we learn how to become
like God, fully mature and thus capable of deeper relationship with
him. From that, I would say that I have an ambivalent relationship
with the idea of "kingship". I don't deny that there is such a thing
as kingship, or authority, and while I have a personal taste for law,
I don't think that either that or kingship are really very interesting
in the end, though they may persist eternally. Such spiritual
realities are means to the end of a familial and friendly relationship
with God, a simple intimacy.
What I could try to do, and, as noted below, may try to do in the
future, is read through Judges and the books that talk about the kings
of Israel, and perhaps other parts of the Bible, to see if there are
any clues as to why God would prefer the somewhat anarchic Judges days
over, say, the settled and established days of Solomon. My guess
for now is that the reasons given above, or some of them, may have
something to do with why God preferred to be that kind of king (a
more hands-off one) than to use more established governments like those
of Saul, David, and Solomon. God may share with libertarians some of
their values, and prefer a kingship that offers liberty and insecurity,
which can be the foundations for love and trust of God. When we
choose too little freedom and too much security (or if we have an atheistic
liberty and insecurity as the foundation of government), we
reject God as king over us.
There is a difference between libertarian and Judges-like government.
Liberty at the expense of security might plausibly be libertarian
values for some meaning of "security", (i.e. favoring the insecurity of not
knowing if you have a job [will be able to find a job] rather than of
wondering whether your contract will be enforced), but most libertarians
(I would guess) value wealth, and think that wealth (in the form of liberty,
or economic wealth) should follow from ideal government, whereas I think
God (as love) would be ambivalent about wealth, and wealth would not be the
main point of his government.
Isn't wealth basically that which God created in the beginning and called
good, and even very good? Arguably so, but there's a mixedness to that
goodness. In the very fact that it is so good, it becomes a temptation
to be valued more than God. Perhaps God creates wealth so that we have
something difficult to renounce (or become genuinely and fully willing
to renounce) in favor of him, so that our love is even more tested to
the point of reality, than if it was only tempted by being confronted
by suffering or poverty.
Now, to circle back to the beginning where I mentioned the situation
in the Northern Triangle... does God prefer that over the state of affairs
in the United States, if he preferred Judges-era Israel over Solomon-era
Israel? One could argue that God is not as much king in the Northern
Triangle as he was in the time of Judges, and that would give an easy
way to decide. If the United States is not under God's kingship (except
in the sense that all reality is) and neither is the Northern Triangle,
then we might as well minimize horror, since horrors are evil, and in
that way do what God wants. But I could say in reply that rates of
Christianity are high in the Northern Triangle (greater than 80% in all
three countries as of the 2010s). Maybe the people there
are gaining spiritually, despite living under the terror and futility-making
of the gangs.
It's interesting that Jesus says, in Luke 6:
24 "But woe to you who are rich! For you have received your
consolation. 25 Woe to you, you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. 26 Woe, when men
speak well of you, for their fathers did the same thing to the false
prophets.
Maybe poverty is a blessing that God will share with all of us fairly.
This perspective does make it hard to evaluate altruism. Is it right
to alleviate the poverty of chaos and evil in the Northern Triangle
(if we could figure out how)? It doesn't sound like the worst thing
you could do. But is it a really necessary thing? The people there
(other than those who perpetrate the evil according to their own wills)
are storing up all the blessings of the beatitudes, which are the
counterpart to the "woes" in Luke 6. What is it that is really
up-for-grabs, a site for gain or loss, such that if we increase things
on some axis, things actually get better for people in God's eyes,
and if we decrease along that axis, things actually get worse?
I would think that holiness, closeness to God, and the like are
that axis that should be maximized, and that the case for suppressing
gangs in the Northern Triangle would be to keep the gang
members away from the intense temptations of gangs, and allow them
to find the anti-temptations of their
culture's Christians (when those Christians are at their best), or
whatever other source of anti-temptation they might encounter, which
the gravity of gang life draws them away from. It could well be
possible to suppress gangs without people turning to God, but in
principle, it might help.
What could be done for the United States? One way to look at the
United States is that we are stuck with an established social order,
a firm and consistent government, because it simply is unnatural for
people to choose otherwise. In a way, we should hope that is not
true, lest we fall into some kind of situation where we feel morally
/ socially compelled to trade away all
freedom and trust in God for safety and pleasantness, because
our preference for the United States' establishedness over the
Northern Triangle's lack of establishedness comes from our ingrained
social value of safety and pleasantness. It may not be the case
that we value the United States' government for that reason, and
thinking optimistically, maybe we can say "no" to the psychological
fuels of consumerism (hedonism and preference satisfaction) even if
it currently is our reason for such valuing. So maybe (theoretically)
we have a choice (one which we may even have practically in the
future) as to which world to live in -- we could choose a
less-established world, one more like the Northern Triangle and less
like the United States.
Should we take that opportunity? I find it difficult to say yes --
perhaps I am too much a product of my biology and culture. If I can't
say yes, I can offer something like what was mentioned above, where
we realize in a deep way the insufficiency of our developed earthly lives.
We might spend the time that we currently do on entertainment to contemplate
how lacking our safe, comfortable world is, how it is not ideally tuned
toward producing holiness and love of God, the only fruits of this life
that matter in the end. Try as we might to replace stress and risk
with anti-temptations, there is a dimension of love that we will seldom
if ever experience if we never pursue and undergo the cross. We will
have made discipleship of Jesus obsolete (to some extent this is already
the case).
It might be possible to say yes [to the choice of a less-established
government] if we were all (or generally all) Christians (given that young
people are in some sense not born Christian) and we thought of our
civilization pursuing the cross by disestablishing, in order to rely on
God more. We might think of it as civilizational trust. We wouldn't rely
on the machinery of government to enforce laws, but on how we instill those
laws in each other, most essentially on the extent to which they are
written in us through our own consent. This would be a case of the cross
(risking death for the sake of others) if a Judges-like government led to
greater trust in God and thus lower rates of people failing to really love
God.
I have reached the end of what I had to say, more or less off the top
of my head, and now I am curious to see what the Bible actually says.
So, as I thought I might in previous paragraphs, I will read Judges and
the following books up to the end of Solomon's reign to get some clues as
to why God preferred the judges-era pattern of government over the
kings-era one. (I could expand my reading to include the period of time
the Israelites were in the wilderness, since it's analogous to Judges, and
to read about the kings after Solomon, but that would be a lot of reading,
and I'm already delaying the release of this post by a bit by doing as much
as I plan to. (Similarly I could try to compare and contrast the
less-established eras of church history (first three centuries, persecuted
churches, poor churches, churches in chaotic situations) with the
more-established (post-Constantine, national, protected, wealthy churches),
but that would be even more reading.) I hope I'm getting a reasonable
sample of the difference between less- and more-established governments
with the readings I intend to do, at least for now.)
Having read the Bible, and reflected, here are my thoughts on God
and establishedness.
Three caveats: 1) When I read, I just read the ESV without doing any
deeper study. There is some chance that I'm not getting what a scholar
would. Whether this is actually a problem, I'm not sure. I would
guess that the ESV is usually not misleading (that's the point of
a translation). But I would guess that there are at least a few
things I'm missing or getting wrong. 2) I only read Judges, 1 Samuel,
2 Samuel, and the part of 1 Kings about Solomon. But Exodus through
Joshua has similarities with Judges, and the kings after Solomon
are often like Solomon in that they are established. Also 1 and 2
Chronicles overlap with the readings about Saul, David, and Solomon.
I considered reading all these, but thought that it was better to
not put too much time into this post, at the risk of missing some
nuance. (And as I went I realized that the entire Bible is relevant
to questions of establishedness and disestablishedness.) I hope that
the additional readings would not (or will not) overturn too much of
what I have seen, but only add details to the same overall picture.
3) I am biased in favor of my own preferences and intuitions. I don't
feel like I am (I tried to be fair-minded in the verses I highlighted
and conclusions I drew), but I know that I am.
(Therefore this post is not a maximally-established thing in itself,
and calls for some kind of improvement or criticism.)
My method in reading the selected passages was to look for and
elaborate on references to the concepts of establishedness,
disestablishedness, establishment, establishing, and disestablishing,
both psychological and political, as well as to references to God's
intervention. A rough definition of establishedness is "the state of
having been made so, put together, organized, given a place" (and also
some connection to whatever else the common meaning of "established" is).
A rough definition of "establishment" is "a thing that continually
establishes something". I assume that psychological establishedness
is the bedrock reality, and political establishedness emerges from that
(and then turns around and affects individual psychological
establishedness). (If all the soldiers are afraid, the army is less
established -- it is weaker, less organized, less a body of people.)
I found that there were situations in my reading that were "mixed".
("Mixed" things, in themselves, call for feelings of ambivalence,
just as ambiguous things call for a sense of uncertainty or undefined
thought.)
I was interested in the following questions: what is the difference
between the Judges-era of God's kingship and the human kings-era of
God's kingship from a spiritual perspective? Why might God have
preferred the Judges-era? Did God intervene more, or less, in one
era or another? I thought that the main spiritual difference between
the Judges era and the Kings era was establishedness.
The really important field (with respect to
establishedness) is establishedness on an individual level, but
political establishedness affects this. With a king, a political
body is more established than under a succession of judges. So
that is why I focused on the theme of establishedness.
I think the idea of establishedness might be a good,
general one. I found myself taking it different places in the text. I
am not sure it is the best concept, and will only endorse it (for now)
within the context of this post. (My uncertainty about it being
something like: Why does this exact concept need to exist? Is there a
better mapping of relevant phenomena to a name?)
One piece of my intellectual background that's worth mentioning here
is the story of my acquaintance with and adoption of the New Wine System.
When I was in college, and just out of it, I spent a number of years
(maybe five?) puzzling (at times) over soteriological verses from the New
Testament. "Salvation is by grace through faith apart from works, so
that no man can boast" says Ephesians. "People are justified by works
and not by faith alone" says James. "The work of God is to believe the
one he sent" says John. "God wants everyone to be saved" says 1 Timothy.
I thought of the different theological positions I understood (somewhat)
at the time: Church of Christ, Catholic, Reformed, Arminian Baptist.
The Reformed did pretty good with Ephesians (God is the one who saves, 100%),
but really bad with 1 Timothy in combination with Ephesians (unless they
were universalists, but I didn't think universalism was biblical). The
Arminian Baptists had figured out a way to reconcile Ephesians and 1
Timothy (those who choose to have faith are saved, apart from works), except
that them saying that people needed to have faith meant that those people
were doing the "work" of faith (John), and obviously they could boast about
it. (They could just choose not to, but they could also just choose not to
boast about other works, so if the "not boasting" thing is the point of
the Ephesians verse, it must be really hard to just not boast.) The
Catholics and Churches of Christ did pretty good with James, but not so
good with Ephesians.
I thought that everyone had difficulties interpreting scripture, and
I came up with my own weird way to reconcile things (when we obey, we
do God's will, so we are nothing but God acting in the world, but when
we disobey, then it is we who act -- a view I found out later was similar to
Lutheran monergism).
At some point, I faced the possibility of people (a particular person)
who seemed basically good going to hell, just because they (he) weren't
(wasn't) a Christian. My mind remembered the universalist-leaning verse
"every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord", and I
looked it up, and saw that it came originally from Isaiah. I searched
on a popular Internet search engine, for the verse in Isaiah, and discovered
the site for the New Wine System. It
looked similar to how it does now (I found it in fall of 2012), offering
resolution of scriptural difficulties. It talked about a different
kind of soteriology, referencing the verse in Isaiah. I was interested,
and thought that it might have (what I would now call) high expected
value. So I ordered the comprehensive exposition of it (New Wine for
the End Times) and read it.
I was first impressed by how it handled the issues that I had coming
in to reading it. My opinion at the time was that it dealt with the
verses mentioned above, and others, in a more natural way than the
stretchings that I suspected or had heard people making to get around
the apparently plain meaning of each verse. It gave a place for otherwise
obscure passages in its own context. Also, it offered a scriptural reason
to think that God wouldn't (in keeping with his 1 Timothy desire that all
people be saved) create people who through no fault of their own were never
adequately preached the gospel, and who therefore would have to go to hell.
But ultimately it was the part that I had least desire for going in
that had the greatest effect on me. The New Wine System is about the
Millennium. The Millennium exists to bring people to holiness, full
spiritual maturity (so that they no longer have any sinful habits, and
(I would now emphasize), they fully put God first in their hearts -- and
possibly full spiritual maturity encompasses other dimensions as well). It
inherently provides a scriptural explanation of where, for instance,
people who died in pre-contact traditional cultures could hear about
Jesus. If the Millennium solves that problem, it does so by "preaching"
holiness -- the Millennium exists both to include people and to bring
them to completed spiritual maturity. In most Christian cultures,
holiness is not necessary for salvation, but in the New Wine System it is.
This can be a powerful idea for anyone (I have some ideas for why
it might ought to be, here), but
it was particularly powerful for me. I had already had some interest
in the idea of designing better ideologies for altruistic purposes,
and this seemed to me to be an excellent way to motivate people to
be more altruistic. The idea was so powerful and obviously useful,
and also so Biblical (from what I could see at the time), that I
ran with it for years. I developed a natural theological support
for it (which, is somewhat helpfully sketched out
on this blog), to the point that now I think
imagining a God who is not in many ways compatible with the New
Wine System doesn't make as much sense, from a philosophical standpoint,
than imagining one who is.
Now it's been about 9 years since I initially read about the New
Wine System, and I have some uncertainty whether it is actually biblical.
I think the developer of the New Wine System may really have shown it
to be so, but I am a more critical reader now, and I'm more aware of
the possibility of Bible scholarship overturning an apparently "plain
reading" of Scripture. I think the developer did engage with more than
just the most plain (or naive) layer of Scripture study, but I wonder
if Bible scholarship could still overwhelm his theory. I am considering
re-reading New Wine for the End Times, but am not sure I understand
enough about Bible scholarship to make an effective reading of it for
the purpose of being critical.
(However, scholarship may be overrated. We haven't had
cutting-edge Bible scholarship, which has the latest, most authoritative
take on the original context and how the Bible fits into it, until
(by definition of "cutting-edge"), this exact historical moment. So
was all thinking about God fatally flawed and useless over the centuries
between the original reception of the Bible and right now? If scholarship
can overturn soteriologically-relevant doctrines, that seems to be a big
problem for the past (or for us now, given that scholarship could, at least
in theory, overturn them again). We could be misleading ourselves or other
people about how to properly relate to God. God obviously was on some level
okay with people seeking him without having the best conceivable scholarship,
and, in fact, this doesn't seem to be much of a biting of the bullet on a
New Wine view of soteriology. If it is true, it's okay, or more okay, if
we don't know how salvation works.)
(Also, I am not sure that we should view the Bible as something
revealed to the first century (or to Ancient Judaism), in no way
progressive. A priori, I don't see why I should be sure it
should be seen as an ancient truth to be handed down, high fidelity,
to the present, or whether it's supposed to be reinterpreted by people
in the present or future. I might be somewhat of a progressive Christian,
by entertaining this thought. I think the difference between me
and the usual progressive Christianity that I see is that I bend
the Bible (to the extent that I might, if the New Wine System turns
out to not be the most conservative reading after all) toward
a rationalist "theism" ("theism" as an ethical orientation toward
God's well-being and interests, by contrast with "humanism" as an
ethical orientation toward human well-being and interests), through
my natural theology, while they bend the Bible (to the extent they
do) toward a more secular humanism.)
So, given that as my background, I have I think an unusual take
on what matters. Maximizing holiness (a concept which could be a container
for all sorts of ways of being set apart to God: growing into spiritual
maturity, overcoming sins, loving and trusting God, setting aside idols
of whatever form, being fully disposed to obey God, pursuing and/or
undergoing the cross, and I would guess other congruent concepts and
phenomena) is ultimately necessary for salvation, and we should live like
it. The New Wine eschatology (the Millennium) allows this to be entirely
realistic. What is really dangerous is that which gets in the way of
completing the journey. Being satisfied, permanently, at 99%
of the way, is death. Or, whatever gets you to permanently stop growing,
at any level of maturity. Likewise, if anything causes you to be an
enemy of God, that is dangerous, and to become a permanent enemy of God
is death. (In the end, it's enmity that kills. Those who refuse to
grow all the way will eventually be forced to confront that fact, and
either choose to listen to God after all, or choose to be permanent
enemies). One would hope that the 1000 years of the Millennium could
undo damage done during the ~40-80 years on earth, but likely enough not,
in some cases, and that risk is worth trying to address. People can
acquire enmities with God or cherishings of idols that are hard to undo.
(Salvation could be defined as "how it is we end up in heaven and not
in hell". The New Wine view (which I think is supported
by natural theology) is that hell is temporary, ending in annihilation.
Over the long run, certainly over eternity, God in his holiness can't
endure any unholiness at all, so any holding onto sin (putting anything
ahead of God in our hearts), must cease, and if we make it so that we
hold onto it and never let go, then God must destroy us at some point.)
I've been a reader of Slate Star
Codex (now reborn as Astral
Codex Ten) since fall of 2016. A speaker at a philosophy club presented
short-termist effective altruism to me in 2013, an influential event on me.
In 2020 and part of 2021, I read the Effective Altruism Forum a lot. I've
been thinking about rationalist/EA ideas since 2013, more so since 2016.
I spent time developing views that related the New Wine system and my natural
theology to their concerns: the future, ethics, civilization, and perhaps
others. I am concerned (as I've somewhat expressed
here) that if humans get what they want (satisfy
ethical humanism (or humanism + "zooism", as is not-too-uncommon in secular
spaces nowadays), they may damage the prospects of people to adequately put
God first. (In reality, putting God first is what ethical humanism calls
for, if it takes God into consideration -- ethical theism satisfies ethical
humanism). Human civilization seeks establishedness, almost by definition.
But establishedness, especially highly optimized establishedness (both
political and psychological) could be dangerous -- strangely enough, more
dangerous in the end than the deaths caused by the genocides of the 20th
century (which didn't by themselves keep their victims out of heaven).
And, in principle, as unnecessary as those deaths, and as apparently up to
human initiative to prevent.
This causes me to have "priors" (a viewpoint going in to my investigation)
which cause me to be concerned with the danger of bad establishedness, and
to be more favorable to the prospect of good disestablishedness.
Establishedness is attractive and a natural end state for human psychology,
and if people settle on an end state which is not sufficiently connected to
God, that's dangerous. Disestablishedness is often inherently unstable and
unattractive, not what we gravitate toward. But it is our (only?) hope
(either through human initiative, or through purely divine intervention)
to break us out of bad establishednesses.
A brief synopsis of the portion of the Bible covered:
In Judges, Israel goes through cycles. They turn away from God,
go into a kind of "mini-Captivity" (a political disestablishment),
ruled over by neighboring kings, cry out to God, he raises up a
temporary ruler for them (a judge), the land has rest for a while,
then the people turn away and the cycle repeats. This has its
upsides and its downsides. It's apparently the form of government
that God originally wanted. But it does allow for some terrible
things to happen (as noted at the end of the book).
In 1 Samuel, the people get tired of this way of doing things and
want a permanent ruler (a king) set up over them, just like all the
other nations. God is unhappy about this but goes along with what
they say. He gives them a first king who isn't really the best king.
(Who was kind of obviously not the kind of person to make a good king.)
Perhaps God expected this king to do a bad job and motivate the people
to turn back from the monarchy? In any case, the king proves himself
so bad that even God "regrets" (controversial statement, explored below)
having made him king. God gets a better king anointed, and then
takes the future of the kingdom away from the first king. But not the
kingdom itself, immediately. A long process whereby the king-to-be
becomes more established ensues, and the first king is threatened by
this and is ultimately disestablished.
In 2 Samuel, the second king rules, consolidates power (establishes
the kingdom), but then sins in a major way. God disestablishes him
as punishment. The second king struggles with an attempted coup and then
re-establishes himself, grows old, and dies.
In 1 Kings, the second king has to establish his chosen son as king
(before dying), and then that son, the third king, enjoys the fruits
of his (third king's) supervirtue of wisdom (a gift God was pleased to
give him), as well as the fact that the land is now at peace (unlike in
the second king's day). This third king gets really rich and drafts
forced labor to build a temple to God, which God didn't really ask for
but goes along with. This king also builds a multi-building palace,
using forced labor. He impresses a lot of people (his own people, a
foreign queen). He has 700 wives and 300 concubines, some of
whom are foreign, some probably political brides to ensure peace.
Some of them turn him away from being true to God, get him to worship
foreign gods. God is angry at him for doing that and disestablishes
him somewhat. He raises up someone to cause a civil war and take
10/12ths of the nation away from the third king's successor. (That
takes us to the end of chapter 11, which is as far as I chose to go.)
I can also add a prelude and postlude to the above synopsis
(things I remember from past readings of the rest of the Bible):
Prelude:
First, God existed. Then he created the heavens, earth, and
first people. (Established reality.) The people of Israel began
long ago as a family consisting of one man (Israel), his two wives
and two concubines, and his 12 sons and some number of daughters.
God chose them (established them). The family had to go to Egypt
because of a famine (disestablishment), where they made a good first
impression. But they never assimilated, and as the generations went
by and they became populous, the Egyptians felt threatened by them
and enslaved them (politically disestablished). They made them work
to build things. After many generations of this, an Israelite who
had an aristocratic (Egyptian) background, but who had been away
being a shepherd, was called to come back and free the people (disestablish
Egypt, establish Israel) and lead them out of Egypt. So he did, and
the people wandered in the desert (in a disestablished state) for
forty years, preparing (spiritually and militarily) (being established
by disestablishedness of wandering) to enter the land that Israel and
his family had left from to come to Egypt. They enter the land
and drive out, kill, and sort of enslave the residents (disestablish
them), and this is where Judges begins.
Postlude:
After the third king's reign (in 1 Kings), there was a civil war, resulting
in two kingdoms descended from Israel (a disestablishing phenomenon
for Israel). The line of the second king and his sons kept a smaller
part, while a new dynasty took the larger part. The line of the second
king and his sons was sometimes good from God's perspective, while the
new dynasty and its successors never was. The good kings turned to God
and turned the people to God (establishing of spiritual relationship),
while the bad kings turned to foreign gods (establishing of spiritual
relationship) and turned the people away from God (disestablishing of
spiritual relationship). Both kingdoms were eventually conquered by
neighboring empires (the "Captivity") (political disestablishing).
The people of Israel remained in various captivities for many centuries. In
our day, there has been a revived political state called Israel (political
establishment) in which some of the descendants of Israel live,
which occupies land once held (and still held) by non-Israelites
(disestablishing them). Many of the descendants of Israel are lost, maybe they
died out or were assimilated into non-Israelite populations. So in
a sense the captivity has never ended.
God sent his son (also God) to become a human, born to
a descendant of the second king. He had a rightful claim to
the earthly throne of Israel, but was not recognized by them
and wasn't even really going for that. Instead he was shamefully
executed by a foreign empire, at the desire of the
leaders of Israel. (He disestablished himself to become a human,
and disestablished himself to die shamefully.) This was to accomplish
at least one of a number of possible spiritual agendas. He rose from the
dead a few days later (re-established), spent some time with his
friends, and then disappeared, going back to...? Possibly, suffering
everything "the least" beings suffer (being disestablished), and sending
his Spirit (also God) to do work in the people who consider themselves
his followers (being established). These followers created a sort of
parallel-Israel and built a big civilization (establishedness), which
split, split again in multiple pieces, had civil wars (disestablishedness),
persecuted (establishedness) itself and others, was tamed or captivated by
a secular (foreign? native?) power (a deceptive disestablishedness),
colonized and evangelized the world (establishedness), and overall
pursued the God-king's agenda, with mixed success, to the present day.
On this blog I use the World English Bible by default, so that is what
I use for excerpts, but when I did the reading I read the English
Standard Version.
Judges 6:
7 When the children of Israel cried to Yahweh because of Midian,
8 Yahweh sent a prophet to the children of Israel; and he said to them,
"Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, 'I brought you up from Egypt, and
brought you out of the house of bondage. 9 I delivered you out of the
hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of all who oppressed you, and
drove them out from before you, and gave you their land. 10 I said to
you, "I am Yahweh your God. You shall not fear the gods of the Amorites,
in whose land you dwell." But you have not listened to my voice.'"
11 Yahweh's angel came and sat under the oak which was in Ophrah,
that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite. His son Gideon was beating out
wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. 12 Yahweh's
angel appeared to him, and said to him, "Yahweh is with you, you mighty
man of valor!"
13 Gideon said to him, "Oh, my lord, if Yahweh is with us, why then
has all this happened to us? Where are all his wondrous works which our
fathers told us of, saying, 'Didn't Yahweh bring us up from Egypt?' But
now Yahweh has cast us off, and delivered us into the hand of Midian."
14 Yahweh looked at him, and said, "Go in this your might, and save
Israel from the hand of Midian. Haven't I sent you?"
Apparently in the days of Judges, when God alone was king, God could
appear pretty hands-off. Effectively, appearing hands-off is to be
hands-off on some level (you allow people to think you aren't involved).
(So, perhaps, if you see through the eyes of faith or philosophy that God
is always active in your life, you enable him on some level to be more
hands-on?)
Judges 7:
1 Then Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, and all the people who were with him,
rose up early and encamped beside the spring of Harod. Midian's camp was
on the north side of them, by the hill of Moreh, in the valley. 2 Yahweh
said to Gideon, "The people who are with you are too many for me to give
the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel brag against me, saying, 'My
own hand has saved me.' 3 Now therefore proclaim in the ears of the people,
saying, 'Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return and depart from
Mount Gilead.'" So twenty-two thousand of the people returned, and ten
thousand remained.
4 Yahweh said to Gideon, "There are still too many people. Bring them
down to the water, and I will test them for you there. It shall be, that
those whom I tell you, 'This shall go with you,' shall go with you; and
whoever I tell you, 'This shall not go with you,' shall not go." 5 So he
brought down the people to the water; and Yahweh said to Gideon, "Everyone
who laps of the water with his tongue, like a dog laps, you shall set him
by himself; likewise everyone who bows down on his knees to drink." 6 The
number of those who lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, was three
hundred men; but all the rest of the people bowed down on their knees to
drink water. 7 Yahweh said to Gideon, "I will save you by the three
hundred men who lapped, and deliver the Midianites into your hand. Let
all the other people go, each to his own place."
When we are disestablished, then we know that God was being hands-on
through us.
Judges 8:
1 The men of Ephraim said to him, "Why have you treated us this way,
that you didn't call us when you went to fight with Midian?" They rebuked
him sharply. 2 He said to them, "What have I now done in comparison with
you? Isn't the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage
of Abiezer? 3 God has delivered into your hand the princes of Midian,
Oreb and Zeeb! What was I able to do in comparison with you?" Then their
anger was abated toward him when he had said that.
(Gideon is a descendant of Abiezer.)
Quoting from my notes:
8:1 Ephraim is mad that they weren't called to fight. (The established
norm of war?) If they had [fought], that might have diluted God's story. The
"logical", "right", "best practices" way of doing things is a powerful
norm but is not necessarily in favor of trusting in, loving God -- It
takes social courage to resist establishment / establishedness.
Judges 8:
21 Then Zebah and Zalmunna said, "You rise and fall on us; for as the
man is, so is his strength." Gideon arose, and killed Zebah and Zalmunna,
and took the crescents that were on their camels' necks.
22 Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, "Rule over us, both you,
your son, and your son's son also; for you have saved us out of the hand
of Midian."
23 Gideon said to them, "I will not rule over you, neither shall my
son rule over you. Yahweh shall rule over you."
Gideon refuses to be king. The people seem to have had an instinct
to make a king. The disestablishedness of their gratitude? Or perhaps
the disestablishedness of their fear, looking at a way to not be afraid
(a new establishedness), rooted in Gideon and his house? We want to
make humans into our saviors, when we see them save. In Gideon's case,
that he saved them was because of God, really, but the people apparently
couldn't see that.
Judges 10:
6 The children of Israel again did that which was evil in Yahweh's
sight, and served the Baals, the Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, the gods
of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the children of Ammon, and the
gods of the Philistines. They abandoned Yahweh, and didn't serve him.
7 Yahweh's anger burned against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of
the Philistines and into the hand of the children of Ammon. 8 They
troubled and oppressed the children of Israel that year. For eighteen
years they oppressed all the children of Israel that were beyond the
Jordan in the land of the Amorites, which is in Gilead. 9 The children of
Ammon passed over the Jordan to fight also against Judah, and against
Benjamin, and against the house of Ephraim, so that Israel was very
distressed. 10 The children of Israel cried to Yahweh, saying, "We have
sinned against you, even because we have forsaken our God, and have
served the Baals."
11 Yahweh said to the children of Israel, "Didn't I save you from the
Egyptians, and from the Amorites, from the children of Ammon, and from the
Philistines? 12 The Sidonians also, and the Amalekites, and the Maonites,
oppressed you; and you cried to me, and I saved you out of their hand.
13 Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods. Therefore I will save
you no more. 14 Go and cry to the gods which you have chosen. Let them
save you in the time of your distress!"
15 The children of Israel said to Yahweh, "We have sinned! Do to us
whatever seems good to you; only deliver us, please, today." 16 They put
away the foreign gods from among them and served Yahweh; and his soul was
grieved for the misery of Israel.
(God goes on to raise up a judge to save them.)
In the days of the Judges, God could get really frustrated with his
people (perhaps he does now and we don't hear about it?). It sounds
like he gave up on them -- that's what he said. The people repented
anyway, and he grieved for them, and seemingly changed his mind. (The
ESV uses the interesting "impatient for the misery of Israel".)
I use the term "seemingly" to signal that there is controversy
about whether God should be seen as ever changing his mind, or be
emotionally vulnerable to his creation. I think to defend a maximally
strong, unchanging God, you would have to have theological assumptions
drawn from outside this text (or it has been misleadingly translated
by both the WEB and ESV.) The text most plainly shows God and Israel
having emotions about each other, having something like a fight, and
then making up. They are personally intertwined with each other, on
an emotional level. They are both brought down (disestablishedness)
to the level of where they are compelled by their own natures, because
of the relationship. God is compelled to reject them by his own nature
and also to restore them after they repent. The people are brought
down to the level of facing death and rejection, and to the human needs
of seeking survival and acceptance. At that level they repent. This
all is a kind of intimacy, a political intimacy because it involves a
group of people being close to God, being moved together to seek him.
For all that we could feel like the Israelites were
wayward or spiritually backward, I am impressed by how they were able
to feel, and feel together. How likely is it that all of America's
Christians could repent at the same time, in the same spirit?
Have we really repented of anything as a religion in a long time?
Or do we just assume that sin is something private and quiet?
Or do we downplay sin to the point that while it is certainly
something we talk about (it's a mark of being a human, and saying
that you are a sinner can be part of how you belong to a Christian
community), it's not something we deeply believe in? (Or when we
do call out sin in Christianity, it's always "those other Christians",
and not "me personally"?)
(Are America's or the West's Christians one people in the first place,
able to even consider collectively repenting? What about within
denominations? Could the pope effectively call the Catholic Church
to repent? Or are even they not one body?)
In their distress, they turned to God. Presumably, they had clear
evidence that God was in the picture (he spoke to them). In our
day, though we are Christians, do we feel like God is really in the
picture? Do we think to turn to him, or are we practical atheists?
The Israelites were more communal, public, and
emotional than we are, and so were able to experience something
with God (and each other) that we do not, a particular dimension of
loving God with their hearts.
I think that disestablishedness is what causes deep emotions,
more so than establishedness. There is a kind of inner poverty which
deepens emotions. When a whole nation is disestablished, its many
members become more deeply emotional. This is a cost to an experiential
diet which is too put-together, and that put-togetherness is what I would
expect from a maximally firm and consistent government, by default.
A maximally established government, by default, does not allow for
disestablishedness in the people it establishes.
(It may also be the case that disestablishedness is what gives individuals
the desire to be one people with each other. When a nation is wealthy
it is held together by institutions or mechanisms, rather than by people
being one people.)
I can't remember anything happening quite like this (Judges 10) in the
Kings era (after Saul becomes king in 1 Samuel 10). I may have missed it,
though. (On a future reading I should test the idea that just occurred to
me, to see if "the people" exist in the Kings era as much as they do in
the Judges era. I think they do in the Wilderness era under Moses. They
aren't always the best characters, but they exist as part of the spiritual
story. Whereas in the days of Saul, David, and Solomon, maybe not? Those
kings get a lot of narrative, and they have relationships with God. Could
it be as though the king relates to God instead of the people relating
to God?)
(Side note: every year, the young women of Israel lamented for
four days over Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11:40). Do we do anything
analogous, as Western Christians?)
Judges 17:
1 There was a man of the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Micah.
2 He said to his mother, "The eleven hundred pieces of silver that were
taken from you, about which you uttered a curse, and also spoke it in my
ears -- behold, the silver is with me. I took it."
His mother said, “May Yahweh bless my son!”
3 He restored the eleven hundred pieces of silver to his mother, then
his mother said, "I most certainly dedicate the silver to Yahweh from my
hand for my son, to make a carved image and a molten image. Now therefore
I will restore it to you."
4 When he restored the money to his mother, his mother took two hundred
pieces of silver, and gave them to a silversmith, who made a carved image
and a molten image out of it. It was in the house of Micah.
5 The man Micah had a house of gods, and he made an ephod, and teraphim,
and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest. 6 In those days
there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own
eyes.
From my notes:
17:1-6 Dedicating silver to the LORD by making idols out of it.
(Would a king have had a firmer, more consistent state religion
which successfully preached and enforced orthodoxy? In principle,
that sounds more likely than in a disestablished political system.)
Judges 19:
22 As they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city,
certain wicked fellows, surrounded the house, beating at the door; and they
spoke to the master of the house, the old man, saying, "Bring out the man
who came into your house, that we can have sex with him!"
23 The man, the master of the house, went out to them, and said to them,
"No, my brothers, please don't act so wickedly; since this man has come into
my house, don't do this folly. 24 Behold, here is my virgin daughter and his
concubine. I will bring them out now. Humble them, and do with them what
seems good to you; but to this man don't do any such folly."
25 But the men wouldn't listen to him; so the man grabbed his concubine,
and brought her out to them; and they had sex with her, and abused her all
night until the morning. When the day began to dawn, they let her go. 26
Then the woman came in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of
the man's house where her lord was, until it was light. 27 Her lord rose up
in the morning and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his
way; and behold, the woman his concubine had fallen down at the door of the
house, with her hands on the threshold.
28 He said to her, "Get up, and let's get going!" but no one answered.
Then he took her up on the donkey; and the man rose up, and went to his
place.
29 When he had come into his house, he took a knife and cut up his
concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her
throughout all the borders of Israel. 30 It was so, that all who saw it
said, "Such a deed has not been done or seen from the day that the
children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt to this day! Consider
it, take counsel, and speak."
Chapter 19 contains shocking, brutal evil, which leads to a civil war
in 20 and 21, against Benjamin, the tribe in which the rape occurred.
The people grieve over what they've done to Benjamin and try to get
wives for them so their line doesn't die out. First they kill all the
men in a town that didn't join them in going to war, and take their
wives for Benjamin, and then they engage in human trafficking at a
feast to Yahweh:
Judges 21
16 Then the elders of the congregation said, "How shall we provide wives
for those who remain, since the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?" 17
They said, "There must be an inheritance for those who are escaped of
Benjamin, that a tribe not be blotted out from Israel. 18 However, we may
not give them wives of our daughters, for the children of Israel had sworn,
saying, 'Cursed is he who gives a wife to Benjamin.'" 19 They said, "Behold,
there is a feast of Yahweh from year to year in Shiloh, which is on the
north of Bethel, on the east side of the highway that goes up from Bethel
to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah." 20 They commanded the children of
Benjamin, saying, "Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, 21 and see, and
behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then
come out of the vineyards, and each man catch his wife of the daughters of
Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin. 22 It shall be, when their fathers
or their brothers come to complain to us, that we will say to them, 'Grant
them graciously to us, because we didn't take for each man his wife in
battle, neither did you give them to them; otherwise you would now be
guilty.'"
23 The children of Benjamin did so, and took wives for themselves
according to their number, of those who danced, whom they carried off.
They went and returned to their inheritance, built the cities, and lived
in them. 24 The children of Israel departed from there at that time, every
man to his tribe and to his family, and they each went out from there to
his own inheritance. 25 In those days there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.
And that's the end of the book.
Clearly, the judges system has problems.
1 Samuel 8:
1 When Samuel was old, he made his sons judges over Israel. 2 Now the
name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah. They
were judges in Beersheba. 3 His sons didn't walk in his ways, but turned
away after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice.
4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together and came
to Samuel to Ramah. 5 They said to him, "Behold, you are old, and your
sons don't walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all
the nations." 6 But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, "Give us
a king to judge us."
Samuel prayed to Yahweh. 7 Yahweh said to Samuel, "Listen to the voice
of the people in all that they tell you; for they have not rejected you,
but they have rejected me as the king over them. 8 According to all the
works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of
Egypt even to this day, in that they have forsaken me and served other
gods, so they also do to you. 9 Now therefore, listen to their voice.
However, you shall protest solemnly to them, and shall show them the way
of the king who will reign over them."
10 Samuel told all Yahweh's words to the people who asked him for a
king. 11 He said, "This will be the way of the king who shall reign over
you: he will take your sons and appoint them as his servants, for his
chariots and to be his horsemen; and they will run before his chariots.
12 He will appoint them to him for captains of thousands and captains of
fifties; and he will assign some to plow his ground and to reap his
harvest; and to make his instruments of war and the instruments of his
chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers, to be cooks,
and to be bakers. 14 He will take your fields, your vineyards, and your
olive groves, even your best, and give them to his servants. 15 He will
take one tenth of your seed and of your vineyards, and give it to his
officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants, your
female servants, your best young men, and your donkeys, and assign them
to his own work. 17 He will take one tenth of your flocks; and you will
be his servants. 18 You will cry out in that day because of your king
whom you will have chosen for yourselves; and Yahweh will not answer
you in that day."
19 But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; and they
said, "No, but we will have a king over us, 20 that we also may be like
all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us,
and fight our battles."
21 Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them
in the ears of Yahweh. 22 Yahweh said to Samuel, "Listen to their voice,
and make them a king."
Samuel said to the men of Israel, "Everyone go to your own city."
From my notes:
8:10-16 Samuel's warning against kings is that they take away people's
freedom. Established governments become their own entity (vs. 15 -
the officers get the money) which take people out of their normal lives.
This sort of sounds like a libertarian's case against government.
God may have been the following: concerned about that but more concerned
with the people's desire to be like the nations (vs. 20, vs. 5).
When the people protested, they were being somewhat reasonable. They
didn't want corrupt judges anymore. Maybe kings would be better? When
I write that, I think, "no, why would kings necessarily be less corrupt
than judges?" So maybe the people just wanted a king and were using
the corrupt judges as a pretext. Nevertheless, God's chosen path was
imperfect even by his own standards, in that sin was a part of it.
Human civilization is us chasing some ideal of earthly perfection,
or even (pragmatically) just iterating "being better" over and over,
and in the process rejecting God, or not.
1 Samuel:
1 Samuel said to Saul, "Yahweh sent me to anoint you to be king over
his people, over Israel. Now therefore listen to the voice of Yahweh's
words. 2 Yahweh of Armies says, 'I remember what Amalek did to Israel,
how he set himself against him on the way when he came up out of Egypt.
3 Now go and strike Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and
don't spare them; but kill both man and woman, infant and nursing baby,
ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
4 Saul summoned the people, and counted them in Telaim, two hundred
thousand footmen and ten thousand men of Judah. 5 Saul came to the city
of Amalek, and set an ambush in the valley. 6 Saul said to the Kenites,
"Go, depart, go down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with
them; for you showed kindness to all the children of Israel when they
came up out of Egypt." So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.
7 Saul struck the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, which
is before Egypt. 8 He took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and
utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. 9 But Saul
and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, of the cattle, of
the fat calves, of the lambs, and all that was good, and were not willing
to utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, that
they destroyed utterly.
10 Then Yahweh's word came to Samuel, saying, 11 "It grieves me that
I have set up Saul to be king, for he has turned back from following me,
and has not performed my commandments." Samuel was angry; and he cried to
Yahweh all night.
12 Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning; and Samuel was told,
saying, "Saul came to Carmel, and behold, he set up a monument for himself,
turned, passed on, and went down to Gilgal."
13 Samuel came to Saul; and Saul said to him, "You are blessed by
Yahweh! I have performed the commandment of Yahweh."
14 Samuel said, "Then what does this bleating of the sheep in my ears
and the lowing of the cattle which I hear mean?"
15 Saul said, "They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the
people spared the best of the sheep and of the cattle, to sacrifice to
Yahweh your God. We have utterly destroyed the rest."
16 Then Samuel said to Saul, "Stay, and I will tell you what Yahweh
said to me last night."
He said to him, "Say on."
17 Samuel said, "Though you were little in your own sight, weren't you
made the head of the tribes of Israel? Yahweh anointed you king over
Israel; 18 and Yahweh sent you on a journey, and said, 'Go, and utterly
destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they
are consumed.' 19 Why then didn't you obey Yahweh's voice, but took the
plunder, and did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight?"
20 Saul said to Samuel, "But I have obeyed Yahweh's voice, and have
gone the way which Yahweh sent me, and have brought Agag the king of
Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. 21 But the people
took of the plunder, sheep and cattle, the best of the devoted things,
to sacrifice to Yahweh your God in Gilgal."
22 Samuel said, "Has Yahweh as great delight in burnt offerings and
sacrifices, as in obeying Yahweh's voice? Behold, to obey is better than
sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is as the
sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because
you have rejected Yahweh's word, he has also rejected you from being
king."
24 Saul said to Samuel, "I have sinned; for I have transgressed the
commandment of Yahweh and your words, because I feared the people and
obeyed their voice. 25 Now therefore, please pardon my sin, and turn again
with me, that I may worship Yahweh."
26 Samuel said to Saul, "I will not return with you; for you have
rejected Yahweh's word, and Yahweh has rejected you from being king over
Israel." 27 As Samuel turned around to go away, Saul grabbed the skirt of
his robe, and it tore. 28 Samuel said to him, "Yahweh has torn the kingdom
of Israel from you today, and has given it to a neighbor of yours who is
better than you. 29 Also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent;
for he is not a man, that he should repent."
30 Then he said, "I have sinned; yet please honor me now before the
elders of my people and before Israel, and come back with me, that I may
worship Yahweh your God."
31 So Samuel went back with Saul; and Saul worshiped Yahweh. 32 Then
Samuel said, "Bring Agag the king of the Amalekites here to me!"
Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag said, "Surely the bitterness of death
is past."
33 Samuel said, "As your sword has made women childless, so your mother
will be childless among women!" Then Samuel cut Agag in pieces before Yahweh
in Gilgal.
34 Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house to Gibeah
of Saul. 35 Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death, but
Samuel mourned for Saul. Yahweh grieved that he had made Saul king over
Israel.
One time, about five years ago, I had a conversation with a young
evangelical in a cafe about 1 Samuel 15. The ESV says that God
"regretted" making Saul king. Samuel insists that God's not the kind
of God to "regret" (that's the word used in vs. 29 instead of the WEB's
"repent"). But God "regrets" nonetheless, the chapter later
repeats (vs. 35). My interlocutor didn't like what he heard and came
back maybe a week or two later having read some source on the Internet
saying that God "relented", he didn't "regret". The stakes are, if God
regrets, he changes his mind, and thus was wrong at some point. God
would then not know everything -- at least, not the future. He might
have been justified in thinking that Saul was an acceptable choice
as king back when he was anointed, but, as in vs. 11, because of what
Saul did, what Saul chose to become by his own free will, this was
no longer the case. God would have taken a risk on Saul, one which
could turn out not as God desired. If that's so, there are probably
an innumerable quantity of decisions like those of Saul (a number of
them for each of us) that God can't foresee.
For my part, I didn't like hearing from him that "regret" meant
"relent" anymore than he liked hearing the possibility that God could
regret.
Why would the ESV use "regret"? Did they want to confuse people,
knowing all the while that God can't really regret? Or were they
saying what was most intellectually valid, trusting people to come
to the right conclusion? Or is it really that there is some uncertainty
in knowing what the Bible really says, and "regret" is possible, but
"relent" is also possible? Or is it that "regret" is the best way
to translate it and we only make theological assumptions that God
must be above regret, which are not really supported by the Bible?
To this day, I'm not really sure. I guess I take the "there is some
uncertainty in knowing what the Bible really says" option. I don't
have a problem with thinking that God has regrets and doesn't know the
future completely. But I am not completely sure that that is what the
text says.
Why does it even matter? Why do we prefer to think of God one way
or another? Neither my interlocutor nor I really knew all of what the
Bible said. (So we could each bring up something that the other hadn't
heard.) I think our preferences might have been along the "reality" /
"perfection" split alluded to later.
He wanted a God (and thus an image of the way things should be, perhaps,
thus an image of how he was to live and how his church should be run,
and so on) based in... something different than I did. He might have
approved of winning and being right more than I would have. At the
time, I was attracted to the thought that God regretted because it
made sense with the view of God I was developing at the time. I saw
God as someone who was continually being crucified -- our ordinary
existences, often enough, are part of God's ongoing crucifixion. Such
a God might well regret -- a God who is inherently vulnerable might
as well be vulnerable to regret. I may have also had the Problem of Evil
in mind. A God who had limitations of any sort would be more the kind
to permit evil. Nowadays, I would rather believe that there is a God
with a really good heart who exists, rather than one who is emotionally
disconnected from the reality of those who suffer but who can guarantee
victory; while I can suppose that my interlocutor might have rather
believed that victory was assured, and didn't see a problem with God
being emotionally disconnected.
Maybe this is one of those "metaphors for life". We can have victory
if we are emotionally disconnected. "Victory" could also mean "physical
survival". We suspect that if we really saw things the way they were,
emotionally, we would lose some sort of competition, or die. We don't
want to die -- we shouldn't die, right? I wonder how much of our thoughts
about God are metaphors, where our real concerns are in our
subconscious approaches to all kinds of non-God realities, like death,
our lifestyles, and the values of our social groups. Maybe we have
so much trouble with talking prosaically about those topics that they
can only come out poetically, and get into our thoughts about God, or
wholly create them.
Who are you more likely to rebel against, a God who is emotionally
invincible (and has foreknowledge and omnipotence), or one who
regrets (and thus lacks foreknowledge, and perhaps omnipotence)? Personally,
I feel a greater loyalty toward the one who regrets. The one who
regrets is real, but the one who is emotionally invincible, I would
only feel like I should obey more if I do so out of fear -- not out of
love. I don't have as much respect for a God who is emotionally
invincible, although I may consider it imprudent to fight him.
He's playing it safe.
Of course it could be the case that an emotionally involved God
could happen to also have foreknowledge, and didn't really "regret"
making Saul king, but simply "grieved" it, as in the WEB. He felt
grief over what he did, although he knew all along what would happen
and that it was the right thing to do.
As I type this out, I feel like while I still can't be completely
sure that there is not some less-intuitive but valid way to read
1 Samuel 15, which supports something like "relent" instead of
"grieved" or "regretted", I lean somewhat toward "regret" or
"grieved" both because two literal translations
(WEB and ESV), one widely respected by evangelicals (ESV), give
"grieve" or "regret" as their main readings, and because Samuel
insisted that God did not "repent" or "regret", when clearly
God did by turning back from supporting Saul. Samuel's misstatement
(wishful lie?) is poignant. He wants a reliable God as much
as anyone would. But God turns back from the things that he says
he'll do, and he grieves about some of the things that he's done.
In terms of this post, the conclusion I would draw is that:
We can be uncertain about what the Bible says (it is effectively
less-established to us than if we were certain); God may not have
foreknowledge (less-established), or does things that he knows
will hurt him and other people; God says he'll do one thing and
then reveals that he will do another, based on how things have gone
(God either lets us believe things that are not true about what his
intentions are, or changes his plans) -- so, we will not get what
we expected from him, thus the idea of his promises is less-established.
All of these things can contribute to a reduction in our overall
psychological establishedness.
I don't think that if God lacks perfect foreknowledge (the only limitation
at stake here) that he is not competent enough to be trustworthy. Nor
do I think the above gives people reason to disobey God. I believe God's
authority comes from his willingness to undergo what we undergo. (I say
"I believe" not as a politically rousing phrase, but rather to signal that
this comes from my own perception of noetic reality, instead of from something
I would try to prove based on commonly-shared principles.) What he recommends
(if we know what that is) is the best course of action for us to take,
because he knows better than anyone. Even if he lacks foreknowledge, he
knows the present perfectly, and thus can predict better than any human,
and also knows what he will do. What he couldn't predict, under the view
that he lacks foreknowledge, is what people decide given their freedom,
and thus how some things will play out between now and the end. But
between you and God, if you are the way he wants you to be, things will
turn out well, in the end.
2 Samuel 6
1 David again gathered together all the chosen men of Israel, thirty
thousand. 2 David arose and went with all the people who were with him
from Baale Judah, to bring up from there God's ark, which is called by
the Name, even the name of Yahweh of Armies who sits above the cherubim.
3 They set God's ark on a new cart, and brought it out of Abinadab's
house that was on the hill; and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab,
drove the new cart. 4 They brought it out of Abinadab's house which was
in the hill, with God's ark; and Ahio went before the ark. 5 David and
all the house of Israel played before Yahweh with all kinds of
instruments made of cypress wood, with harps, with stringed instruments,
with tambourines, with castanets, and with cymbals.
6 When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached for
God's ark and took hold of it, for the cattle stumbled. 7 Yahweh's anger
burned against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error; and he
died there by God's ark.
From my notes:
6:6-7 Uzzah tries to save the ark (protect God?) but disobeys God
in the process. God is angry and kills Uzzah.
Does this mean God cannot be benefited at all? Or that which makes
up his well-being can't be benefited by human initiative? Our
well-being is part of his well-being. But God himself can't be
killed by anything outside himself. He will be okay in the end,
no matter how bad things get for him now. We have to respect him
in who he is (part of making him holy) -- which is a kind of
establishment over us. (That God is a certain way and the nature
of God is the nature of establishedness.) We can rest in his
establishedness and therefore respect him.
God lets us violate his holiness whenever we sin, but he made the
ark a teaching point to teach his people to respect him (Is this
ego-respect God wants, or survival-respect? I think the latter,
or an analog to the latter given that survival is not literally
a concern for God)
To respect something is to leave it as it is, whatever state of
establishedness or disestablishedness it is. Being is an
established thing, so all things that are are established in
some way. To disrespect is to disestablish. To disrespect is
good (or has a good outcome) when it opposes bad establishedness.
(Or maybe disrespect is always bad, bad for the disrespecter?
In that case maybe there's a respect for the highest someone
can be and that they be the highest which can motivate
disestablishing moves.
As long as bad establishedness exists, there is occasion for
(some kind of) disestablishedness.
2 Samuel 24
1 Again Yahweh's anger burned against Israel, and he moved David
against them, saying, "Go, count Israel and Judah." 2 The king said to
Joab the captain of the army, who was with him, "Now go back and forth
through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to Beersheba, and count
the people, that I may know the sum of the people."
3 Joab said to the king, "Now may Yahweh your God add to the people,
however many they may be, one hundred times; and may the eyes of my lord
the king see it. But why does my lord the king delight in this thing?"
4 Notwithstanding, the king's word prevailed against Joab and against
the captains of the army. Joab and the captains of the army went out
from the presence of the king to count the people of Israel. 5 They passed
over the Jordan and encamped in Aroer, on the right side of the city that
is in the middle of the valley of Gad, and to Jazer; 6 then they came to
Gilead and to the land of Tahtim Hodshi; and they came to Dan Jaan and
around to Sidon, 7 and came to the stronghold of Tyre, and to all the
cities of the Hivites and of the Canaanites; and they went out to the
south of Judah, at Beersheba. 8 So when they had gone back and forth
through all the land, they came to Jerusalem at the end of nine months
and twenty days. 9 Joab gave up the sum of the counting of the people to
the king; and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men
who drew the sword, and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand men.
10 David's heart struck him after he had counted the people. David said
to Yahweh, "I have sinned greatly in that which I have done. But now,
Yahweh, put away, I beg you, the iniquity of your servant; for I have done
very foolishly."
11 When David rose up in the morning, Yahweh's word came to the prophet
Gad, David's seer, saying, 12 "Go and speak to David, 'Yahweh says, "I offer
you three things. Choose one of them, that I may do it to you."'"
13 So Gad came to David, and told him, saying, "Shall seven years of
famine come to you in your land? Or will you flee three months before your
foes while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days' pestilence in
your land? Now answer, and consider what answer I shall return to him who
sent me."
14 David said to Gad, "I am in distress. Let us fall now into Yahweh's
hand, for his mercies are great. Let me not fall into man's hand."
15 So Yahweh sent a pestilence on Israel from the morning even to the
appointed time; and seventy thousand men died of the people from Dan even
to Beersheba. 16 When the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem
to destroy it, Yahweh relented of the disaster, and said to the angel who
destroyed the people, "It is enough. Now withdraw your hand." Yahweh's
angel was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
17 David spoke to Yahweh when he saw the angel who struck the people,
and said, "Behold, I have sinned, and I have done perversely; but these
sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me, and
against my father's house."
18 Gad came that day to David and said to him, "Go up, build an altar
to Yahweh on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite."
19 David went up according to the saying of Gad, as Yahweh commanded.
20 Araunah looked out, and saw the king and his servants coming on toward
him. Then Araunah went out and bowed himself before the king with his
face to the ground. 21 Araunah said, "Why has my lord the king come to
his servant?"
David said, "To buy your threshing floor, to build an altar to Yahweh,
that the plague may be stopped from afflicting the people."
22 Araunah said to David, "Let my lord the king take and offer up what
seems good to him. Behold, the cattle for the burnt offering, and the
threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. 23 All this, O
king, does Araunah give to the king." Araunah said to the king, "May
Yahweh your God accept you."
24 The king said to Araunah, "No, but I will most certainly buy it
from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to Yahweh my God
which cost me nothing." So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen
for fifty shekels of silver. 25 David built an altar to Yahweh there, and
offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So Yahweh was entreated for
the land, and the plague was removed from Israel.
From my notes:
Ch. 24 This is a weird passage, esp. vs. 1. Vs. 1 is hard to make
sense of since it sort of looks like God is the author of sin.
1 Chronicles 21:1, a parallel text, says that Satan incites David.
Maybe Satan used God to incite David, sort of like in Job? But
then, in 2 Samuel 24:1, it says that God was angry, and incited.
Could Satan make God angry at Israel? Point out some sin (as
Accuser) that God would otherwise overlook? This seems to give
Satan a lot of power over God. Is God less-established than in
say, a classical-theism-leaning reading of the Bible? (Which might
be the reading which is most in favor of establishedness and sees
God as most established). (Could God be the author of sin? If
that's so, how can we trust him? Less so than if he couldn't be,
so he would be less-established.) Or is it the case that 2 Samuel 24:1
is wrong, and should be superseded by 1 Chronicles 21:1, which makes
more sense theologically? In that case, the Bible itself is not
perfectly established.
And yet we trust God, and/or the Bible, anyway, even though they
may have some weakness or contradiction of what we might naively
consider perfect establishedness.
(I suspect that there is at least one classical-theism-leaning /
max-establishedness interpretation of 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles
21:1 which preserves or attempts to preserve a view that God and
the Bible are perfectly established. It may be that I would
grant them ~1 credence if I read them (or find it the case that if
I added up all their credences it would come to ~1, crowding out
the disestablishedness here), but if they were merely plausible,
they wouldn't take away all my uncertainty about the establishedness
of the Bible, which is itself a disestablishedness.)
I don't think that disestablishedness kills Biblical Christianity,
because it's a special case of the Problem of Evil, and no matter
how messed-up the world is, we still trust God anyway (if we are
Christians), even if we can't explain how God could be both good
and perfectly in-control given the worst of the evils we see.
If (like me) we simply relax the
expectation that God be perfectly in-control, then how can
we trust reality? Well, for myself, I don't think about it, but
I find that I mostly just do. The Bible only has to be
significantly ("quantitatively") or specially ("qualitatively")
trustworthy to be worth following.
(I don't think God lacks power, but I do think that he is unable
to will evil, but that is needed for temptation, and temptation is
needed for us to come to fully value him and his values. So someone
else has to will the evil of temptation, and that "someone else"
has bargaining power over God and can
make the world be worse than what God would otherwise have it be.
God's holiness is more fundamental to who he is than his power,
and thus he can't be in perfect control.)
We do trust disestablishedness, and, at least given this discussion
(about 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1), in some sense
disestablishedness is trustworthy, since the best path, even if
imperfect, is the one we ought to trust.
2 Samuel 24:2-3 David orders a census -- this is something he's
not supposed to do. Why would he order a census? Presumably
to know his strength. To know how established you are establishes
you. God would consider this bad if it meant David wasn't trusting
him.
2 Samuel 24:10 David's conscience disestablishes him and he asks
God to take away his sin (a kind of re-establishing).
2 Samuel 24:11-13 God offers David a way to pay for his sin.
2 Samuel 24:14 David trusts God's untrustworthiness more than man's
untrustworthiness (Untrustworthy in the sense that, generally,
a pestilence is something you should avoid, and which bad people
are the kind of people to do to you.)
2 Samuel 24:25 David completes his repentance (presumably), and
God responds.
1 Kings 5
1 Hiram king of Tyre sent his servants to Solomon, for he had heard
that they had anointed him king in the place of his father, and Hiram
had always loved David. 2 Solomon sent to Hiram, saying, 3 "You know
that David my father could not build a house for the name of Yahweh
his God because of the wars which were around him on every side, until
Yahweh put his enemies under the soles of his feet. 4 But now Yahweh
my God has given me rest on every side. There is no enemy and no evil
occurrence. 5 Behold, I intend to build a house for the name of Yahweh
my God, as Yahweh spoke to David my father, saying, 'Your son, whom I
will set on your throne in your place shall build the house for my name.'
From my notes:
5:3 When the land is at rest (established), you can build a temple
to God.
Optimistically, good temple-building can serve as an anti-temptation
to ameliorate the spiritual dangers of establishedness.
Secular "temple-building" might be exemplified by the proliferation of
art and games in our time, or especially as presented by transhumanists
with regard to the far future (in X-Risk)
or also what could be called "advanced experience", also in X-Risk
but also in "Letter From Utopia".
1 Kings 5
13 King Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty
thousand men. 14 He sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month by courses:
for a month they were in Lebanon, and two months at home; and Adoniram was
over the men subject to forced labor. 15 Solomon had seventy thousand who
bore burdens, and eighty thousand who were stone cutters in the mountains,
16 besides Solomon's chief officers who were over the work: three thousand
three hundred who ruled over the people who labored in the work. 17 The
king commanded, and they cut out large stones, costly stones, to lay the
foundation of the house with worked stone. 18 Solomon's builders and
Hiram's builders and the Gebalites cut them, and prepared the timber and
the stones to build the house.
From my notes:
5:13 Solomon drafts forced labor out of Israel. (A good thing, to
build the house of God? But God didn't even want a house, originally.
Which would God rather have, for his people to be free, or for them
to have more-established symbol of his establishment over them? Or
should the temple be seen as a way to honor God? Which would he prefer,
to be honored, or for his people to be free? Perhaps God values being
honored for the spiritual benefit being given those honoring?
An overall question: to what extent is Solomon a return to Egypt?
I'm not sure what to think of the temple -- it is somewhat ambiguous
and mixed to me.
1 Kings 6
11 Yahweh's word came to Solomon, saying, 12 "Concerning this house
which you are building, if you will walk in my statutes, and execute my
ordinances, and keep all my commandments to walk in them, then I will
establish my word with you, which I spoke to David your father. 13 I
will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people
Israel."
From my notes:
6:11-13 As Solomon builds the temple, God states that "concerning the
temple" (Solomon's physical establishing), Solomon should also build
a legal / loyal / obedient temple (a spiritual / psychological /
fiducial establishing).
1 Kings 7
1 Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished
all his house. 2 For he built the House of the Forest of Lebanon. Its
length was one hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height
thirty cubits, on four rows of cedar pillars, with cedar beams on the
pillars. 3 It was covered with cedar above over the forty-five beams
that were on the pillars, fifteen in a row. 4 There were beams in three
rows, and window was facing window in three ranks. 5 All the doors and
posts were made square with beams; and window was facing window in three
ranks. 6 He made the hall of pillars. Its length was fifty cubits and
its width thirty cubits, with a porch before them, and pillars and a
threshold before them. 7 He made the porch of the throne where he was
to judge, even the porch of judgment; and it was covered with cedar from
floor to floor. 8 His house where he was to dwell, the other court within
the porch, was of the same construction. He made also a house for
Pharaoh's daughter (whom Solomon had taken as wife), like this porch. 9
All these were of costly stones, even of stone cut according to measure,
sawed with saws, inside and outside, even from the foundation to the
coping, and so on the outside to the great court. 10 The foundation was
of costly stones, even great stones, stones of ten cubits and stones of
eight cubits. 11 Above were costly stones, even cut stone, according to
measure, and cedar wood. 12 The great court around had three courses of
cut stone with a course of cedar beams, like the inner court of Yahweh's
house and the porch of the house.
From my notes:
7:1-12 Solomon builds a palace for himself, maybe using forced labor,
certainly using a lot of resources. Perhaps this can be partially
justified by his need to imporess the people in order to be their
establishment?
(The tricky thing about unjust financial decisions is that they are
often partially justified.)
1 Kings 8
1 Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel with all the heads of the
tribes, the princes of the fathers' households of the children of Israel,
to King Solomon in Jerusalem, to bring up the ark of Yahweh's covenant
out of David's city, which is Zion. 2 All the men of Israel assembled
themselves to King Solomon at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is
the seventh month. 3 All the elders of Israel came, and the priests
picked up the ark. 4 They brought up Yahweh's ark, the Tent of Meeting,
and all the holy vessels that were in the Tent. The priests and the
Levites brought these up. 5 King Solomon and all the congregation of
Israel, who were assembled to him, were with him before the ark,
sacrificing sheep and cattle that could not be counted or numbered for
multitude. 6 The priests brought in the ark of Yahweh's covenant to
its place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, to the most holy
place, even under the cherubim's wings. 7 For the cherubim spread their
wings out over the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark
and its poles above. 8 The poles were so long that the ends of the
poles were seen from the holy place before the inner sanctuary, but
they were not seen outside. They are there to this day. 9 There was
nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets which Moses put there
at Horeb, when Yahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when
they came out of the land of Egypt. 10 It came to pass, when the priests
had come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled Yahweh's house,
11 so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the
cloud; for Yahweh's glory filled Yahweh's house.
From my notes:
8:1-11 Whatever God thought of the temple, he gave signs of blessing.
1 Kings 8
22 Solomon stood before Yahweh's altar in the presence of all the
assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands toward heaven; 23 and he
said, "Yahweh, the God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven
above, or on earth beneath; who keeps covenant and loving kindness with
your servants who walk before you with all their heart; 24 who has kept
with your servant David my father that which you promised him. Yes, you
spoke with your mouth, and have fulfilled it with your hand, as it is
today. 25 Now therefore, may Yahweh, the God of Israel, keep with your
servant David my father that which you have promised him, saying, 'There
shall not fail from you a man in my sight to sit on the throne of
Israel, if only your children take heed to their way, to walk before me
as you have walked before me.'
26 "Now therefore, God of Israel, please let your word be verified,
which you spoke to your servant David my father. 27 But will God in very
deed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens can't
contain you; how much less this house that I have built! 28 Yet have
respect for the prayer of your servant and for his supplication, Yahweh
my God, to listen to the cry and to the prayer which your servant prays
before you today; 29 that your eyes may be open toward this house night
and day, even toward the place of which you have said, 'My name shall
be there;' to listen to the prayer which your servant prays toward this
place. 30 Listen to the supplication of your servant, and of your people
Israel, when they pray toward this place. Yes, hear in heaven, your
dwelling place; and when you hear, forgive.
31 "If a man sins against his neighbor, and an oath is laid on him to
cause him to swear, and he comes and swears before your altar in this
house, 32 then hear in heaven, and act, and judge your servants,
condemning the wicked, to bring his way on his own head, and justifying
the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness.
33 "When your people Israel are struck down before the enemy because
they have sinned against you, if they turn again to you and confess your
name, and pray and make supplication to you in this house, 34 then hear
in heaven, and forgive the sin of your people Israel, and bring them
again to the land which you gave to their fathers.
35 "When the sky is shut up and there is no rain because they have
sinned against you, if they pray toward this place and confess your
name, and turn from their sin when you afflict them, 36 then hear in
heaven, and forgive the sin of your servants, and of your people Israel,
when you teach them the good way in which they should walk; and send
rain on your land which you have given to your people for an inheritance.
37 "If there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence, if there is
blight, mildew, locust or caterpillar; if their enemy besieges them in the
land of their cities, whatever plague, whatever sickness there is, 38
whatever prayer and supplication is made by any man, or by all your people
Israel, who shall each know the plague of his own heart, and spread out his
hands toward this house, 39 then hear in heaven, your dwelling place, and
forgive, and act, and give to every man according to all his ways, whose
heart you know (for you, even you only, know the hearts of all the
children of men); 40 that they may fear you all the days that they live in
the land which you gave to our fathers.
41 "Moreover, concerning the foreigner, who is not of your people Israel,
when he comes out of a far country for your name's sake 42 (for they shall
hear of your great name and of your mighty hand and of your outstretched
arm), when he comes and prays toward this house, 43 hear in heaven, your
dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you
for; that all the peoples of the earth may know your name, to fear you,
as do your people Israel, and that they may know that this house which I
have built is called by your name.
44 "If your people go out to battle against their enemy, by whatever
way you shall send them, and they pray to Yahweh toward the city which
you have chosen, and toward the house which I have built for your name,
45 then hear in heaven their prayer and their supplication, and maintain
their cause. 46 If they sin against you (for there is no man who doesn't
sin), and you are angry with them and deliver them to the enemy, so that
they carry them away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near;
47 yet if they repent in the land where they are carried captive, and
turn again, and make supplication to you in the land of those who
carried them captive, saying, 'We have sinned and have done perversely;
we have dealt wickedly,' 48 if they return to you with all their heart
and with all their soul in the land of their enemies who carried them
captive, and pray to you toward their land which you gave to their
fathers, the city which you have chosen and the house which I have
built for your name, 49 then hear their prayer and their supplication
in heaven, your dwelling place, and maintain their cause; 50 and
forgive your people who have sinned against you, and all their
transgressions in which they have transgressed against you; and give
them compassion before those who carried them captive, that they may
have compassion on them 51 (for they are your people and your
inheritance, which you brought out of Egypt, from the middle of the
iron furnace); 52 that your eyes may be open to the supplication of
your servant and to the supplication of your people Israel, to listen
to them whenever they cry to you. 53 For you separated them from among
all the peoples of the earth to be your inheritance, as you spoke by
Moses your servant, when you brought our fathers out of Egypt, Lord
Yahweh."
From my notes:
8:22-53 Religious activities that were previously unrelated to any
temple are now related to the temple.
People wanted a place to worship (were going to "high places" (3:3)),
so here was a way to give them a place of awe in a city.
Was "wild" religion (a military commander using Urim and Thummim in
the field? Or simply inquiring of God? Or a farmer inquiring of God?)
devalued by there now being a temple, an "official" place to be
religious?
In Jesus' day, the Samaritans may have felt that their non-temple
worship was devalued by the existence of the temple.
1 Kings 8
57 May Yahweh our God be with us as he was with our fathers. Let him
not leave us or forsake us, 58 that he may incline our hearts to him, to
walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, his statutes, and his
ordinances, which he commanded our fathers. 59 Let these my words, with
which I have made supplication before Yahweh, be near to Yahweh our God
day and night, that he may maintain the cause of his servant and the
cause of his people Israel, as every day requires; 60 that all the peoples
of the earth may know that Yahweh himself is God. There is no one else.
61 "Let your heart therefore be perfect with Yahweh our God, to walk
in his statutes, and to keep his commandments, as it is today."
From my notes
8:58 Solomon prays for anti-temptation.
8:61 Solomon wants people's hearts to be fully true to God.
1 Kings 9
1 When Solomon had finished the building of Yahweh's house, the king's
house, and all Solomon's desire which he was pleased to do, 2 Yahweh
appeared to Solomon the second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon.
3 Yahweh said to him, "I have heard your prayer and your supplication that
you have made before me. I have made this house holy, which you have built,
to put my name there forever; and my eyes and my heart shall be there
perpetually. 4 As for you, if you will walk before me as David your father
walked, in integrity of heart and in uprightness, to do according to all
that I have commanded you, and will keep my statutes and my ordinances,
5 then I will establish the throne of your kingdom over Israel forever,
as I promised to David your father, saying, 'There shall not fail from
you a man on the throne of Israel.' 6 But if you turn away from following
me, you or your children, and not keep my commandments and my statutes
which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship
them, 7 then I will cut off Israel out of the land which I have given
them; and I will cast this house, which I have made holy for my name,
out of my sight; and Israel will be a proverb and a byword among all
peoples. 8 Though this house is so high, yet everyone who passes by it
will be astonished and hiss; and they will say, 'Why has Yahweh done
this to this land and to this house?' 9 and they will answer, 'Because
they abandoned Yahweh their God, who brought their fathers out of the
land of Egypt, and embraced other gods, and worshiped them, and served
them. Therefore Yahweh has brought all this evil on them.'"
From my notes:
9:1-9 Being established by God is conditional on being true to him
in a sustained way.
1 Kings 9
15 This is the reason of the forced labor which King Solomon conscripted:
to build Yahweh's house, his own house, Millo, Jerusalem's wall, Hazor,
Megiddo, and Gezer.
From my notes:
9:15 Solomon did use forced labor to build his house.
1 Kings 10
1 When the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning
Yahweh's name, she came to test him with hard questions. 2 She came to
Jerusalem with a very great caravan, with camels that bore spices, very
much gold, and precious stones; and when she had come to Solomon, she
talked with him about all that was in her heart. 3 Solomon answered all
her questions. There wasn't anything hidden from the king which he didn't
tell her. 4 When the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon,
the house that he had built, 5 the food of his table, the sitting of his
servants, the attendance of his officials, their clothing, his cup
bearers, and his ascent by which he went up to Yahweh's house, there was
no more spirit in her. 6 She said to the king, "It was a true report that
I heard in my own land of your acts and of your wisdom. 7 However, I
didn't believe the words until I came and my eyes had seen it. Behold,
not even half was told me! Your wisdom and prosperity exceed the fame
which I heard. 8 Happy are your men, happy are these your servants who
stand continually before you, who hear your wisdom. 9 Blessed is Yahweh
your God, who delighted in you, to set you on the throne of Israel.
Because Yahweh loved Israel forever, therefore he made you king, to do
justice and righteousness." 10 She gave the king one hundred twenty
talents of gold, and a very great quantity of spices, and precious
stones. Never again was there such an abundance of spices as these
which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.
From my notes:
10:1 The queen of Sheba connects Solomon to the name (reputation?)
of the LORD.
10:9 The queen of Sheba blesses the LORD, having been
blown away (because of being blown away?) by how wise and wealthy he
made Solomon.
Humans are impressed by that kind of thing, and therefore it is a
mechanism to cause them to find God trustworthy. Wealth is attractive,
to whatever culture goes with it, whether that culture is ultimately
trustworthy or not. (Westernness (as in the SSC post
How The West Was Won) establishing
itself globally).
Are there other ways to draw people to God, particularly when they
start out, far from any peculiarly Biblical values?
1 Kings 11
1 Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, together with the daughter
of Pharaoh: women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and
Hittites, 2 of the nations concerning which Yahweh said to the children of
Israel, "You shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you,
for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods." Solomon
joined to these in love. 3 He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and
three hundred concubines. His wives turned his heart away. 4 When Solomon
was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart
was not perfect with Yahweh his God, as the heart of David his father
was. 5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians,
and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. 6 Solomon did that
which was evil in Yahweh's sight, and didn't go fully after Yahweh, as
David his father did. 7 Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the
abomination of Moab, on the mountain that is before Jerusalem, and for
Molech the abomination of the children of Ammon. 8 So he did for all his
foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods. 9 Yahweh
was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned away from Yahweh,
the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice, 10 and had commanded
him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods; but
he didn't keep that which Yahweh commanded. 11 Therefore Yahweh said to
Solomon, "Because this is done by you, and you have not kept my covenant
and my statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the
kingdom from you, and will give it to your servant. 12 Nevertheless, I
will not do it in your days, for David your father's sake; but I will
tear it out of your son's hand. 13 However, I will not tear away all the
kingdom; but I will give one tribe to your son, for David my servant's
sake, and for Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen."
14 Yahweh raised up an adversary to Solomon: Hadad the Edomite. He
was one of the king's offspring in Edom. 15 For when David was in Edom,
and Joab the captain of the army had gone up to bury the slain, and had
struck every male in Edom 16 (for Joab and all Israel remained there six
months, until he had cut off every male in Edom), 17 Hadad fled, he and
certain Edomites of his father's servants with him, to go into Egypt,
when Hadad was still a little child. 18 They arose out of Midian and
came to Paran; and they took men with them out of Paran, and they came
to Egypt, to Pharaoh king of Egypt, who gave him a house, and appointed
him food, and gave him land. 19 Hadad found great favor in the sight of
Pharaoh, so that he gave him as wife the sister of his own wife, the
sister of Tahpenes the queen. 20 The sister of Tahpenes bore him
Genubath his son, whom Tahpenes weaned in Pharaoh's house; and Genubath
was in Pharaoh's house among the sons of Pharaoh. 21 When Hadad heard
in Egypt that David slept with his fathers, and that Joab the captain
of the army was dead, Hadad said to Pharaoh, "Let me depart, that I may
go to my own country."
22 Then Pharaoh said to him, "But what have you lacked with me, that
behold, you seek to go to your own country?"
He answered, "Nothing, however only let me depart."
23 God raised up an adversary to him, Rezon the son of Eliada, who
had fled from his lord, Hadadezer king of Zobah. 24 He gathered men to
himself, and became captain over a troop, when David killed them of
Zobah. They went to Damascus and lived there, and reigned in Damascus.
25 He was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon, in addition to
the mischief of Hadad. He abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria.
26 Jeroboam the son of Nebat, an Ephraimite of Zeredah, a servant of
Solomon, whose mother's name was Zeruah, a widow, also lifted up his hand
against the king. 27 This was the reason why he lifted up his hand against
the king: Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breach of his father
David's city. 28 The man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valor; and Solomon
saw the young man that he was industrious, and he put him in charge of
all the labor of the house of Joseph. 29 At that time, when Jeroboam
went out of Jerusalem, the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him on
the way. Now Ahijah had clad himself with a new garment; and the two of
them were alone in the field. 30 Ahijah took the new garment that was on
him, and tore it in twelve pieces. 31 He said to Jeroboam, "Take ten
pieces; for Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, 'Behold, I will tear the
kingdom out of the hand of Solomon and will give ten tribes to you 32
(but he shall have one tribe, for my servant David's sake and for
Jerusalem's sake, the city which I have chosen out of all the tribes
of Israel), 33 because they have forsaken me, and have worshiped
Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of Moab, and
Milcom the god of the children of Ammon. They have not walked in my
ways, to do that which is right in my eyes, and to keep my statutes
and my ordinances, as David his father did.
34 "'However, I will not take the whole kingdom out of his hand, but
I will make him prince all the days of his life for David my servant's
sake whom I chose, who kept my commandments and my statutes, 35 but I
will take the kingdom out of his son's hand and will give it to you,
even ten tribes. 36 I will give one tribe to his son, that David my
servant may have a lamp always before me in Jerusalem, the city which
I have chosen for myself to put my name there. 37 I will take you,
and you shall reign according to all that your soul desires, and shall
be king over Israel. 38 It shall be, if you will listen to all that I
command you, and will walk in my ways, and do that which is right in
my eyes, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as David my servant
did, that I will be with you, and will build you a sure house, as I
built for David, and will give Israel to you. 39 I will afflict the
offspring of David for this, but not forever.'"
40 Therefore Solomon sought to kill Jeroboam, but Jeroboam arose
and fled into Egypt, to Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt until
the death of Solomon.
41 Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and
his wisdom, aren't they written in the book of the acts of Solomon?
42 The time that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel was
forty years. 43 Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in his
father David's city; and Rehoboam his son reigned in his place.
From my notes:
1 Kings 11:1-8 What most directly turns Solomon away from God is
his many foreign wives. Solomon somehow has time to have 700 wives
and 300 concubines. He isn't the enemy of neighboring countries,
but instead intermarries -- a peaceful, integrating thing to do.
This creates a bad establishedness.
11:9-11 God is angry at Solomon for being spiritually unfaithful
to him.
God blessed Solomon richly, but still he turned away. The riches
were not enough to secure his loyalty and actually (may have) hindered
it (certainly the state of rest that the land could be connected with
his many foreign wives).
11:14-41 So the cycle continues, to some extent, with a promised
civil war.
God's values are not the same as ours, and he preferred the way things
were under the Judges to the way they were under Solomon. People were
unfaithful to him in both scenarios, but in the days of Judges they could
be disestablished more regularly, led to call out to God more regularly.
We don't get to have perfect establishedness, not even from God.
(Perhaps in heaven we do.) God and the Bible are of at least somewhat
questionable trustworthiness. This does not mean that we should not
trust them.
People (my cafe interlocutor and Samuel alike) want to see God as the kind
of God who doesn't change his mind.
--
One question I found fairly simple to answer: whether God notably
intervened more or less in the Judges era or in the Kings era. I
think it's inconclusive. The Kings-era writings were more detailed,
so they would catch more interventions. Judges was a more "30,000 ft
in the air" perspective. It's clear that God intervenes in both eras.
Was God "hands-on", or "hands-off"? It depends on your perspective.
You could argue (I would agree) that all of existence is connected to
the consciousness of God. God is conscious of everything that actually
exists in a moment, and it's by his conscious will (at least in a kind
of "efficient cause" sense) that all things occur. But that's true
of all kinds of earthly scenarios. People can get into very "godforsaken"
situations in which in fact God is fully present in some metaphysical
sense, but not in a "psychological" sense, from the perspective of what
the "godforsaken" one can honestly see. Perhaps a theocracy (or a
religiously-informed "firm and consistent" government?) is an attempt
to get further from that possibility, while a libertarian government
would allow people to get closer to that psychological state of
"godforsakenness". Generally speaking, God does not seem to enforce a
strictly godforsaken nor strictly "godimbued" (what I'll say is the
opposite of "godforsaken") experiential diet for us, but we generally float
somewhere between the two. Maybe the "slider" was more on psychological
godforsakenness in the Judges days, and more on psychological
godimbuedness in the Kings days? I know that in the Judges days, it
was possible for someone who was arguably an ordinary person at
the time (Gideon when God first appeared to him) to be notably
psychologically godforsaken, and that this was something the writer(s)
of Judges thought worth pointing out, whereas in the Kings days,
at the height of Israel's political establishedness, during the
dedication of Solomon's temple, God appeared in a cloud in a vivid
and obvious miracle in front of everyone.
I think overall in the Judges era God let people suffer more
and trust more, while in the Kings era he established them more and
blessed them more. Up until Solomon's reign, violence was more
part of the story.
Spiritually, the high water mark of the era I read about was definitely
David, who existed in the establishing-but-not-established phase of
civilizational development. How many other people in his kingdom
were influenced by his passion for God, I don't know. But if we
see that kings can corrupt their nations, we might have at least
a weak sense that good ones can "anti-corrupt" them. (Maybe there's
more evidence that I'm already forgetting. I don't have a very
retentive memory.)
Is the human kingship of Israel worth it just to get one good
character into the Jewish cultural memory? Probably not, but it
is a mitigating factor. (The spiritual consequences of all the
kings that followed David probably outweighed the good of his
memory.) David could have been an exemplary judge, who prophesied
that one day, when the land was really ready, there would be a
king.
Here are some thoughts that I had about establishedness. I meant
to write this up in a more organized way, but I am losing energy to
work on this project, so I will mostly just leave these notes.
The truth, and legitimacy, can be related to as "definitions", and as what
they cash out to. We have a duty to the truth, whatever it is, and to
legitimacy, whatever it is. We relate to them as unspecified things. But
they also exist in a defined way. (They "cash out" to something specific.)
Legitimacy cashes out to God, and in a sense, so does the truth. (God is
the experiential / noetic path that is maximally non-misleading to follow.)
Truth and legitimacy are to be loved and are good in themselves.
If "orthodoxy" is a synonym for "the truth" (whether God or his teachings,
which are an extension of him), then of course it is good.
But if it ends up being "the set of established beliefs", then it no longer
is in touch with the truth (the truth makes us be open to what is not yet
known to us). The set of established beliefs is not the full truth. To
relate to the truth, we must have our eyes open. We must relate to
it, as full-fledged persons. But "the set of established beliefs" says
"focus on the things which do not require you to see for yourself, to
think and care for yourself". If we emphasize orthodoxy enough, we shut
out the part of ourselves that can genuinely assent to orthodox beliefs.
We are no longer alive to truth, whatever it may turn out to be. It could
so happen to be that someday we will have an exhaustive knowledge of
reality insofar as it really matters for us to know. But even then, there
is a difference between relating to that as truth, as something which
easily could not be what it turns out to be but which is what it turns
out to be, and relating to that body of truth as something taken as a
matter of course. When we cease to see, because we are so sure we
know what things look like, we do not really believe what we think we
do. We don't fully trust those beliefs, because we take them as a matter
of course.
Having the right beliefs in one sense gives us the right to take beliefs
as a matter of course, but that is a dangerous temptation, because it
can cause us to cease to really believe in them on more than a shallow
level. We can perform our duties to the established truth which we
no longer see for ourselves, but having deferred to others, we no longer
see and no longer believe it (as a whole and in its separate propositions)
for ourselves. So if we think faith saves us, orthodoxy is dangerous,
much more dangerous than heresy. With heresy, you know something is wrong.
You can see the controversy between orthodoxy and heresy, and see how
heresy is flawed. If you are a heretic, you are persecuted and alive (if
your heresy hasn't founded an orthodoxy of its own). But in an unbroken state
of orthodoxy, people can fail to fully trust in the propositions they
think they trust in. They can trust in Jesus, have the right propositions
about Jesus, but lose interest in him on any more than a fairly
superficial level. What is left is to retreat from really seeing the
world, really seeing Jesus, and instead retreating to a kind of modest
hedonism. What is left to be seen when everything fades into the
background is your psychological well-being. Perhaps we can still
love people somewhat in this state, but not as much as if aliveness to
the truth enables us to really see the people around us. We see them
as they are when God, the truth, shows how they can be seen with gusto.
If only the experts can handle the truth of the Bible, then only the
experts will see the Bible as truth, and everyone else must defer to
them, and then do not have the opportunity to see the Bible as truth,
to really see it, for themselves. Which is better, to have all
the right doctrines, to be able to justify them, but not be able to
deeply believe them or follow them, or to have some wrong doctrines,
or risk that by not really being able to justify them, but be able
deeply believe them and follow them? Uncertainty cuts against this
deep belief, but so does complacent certitude. We learn (or our
brains shut down as though we learn) to no longer trust our judgment,
and this gives us certitude, and frees us from uncertainty. True
belief, where we are both alive as knowers, open to truth-as-definition,
and also to what the truth cashed out to, is something which is not
a default position. Uncertainty and certitude are both powerful,
natural states, but true belief has to sit in the middle, and is
perhaps weaker.
The mindset of acquiring perfectly-justifiable propositions (or
justifiable up to the best any humans can manage) is often (always?)
at least somewhat aslant the mindset of actually believing those
propositions, actually trusting them and living them out. If the
purpose of the pursuit of knowledge is to acquire true beliefs,
then justification and belief are somewhat in tension.
People trust in establishedness, even if on certain levels
disestablishedness is more trustworthy, and establishedness can be
untrustworthy.
Establishedness is more trust-producing than disestablishedness
Ambiguity and mixedness. "Mixedness": a thing is mixed if it in some
sense should or could in itself produce ambivalent feelings in someone
contemplating it. Ambiguity is when a thing should or could in itself
produce a lack of knowledge or an uncertainty. A mixed thing can be
understood, but it is complex to evaluate. There is an element of
contradiction in mixedness, which can produce (perhaps should produce)
feelings of horror, sadness (or something akin to sadness), or bewilderment
("bewilderment" being perhaps not identical to one of ambiguity's
possible fruit, confusion -- maybe "bewilderment" is emotional, while
confusion is mental?).
Given ambiguity and mixedness, how should we prefer, act, and trust, as
Christians? I want to explore this question at length, but don't have my
conclusions now, and I want to finish this post sooner rather than later
rather than wait for them so as to be able to report them here, where in a
sense they are called for. I will say that my initial sense is that it is
not obvious that we have to 1) be hedonists (only sure of our own feelings
and thus only ultimately value them), 2) be naive humanists (because the
fact that God might exist, if there's enough credence for it, even
if it is some way away from certainty, is a powerful
consideration in how we should act and trust), or 3) abandon all of the
law of the Bible (or whatever could be thought of as law) in favor of
reason (because the possibility that the Bible might be the word
of God such that it should shape our preferences, actions, and trustings,
if high enough, could be a powerful consideration in how we proceed, as
with belief in God). I don't think it impossible for people to come by
reasonably firm preferences, courses of action, and trustings even given
ambiguity and mixedness. However, the tonality of those preferences,
courses of action, and trustings, will be different given ambiguous and
mixed inputs, and most likely some or many of the specific preferences,
courses of action, and trustings recommended by a worldview that tends
toward acknowledging ambiguity and mixedness may differ from one which
tends away from acknowledging them.
Reading in Descartes (Meditations), I see the idea of a lackingness
in reality which calls out for perfection. Perfection is the ultimate
establishedness. The calling out could be a desire we feel in ourselves
for reality to be other than it is, to be in some sense "mature and
complete". (Perhaps I am somewhat in line with Levinas' "metaphysical
desire" here, or perhaps I am not.)
I have found myself and reality to be lacking in something, but I didn't,
and wouldn't, use the word "imperfect" to describe the lacking things,
nor "perfect" to describe the good things. I think that you could say
that "perfect" can be defined in different ways, and could have different
flavors, but I would use a different word, "reality", for that which
all beings aspire to, or ought to. I don't want to define "perfect" as
"real, really so" given the connotations of "perfect". But maybe my
"real" is a substitute for "perfect", and if not the same thing, has
features in common with it.
There is a big difference between a person described as real, and one
described as perfect. I have tried to define this difference over
the years. I think many people will know what I'm talking about already,
but spelling out exactly what this "reality" is has somewhat eluded
me. I will attempt to give the definition I know of now.
Being real has something to do with bearing the burdens of reality.
A real person speaks honestly about what is bad in reality, without
trying to paint things as all being good. They are honest with
other people about negative things, rather than fakely polite. A
real person accepts the blame for things they have done, and takes
on responsibilities. A real person might go to die on a cross, but
a perfect person might come up with (perfectly correct) reasons why
they didn't have to. (Maybe dying on a cross is a state of need,
incompleteness, abjection, which are not in keeping with true unlackingness,
on Perfection's account.)
So, which is more established, reality, or perfection? Is perfection
real? Is reality perfect? This is a somewhat ambiguous way of putting
things. To me, "reality" is a flavor or an image, which ironically does
not have to exist (a world where everyone is "fake" is conceivable). (This
"reality" has something to do with "people who are in touch with the world
as it actually is, in its ambiguity and mixedness". The "real" personality
trait is one which is truth- and thus reality-oriented. Those are some
of the elements that make up that flavor or image.)
Yet, I think that "reality" must exist, from a different angle, because
"reality" (whether exactly defined as above, or in some better way) is what
is the foundation of legitimacy. I believe (I say this not to be rousing
or speech-giving, but rather to signal that I noetically perceive this, but
may not at this time be able to prove it to one who doesn't see it) that
things can be only if they ought to be -- what does not at all ought to be
does not exist. "Ought", or legitimacy, is the basis of reality. But this
ought is inherently one of burden-bearing, of going to the cross, and of a
father's love. Only a person who was fully willing to bear our burdens and
love us would deserve to declare absolute ought. So the foundation of
reality has at least a note of connecting with the dark elements that can't
be erased from the past, of putting oneself at risk, and of grief over
those who are lost. There is no perfect win state for love (although hate
can easily imagine a perfect win state for itself). If full being is maximal
establishedness, then there is ambivalence mixed into maximal
establishedness, and this is, in a sense, disestablishedness.
Which is more trustworthy, establishedness or disestablishedness? Naively,
we might want to say that establishedness just is trustworthiness. But
if being itself is Christ-like in its founding principle, when it is
as it should be, then there is some disestablishedness in trustworthiness,
and it seems from God's preference for the pre-human-kings model of
government in Judges that there is something valuable in us valuing
disestablishedness, in some ways. Disestablishedness brings us to ask,
seek, and learn from God, and occasions intimacy with God. Which is
more valuable, to be well-off, or to be close to God? Establishedness
gives us (or just is) well-being, but disestablishedness gives us
closeness to God. At least, that's our usual experience on earth.
How should we approach government on earth? Should it be something
that produces maximal wealth, or maximal closeness to God? Both
establishedness and disestablishedness are mixed things, and certainly
disestablishedness does not always produce closeness with God.
It's hard to come up with a formula, favoring one or the other. I
think the editor of Judges may have had that view, of the mixedness
of both the judge and human king models of government. From a deeply
theistic point of view, it may be hard to say what to do. What really
favors God's interests?
I feel as though there is a way for Christians
to really favor God's interests. Pursuits like evangelism and apologetics
(at their best), I think do move the world in God's direction. I
suspect that with care, one could figure out how the adjacent pursuits
(art, culture, politics, government, economic system, etc.) tend to favor
or disfavor people coming to love God. Perhaps one could come up with
a list of secular values which are preparatory for loving God. (Maybe
some of the traditional virtues work. I would suggest
fiducialism as a less-traditional orientation,
to balance out hedonism.) Then, in art, politics, and even government,
these could be worked into what is given to secular people as their
culture, without directly establishing Christianity as the religion
of a secular nation. For whatever reason, it appears that Jesus did
not want his kingdom to be established with force, and governments
seem to have to use force, as far as we've seen. This disestablishedness
is in keeping with the disestablishedness of the Father, who (perhaps)
aches to have to send his rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.
Some element of valuing disestablishedness, and the disestablishedness of
God's people, and even of God, should be part of whatever pursuing we
do of God's interests, including that of shaping culture.
Talk of mixedness may make it seem like there's no point to altruism
of any sort. But I think there is something which is an unambiguous
good (people entering God's rest) and something which is an unambiguous
bad (people not entering God's rest). The proper aim of theistic
altruism (including Christian altruism) is for people to enter God's
rest. Obtaining other goods beside salvation may be instrumental
in bringing about salvation, but in themselves they are mixed. And
we have only partial knowledge of whether we have succeeded in
contributing to someone else's salvation. It isn't as simple as
seeing them make a profession of faith. (That's a good sign but
not the end of the story.) So it's hard for us to really be able
to say "this is the 100% right thing to do" or "we have 100% succeeded
in our aims by doing this thing". The belief that we have won (or
even that God has unambiguously won) through any given thing that
we may do or already have done is not something we can hold with
certainty, but only with probability. That said, there are courses
of action which are better than others, and, though we may not be
able to be sure we've 100% found them, we should seek to find them.
Everything that exists ought to be, but some things ought to be permanently
(are legitimate), while others only ought to be temporarily (are
illegitimate). Both establishedness and disestablishedness exist and
therefore both ought to be. (They each are established on the level
of "oughting to be".) Some establishedness ought not to be permanently,
similarly with some disestablishedness. Trust requires a disestablishedness
which ought to be permanently, so that we can trust God forever.
Justice could be defined as "the state of things being established".
Maybe established in certain ways, or in certain dimensions.
There is something legitimate about bringing the world to legitimacy.
However, the process itself can be mixed. We are told to leave
vengeance to God. We imagine that vengeance, for God, feels like it
does for us. There is something sweetly establishing about the
vengeance that brings justice (or, vengeance which we believe
brings justice). But would God take pleasure in the death of
the wicked? The wicked deserve to die, but he does not have to
take satisfaction in that the way we might want to (we who have
experienced the wicked person firsthand, the fresh bitterness
of them).
Although bringing the world to justice makes it most legitimate,
and legitimateness is the best, there is still loss along the
way, and even justice and legitimateness call for some degree
of ambivalence.
Establishedness (or establishment) on the deepest level permits
disestablishedness on all the others.
God's disestablishedness (Problem of Evil, any way that God is tragically
hands-off) can't dominate the fact of his ultimate trustworthiness.
Why? If his (relative) untrustworthiness follows from his (ultimate)
trustworthiness (such as in MSLN theodicy),
then no matter how bad evil is, no matter how much it rules the world,
and no matter how tragic the loss it inflicts; overall, generally speaking,
God wins in the end -- but, with mourning and perhaps with something like
a limp.
--
Even though all(*) will be well in the end, there is brokenness in the
here-and-now, and the here-and-now is no less real than the far future
of God's rest ("Jesus wept").
Physical survival requires establishedness, but trust requires
disestablishedness.
There is an establishedness to disestablishedness (it exists).
Being is both established and disestablished, because persons are both
established and disestablished. Everything reduces to personal being
(impersonal beings only exist insofar as they are perceived by personal
beings -- Berkeley's "esse is percipi" or in my jargon,
they are "parts of persons' experience bodies).
Trust as having a question, as saying "yes".
(Sidebar: Belonging to a group gives a sense of stability, but tempts
you to no longer seek God. Does a group experience intimacy with God?
When you belong to a group, the group usually influences you more than
you influence the group.)
Crying out to God requires that we be in poverty and no longer want to
be in poverty. Crying out to God is what bonds us to God deeply.
What is most valuable about poverty is the aspect of poverty where we
don't value it, where we have to undergo something we genuinely don't
want to undergo. We may, or may not, connect that true poverty with
God. If we don't, then the poverty has not had its real value, and
may have little value at all (if the only good (or the main good) that
exists is wealth and love, and there is no love, then the only field
of value is wealth, and poverty is an unambiguous bad).
Do we find God by surrendering, or by fighting? Surrender adheres to
establishedness, while fighting questions establishedness and therefore
actually sees things. If we take the route of fighting, will we turn
away from God (as though, for instance, by pursuing reason and morality
to their limits, we will be drawn away from God)? Is surrender really
a virtue? If we are supposed to love God with all of our hearts, souls,
minds, and strengths, I would think that means that we should seek to
fight (to be active, alive, engaged, seeing for ourselves, seeing that
God is good for ourselves) in order to devote all of our hearts and
minds to God.
Establishedness has a future, and a past. Past establishment is in
heritage, upbringing, ethnic identity, similarly.
How mixed upbringing is (both fortunate and unfortunate). It gives
you a place in life, a sense of who you are and where you are going,
a concept of right and wrong, and a way to form ties of kinship
with other people. But because people's upbringings
differ, there is often an automatic enmity people have with those
who have other upbringings. If your upbringing doesn't happen to
have really been in line with the truth, it can tempt you to not
believe the truth.
I wonder to what extent, consciously or not, we rely on being part of
a people group, having a leader, being part of a community or a church,
being in a romantic relationship or having certain kinds of friendships,
in order to allow ourselves to put to sleep a part of ourselves, the
part that is fully conscious of psychological disestablishment, and
which makes decisions with a full facing of reality.
A work of art can be a psychological establishment, to take it in or
just to know that it exists. Similarly, an artist. To be a fan is
to lean on someone to speak for you through their art.
I fear that to settle on a bad (but probably apparently good)
establishedness is one of the most likely ways to forfeit heaven.
Disestablishedness doesn't let you love the way things are too much.
If you love the way things are enough, why love God? Why be
interested in God? Why be interested in what God is actually
saying?
Perhaps not having a human king is like not having a spouse. You (a
body of people) relate to God alone. Perhaps with the issue of
kinglessness there is something analogous to Paul's idea that those
who have wives seek to please them, but those who do not primarily
seek to please God.
There is a kind of discontent (disestablishedness) which is a sickness
of spirit, which leads to despair and a godless fiducial life, while there
is a spiritual hunger (disestablishedness) which is full of life, which
leads to love and trust of God.
Some people, perhaps, reject the obvious advantages of establishedness
because those who are established don't understand the less-obvious
value of disestablishedness. I think real goodness and badness are
largely orthogonal to that divide. An established person does need
to trust disestablishedness -- but not necessarily the disestablishedness
that a given valuer of disestablishedness prefers.
Political fights: not even God gets his way, so why should you insist
that you do?
David (for instance, when he refuses to kill Saul) obeys some kind of law.
The king can't rely on a king to decide for him, so he must listen to the
law himself. The king inquires of God for the people, is more naked before
disestablishedness. So perhaps we should be kings/queens ourselves, and
be like David?
Becoming yourself -- going from disorganized, undifferentiated,
unselfconfident, chaotic, undefined, unopinionated, or other species
of disestablishedness, to their opposites, species of establishedness.
Perhaps maturity (the thing for which we have "metaphysical desire"?)
is a seemingly-inevitable outcome of life, a gravity well we can't
escape. How frightful to fall down the wrong well, or to get stuck
in a bad maturity. We are at risk when we fail to seek the best,
and fail to let the best judge the set of established values that
tell us if we are okay, or not (in need of reaching out for what we
realize we don't have, or not).
We value the firmness of true establishedness (establishedness as
definition) instead of what true establishedness is (what satisfies
the definition), which is love. Pure love, apart from wealth, is
the cross, and mourning (and maybe something else?)
When there is no law (or education), an established culture, then
individuals rule over each other. If there is one king, he can
prevent many kings, by his authority. (But I think better for
everyone to share the same law and education (that is, a really
good one), so that no one needs to be ruled over by another person's
force of personality.)
I've been acquainted with people who were raised Christian, but then
sometime in their childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood, something
bad happened (or there was a pattern of bad things happening), and as
a result, they turned against Christianity. Some kind of disestablishedness
was involved in their stories of becoming ex-Christians. I don't know if
they "had to" reject Christianity as a result of what happened to them,
or whether it would be maximally fair to Christianity to blame what
traumatized them on Christianity itself, but I do know that they were all
generally untrusting people, perhaps as a result of what happened, and
that inability or disinclination to trust is something that would naturally
follow from disestablishedness, likely enough in a way that people might
not trust God, and find Jesus (the name of, and whatever connects to the
name) to be aversive, untrustworthy, etc.
Childhood can be a sheltered time. Then we "throw children to the wolves"
during their teens, twenties, and beyond. Then, after having confronted
the "wolves", children (now more adult), try to (or get to) have a time
of relative rest, learning, and healing. The Millennium has its type
in that phase of life.
I think that despite the value of disestablishedness, there can be
better and worse disestablishedness, and given a certain pattern of
disestablishedness in a person's life, better and worse ways to
enable young people to learn the important lessons that disestablishedness
is good at teaching. (One example: do our children know that crying
out to God is a thing to do in hard times?)
Not all cultures seem to throw their children to the wolves as much as
ours does. I've suspected that the teens and twenties are a long, drawn-out
initiation rite. You learn the nature of reality (that no one will hold
your hand, that people won't support you, that you can't accomplish great
things). You are given freedom, but then no human authority limits you,
rather wild chance limits you. This is good in a liberal society where
we're not allowed to say out loud what right or wrong really are since
there is no socially shared moral realism (maybe to the extent that we no
longer say to ourselves in our own minds what right or wrong really are).
You don't decide that the status quo is good, you simply lose the spirit
or fight that would have caused you to oppose it, and thus the social
order is preserved.
In other cultures, we would have a kind of communicable order (if we were
Aborigines, the Law of the Dreamtime, for instance), and the community would
intentionally initiate young people, and provide a harrowing initiation
rite. But now the harrowing initiation rite is just life itself, and there
is no human intentionality behind it, no intellectual order to hold to
consciously.
If we had the nerve to initiate our young people like some traditional
cultures do, we might not need disestablishedness as much. And even if
we lean on disestablishedness to teach young people, we may be able to
do so more effectively and with less gratuitous suffering (and alienation
from God, a response like Gideon's when God first came to him) if we
are conscious of all this and find some suitable way to be active
and intentional in the lives of young people as they develop.
Which is worse, to rely on yourself rather than on God, or to rely,
not on yourself, but on a collective, rather than on God? (This
may be a trick question.)
David had a harder life than Solomon, but was more fortunate
spiritually.
"God is king" can be spoken to say "God is worthy to be king" or
to say "God is in perfect control".
Disestablishedness is bad (Gideon not seeing God), and people don't
like it. Too much establishedness is bad. (The worst of Solomon.)
But coming to be established (David), is good?
If we cry out to God and he answers, we need to have disestablishedness
to begin with and then we end up with more establishedness. This
sounds like an analogue to economic growth (political-spiritual growth?).
So when the "cry out and be answered" mechanism / practice / pattern is
working, it converts disestablishedness into establishedness. This
involves trusting God as part of the process, and maybe a lasting
loyalty to or closeness with God is a lasting result.
Anarchist anarchy (the anarchy that anarchists desire and which can
sound like a good thing) may take work to maintain. Hierarchy is
a natural tendency in groups of humans above a certain size, so it
may be only with vigilance that hierarchy can be suppressed.
Similarly the trend toward establishedness is a natural part of
human psychology, and if there is any danger inherent in establishedness,
such that we need to bring about some disestablishedness, or genuinely
value disestablishedness, it (establishedness) probably has to be
resisted consciously and deliberately.
I don't identify with labels (even if they may in some sense accurately
describe me), and I am hesitant to label myself, but it does seem like I
should ask myself if by writing this post, I am asserting that I am a
Christian anarchist.
Perhaps if that term is taken broadly enough, it could contain the
ambivalence about establishment in this post (rather than being unambivalently
against power). Anarchism could be an attempt to bring about a utopia,
and I have a utopian side, but I think that utopias are inherently
mixed. Anarchism could be a rousing call to war against establishments,
and I would like to not make rousing calls or tear down people's houses.
Anarchism might love establishedness more than God in its own way.
Perhaps (it might love) the establishedness of being in the right
theologically (assuming that the Sermon on the Mount trumps the parts of
the Bible that allow for us (perhaps in our weakness and hardness of
heart) to institute state violence).
Is the Northern Triangle being punished for its own sins by being
disestablished? Maybe in some sense, their actions are causing
their situation. (Some individuals in the area causing it more than
others.) But they are sort of like client states of the United
States. The consequences of American sins rippling out to the
nations within the sphere of the US's influence. (American
demand for cocaine, American leaders dumping gang members in El Salvador
at a bad time in El Salvador's history.)
The world is becoming one established thing. The larger the electrical
grid, the bigger the failures (according to this paper).
Establishedness brings disparate elements into one, letting them
sicken each other, and suppresses failure so that they end up worse.
(Israel and Judah were not in captivity for a long time, under the
kings, while it was a cyclical occurrence under the judges -- until
they were each taken into captivities that have lasted to this day
(not all the Israelites have come out of the nations)).
Granted, a minarchist or localist dissent to globalism can still
be established in a way that affects how people relate to God. Maybe
a healthy localism is the greater threat to loving God, unless it
guards against forgetting God, because it really can speak to
human needs convincingly. (It's higher on the
Hierarchy of Betrayal than
what currently rules the world.)
The spiritual danger of kings can also be found in localism, globalist
liberalism, or libertarianism. Whatever house you like to sleep in
can tempt you by its comfort to never sleep outside (so you don't
sleep under the stars).
It's premature for me to have a worked-out opinion on what I would say the
relationship of Christianity and politics ought to be, but I would
say that whatever approach Christians take should emphasize people's
relationships with God, instead of people's conformity with
Christianity-derived laws or even ethical preferences. Ethical attitudes,
even ones derived from Christianity, can't replace a person's relationship
with God, and a person in a saving relationship with God can be wrong
about their ethical attitudes with less of a cost to them than a
Christian-themed person who does not love God.
Political establishedness is based in some kind of collective identity.
I find that naturally I tend to lack identities (that is my "is"). But
if I think about what kind of collective identity I should choose (out
of a kind of "ought-believing", perhaps),
I find that it ought to be the Jews in the Captivity, especially those
who wrote down the Old Testament, looking back at their history, what
went wrong; regretful, dispossessed, in the desert. Power tempered
with sorrow, no sense of pure winning. Few people (if any)
can win anymore (can legitimately consider getting what they want to
be a pure victory for the good) given the history that goes into where
we are today. Everything is sullied, though we try to forget that
and be pragmatic, concerned less for the truth in itself than for how
we can get our interests served, how we can get the most winning out
of whatever we have. But the Jews in Captivity (at least, some of them)
knew that they couldn't win anymore. If you can't win, all you have
left is the truth.
I think a collective identity like that of (some of? most of?) the Jews
in Captivity can found trustworthy power, more so than most others. It
doesn't come naturally to us (even if we were in captivity, it might
not). But it would come more naturally to us if we shared that identity
with each other.
--
It might sound like there is no unsulliedness, but that is not true.
Holiness is possible, and God has always been holy. It's just that
his holiness does not prevent him from his life story getting mixed
up with sordid events, or even from him using resources that were
partly "paid for with dirty money". What is unsullied about God is
his love.
In Part 1 I said:
One could argue that God is not as much king in the Northern
Triangle as he was in the time of Judges, and that would give an easy
way to decide.
I think the Northern Triangle may be significantly worse (more
horrific) than in Israel in the days of the Judges. (Maybe this
indicates that God is less king there psychologically, if not
metaphysically or by rights.) The worst
thing that is recorded in Judges scandalizes the whole nation and is
unprecedentedly bad (Judges 19:30), but in the Northern Triangle, it
sounds like incidents of that level of brutality and depravity are not
necessarily literally common, but common enough to be "a thing that
happens", and do not seem to provoke national outrage on the scale of
Judges-era Israel. One could argue that disestablishedness at the
level of the Northern Triangle produces enough gratuitous evil (not
even beneficial instrumentally in turning people to God or in any
other way) that it's worth reforming to make it more established. The
captivities that the Israelites experienced in the days of Judges
might not have been as bad as the situation in the Northern Triangle.
On the other hand, it may be that as bad as the Northern Triangle
can be, it's still spiritually productive, and if we were successful in
fixing it from a worldly point of view, we wouldn't stop at leaving
it at a Judges-level of disestablishedness, but would establish it
like the US, which could be spiritually worse. I suppose this is an
empirical question, if we knew how to measure these things.
Ideally, there would be some way to keep the best of both the
Northern Triangle (or Judges-era Israel) and the United States. A
wise person once told me "awareness comes through pain", but in theory there
might be a high level of genuine awareness that can be attained with more,
or less, pain. Maybe some confusion or deception comes through pain as
well as awareness.
Maybe, in a sense, God wanted the people in the days of Judges to be
their own kings, to be established in themselves at a local or even
individual level, something that a king would take away from them.
A libertarian's desire for personal establishedness might have some
parallel with this.
I think of my experiences with people who have played the role of "king"
in my own life, someone from whom I sought establishment over me, and
they tended to be some of the worst relationships that I have known.
A "king" like Solomon, a "king" like David, and a "king" like Saul. I
have had to learn to not seek "kings" and instead be established in myself,
and therefore take the risk of disestablishedness, and the experience of
disestablishedness, more on my own. Perhaps this is something God wanted
for the people in the days of Judges, that at more levels of society,
people would be established for themselves, would only depend on
God.
To be your own king is oddly enough to be more disestablished than to
rely on a king to be establishment for you. It is also to become more
established in yourself. If that establishedness is rooted in your
relationship with God, then we get a "Judges-like" personal establishedness.
But if that establishedness is disconnected from God, we get a
"libertarian-like" personal establishedness (taking libertarians as
strawmen who just want to do their own thing). A Christian libertarian
has two paths open to him or her.
Thinking back on past books, I remember one entitled
How Can We Love?. That
book was an intense book, which was a reaction, in part, to someone
who was too worn down. If you are ambivalent enough, do you stop seeing
evil, and thus fighting evil? In How Can We Love?, I called out
one sin in particular, economic sin, not using your own resources in
a way that connected with the poverty of whoever is poor. The book
recommended forgiveness, but the energy of it was insistent and I wonder
how many readers could grasp that it favored forgiveness, underneath
the impatience and simplicity of it. I suppose the book may be saying
"Go do work" -- ideally that is what it would communicate. In that
sense it may be compatible with a view that things are mixed -- maybe
it's clear enough that the best course of action is to go do work,
even if things are mixed.
I also wonder how much that book really favors loving God. It
contains some explicitly theistic material. But I suspect that a
reader who wasn't careful would forget that God exists, and think that
humans were supposed to be moral, were supposed to rise up and fight
evil, that we should all take on the role of God. The book was
written with a strong, authoritative voice, which could lead someone
who was looking for a human to be their god to find that in me, or in
the person they might think I was given the book I wrote back then.
I wonder to what extent morality is something that we are into so that
we can be God, so that we can work righteousness. (There is both a
positive version of that "being God" (being like God, kin to God) and
a negative version (trying to be a god, but a stranger to God).)
I do think fighting evil is important, but the real evil is subtle.
In my own experiences with evil, I see how much it is based in
deception. The mindset that boldly goes out to do work may not be
the one to understand what the truth is.
Some people are like prophets, and some like kings. Prophets say
the truth without any sense of responsibility. They don't have
to live up to their messages. The truth has to be said by someone,
even an unworthy person. It has to be said with full bluntness, and
cause whatever casualties it causes. But kings have maximal human
responsibility. They are the caretakers of groups of people. The
subtlety is that the king (ideally) listens to prophets, and implements
what they say. But the king does so with responsibility and an
eye to all the costs, and thus sees the mixedness of what he does.
The prophet has the freedom to see things as black and white, but
the king either sees shades of grey (ambiguity) or black inextricably
intertwined with white (mixedness).
Jesus was both prophet and king, although on earth he kept his
kingship more or less contained. Perhaps a rare few people can
balance being both prophet and king. Usually the prophet must
be powerless, and the king must listen to the prophet, for things
to work properly. But in a democracy, who is really powerless?
There's more of a continuity between a prophet and a king. You
could start out as a prophet and then without realizing it start
to have a (micro-)king's power, and the need for a king's
responsibility to all those in his kingdom.
Davids think they are surrounded by Goliaths, but they are
Goliaths themselves, to somebody or the other. A classic way
for evil to enter a situation is to think you have all the
freedoms of smallness, when in fact you have become large yourself.
What is real evil? Christians involved in politics should think
about how spiritual warfare works. Our battle is with unseen beings,
not with people.
I think my old book (How Can We Love?), written by a younger
person than I am now, is a valuable thing for an old and worn-down person
to read, if they don't lose the wisdom of sorrow. Part of good
establishedness is to have both energy and moral clarity (youth?) along
with the discernment and compassion (age?). It may be hard to balance
both young and old energies in oneself at the same time, but if that is
impossible, at least drifting back and forth between them can be good.
(Side question: when Jesus was on earth, during the time of his
ministry, was he young, or old?)
Even if God does not mourn the death of a purely evil person when they
have hardened themselves, the hardening itself and the decisions leading
up to it are a tragic thing. Truly moral monsters chose to be that way,
and were originally children.
--
The mourning in heaven does not dominate all other feelings. To be
truthful, one must acknowledge both the good and the bad.
(Sidebar: Establishedness. One of the Desert Fathers said something
like "You should worry when the temptations cease." The danger of the
Promised Land. God wants you to be there, but it's still spiritually
dangerous.)
Lack of resolution as disestablishedness. The way of the desert:
you want something but you can't have it. Resolution: have it or stop
wanting it. God can work in your life through the lack of resolution.
Monasticism as institutionalized disestablishedness. A loose institution?
(A movement?) Or a built-up institution? (A monastic order?) If built-up
enough, there is less disestablishedness, more establishedness. The
establishedness of a set of rules for monks. Monastic orders as kings?
Celibacy is a kind of establishedness in the desert (the desert is what
is established in the celibate person). The human mind
tends to want to find rest in people rather than in God alone. Biologically,
people tend to have an urge to find a mate. With a mate, a person can
found a family (and nations come from families). Therefore celibacy is
often a lifestyle of disestablishedness. It has its own establishedness
(it is a lifestyle), but it causes its adherents to sometimes be alien
to their own nature. (That's been my experience as a celibate person,
more or less.)
The ability to choose disestablishedness, whether through celibacy or
some other strategy, is a useful thing if you want to make sure that you
remain close to God through something like the Judges pattern (through
the cycle of disestablishment leading to inquiry of God and calling out
to God for help, or other seeking of God, followed by his answer, a
basic pattern of spiritual intimacy). An interesting challenge for
a Christian political thinker could be to think of ways that the
body politic could choose disestablishedness, such that the body had
higher rates of spiritual intimacy. In the days of Judges, it seems
as though God imposed disestablishedness on the Israelites by selling
them into "mini-Captivities", but perhaps there are other, less brutal
ways for a nation to be close to God, available to willing peoples.
(Maybe it would also make sense to think of corporate churches (i.e.,
"100 people with a pastor and a building"), or other associations
of Christians, as "Christian micro-nations" and apply Christian
political thinking to them, including the idea of deliberately
seeking certain kinds of disestablishedness.)
Asceticism (a form of choosing disestablishedness) may be somewhat valuable
as a means to be free of the slavery of having to give yourself what you
crave, or as a means to a simple life more free from economic slavery, and
perhaps for other reasons, but it is most valuable if it actually causes
you to love and trust God more.
One response to the reign of establishedness is the monastic response.
(Especially the least-established monasticisms.) The early Christian
monks lived the way of the desert. In the spiritual desert, there is
little food or water, and wild and evil spirits roam around, looking
for a desert mind to tempt. This provides a disestablishedness which
gives the desert-dweller increased opportunities to cry out to God.
I've emphasized crying out to God, since it is in Judges, but there
may be other patterns by which people draw close to God due to
disestablishedness. Disestablishedness causes people to have to
be watchful, to avoid spiritual danger. Avoiding spiritual danger
is a motion of choosing God's values, and is a way for the will,
intellect, and intuition (and possibly the emotions and body) to
love God.
(Sidebar: Is there a way to de-escalate without risking your opponent
taking over you? If the US hadn't responded after 9/11, what would
have happened? By not intervening in the Middle East / Afghanistan,
would they have undermined support for those who wanted to attack
America, by giving them less legitimate cause for grievance?
Our nation is taken to be a representative of Christianity by some
Muslims, but it can't actually act in a radically Christian way
(like showing mercy to the people behind 9/11 or "resisting not evil"),
because America is not legally a Christian country, can't call on
supernatural / gracious principles openly (or probably can't, seems
like it can't), and instead behaves secularly. And, perhaps, this is
what we should expect from Jesus' "my kingdom is not of this world".
Can Christians undo the perception that America's behavior as a
nation-state in some way represents Christianity? Could the US
pursue (and undergo) the cross for reasons which are not explicitly
religious (are secular in some sense) and thereby somewhat make
the government more Christian on an unofficial level (perhaps (in its
unofficialness) more real for being fiducial / practical)?)
I received my mail-in ballot for the California gubernatorial recall
election during the writing of this post (August 2021). I decided a year
or two ago to not vote anymore. I might make exceptions for nonpartisan
offices or sufficiently small-scale elections. But generally, I want
to be a Southern Californian who did not vote for whomever Southern
Californians are assumed to vote for, and a Christian who did not vote
for whomever Christians are assumed to vote for. I hope to be
apolitical, and so I want to build a track record of not being on the
side of people that people hate, and who hate them. My hope is that I can
be a helpful citizen in the area of depolarization.
But if I don't vote in this recall election, it might make a small
difference in the outcome. For voting to work, we have to approach
it as though our voice matters. And the stakes in this election are
non-zero. Some kind of harm could come if the wrong candidate is
elected.
This bothered me for a bit. I remembered Judges, however, and thought
"well, maybe having the wrong person in office is just what people need".
Maybe it's better for people spiritually to have their land misgoverned.
And that may be enough to satisfy me, so that I continue to not vote.
But part of me thinks "We're not going to turn to God as a people if
things go wrong. We're just going to have misgovernment without any
spiritual benefit." I'm not sure how true that sentiment is. (Did
politically conservative Christians not at all turn to God for help
under Obama? Did politically liberal Christians not at all turn to
God for help under Trump? Do decaying times not turn numerous
individuals toward God, whether Christian or non-Christian? Is it
possible that there is a level of dysfunction which is merely irritating
and enraging but does not connect with deeper life
(like Sartre's quote from No Exit about pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses but never hurts
enough), that this is where we are right now, but if we break out of that
to really hurt, then we will turn to God?) But I think it is probably
partly true.
During the writing of this post, I happened to listen to a podcast
on climate change (Michael Klare on Future of Life Institute's podcast).
This reminded me of the issue. The podcast talked about how states
will fail (are already stressed and failing), due to climate stresses.
This will have a spillover effect on the rest of the world. The
global trend will be toward more disestablishedness in the coming
decades. My sense of living in the hyper-developed future will make
less sense in the more immediate future, and the threat of a loveless
or godless establishment (but an eminently humanistic one) will be
pushed out beyond my lifetime. (Unless AI can really "save the day"...)
Perhaps for whichever Christian thinkers who are not consumed with the
immediate struggles of the future there could be an important job of
developing a version of establishedness which acknowledges the
inherent dangers of establishedness, genuinely values the good that
only comes through the disestablishedness which that establishedness
necessarily lacks, and does not fail to exemplify the good which
tends to only come or more naturally come through disestablishedness
but which can be incorporated into establishedness.
When the end of disestablishedness becomes plausible, hopefully
Christian thinkers (and even more hopefully, Christian culture at
large) will be ready for the challenge, possessing ideas (thought,
and embodied) developed in our time. (As hinted above, according to
some, AI may accelerate the process of ending disestablishedness,
and if human agency and culture mean anything after AI takes over,
and if the takeover occurs sooner rather than later then the
challenge may come as early as this century, rather than later.)
10 December 2021: for this section, see also
Disestablishedness vs. Anti-temptation.
14 August 2022: I realized that this section has a major flaw and the
"patch" to fix it (at least for now) is
here.
During the writing of this, Texas' abortion law was in the news, so
I've thought more about the issue.
One argument for legalizing abortion is this: Christians tend to want
to believe that infants who die do not go to hell. It would seem odd
for God to create a child, allow him or her to die before he or she was old
enough to make decisions, and then send him or her to hell
(for all eternity?). If it really is the case
that infants who die "go straight to heaven", then isn't abortion the
best form of ensuring salvation?
Intentionally causing abortions, believing that infants are real people,
would be murder, and so that's not an option for Christian consequentialists.
But the question then arises: why does God not just kill us all and
send us to heaven where we can be saved? Or simply create us in heaven
where we are saved? Is God on the side of people not going to heaven?
I believe (following the New Wine System), that when people die, they
sleep in the grave. Eventually Jesus will return and inaugurate the
Millennium, and those in the grave will be resurrected, to complete their
journey toward holiness. Those who have not heard the gospel (pre-Columbian
American Indians, pre-contact Aborigines, ancient Chinese, many modern
people, etc.) will hear it. When the Millennium is over, those who fully
side with God will go to heaven, who have completed their journey, and
those who do not, who have not, will go to an annihilationist hell. The
Millennium is primarily a time of education in holiness. Whether people
fully love God or not is the one big question of reality, a question which
God can't answer just by making people be the way he wants them to be
(sending them straight to heaven without letting them risk hell). To
have the opportunity to love because you want to means that
the love comes from you and no one else, your consciousness and thus
your choice is the origin of it, and thus the risk of choosing to
reject God.
Given this belief, I think what is most critical is to help people end up
in heaven, to cause them to make the most progress toward love of God, and
away from hatred of God, and the least progress toward terminal love of
idols. So now, what are the purposes of life on earth, and of the Millennium?
The Millennium is a time where Jesus is king and spiritually mature people
rule -- an actually good theocracy. (Earthly theocracies may try to make
Jesus king, officially say they do, but fail to, and may set supposedly
but not really spiritually mature people over others, but these will not
be the case in the Millennium.) One would think that it would be the ideal
environment for people to come to love God. But if so, then shouldn't we
wonder if abortions are the best thing, so that babies end up in the
Millennium without being messed up by earth life?
Life on earth is perhaps better for people spiritually, on average, than
the Millennium. This makes sense if we see the value of disestablishedness.
Disestablishedness can be a good teacher, teaching us to trust God more
deeply. All the awful things about life on earth can be spiritually
beneficial, and if we added up all the benefit, we might see that living
this life is overall better for humans than not to, at least for the duration
of a normal human lifespan. The quantity of spiritual maturing per person
per year, on average, might be higher, and to the extent that turning to
God can prevent loving idols or hating God (presumably the sooner the
better, if this turning to God is sound and not fake), a faster pace of
spiritual maturing might have better outcomes in the end, in terms of
people saved as opposed to lost.
But the spiritual benefits of this life are unevenly distributed. This
life is inherently chaotic, random, or even systemically unfair. Some
people respond poorly to suffering, in that it doesn't turn them toward
God. Some people, because of the way things are set up, live lives of
ease, never getting the opportunity to cry out to God. Some people
never hear the gospel (although they do still have relationships with
God, perhaps without realizing it, and may get most or all of the
spiritual benefits of this life apart from those that come from
explicitly trusting in the name of Jesus). All these unfairnesses are
addressed by the Millennium, which can make up for the blatant
gaps in the effectiveness of this life as a spiritual regime.
This life (at its best) is a good but rough childhood, while the
Millennium is a time of relative rest, learning, and healing.
There are lessons better learned in a rough time of life than
in a supportive one (personal responsibility and trust, especially
trust of God).
It may be possible some day to bring about a government on earth
that approaches the "millenniality" of the Millennium. There
would be no advantage to children growing up in the Millennium
instead of under that government -- at most, they could be equally
beneficial. And so, there will never be a clear spiritual reason
to abort babies (under New Wine assumptions, as given here). But
this requires us to value the disestablishedness of this life, and
consider it a spiritual asset, so that we don't automatically think
that simply sending children to heaven (or the Millennium) is
better.
--
So one might think that the best government on earth is the most
disestablished one we can stand. However, one of the natural consequences
of people behaving the way God wants them to (part of spiritual
maturity, something that over time follows from genuinely loving God),
is for people to behave in establishing ways. So there's a kind of
double-bind: in order to become saved, disestablishedness is
best, but in order to have been saved, establishedness is
best, or a natural corollary. We can deliberately be disestablishing
in ways that are not sinful (I imagine this is part of the Millennium,
of millenniality), but overall we will still be more established
than the least-established possible state of affairs in life on earth,
which might on average be more effective in developing the sides
of spiritual maturity that this life is uniquely good at developing.
As I was getting closer to finishing work on this post, I read a little
bit of the book on climate change that came in the mail, which I intend
to focus on when this post is done (the book is All Hell Breaking Loose,
by Michael Klare). I am reading the book as research for my book on
the cross, but found the following part relevant to this post:
Klare p. 12 "A world of multiple failed states, vast
'ungoverned spaces,' and recurring mass migrations would pose mammoth
challenges for the United States, no matter how hard we try to avert our eyes
from the chaos."
When we are disestablished, we face the problems other people face.
(A "fraternity of disestablishedness".) We find it more natural to
pursue the cross (risk ourselves for the benefit of others) if we
are disestablished in such a way to feel like we are part of the
disestablished world.
Editing of this post has continued until 14 September, the day of
the California gubernatorial recall election. The results are not
in and I feel a kind of uncertainty. Celibate people are not necessarily
asexual, and those who choose to be apolitical may still have political
desires. I didn't vote, but will the election turn out the way my
instincts seem to think I wanted it to? It may be hard to tell any
sexual desire from lust, from its phenomenology, although there
may be legitimate sexual desires. Similarly, a political desire may feel
the same whether it is (spiritually) legitimate or not. An illegitimate
political desire is something like sexual lust.
The thirst for (political and personal) establishedness can be a
kind of lust. Perhaps the desire for establishedness is a necessary
thing, just as sexual desire seems to be needed to keep humanity
going. But it is like the bearing of the Ring in Lord of the
Rings, both necessary and dangerous.
--
Now they have announced the results of the election. I feel free
of the question, whether it turned out the way I wanted to or not, and
in fact, my yearning uncertainty dissipated before I heard them.
Spirits come in and out of my experience
body, something I have to learn to take into account.
Jesus left his establishedness, came to be disestablished on earth,
and then was disestablished to the point of death on the cross. It was
his willingness to be disestablished which made him able to refound
reality on a better footing, a better establishedness.
What is the relationship between the concept of establishedness from
this post, and the concept of the cross (from the book I'm writing)?
This is a question that I find important, and once I explain my
concept of the cross, you may find it important as well. I'm not
sure exactly what I will end up thinking the cross is, but a working
definition is: "self-risking, of death and of undergoing experiences
that from a human perspective seem as bad as or worse than death, which
may be forced on a person by life, and which therefore requires a
difficult 'leaving of security'; a self-risking which is pursued for
the sake of altruism (secular or theistic); both the deliberate or
semi-deliberate pursuit of that kind of self-risking altruism and
the undergoing of the consequences of pursuing that risk".
Extreme disestablishedness leads to death (if your body is completely
disestablished, you die, and to the extent that humans don't need
bodies, if your personality is completely disestablished, you don't
exist anymore). What does extreme establishedness lead to?
Establishedness without any disestablishedness does not trust, and
thus is impersonal. It is a spiritual death. So both of these
extremes are dangers. Pursuing the cross is perhaps a way to guard
against overvaluing establishedness. Undergoing the cross brings
disestablishedness. Pursuing the cross (if you are a theist) is
an act of trust in God (and if you are not can still be an act of
trust). Undergoing the cross gives a person (perhaps numerous)
opportunities to trust God.
Altruism (generally) seeks to establish. True altruism would seek
to establish true well-being (whatever that turns out to be). There
is good and bad establishment, good and bad well-being. The cross
is a way to be altruistic. It goes through a path of disestablishedness,
in order to establish true well-being. The cross (as Jesus experienced
it, at least), is a path to shame, to losing. Undergoing the cross
often involves confrontation with the spiritual reality of being put
to shame, and losing. The cross is part of being a disciple of Jesus.
To be a Christian, we must seek to undergo shame and losing. But
the way to do this is through the cross. If being like Jesus is an
essential part of legitimacy (which I think it may be), then we need
to have his values. If we value undergoing shame and losing, then
we value a kind of disestablishedness. We no longer see victory in
the ordinary human way. Our personalities ought to be forever marked by
pursuing and undergoing the cross. We should become like Jesus.
Jesus
(in the end) might be imaged as a weird, frightening power, or as a
lamb with its throat cut (the same person because the power comes from
the authority of having been the kind of person to willingly undergo the
cross). Or he could be imaged as a friend, visiting friends, with
wounds in his side and hands. We have to be willing to pay and we should
be marked, like Jesus. The cross is a basic feature of any legitimacy
(we must always be willing to risk our own death and the experiences that
are worse than death for what is the best, whatever the best may turn out
to be, in order to value it as the best, as first with us -- the best, by
definition, deserves it). To trust is to say "this is worth undergoing",
to value with "skin in the game." So now our concept of legitimacy (of
establishedness on the deepest level), involves us trusting and thus in
a sense valuing defeat and disestablishedness (on a shallower level).
--
Objection: in Hebrews 12:2, Jesus "despises the shame" of the cross.
So how could he value it? The valuing we do with trusting is different
than the valuing we do when we have opinions about things. (We trust
"with our bodies" and have opinions / despise "with our eyes".) (Or
in some other way, Jesus disvalued it on one level while valuing it
on another.) That's the brief "philosophical" answer. Would Jesus
really have been prone to shame? Overall he seems like someone
who was past that area of life. On the other hand, I wouldn't expect
the Jesus of most of the Gospels to have struggled so much in
Gethsemane. Maybe Jesus did feel shame on the cross, even though
he "despised it" (thought little of it?) sufficient to launch himself
toward Gethsemane. The really critical moment in Jesus' life is
Gethsemane -- if you want to call him Victor, that's where he won,
but the way that he won was through abjection, and it would be
fitting if the completion of the victory, his death, would go
through the way of abjection, both that of his cry of godforsakenness
(as a real cry of psychological godforsakenness) and of shame (out of
a real sense of defeat, of being shown to be a failure, of being
held up physically naked in front of everyone).
--
7 September 2023: When I re-read this while reviewing the blog, I
found the idea that we "must seek to undergo shame and losing" interesting
and unfamiliar. The cross makes a lot of sense if it is pursued because
it's the only way to do something necessary -- so the point is to accomplish
something, and the undergoing of it is a side effect. Undergoing the
cross is costly, could prevent the doing of good. But I think if I
want to defend the idea that we must seek to undergo shame and losing,
I would say it is to understand Jesus and what he went through. The
disciple eventually, to a large extent, becomes the teacher, by going
through the way of the teacher.
Maybe we can understand him without going through what he went through?
If not, or for those who do need to experience something essentially like
Jesus' Gethsemane and crucifixion (facing a decision worse than death, and
death or the suffering that is worse than death, being willing to die,
facing pain, shame, and loss), whatever lack of testing there is in this
life in that area can be made up for in the Millennium.
(Sidebar: Establishment Christianity: the more established Christianity
is, the easier it is to be a Christian, and the less likely it is for
people's discipleship to resemble that which Jesus described (less likely
to be hated for it, to have broken relationships because of it, to in
any sense be on the path to execution (carry your cross) because of it).
The less Christians understand what it was like to be Jesus, and the
cheaper and easier it is to bear the name of Christian.)
The establishedness of the scholarly consensus on the Bible. If they
are wrong, who can contradict them? We go down with them, like Israel
going down with their kings. It might be that most or even all of their
positions are correct, but if their establishedness keeps us from loving
God with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, if they produce
a sense of "the experts have these things figured out, I don't have to
engage, myself -- in fact, I'm not qualified, so I should stop trying
to understand" or if people start taking Christianity for granted because
it's been so right for so long (no longer understand what it's like
to be Jeremiah or Elijah, nor mourn the fact that we no longer understand
that, having valorized establishedness so much with our wealth of
Bible knowledge), then perhaps for all that we know, we have undermined
the thing that really matters.
As I've been focusing on writing this post, I have somewhat neglected
the project which I had been working on before, which is a book about
the cross, pursuing it and undergoing it. Once you have gone through
the cross, everything is made new, a typically "New Testament" idea.
Perhaps it is more Christian to be "crucial" and to be made new, than
it is to mourn the past and see the mixedness of things. Perhaps
the latter is a more "Jewish" or "Old Testament" view. The energy (the
vibe, motion, quality of the psychological power) of cross-based
thinking is on the surface incompatible with that of looking back on
mixedness, and remembering loss.
I find it possible to make space in myself for both the Old
Testament and the New. The New Testament does not erase the Old Testament,
but adds to it. It provides an additional context but does not take back
the old words, or somehow make it so that God did not feel the way he
did or be the way he was in Old Testament times. (Similarly the Old Testament
is contextualized by the New.) Likewise Scripture does
not take away from reason, but adds to it. Reason is seeing from our
own points of view, and thus is linked to empathy. We can empathize with
God as he sees the mixedness and loss from human history.
One writer who may have been attempting to reconcile the two (Old and
New) is Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is a story of the cross which
has a bittersweet ending. When I read the trilogy first, I was in elementary
school. I don't remember why I liked it, other than the writing style, but I
did like it. I know I didn't pick up on some
of the themes of bittersweetness and loss which Tolkien intended (and I
would doubt that most of the readers in the various waves of Tolkien fandom
did).
Maybe the relatively triumphant resurrection and ascension ending in
the original cross story are more joyous and clear than the ending of
LOTR. But perhaps Tolkien was being more true to reality by adding
to the history of the Biblical period the history of the Church afterward.
(The triumph we might read into the cross is provisional and in a sense
premature.) Maybe we should look at the ascension as not really being
the end of Jesus' cross, but his transition to a new cross, the ongoing cross.
It seems that whatever we do to each other, we do to him. The Church's
history, as viewed by us as we are still in it and are trying to win
through it, might be different than what we would see if we were
in captivity like the Jews, no longer able to try to fix anything,
just remembering what went wrong. In heaven, on the important metric
of "can we help bring any more people to salvation?", there is no more
winning, only having won what was already won, and having lost what has
been lost.
I could make a simplistic history
of the Church that resembles that of Israel: start out disestablished,
obtain establishment, become corrupt, disaffect itself, split, civil
war, lose its establishment, go into (secular) captivity (which we forget
is even captivity -- a psychological captivity of blindness),
suffer the spiritual consequences. There is a lot of mixedness in the
history of the Church. Sometimes we see it (or simply the downside,
unambivalently) when we consider humanistic concerns, like Church
support of slavery. But there is more to see if we look through deeply
theistic lenses. We can try to blame and fix (two sides of the same
coin), but someday we may have to just see reality as it is and has
been, and not how it should be according to our desires. We will see
its irrevocable losses. This is one of the lenses which God, as a
truthful being, must see through, I think.
There can be a sense that "having the answer isn't the answer". Answer-having
in itself, apart from whatever the answer is, is not firmly trustworthy.
This may explain why some people choose progressive or postmodern-leaning
Christianity over more orthodox Christianity. I agree that orthodox
Christianity in itself (the repository of correct doctrines and practices),
if taken apart from the specific doctrines and practices themselves (which
may really be good), is a deficient and untrustworthy thing. But I think
that refusing to have an answer is itself having the answer to some kind
of question, and is equally deficient and untrustworthy. Both sides can
rightly object to each other, because they are both lacking.
I think just realizing that we are all lacking in all we do, that everything
we pursue is lacking, that all of our answers (even anti-answer answers) are
deficient, partially describes a third option, other than orthodox and
progressive. I think orthodox doctrines are usually right (or, I think
what people think of as orthodox doctrines usually really are, although
I should give the caveat that I haven't thoroughly explored this question
for myself). But no matter how right we are to hold them, we, and our
Christianity, are deficient. Similarly, to not sin is worth doing, and
if our practices as Christians successfully turn us away from sin, that's
good. But our Christianity is still deficient.
In the midst of all this deficiency, one would hope that at least God could
be not-deficient. It's true that God isn't deficient, but our images of
God probably are, and if we properly understand God we understand
non-deficiency in a different way. God is not "All-Powerful" even if
ultimately he could choose to end the universe at any moment (as I believe
he has the power to do). Power doesn't make God non-deficient. What makes
God God is his reality -- his disposition to undergo everything. I think
both progressives and conservatives have in the back of their heads that
God exists to keep us children, to take care of things for us. We don't
want to undergo everything, so God does it for us, but because we don't
trust that undergoing by being willing to go through it ourselves, and
better, to go through it, we have no personal understanding of what God
does. And so we think that God exists to serve us, either in a blatantly
humanistic way, as with the progressives, or as with the conservatives (to
the extent that they too are not blatantly humanistic), to enforce
establishedness and rule over us, which is also humanistic to the
extent that it satisfies our desire for order and answers. It serves that
purpose of ours. It's one kind of humanism or the other, and the two
humanists fight it out because it's personal -- it's what they
want. We don't realize that true theism is possible -- God can be harmed
and can exist for himself, not just as the means to our own benefit. If
reality is by definition what is most established (it is what it is, after
all, and no one can argue with it), then what is more real than God? But
the tonality of God is entirely different than that of the establishedness
we tend to prefer. God is the kind of being to get beaten up by the side
of the road.
I think that what is deficient in us is a lack of love. I hesitate
to use the word "love" because it's loaded. Whatever version of love
people are already into is pretty psychologically compelling, so if
we're wrong, it's hard for us to change, and it's likely to subtly
mislead us. But perhaps "love" can be defined (looking to what we
can do about the way things are) as "the cross" and (looking to the
way things are and have been, in themselves) as something like
"mournful history". These are the ways in which we truly value what
is and what was.
What's important is that individuals have the good disestablishedness
(good in itself, or instrumentally good) they need to become close to
God. A society can be established, overall. But it still has to
permit some disestablishedness.
A church can be a safe place in a chaotic environment (I imagine that
is how it can be in the Northern Triangle, or how it was in the early
Middle Ages in the former Western Roman Empire). But if there is ever
a shortage of disestablishedness in the world, perhaps the church can
be a less-established place than the world, a refuge from safety,
convenience, and so on. Practically speaking, this might mean that
church leaders concern themselves less with protecting their congregants,
less with promoting order and decorum, less with providing (even spiritual)
wealth, letting people fend for themselves spiritually and hurt each other.
However, to continue to "feed Jesus' sheep", as Peter was commanded, they
would still provide some kind of strengthening or
anti-temptation.
Is it possible for the church to be "Solomonic"? To establish God's house
but love wealth, and friendship with society which is against God or
orthogonal to God, and from that turn against God? It seems likely.
Solomon's 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14) may have something to do with
the number 666 in Revelation. Through Solomon, we see that the church can
be like Babylon.
Some churches are more established than others (more at risk). All
Christians in wealthy nations are at risk of being filled up with wealth
and having no room for God, or little room.
Solomon was wealthy in wisdom, and the church is at risk of becoming
wealthy in wisdom. Even possessing beliefs that are 100% true, or the
best truths, or the set of best available truths, can be dangerous
(they can mislead despite being correct
in themselves).
(When I made this section, I thought there would end up being more
than one conclusion-like passage in my notes, but there was only one.)
It's possible to trust in a completely established way (to be receptive
to enhancement that you don't need because you're completely established,
to be receptive to blessing). ["Receptivity to enhancement" is Joseph
Godfrey's definition of trust from Trust of People, Words, and God.]
But there is a kind of trust which requires the trusting person to be
disestablished, and this is the deeper trust. Is trust of God a
self-destroying tendency? So that as we trust God more and more, we become
more and more established (our problems get solved), and so we become less
capable of trusting deeply?
[I now think that receptivity itself inherently is or requires a
disestablishedness, so I don't endorse the first sentence of the last
paragraph. But there's still a difference between a minimally receptive,
maximally established trusting being and one who is more receptive and
less established.]
It is conceivable that as we trust God, we become established in some ways,
but in others become more and more disestablished, so that we trust more
and more deeply. We are established because we are continually being
established by the legitimacy of God, but the establishedness runs out
of us rapidly enough that we need to be continually filled.
This sounds sort of like bhakti, like a Hindu approach to spirituality.
(Or perhaps a Muslim one.) Is it sufficiently Christian? Could it
be compatible with Christianity? Jesus promises a woman at a well that
he can give her living water (John 4):
1 Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was
making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself
didn't baptize, but his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed into
Galilee. 4 He needed to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a city of
Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son
Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being tired from his
journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a
drink." 8 For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9 The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, "How is it that you, being
a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" (For Jews have no
dealings with Samaritans.)
10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who
says to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have
given you living water."
11 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the
well is deep. So where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than
our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his
children and his livestock?"
13 Jesus answered her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst
again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never
thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well
of water springing up to eternal life."
15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I don't get
thirsty, neither come all the way here to draw."
16 Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come here."
17 The woman answered, "I have no husband."
Jesus said to her, "You said well, 'I have no husband,' 18 for you have
had five husbands; and he whom you now have is not your husband. This you
have said truly."
She thirsted (she desired people enough to have five husbands), but didn't
need to thirst anymore. Yet, if she had a well of water springing up in
her, where would all that water go? One possibility is that she would
always be broken (or, put less negatively, be porous) and thus she would
permanently need the water, and her porosity would be a permanent
disestablishedness. Another possibility is that she would be completely
whole and established, and the water would overflow out of her, so that
God would no longer be a deep need for her, but rather a blessing,
something extra.
If the latter, then there is something lost, that Hindu- or Muslim-tinged
dimension of human feeling, of love (and, in Biblical terms, the Psalmists
loved God in a similar way that can only be experienced firsthand
from a place of disestablishedness). If the former, then there is
disestablishedness in God's rest, somewhere in it.
It is true that there is a kind of thirst that is evil and leads to sin
(a lot of thirst is that way). But there is a thirst that is good and
leads to love of God. Either somehow what Jesus says here is not
incompatible with that, or this is something good that is lost in heaven.
There are other passages that talk of living water. Jeremiah 2:13:
13 "For my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters,
and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can't hold water.
In this chapter God is angry that Israel seeks establishedness from
spiritual sources that aren't reliable. Also, Jeremiah 17:
7 "Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh,
and whose confidence is in Yahweh.
8 For he will be as a tree planted by the waters,
who spreads out its roots by the river,
and will not fear when heat comes,
but its leaf will be green,
and will not be concerned in the year of drought.
It won't cease from yielding fruit.
followed by
13 Yahweh, the hope of Israel,
all who forsake you will be disappointed.
Those who depart from me will be written in the earth,
because they have forsaken Yahweh,
the spring of living waters.
And in Zechariah 14:
8 It will happen in that day that living waters will go out from
Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea, and half of them
toward the western sea. It will be so in summer and in winter.
9 Yahweh will be King over all the earth. In that day Yahweh will
be one, and his name one.
10 All the land will be made like the Arabah, from Geba to Rimmon
south of Jerusalem; and she will be lifted up and will dwell in her
place, from Benjamin's gate to the place of the first gate, to the
corner gate, and from the tower of Hananel to the king's wine presses.
11 Men will dwell therein, and there will be no more curse; but
Jerusalem will dwell safely.
There is a kind of establishedness which is good, which prevents
the disestablishedness that is bad. The human taste for establishedness
leads us to seek "water" from various sources. We can learn to trust
in (thirst for) good water, or bad, and thus learn to love good, instead
of bad.
I can see how a reader of these verses might think that
the good is solely formed of establishedness, that God only wants us
to be established, only using disestablishedness to teach us to seek
good establishment. To do this kind of post most properly, I should read
the entire Bible, and that's something that appeals to me, but which
I don't have time for right now. So there are verses I'm not considering.
But one important one to remember is this (Matthew 22):
36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?"
37 Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first
and great commandment.
Suppose you were trying to obey this. Maybe you were an Indian Christian,
and sought to make an album of worship music. The music you made
(perhaps sounding something like
this) owes
some debt to Hindu and Muslim culture, the cultural climate of India.
You yourself feel devotion in a way which is somewhat "bhakti-like".
So you produce lyrics which have a yearning in them, and a kind of
mysterious darkness to them, the darkness of love for Jesus. Your
heart, as it is, loves God in this way. There is nothing (obviously)
sinful about this love, but at the same time, there is something
disestablished about it.
Another scenario. You are a Christian raised in, and regularly attending,
an orthodox Western church. Your life is flat and solid, and you have no deep
understanding of the scriptures. You can't understand what the psalmists
are talking about. You have never been forgiven much, and you do not
love much. You have never undergone the cross, nor have you walked
in the wilderness. You know the doctrines of the Bible with great
accuracy, but you don't understand what they mean on an emotional level.
Are you loving God with all of your heart? Maybe that is the case,
and your heart really is that narrow. But it could be the case that
you are not. Perhaps even if it is narrow, you ought to expand your
heart. The difference between expanding a narrow heart (by, for instance,
sewing on a new chamber) and simply causing a heart to expand to its
true size (by stretching it out) may not matter much. Loving God with
all of your strength may mean that you must expand your heart deliberately.
With all that in mind, perhaps with great discipline (and little emotion),
you set out to learn to love with your heart and your guts, putting your
life on the line. Having done this, you learn new dimensions of love
for God and would never want to go back to your "perfect" establishedness
(your initial flatness and solidity of life). Now that you have expanded
your heart, you can't go back without loving God with less than your
full heart. Disestablishedness is part of your love. You were brought
out of the captivity, the broken cistern, of dead establishedness, and
are now drinking water like a tree, up through your roots and out through
your leaves. Establishedness on one dimension can be a broken cistern
on another, while disestablishedness on one dimension can be a flow of
water through yourself on another, and thus, establishedness. Establishedness
for a living being (or an ecosystem) is different than establishedness
for a mathematical fact or a stone monument.
It is possible that some of the ways of loving we have known are
somehow not what God wants, and he only wants pure establishedness in
the end, without any disestablishedness. If I were only thinking about
God on the basis of reason (through answering the question "what do
I think God / love is like?" or through a more disciplined natural
theology), I would see no reason to think that disestablishedness can't
be a part of Legitimacy, that the greatest forms of trust (and therefore
of love) require disestablishedness of some sort, and that whatever
loving-disestablishedness which comes only with enduring unbearable
suffering (suffering which must someday cease, because God finds it unbearable as well)
is a regrettable loss, a (necessary) amputation of love.
But I can see that the Bible, if read from an ordinary human lens,
may seem to imply otherwise. I think that the best meeting place
between my reason-based theology and the Bible is Jeremiah's image
of the tree planted by the stream. I could see in that image an opening
for a tree that might be deeply and powerfully thirsty, and which would
drink from the stream with a great drawing of water, but the water
would be continually transpiring from the leaves of the tree (and in
fact, with trees, it is the transpiring which draws the water). As
a tree's thirst connects it with the stream, so our thirst connects
us with God. If we only drink from God, we will not be thirsty
for the bad alternatives (lies, "five husbands", "kings").
The way this is written may seem like I could be saying that people
ought to have a particularly large number of leaves and live in a
particularly hot climate so that they can drink much and transpire
much. I think sheer quantity of trusting is neither good nor bad.
Real love is better than merely big love. So it may be just as well
to have fewer leaves and live in a cooler climate. But for some
people, real love may require big love, and the passion of that
love may require thirst and the feelings we might associate with
some Muslim, Hindu, and Ancient Jewish cultures, and not so much
with modernized Greco-Roman and New Testament cultures (nor perhaps
some Buddhist cultures).
I'm hitting the limits of what I can (more or less) responsibly
write right now about trust, given how much I've thought about it,
but I think something like the depth of trusting matters more than
the quantity. Perhaps it is like certain quantities of trusting
at certain times open up parts of our persons, and those persons (we)
are more trusting because of it, even if the "throughput" of water
has gone down. I think that mourning (both involuntary, sometimes, and
more-voluntary) and the cross (both involuntary, sometimes, and
more-voluntary) open up levels of trusting that enable us to empathize
and be kin with God, in the realness of his love. God himself, even
in heaven, his rest, will be disestablished to the extent that some
of his children are not there. In order to trust God's
disestablishedness (to personally find it valuable, to voluntarily
be conscious of it) we must participate in it.
Is it possible to love someone if you take them for granted? Can you
listen to someone if you have no sense of hanging on what they are
about to say? I think the answer to both questions is "no". Both
require a kind of disestablishedness on the part of the lover. But
perhaps there's kind of a LeGuinian
ordinariness to the not-taking-for-granted and the hanging-on-the-answer
of people who love and listen, which is not a thirst, but which is
still a disestablishedness.
So either because love, when brought to its fullness, requires a trust
which itself requires a certain disestablishedness, or because to
be kin with God means that we share in his disestablishedness and loss,
maximal establishedness in some way contains a kind of disestablishedness.
There are disestablishednesses which deserve to exist forever, and thus
which are legitimate and part of Legitimacy.
--
[Here is a (hopefully complete) list of "living water" references.
Most of them do not affect what I've said above, but here are two
that might: Revelation 7:15-17 says that God will "wipe away every tear from
their eyes." This does not necessarily rule out a quieter mourning, or a
joy that is tempered such that it is consistent with the fact that some
people did not make it into heaven. It also says that "they will hunger /
thirst no more". That may refer to natural hungers (for food or people),
and not to a hunger for God. Being "sheltered with his presence" (vs. 15)
may be a relationship of dependency, and to be truly dependent is at least
objectively if not necessarily subjectively to be disestablished.
John 7:37-39 says that the living water Jesus talks about is the Spirit.
Does the Spirit take away our hunger for God? Hunger is a
disestablishedness.]
--
[I mentioned that the Psalms show a love of God that is found in
disestablishedness, but a sampling of them makes me suspect that
when they do, they do as part of the brokenness of life (Psalm 42's
"as the deer pants for water" is followed by what sounds like a
psalmist going through something dark). Therefore it's something
that may have to pass away in heaven. This would be a loss.
But I think another way to anchor a belief in a good thirst in
the Bible, which may be applicable to heaven, is to consider the
conjunction of Song of Solomon and Revelation. Song of Solomon
says that the flashes of love are the flame of the LORD (8:6).
So some element of eroticism connects to God. I believe (from
natural theology) that God experiences what we do, in some
sense interpreting it as we do (like how a word means basically
the same thing to two people, although they hear different
connotations in it). Eroticism means something similar to God
as it does to us. This isn't to say that God sexually desires
(maybe you have to have a body of your own, one which in a sense
rules over you like ours rule over us to be sexual), but eroticism
is broader than that. I think it includes a kind of perpetual
thirst.
Revelation strikes me as being similar to Song of Solomon.
Both have the mixture of beautiful dream and nightmare, and both
are about becoming something new, and about the psychological
upheaval and overwhelmingness of that process. Revelation
talks about the Bride, and Song of Solomon talks about a bride.
I agree with people that Song of Solomon is about regular
sexuality, but if the church is called a Bride in
Revelation, it seems natural to connect eroticism to the church's
relationship with Christ. Calling the church (a group of people)
a woman, shows that there is some distance between "Bride" and
church, that "Bride" is somewhat of a metaphor. But we don't
know how much it is a metaphor, and so, I think, we may assume
similarity unless we have a reason to doubt it. A group of
people (as in Judges 10) could have a kind of intimacy (a political
intimacy) with God (in that case the intimacy of children with
father), and so, I would guess, a political intimacy could involve
some kind of eroticism, or something like eroticism. I don't know
if this is a watertight proof that a "good thirst that never goes
away" is projected to be part of heaven by the Bible, but it might
be, and if it's not, then something is lost.]
Perhaps that should have been the conclusion of this post, or something
with a similar feeling. But the post that actually exists still has
some ground to cover.
--
I found as I read this post through for the first time, mostly finished,
that I liked my own writing better than the parts where I engaged with
the Bible. Perhaps that is because I quoted the Bible at length, in order
to give context, but somehow it is more enjoyable to read the Bible
all by itself and not quoted in a blog post. That is what I found.
Another reason might be that the Bible is a pit of disputes, whereas
my writing has every right to be what it is (my writing). I wonder if I
love philosophy about God more than I do adhering to the Bible.
That is, if I take up the banner of "sola scriptura", then I have to
go where the Bible leads me, into disputes where my opposing interlocutors
(implacable animated beings empowered by my imagination) have all the
weight of tradition and the cognitively heavy data of scholarship. How
can I, by myself, dare to say that the Bible says something untraditional?
I feel that's what I'm doing.
But if I do not take up the banner of "sola scriptura", then my reason
can inform which reasonably-valid interpretation of the Bible I favor.
And then my unhappiness dissipates. It is not hard to see ambiguity,
mixedness, brokenness, the cross, and mourning woven into the Bible,
as I've seen in the readings I did for this post.
I hope that my vision overall can be pieced together from the things
I wrote above. I have talked about different dimensions of establishedness
and disestablishedness, and how they relate to the Bible and to secular
and church life.
--
Strong government has the downside of giving people too much
establishedness, including bad establishedness, but the upside of
preventing horrors. Weaker government has the downside of permitting
horrors, but the upside of breaking bad establishedness.
If you want to help people connect with God, naively instituting
either weaker or stronger government may not work. (People may
not turn to God in distress, for instance.) Political interventions
by themselves can be largely orthogonal to spiritual change. But
in theory, since everything interrelates, any political establishment
or change in establishment, or any disestablishment, should have
some kind of spiritual effect. And if you know what you're doing, you may
be able to make better educated guesses about the spiritual effects
of political interventions. You may also make better educated
guesses about what kinds of spiritual interventions to make (for
instance, ways to prepare people so that when disestablishedness
comes, they are likely to turn to God.)
Our attitudes about "unlackingness" (what being "desires")
and our view of God are related. Humanism (seemingly both secular
and Christian) is into wealth and nice living (establishedness),
but God is into love. God is not a projection of "the wealthiest,
most established being". Wealth can be part of love, but in order
to be subordinate to love, we must remember the poor and awful
side of love (disestablished), the cross and mourning. Disestablishedness
can transform stale wealth and nice living (the default of humanism)
through trust (trust requires or is disestablishedness). Trust is
psychological life. Promoting the love of love (the cross, mourning,
of God in all his complex history) and the maximization of trust, and
in addition any effective
anti-temptations we can devise,
seem to me to be good starting educated guesses as a program for
changing how people relate to reality, so that whatever happens in the
political world will translate into spiritual gain.
I remember one
of my professors, Carlos Puente, telling me that if you take random
data (he might have been dealing with rainfall) and project it through
some function, the output, no matter what the input, is a bell curve
(his book The Fig Tree and the Bell may be
talking about this in the Lessons from Fractal Wires chapter).
Similarly, if we have the right function, the meaninglessness of life,
the random, deterministic impersonal inputs (including political chaos)
that are easy to relate to as such, can affect the meaningful spiritual
life. (They can become material for relating to God.) Both God's and
even Satan's messages, if heeded, can generally
turn out to further God's interests given the right "transforming
function".
So I would say that, spiritually speaking, whether the government is
established or not doesn't matter as much as how well people are prepared
to convert whatever political reality they find themselves in into a
seeking of God. Both establishedness and disestablishedness are mixed,
and under the right circumstances, disestablishedness can be more to our
benefit than establishedness (so it seemed in the days of Judges).
If we need to hear a message but don't want to listen to it, what better
way than to be in pain (blunt as that instrument is)? But better that
we want to hear the right messages, so that pain is not necessary.
To desire to hear is to be disestablished, in a trusting way.
Ideally, humans would need no government because humans would not
sin. Or, the government would exist but in no way be coercive, but
simply be an advisory body that researched recommended ways to live.
Libertarians and anarchists may dream of such a day. The way to get
there (not that it's likely we can on earth at a large scale) is
through internalizing the Law of God, along with all the best
epilaw or episcripture. By
internalizing God's Law, we become more fully kin to God, and this
enables a simpler and fuller intimacy with him, as between a father
and a congruent adult child.
There are dimensions of love which can only be expressed when things
go wrong. Perhaps there are levels of understanding of God that can
only be accessed if we suffer. While God's rest is the inevitable and
necessary conclusion of existence, and is the most legitimate possible
state of affairs, even it has something missing, the expression and
development of this most profound side of love. True well-being is
not just the enjoyment of wealth (of even the right kind), but being
the kind of person who loves most and most truly. Disestablishedness
enables us to connect to this, in ways that establishedness usually
does not.
Therefore, it is not clear to me that establishedness is better
than disestablishedness (nor that disestablishedness is always better
than establishedness). A case can be made for why "judges" are
better than "kings" (and for why "US government" is better than
"Northern Triangle government"). There is establishedness which
really is bad, and disestablishedness that is bad, and establishedness
that is good, and disestablishedness that is good, and examples of
both that are ambiguous, ambivalent, or inscrutable. There may
be times where we more or less know to change a bad situation into
a good, on a political level. But what matters most is what
people make of their situation spiritually, and that which helps
them make more of whatever they have, on that level.
Culture evolves slowly and the future is coming on fast. Hedonism
and preference satisfaction (seeking psychological wealth) are
ingrained in our culture. I am concerned that by default, they will
become the tonality of psychological establishedness in the future.
Establishedness and wealth have a natural affinity, while
disestablishedness and wealthless love have a natural affinity.
It seems wise to me to intentionally emphasize the elements of love
which are likely to be lost if humans get what they want. This good
disestablishedness is something which we should cultivate in ourselves,
and value for ourselves. In this way, we may have a chance to
keep the future from becoming spiritually stunted.
To an extent,
failure to grow spiritually, as soon as possible, is spiritually
dangerous. Perhaps there are levels of deep (and therefore dark)
turning to God which are not required of everyone, but perhaps it
is better to experience some kind of darkness (enabled by
a political or social system which is not maximally established)
now and reap the spiritual benefits for many years to come, avoiding
the spiritual risks of never learning to trust.
Judges
1:1-2 The people of Israel inquire of God what to do and God gives
a specific command.
1:19 God was with Judah.
1:21 The Benjamites didn't do what they were told (and God allowed it)
1:27 similarly w/ Manasseh (following verses: similarly with other tribes)
2:1-5 God says to Israel that they have sinned and foretells/ordains that
they will suffer the consequences.
2:11-15 Israel does evil and God punishes them.
2:16-23 (vss. 11-23 a summary of the rest of Judges?) God raises up
judges, is with the judges, things go well until the judges die and
then the people turn away from God.
(11-23 could be the "Judges Pattern" -- JP)
3:7-11 JP
3:10 the Spirit of God was upon Othniel
3:8 Israel serves a foreign king
3:12-30 JP
3:14 Israel serves a foreign king
3:15 Israel cried out to God, and God gave them a deliverer.
4:2 -- sold to a foreign king
4:6 -- God gives a specific command, which is held up by a human's
fear (or some other form of resistance to action)
4:14 -- Deborah says "Does not the LORD go out before you?"
4:15 -- The LORD routes Sisera by the edge of the sword.
4:23 -- "God subdued Jabin"
ch. 5 Deborah/Barak's song (may reflect their views and not 100% God's)
5:2 "That the leaders took the lead in Israel, that the people offered
themselves willingly, bless the LORD"
5:4-5 The LORD goes out and the earth trembles... did this literally
happen? Or is it poetry referring to the literal actions of Israel?
(In other words, God was acting through the army)
5:9 -- another "bless the LORD" maybe more like "praise God!" as an
interjection than "God is responsible"?
6:15 Gideon asks "if God is with us, why are these horrible things
happening to us?" God's response is "Go save Israel", (as though
saying "Well, now I am intervening"?)
6:31 "If he is a god, let him contend for himself, because his
altar has been broken down" -- words that Israel would not want to
hold to too tightly when their own temples were destroyed.
6:34 The Spirit of the LORD clothes Gideon.
Judges
7:2 God intervenes by using Israel, prefers to do so by having them
be undermanned so that they understand it was by his power and
planning that they won.
Judges: when God doesn't intervene, he doesn't. When he
intervenes, he does.
8:1 Ephraim is mad that they weren't called to fight. (The established
norm of war?) If they had, that might have diluted God's story. The
"logical", "right", "best practices" way of doing things is a powerful
norm but is not necessarily in favor of trusting in, loving God -- It
takes social courage to resist establishment / establishedness.
8:23 Gideon refuses kingship
8:33-35 After Gideon's death, the people whore themselves after the
Baals and forget Gideon's family.
9 Abimelech overturns his father's intention not to start a dynasty
and kills most of his brothers to establish himself.
9:23 God sends an evil spirit between Abimelech and the leaders of
Shechem, so that they fought each other.
Did they realize that they were being moved by God? Presumably not,
or else they would have trusted the spirit less ("Oh, that's not my
idea, maybe I shouldn't act on it.")
9:6 Abimelech is made king
9:22 he reigns 3 years
10:1-2 Tola judges 23 years -- he is not a king. He "judges" and
does not "rule" (Abimelech "ruled") (Is this word choice significant?)
"there arose" him rather than people explicitly making him king
(Abimelech, 9:6)
10:10 Israel realizes (as a people) that they have sinned against God
by forsaking him for the Baals.
10:11-16 God is mad at Israel and says he won't save them any more.
Israel says "do whatever you want. Only please deliver us this day."
They put away the foreign Gods and serve the LORD and he becomes
"impatient over the misery of Israel." This is a kind of political
intimacy, the way God relates to the entire people (and they relate
to him, in one intertwined moment) in an emotional way.
11:11 "Jephthah spoke all his words before the LORD at Mizpah."
11:27 "The LORD, the Judge, decide this day between the people of
Israel and the people of Ammon". God is both judge and king. How
do these roles differ?
11:40 daughters of Israel lament Jephthah's daughter for four days
a year. (Do we have analogous emotional responses?)
Judges 12:1-7 Civil war happens on God-as-king's / a judge's watch.
Judges 13:9 - God answers Manoah's prayer
Samson and Gideon were chosen by God (as were Saul and David).
13:19 (Not clear if it says "The LORD, who works wonders", or "the
LORD, and working wonders")
14:4 God is the one who gets Samson to be romantically interested in
Philistine women.
14:6 The Spirit of the LORD gives Samson strength.
14:19 The Spirit of the LORD empowers him to kill people to technically
fulfill the terms of the riddle.
15:18-19 God answers Samson's prayer for water.
ch. 16 God answers Samson's prayer for vengeance.
17:1-6 Dedicating silver to the LORD by making idols out of it.
(Would a king have had a firmer, more consistent state religion
which successfully preached and enforced orthodoxy? In principle,
that sounds more likely than in a disestablished political system.)
18:1 There was no king and Dan hadn't gotten an inheritance.
(arguably a king would have figured that out)
Ch 19 Gibeah is as bad as Sodom so things have gotten pretty bad
without a king. Shocking, brutal evil (such as is fairly common
in the Northern Triangle, according to Martínez).
20:18 God gives Israel direction in how to punish Benjamin.
20:23 Israel weeps (for having to fight their brothers?) and God
says to keep fighting them.
20:26-28 Same pattern
21:15 "The LORD had made a breach in the tribes of Israel"
The people had compassion but it took the form of human trafficking.
End of Judges: no one wins and the consequences of sin are brutal
and unfair. The people have a point when they want a king. God needs
to adjust -- or the people do.
Spiritual significance: because things got so bad on the ground, Israel
is tempted to not trust God.
1 Sam. 1:19 God "remembers" Hannah (opens her womb)
1:5 God had closed Hannah's womb.
2:10 "The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength
to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed."
Was Hannah prophesying Jesus? Or Saul or David? Was she in the
Spirit? (In vs. 1 she "derides" her enemies). Is she expressing a
hope of people in her day that there would be a king?
If she was prophesying a king (like Saul), is it significant that
she did so after the end of Judges, but before when the people ask
for a king in 1 Samuel? As though God was already considering
having a king? If she was prophesying Jesus, was the timing of
the prophecy meant to convey that at that point God was revealing
to whoever was really listening that there would be another king
someday?
1 Sam. 2:25 "They wouldn't listen to the voice of their father,
for it was the will of the LORD to put them to death."
1 Sam. 2:27-36 God may be saying (vs. 35) that there will be a
king to come, "forever" sounds like "before Jesus", so God as
king. But maybe he mentions this because around this time he's
considering giving Israel an earthly king (a David, earthly type
of Christ)? (God intervenes by sending a man of God to Eli.)
Ch. 3 God speaks to Samuel and foretells more action to come.
2:12-17 Under the "Judges" system (direct kingship of God),
there were corrupt priests.
4:7-9 The Israelites try to frighten the Philistines with God
(the ark) but the Philistines take God (the threat) so seriously
that it gives them the courage to defeat the Israelites.
(Lack of establishment -- enduring breakdown times -- can develop
courage as well, leading to better future establishment.)
4:21-22 The ark was part of Israel's establishedness.
5:6 God punishes Ashdod for having the ark.
5:10-11 Ekron responds to the reality of God when they are afflicted.
"There was a deathly panic throughout the whole city" -- a kind of
disestablishedness / political breakdown?
6:13-15 The Israelites rejoice to see the ark coming and offer
sacrifices when it arrives. (Disestablished state of not having the
ark makes them more appreciative? God returning makes appreciative?)
God-with-us returning makes appreciative? God is often "psychological
establishment" to us.)
6:19 God killed people for looking on the ark (perhaps to teach his
people to respect him)
7:2-3 Israel repents after "losing" God.
8:1-3 Samuel makes his sons judges, but they are corrupt.
8:10-16 Samuel's warning against kings is that they take away people's
freedom. Established governments become their own entity (vs. 15 -
the officers get the money) which take people out of their normal lives.
This sort of sounds like a libertarian's case against government.
God may have been the following: concerned about that but more concerned
with then people's desire to be like the nations (vs. 20, vs. 5).
Ch. 8 - part of following God involves people in charge sinning against
you. If you don't want people sinning against you so bad that you
want to change God's planned form of government, then you are rejecting
him. God's path is imperfect even by his own standards (sin is a part
of it).
9:16-17 God saw Saul as someone who was going to save his people from
the Philistines and "restrain" them.
End of judge era, beginning of king era:
10:1 - Saul made king
Ch. 10 - The Spirit of God rushes upon Saul
Saul is established by God.
10:22 Saul hides from being king.
10:24 Samuel points out that Saul is exceptional -- he is both tall
and handsome (9:2) and seemingly unready to serve (perhaps the only
person to hide in the baggage), prone to fear and distrust of God.
The people are pleased with Saul.
12:14 Perhaps the king and the people are bound together (certainly
this seems to be the case subsequently) More so than the people and
their judges?
1 Samuel 13:6-8
A time of disestablishedness (the people terrified of Philistines)
13:9-12
In a time of disestablishedness, the king is tempted to sin against God,
through his fear. Saul claimed he was seeking the favor of God by
sacrificing. But a better way would have been to trust and obey.
13:13
It seems that perhaps Saul was being tested and in theory could have
passed, with the consequence of establishing Saul's kingdom forever.
The disestablishedness enabled the test, which presumably enables
passing the test and the positive consequences from passing (Saul
establishing himself as, showing and making himself, trustworthy,
he being a useful servant of God, worth establishing forever).
Without having disestablishedness, can we have the rest? Maybe,
maybe not? False establishment has to be stress-tested by
disestablishedness to produce true establishment?
14:11-12
Philistines in their establishedness don't take Jonathan and his
armor bearer seriously? Their cockiness is the sign that God
is with the two Israelites in their plan to attack them (vs. 10).
Ch. 14 God intervenes (vs. 15, vs. 23)
14:24 Saul lays the burden of physical hunger (disestablishedness)
on the people.
14:29-30 Jonathan rebels, because the (discipline?) of the vow of
hunger was misapplied.
14:31-32 The disestablishedness of the Israelites tempts them to
sin.
14:45 Saul's illegitimacy as a ruler meant he deserved to be less
established?
14:47-48 Saul, having "taken the kingship" (having been established
as a ruler), was a competent and valiant deliverer of Israel.
1 Samuel ch. 15
Talk of God's "regret" (in ESV) in vss. 11, 29, and 35. If God
really does regret, he isn't always right. A less-established God?
(Than classical theist God, yes). Should we be more, or less,
rebellious against a God who is caught in tragedy like we are?
Reading "regret" as a normal English "regret" here (as the ESV,
a modern, more-literal, more-scholarly translation allows us to)
is disturbing to some conservative readers, who might prefer a
God who is closer to a perfected classical theist God. Why does
our image of God seem to need to be of one who "does not lie or
regret"? (Who definitely does what he says he'll do / what he
sets out to do.) We like establishedness, of an established and
establishing God? We don't like the note of ambivalence (bittersweetness,
loss, tragedy even within victory or the best?) which is implied
by the most established being having any disestablishedness in him,
or of there being some kind of imperfection (in Descartes' sense (in
Meditation 3) of a calling for what one lacks) in establishedness
itself, or in perfection itself / himself.
(Maybe it is our definition of perfection which is flawed, and we should
conform it to the reality of God, rather than conforming our idea
of God to our idea of perfection.)
15:1,10 God speaks
15:24-28 Though Saul remains in office (one kind of establishedness),
his legitimacy is removed, and his establishedness is rendered temporary,
no longer connected to the future. (A less-established establishedness
for not having a future.) Legitimacy is akin to or part of establishedness.
15:9 Saul and the people disobeyed God.
1 Samuel 16:1-3 God gives Samuel a task and tells him how to proceed
safely. God provides a plan (establishedness) to deal with Samuel's
fear and lack of plan (disestablishedness)
16:6-7 Samuel looks to obvious signs of kingliness
(establishment-bringingness?) but God's preference for the person who
will be king (to some extent in God's place) is for the heart of the
one to be anointed to be a certain way.
16:13-14 God gives his Spirit to David, removes it from Saul, and
sends a harmful spriit to Saul.
16:14-23 God sets up (probably) a way for David to be around Saul.
1 Samuel 17
vs. 37 David had a history of being threatened by wild animals and
being delivered from them by God, which gives him the confidence to
oppose the giant who "defies the army of the living God" (vs. 36)
17:38 Saul wants to armor David, but David isn't used to that
(he is suited to disestablishedness rather than to establishedness?)
17:51 When the Philistine's champion died, they fled. (A leader
establishes his/her group of people, embodies their establishment.)
Ch. 18 David rises up, is more established in his career, yet
faces psychological disestablishedness from Saul. (Mixed
experience.)
19:18-24 God sends his spirit on people go go to get David.
1 Samuel chs. 1 - 20
Saul is established but lost his future, tries to hold onto
establishment, won't let go of it easily, tries to kill the one
with future; David is disestablished, gaining in establishment,
has the future. (Israel seems to be working toward its establishment
by fighting the Philistines.)
22:1-2
David becomes leader (establishment?) of those "in distress, in
debt, bitter in soul" (the disestablished?) David seems to be a
natural leader by this point. When God is with you, there is a
natural tendency to bring establishedness? (When a nation is led
well and it loses its "national sins" (e.g., there is rule of law),
then economic prosperity and psychological establishedness follow.)
22:5
A prophet tells David to leave his stronghold, and he goes.
22:23
David offers safekeeping to Abiathar.
Perhaps David is taking on the role of God -- because God is with him,
his establishment is effectively God's establishment for Abiathar.
Can government on earth be one of truly Godly rulers, those who don't
"misestablish" their people? Can a really God-conveying leadership
or government be in exisence at scale? If we had such a government
and it were perfectly established, how would it make up for the
advantages of the disestablishedness it precludes?
23:1-4 God is inquired of (David feels a question (disestablishedness?)?)
and God answers. Perhaps David is the conduit of his followers
disestablishedness. And/or, he asks God on their behalf, perhaps
such that they don't ask.
God calls David's people to go from one frightening (disestablishing?)
scenario to one which looks even worse to them.
23:10-12 Once again, David asks, and God answers.
23:14 It appears that if Saul was going to capture David, God would
have to have given David into Saul's hand.
23:15 David hides from Saul in the wilderness. The wilderness
(disestablishedness on one level) provides refuge from Saul (establishment
that opposes David). Evil establishment legitimates some kind of outside
to it.
23:16 Jonathan "strengthens David's hand in God". Perhaps he helped
David establish himself in God?
23:22-23 Saul seeks sure information (he is disestablished and seeks
establishedness?)
1 Samuel 24:6
David recognized Saul's establishment as God's chosen one.
1 Samuel 24:20
"the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand" The nation
will be established in David's exercise of his will?
25:10 Nabal seems to imply a certain amount of disestablishedness in
Israel
25:21 David feels entitled to just treatment (psychological
establishedness). Unlike with Saul in ch. 24, David wants to act on
his perceived rights and make reality be in accordance with his claim
on it. This is analogous to Nabal's rhetoric in vs. 11, in that there
Nabal was speaking from a place of establishedness.
25:23-31
Abigail saves David from his (established?) wrath by speaking in a
calming way, presenting herself humbly (disestablished?), offering
food as though making up for a wrong (acknowledge the rightness of
David's claim (intellectual establishedness of the proposition
"David and his men deserve food).
25:38 God kills Nabal
26:9-10 The anointed one is not to be killed
26:19 Being (in a sense) politically disestablished (no longer having
a place in the people of God) can cause you to be cut off from God?
This makes sense instrumentally, but maybe David thought he needed a
place in Israel (in the people? in the land?) in order to serve God.
26:20 (Is the presence of God confined to a certain physical place,
which David is not in at the time of the conversation?)
In any case, it's plausible that disestablishment (political, personal)
can cause people to turn away from God.
26:23 David says that God rewards every man for his righteousness
and faithfulness.
If this is literally true, it's so in a general sense, since the
righteous are not rewarded literally every time. Even if they are
rewarded in an afterlife, their experience on earth will be a mixture
of the establishedness of just reward and the disestablishedness of
lack of just reward or of positive injustice.
28:5 Saul is afraid (psychological disestablishedness)
28:6 He inquires of the LORD, but God does not answer at all.
28:7 So he seeks establishment from a medium, going against God's
commands.
28:19 Israel must be defeated so that Saul can be? The people and
the king must go together?
29:6 David is regretfully informed that, despite his good conduct,
he can't be included in the established activity of his adopted(?)
people, going up in battle against God's people (his own). Belonging
can be a bad thing / establishment can turn a small, disestablished
friend of God into an enemy of God.
(Perhaps God would have been understanding in this case, but it is
still unfortunate when God's people fight against each other.)
30:6 David "strengthened himself in the LORD his God" David was
able to strengthen himself in the LORD because the LORD was his
God? David held him to be God? And God found David trustworthy
because of that? Contrast with Saul in 28:5-7
30:7-8 David inquires of God answers.
30:16 The Amalekites are in some sense psychologically established,
because they celebrate their wealth, but are politically disestablished
due to their heedless celebration.
30:25 David establishes a rule / statute. An established person can
establish a law, and a law is a kind of political wealth, an impersonal
ruler or establishment.
Ch. 31 confirmation that Saul's downfall led to Israel being disestablished
(fled, leaving cities to Philistines)
2 Samuel
1:1-16 David orders the execution of the Amalekite who killed "the
LORD's anointed".
1:20 The disestablishing of one body of people yields establishing
to another.
2:1 David inquires and God answers.
--
Where does the norm of honoring and protecting the LORD's anointed
come from? Quick re-read of 1 Samuel 10 does not show an estblishment
of "don't dishonor / harm the LORD's anointed" Maybe it's somewhere
else? It may not have been handed down by God, but rather be David's
idea -- a wise precedent and norm for a future king to establish. If
the establishment (the person who establishes and (in some sense)
embodies the body politic) is respected and protected, it strengthens
and protects the body politic.
(On the other hand, Solomon is the one who would do things because they
were wise, more so than David, who would do things because they were
right. Deontological ethics (my perception) is a bit hard to reason
about, because it relies so much on "X, Y, Z just are right", a lot
more bedrocks. But if David had a principle behind "honor the LORD's
chosen one" what would it be? Maybe that God chose Saul and preferred
for him to be king (despite that God may have / apparently regretted
doing that, and Saul got the future of his kingship taken away from him).
I think it makes most sense (to me) to say David's honor of Saul was
for the office, and from that for Saul, rather than for Saul in who
he actually was. Not sure where to go with this thought from here.)
--
3:14-16 David gets what was "his". He remembered fighting for Michal.
(The memory of an unpaid debt or wrong, that claim on reality,
is psychologically establishing, is something that can be leaned on).
David, having established himself by getting what was "his", deprives
someone else of what was "his". For David to be more established
was for Paltiel to be less established.
3:18 Establishedness also comes from the words that God said.
3:39 What is the tonality of Israel's establishedness? David, as
establishment, is merciful, while Joab and Abishai, as parts of
Israel's establishedness, are severe. David leaves the repayment
of the evildoers (Joab and Abishai) to God. For David, the
establishment is insufficient, incomplete. But God fills in the
insufficiency (so he seems to expect).
4:10 David once again kills people who killed his enemy.
--
Perhaps from David's conduct we see the mixedness of victory?
--
5:8 Some kind of saying (a precedent?) is established through
the establishedness of David.
5:9 David establishes Jerusalem as his (in our day, because of that,
it is a disputed city)
5:10 God affirms mixed people. (You could take that as "what wonderful
grace to a mixed person like me" and as "there is something genuinely
messed up -- not just formally considered sinful -- with the Godly
establishment on earth" (as though God has chosen the best people
(on whatever metric he considers best) and these are it?). But
the messed-up-ness of someone like David shouldn't produce disrespect
or simplistic anger, because those are even more messed-up than him.
5:12 David was established and exalted for the sake of Israel.
5:19 David inquires of God and he answers.
5:20 And gives them to be defeated by David.
5:23-25 Same as in 19-20.
6:2 God is (symbolically?) enthroned in the ark. (A symbol of how
he is ultimately the establishment of Israel.)
6:6-7 Uzzah tries to save the ark (protect God?) but disobeys God
in the process. God is angry and kills Uzzah.
Does this mean God cannot be benefited at all? Or that which makes
up his well-being can't be benefited by human initiative? Our
well-being is part of his well-being. But God himself can't be
killed by anything outside himself. He will be okay in the end,
no matter how bad things get for him now. We have to respect him
in who he is (part of making him holy) -- which is a kind of
establishment over us. (That God is a certain way and the nature
of God is the nature of establishedness.) We can rest in his
establishedness and therefore respect him.
God lets us violate his holiness whenever we sin, but he made the
ark a teaching point to teach his people to respect him (Is this
ego-respect God wants, or survival-respect? I think the latter,
or an analog to the latter given that survival is not literally
a concern for God)
To respect something is to leave it as it is, whatever state of
establishedness or disestablishedness it is. Being is an
established thing, so all things that are are established in
some way. To disrespect is to disestablish. To disrespect is
good (or has a good outcome) when it opposes bad establishedness.
(Or maybe disrespect is always bad, bad for the disrespecter?
In that case maybe there's a respect for the highest someone
can be and that they be the highest which can motivate
disestablishing moves.
As long as bad establishedness exists, there is occasion for
(some kind of) disestablishedness.
(Probably more to be said (that ought to be said? that will be
said?) about this incident.)
2 Samuel 6:16, 20-23 Michal despises David, and then says (what she
really thinks? or some kind of useful thing to say to undermine David?)
that she objects to him dishonoring himself before the female servants
(risking disestablishment?)
David doesn't buy what Michal is trying to say about looking bad to the
female servants. David is okay with looking uncool, heedless, or
perhaps in other ways vulnerable to disrespect, for the sake of love
for God, and done out of trust in God. God chose (established) David,
the trusting, wholehearted one, over Saul, the untrusting,
"doublehearted"/doubleminded one.
7:6 God never asked for an (established?) house, only (disestablished?)
tents. But (vs. 13) he will allow David's son to build a house.
Humans like to build established temples to their gods, but God doesn't
care (or maybe prefers for there to not be such a symbol of establishedness
attached to him). God may prefer us to have less of a sense of security
and sufficiency, and more of radical trust / dependence, and longing
for him.
(If I had more time I would look into the psalms of David to see how
establishedness/disestablishedness plays out there. I think that radical
trust, dependence, and longing for God might be found there. Psalms
often seem to need disestablishedness to write and to understand
firsthand.)
7:10 God promises to end the cycle of violent people taking over Israel,
as in the days of the judges. Why? Why did he permit the "mini-Captivities"
of the judges days in the first place? Maybe he thought they would work
to teach people to love and trust him (this seems to have been an effect).
But now he wasn't going to use that strategy, and instead give them
(relative) peace and security. Was this because it was what his people
insisted on (by calling for a king in 1 Samuel), and once people insist
on something, God has to work with it in order to be trusted? (If we
define "God" (or even "worthy leader") as "that person which is (most)
trustworthy", and if God wants us to trust him, we won't see him as
being trustworthy if he is too far outside our "Overton window", so it
is more beneficial to him, and us, in pursuing his interests, to "play
along with us", if we really have insisted that our relationship with
him be based in a definition of trustworthiness we insist on. A child
is not ready for the cross (or cross-like discipline, as in Judges).
Was it instead the case that God realized that the people were right,
and the horrible days of the Judges era weren't actually conducive to
people loving and trusting God? It's true that suffering does not
necessarily cause us to turn to God. If we hate suffering so much
that we refuse to find any redeeming value in it, we will refuse to
turn to God from it, and then it will have no practical value to
God, and he will have no reason to keep it around. Can there be a
replacement for suffering in the process of making people holy?
Maybe? Statistically, which is more holiness-producing, a world of
people who "fear God" (in the biblical sense) and suffer, or one in
which they don't fear God and don't suffer? I would guess the
former. Rates of hardening would be lower in the former. Rates
of deep trust, love, and loyalty to God would be greater in the
former, and lower in the latter. (Maybe disestablishedness is
more the root of the good of suffering, and non-suffering
disestablishedness can substitute for suffering?)
7:12-16 Messianic / Christian-sounding language (reading this through
Christian eyes). God is promising a permanent establishment. The
Messiah comes through the line of David (one who loves and
trusts God wholeheartedly and not doublemindedly?) and not Saul
(a half-faithful Israelite) or a pagan ruler (Nebuchadnezzar? Augustus?)
To what extent is God ultimately committed to establishedness of some
sort? God's rest is established (completely stable social order),
and that is the necessary end of existence. That which is legitimate
will last forever, but by definition, what is illegitimate must someday
be rejected by Legitimacy.
Disestablishedness becomes an inherently bad thing when legitimacy and
establishedness are identical. The question becomes, what is the true
nature of legitimacy and thus legitimate establishedness? Jesus, who
goes to the cross, gives us an idea. But here in 2 Samuel 7, maybe we
would look at permanent establishment like David might have, with the
awe of permanent establishedness and not the horror and brokenness
worked into it on some level, when we get specific about what it really
is (something requiring the cross).
7:18-29 David does not feel worthy of having been permanently established
and thinks God is big, a doer of "great and awesome" things (vs. 23)
(And I'd agree that they are great and awesome things, but I don't think
"greatness" and "awesomeness" are better than love. God is other than
"greatness" and "awesomeness", and they serve him.)
8:1-14 David establishes Israel by defeating neighbors and God gives
him victory.
David dedicated silver and gold from "all the nations he subdued" (vs. 11)
to God. (Silver and gold he coerced from them?) Is it right to
dedicate silver and gold taken from ungodly people? Is this honoring
to God? Establishedness justifies behaviors (in the eyes of the
established one; maybe, or maybe not, in reality) which are wrong if we
don't assume that the established one is legitimately established.
Ch. 9 Out of David's establishedness, he establishes Mephibosheth.
10:11-32 "Be of good courage, and may the LORD do what seems good
to him." An establishedness out of one's own strength ("be of good
courage?") and based in trust ("may the LORD do what seems good to
him")?
11:11 Uriah refuses establishedness if God and the people of Israel
are not established (the establishedness of comfort, rest, and
satisfaction of hungers).
11:16 Because David is established, and Joab established under him,
Joab obeys, and Uriah obeys.
If you're established enough, you get your way even if it's bad.
Some level of establishedness is needed for moral agency / moral
self-expression.
12:7 David's establishment (his future) is modified such that now
a note of disestablishment (bloodshed and adultery, vss. 10-12)
will enter the royal family. Vs. 10's "the sword shall never
depart from your house" happens to describe Jesus' life and sort
of describes Church history.
The sin of a king curses those under him.
12:9, 14 David scorned / despised God and his word. David hated
and disrespected God, whom he otherwise honored and loved, and
God was willing to partially disestablish him, with likely (later
on proved actual) consequences for the kingdom.
12:20 David, brought low (in some sense disestablished), turns
to God, like Israel in Judges 10:15.
12:31 Establishedness leads to the servitude of the people adjacent
to the establishedness.
13:28 Absalom establishes his servants so that they murder his brother.
13:3-5, 32-33 Jonadab establishes a plan (which carries Amnon through
when he wouldn't or couldn't otherwise), and is, overall, a crafty
disestablisher (maybe angling to break down David's house for his own
political ends?) Jonadab was an agent of God (presumably), a good
disestablisher, but Jonadab was in himself a bad disestablisher,
and generally, bad disestablishers are to be opposed, just like
bad establishers and establishments.
2 Samuel 14:4-11 David, as establishment, establishes a law (a
precedent)
14:12-13 David is bound by his own precedent. This only makes sense
insofar as his precedent recognized a higher law.
Is God bound by his own law? (On some level yes? So he had to go
to the cross?)
15:2-6 Because of some kind of opening (disestablishedness) in David's
government, Absalom is able to establish himself politically, which
takes away from David's establishment. Having the hearts of people
establishes politically. (So where your heart goes, that you establish?)
Whatever you consider your rightful authority tends to elicit your
love (by way of your loyalty)?)
16:16-19 In disestablished times, it can seem like all kinds of
things can be true.
17:14 God intervenes.
17:15 Hushai thinks fast, has a plan made up quickly. Competence
(establishedness) enables righting wrong (establishing)
Trust vs. competence, one proceeds from disestablishedness, and often
is disestablished, the other proceeds from establishedness.
19:1-8 Mourning can't completely outweigh the fact that someone you
lost due to their evil was evil. The people who are saved from the
death of an evil person are also valuable. (And, that evil is less,
or all gone, is also valuable.) Because David's story has not ended,
he can't mourn forever (he can't bear witness to the truth of what
he lost, the person who was lost), but has to "sit in the gate".
19:22-23 David's establishedness enables him to not kill / to pardon.
21:1 David seeks God and God tells him the famine he sent is over
the bloodguilt of Saul.
21:14 After David has seven sons of Saul hanged to atone for the
bloodguilt, God "responds to the plea for the land".
22:2-4 David finds establishedness in God.
22:7 David calls on God from a disestablished place.
22:28 David sees God as one who establishes the disestablished,
and disestablishes the established.
22:42 David makes it sound like the enemies of him cried to the LORD.
If true, then God has to not listen to the cries of one disestablished
party in order to heed the cries of another.
23:3-4 Legitimate, efficacious establishment, under "the fear of God"
(disestablished in itself before God, but established in its respect
of and obedience to God), blesses the land.
23:10,12 God brings victory through mighty men.
Ch. 24 This is a weird passage, esp. vs. 1. Vs. 1 is hard to make
sense of since it sort of looks like God is the author of sin.
1 Chronicles 21:1, a parallel text, says that Satan incites David.
Maybe Satan used God to incite David, sort of like in Job? But
then, in 2 Samuel 24:1, it says that God was angry, and incited.
Could Satan make God angry at Israel? Point out some sin (as
Accuser) that God would otherwise overlook? This seems to give
Satan a lot of power over God. Is God less-established than in
say, a classical-theism-leaning reading of the Bible? (Which might
be the reading which is most in favor of establishedness and sees
God as most established). (Could God be the author of sin? If
that's so, how can we trust him? Less so than if he couldn't be,
so he would be less-established.) Or is it the case that 2 Samuel 24:1
is wrong, and should be superseded by 1 Chronicles 21:1, which makes
more sense theologically? In that case, the Bible itself is not
perfectly established.
And yet we trust God, and/or the Bible, anyway, even though they
may have some weakness or contradiction of what we might naively
consider perfect establishedness.
(I suspect that there is at least one classical-theism-leaning /
max-establishedness interpretation of 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles
21:1 which preserves or attempts to preserve a view that God and
the Bible are perfectly established. It may be that I would
grant them ~1 credence if I read them (or find it the case that if
I added up all their credences it would come to ~1, crowding out
the disestablishedness here), but if they were merely plausible,
they wouldn't take away all my uncertainty about the establishedness
of the Bible, which is itself a disestablishedness.)
I don't think that disestablishedness kills Biblical Christianity,
because it's a special case of the Problem of Evil, and no matter
how messed-up the world is, we still trust God anyway (if we are
Christians), even if we can't explain how God could be both good
and perfectly in-control given the worst of the evils we see.
If (like me) we simply relax the
expectation that God be perfectly in-control, then how can
we trust reality? Well, for myself, I don't think about it, but
I find that I mostly just do. The Bible only has to be
significantly ("quantitatively") or specially ("qualitatively")
trustworthy to be worth following.
We do trust disestablishedness, and, at least given this discussion
(about 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1), in some sense
disestablishedness is trustworthy, since the best path, even if
imperfect, is the one we ought to trust.
2 Samuel 24:2-3 David orders a census -- this is something he's
not supposed to do. Why would he order a census? Presumably
to know his strength. To know how established you are establishes
you. God would consider this bad if it meant David wasn't trusting
him.
2 Samuel 24:10 David's conscience disestablishes him and he asks
God to take away his sin (a kind of re-establishing).
2 Samuel 24:11-13 God offers David a way to pay for his sin.
2 Samuel 24:14 David trusts God's untrustworthiness more than man's
untrustworthiness (Untrustworthy in the sense that, generally,
a pestilence is something you should avoid, and which bad people
are the kind of people to do to you.)
2 Samuel 24:25 David completes his repentance (presumably), and
God responds.
1 Kings ch. 1
Someone has to be king, and David isn't filling the role (the nation
calls for its own establishment), so Adonijah takes the initiative.
Then David has to establish Solomon. The disestablishedness of
Adonijah's attempt at succession (ungrounded in the will of David),
called for the establishing of Solomon.
1 Kings 2:3-4 According to David, Solomon is to keep God's law,
which will bring prosperity (establishedness) and future for the
line of David (establishedness).
2:5-9 David establishes enmities and friendships of his into
Solomon.
2:13-25 Solomon (has to) defend his establishment, and has his
half-brother killed.
2:43 The name of the LORD (token of establishment) is used as
part of Solomon's establishing conditions on Shimei, which
technically gave him the option to live, but which made it harder
for him. The established one (king) can set up the conditions
within which his subject's free will can operate.
2:46 "So the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon."
1 Kings 3:1 Solomon marries a daughter of Pharaoh. (Presumably
to establish Israel?)
3:7-9 Solomon is lacking (disestablished), realizes it, and asks for
a power / virtue, in order to be established, for the sake of the
establishment of Israel. (In order to establish Israel, their
establishment must be established.)
3:10-12 This pleases God and he gives Solomon wisdom and discernment.
3:28 Israel is in awe of Solomon's wisdom.
Awe involves psychological disestablishedness (psychological
establishedness may accompany it?). When individual people are
in awe (disestablished), it establishes the awe-inspiring one
(or tends to, if the awe-inspiring one is a person). The
king (establishment) becomes stronger, which strengthens
(establishes) the nation as a whole.
Collectives might "like" (select for) cultural currents that disestablish
individuals in favor of the collective's establishedness.
--
Which is worse, to rely on yourself rather than on God, or to rely,
not on yourself, but on a collective, rather than on God? (This
may be a trick question.)
--
4:1-19 Solomon sets up officials.
4:19 "and there was one governor who was over the land" Presumably,
an effective central authority, uniting all the different sub-powers,
which inherently have their own initiative and could break out to try
to take over the rest? Subordinating powers to the whole -- liberal?
monarchical?, either way, established, the mark of a strong, effective,
uniting government.
4:20 Prosperity and hedonic value followed Solomon's establishing.
4:21 Solomon's establishedness enables him to rule over neighboring
kingdoms and get tribute.
4:25 Israel lives in safety under Solomon.
5:3 When the land is at rest (established), you can build a temple
to God.
Optimistically, good temple-building can serve as an anti-temptation
to ameliorate the spiritual dangers of establishedness.
Secular "temple-building" might be exemplified by the proliferation of
art and games in our time, or especially as presented by transhumanists
with regard to the far future (in X-Risk)
or also what could be called "advanced experience", also in X-Risk
but also in "Letter From Utopia".
5:13 Solomon drafts forced labor out of Israel. (A good thing, to
build the house of God? But God didn't even want a house, originally.
Which would God rather have, for his people to be free, or for them
to have more-established symbol of his establishment over them? Or
should the temple be seen as a way to honor God? Which would he prefer,
to be honored, or for his people to be free? Perhaps God values being
honored for the spiritual benefit being given those honoring?
An overall question: to what extent is Solomon a return to Egypt?
I'm not sure what to think of the temple -- it is somewhat ambiguous
and mixed to me.
6:11-13 As Solomon builds the temple, God states that "concerning the
temple" (Solomon's physical establishing), Solomon should also build
a legal / loyal / obedient temple (a spiritual / psychological /
fiducial establishing).
7:1-12 Solomon builds a palace for himself, maybe using forced labor,
certainly using a lot of resources. Perhaps this can be partially
justified by his need to imporess the people in order to be their
establishment?
(The tricky thing about unjust financial decisions is that they are
often partially justified.)
8:1-11 Whatever God thought of the temple, he gave signs of blessing.
8:22-53 Religious activities that were previously unrelated to any
temple are now related to the temple.
People wanted a place to worship (were going to "high places" (3:3)),
so here was a way to give them a place of awe in a city.
Was "wild" religion (a military commander using Urim and Thummim in
the field? Or simply inquiring of God? Or a farmer inquiring of God?)
devalued by there now being a temple, an "official" place to be
religious?
8:58 Solomon prays for anti-temptation.
8:61 Solomon wants people's hearts to be fully true to God.
9:1-9 Being established by God is conditional on being true to him
in a sustained way.
9:15 Solomon did use forced labor to build his house.
10:1 The queen of Sheba connects Solomon to the name (reputation?)
of the LORD.
10:9 The queen of Sheba blesses the LORD, having been
blown away (because of being blown away?) by how wise and wealthy he
made Solomon.
Humans are impressed by that kind of thing, and therefore it is a
mechanism to cause them to find God trustworthy. Wealth is attractive,
to whatever culture goes with it, whether that culture is ultimately
trustworthy or not. (Westernness (as in the SSC post
How The West Was Won) establishing
itself globally).
Are there other ways to draw people to God, particularly when they
start out, far from any peculiarly Biblical values?
10:14 Possible source of the 666 in Revelation 13:18? "666" only
appears in connection with Solomon and Adonikam. Adonikam had 666
sons / descendants (in Ezra 2:13) and 667 (in Nehemiah 7:18). Little
is said about Adonikam (just a name in lists of names). So Solomon
is the only OT figure who could be used in an interesting way by
the author of Revelation. But it still might be a coincidence.
"666" could come from a different source (numerology of someone's
name?). But there's some likelihood that there is a connection (not
safe to completely rule it out).
The passage in Revelation does not make perfect sense if you think
that 666 only applies to Solomon, but it is interesting to see that
the second beast (Revelation 13:11) has "two horns like a lamb" --
perhaps it is a false Christ, or a personification of the church to
the extent that it really furthers the values of the first beast
(who is blatantly against God (vs. 6))
It does make some sense to wonder if the church could be an enemy
(or false friend) of God in the way that Solomon ended up being.
Revelation is a book concerned with corruption of the church.
1 Kings 11:1-8 What most directly turns Solomon away from God is
his many foreign wives. Solomon somehow has time to have 700 wives
and 300 concubines. He isn't the enemy of neighboring countries,
but instead intermarries -- a peaceful, integrating thing to do.
This creates a bad establishedness.
11:9-11 God is angry at Solomon for being spiritually unfaithful
to him.
God blessed Solomon richly, but still he turned away. The riches
were not enough to secure his loyalty and actually (may have) hindered
it (certainly the state of rest that the land could be connected with
his many foreign wives).
11:14-41 So the cycle continues, to some extent, with a promised
civil war.
