In considering the dance between God and Humanity, attempts to interpret the Bible as historical fact have led to unfortunate confusion and dissension. By looking at the Bible as a spiritual history, another interpretation becomes clear: the Bible records the Divine effort to prepare Human Nature for a privileged role in healing the wound of selfishness. Join us on a journey from Genesis to Revelation, a journey that demonstrates complete consistency with Darwinian evolution, and offers the heartening conclusion that flawed Humanity is not the source of all evil in the World, but actually the best hope for its healing.
The Soul Comes First
Spiritual Literalism and Christian Theology
By Brian BalkeTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Brian Balke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-3846-8Contents
Hospital of the Soul, 1,
In the Realm of the Almighty, 3,
The Disease of Selfishness, 4,
Antibody Matter, 5,
Out of Chaos—Intelligent Design!, 7,
Interpreting the Bible, 9,
First Things First, 10,
Integrating Spirit, 10,
Predation, 12,
Working with Humanity, 13,
Boys to Men, 16,
Momma Knows Best, 17,
Standing Up for Love, 18,
Out of the Harem, 19,
Planting the Seeds of Monotheism, 21,
The Brain's Journey, 22,
Nation Building, 23,
The Nature of the Beast, 24,
Try to Be Reasonable, 25,
Living by the Sword, 27,
Just Us, 30,
Faith Renewed, 32,
Shift of Focus, 34,
Existence Proof, 37,
Selections from Scripture, 39,
The Synoptic/Johanine Controversy, 40,
There is No Law but Love, 41,
Women Rising, 44,
Man Up!, 46,
Self-Awareness, 47,
Selflessness, 48,
Discipline, 51,
Compassion, 53,
The New Covenant, 55,
What Was and What Will Be, 59,
Other Traditions, 60,
Talking in Ideas, 61,
Revelation, 63,
Investiture, 64,
Extinctions, 64,
The Era of Humanity, 66,
Skirting the Shadow of Misogyny, 68,
The Era of Truth, 69,
Afterword, 71,
Index, 73,
CHAPTER 1
HOSPITAL OF THE SOUL
At the cultural core of every great and lasting civilization is a religion that holds that the universe manifests divine love. Moreover, the most potent cultural figures in human history have been men and women that prove, through word and action, that placing ourselves in the service of that love is a source of great power and liberating strength.
Conversely, the skeptic looks at the human condition and the history of religious warfare and concludes that saintly martyrdom proves the rule. The universe is a random place, full of cruelty. The faith of the believer is misplaced foolishness.
It is this great gap between heart and mind that I first attempted to fill at www.everdeepening.org. From the perspective of a particle physicist and software designer, the material there and the book Love Works lead from reason into compassionate faith.
Since completing that work, I have wandered in the wilderness, talking with people of simple faith. In the journey, I was deeply impressed by the power of Christian conviction to guide people from darkness toward light. For the man trapped in substance abuse, this can be an inward journey. For the volunteer building a learning center in Africa, it is a journey that shines light outward.
But the simplicity of these relationships of love is bounded by a theology of rules and constraints that I believe would have wounded Jesus's heart. The logic of this theology is simple:
1. God is perfect.
2. Because God is perfect, he must be the origin of all things—because otherwise his perfection could be challenged.
3. Since God is perfect, his Creation was perfect in its conception.
4. Since life is not perfect, the source of imperfection must be human disobedience. In our little, weak way we seek to challenge God.
5. The only way to restore the perfection of Creation is to learn obedience—in other words, to follow God's rules.
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the net result of this chain of logic is that far too much power is ceded by the faithful to those that claim to know the rules.
The more serious fault of the logic is the conclusion that Humanity is a flaw in Creation. This is completely in opposition to the actual truth. Humanity is an essential and valued part of Creation, an element that is held with the most tender concern and honored regard in recognition of the difficulty and importance of the work that we must perform, the pain and sacrifice involved in accomplishment of that work, and the joyous consequences of its eventual completion.
The goal of this book, then, is to heal the confusion and shame that informs so much Christian dialog, replacing it with a sober understanding of our role and the tools given us to achieve it. That understanding will be supported by the evidence of Scripture, which is best interpreted as a history of the work done by Divine Love to prepare Humanity for its job.
In the Realm of the Almighty
If the Bible is the record of the Almighty's work on Humanity, then the only way to make sense of it is to understand the motivations of the Almighty for taking on the work. So I am going to propose a story. It is a story that will be familiar to us, because it involves the angel Lucifer. It also matches the experience of those that have achieved a degree of spiritual maturity in their journey as Christians.
To an infant, a mother must seem a god from whom all things come. But outside the nursery, we know that she struggles with worries that sometimes have no easy solution; thus, it must be with the Almighty. While I am certain that this Creation could be destroyed without great effort by the Almighty that would have undesirable consequences in his Realm.
Note how that metaphor works. It starts with the idea of a relationship—the relationship between a mother and a child. With that image in our minds, it places the Almighty and Humanity outside that relationship as a sort of magnified image of it; then, it makes it clear that there is much more to the Almighty than that relationship to Humanity.
This is the essence of the Realm of the Almighty. It is a place of pure ideas: ideas built upon and around ideas, ideas exchanged and merged and transformed, and ideas evolving into ever larger and more glorious imaginings of possibility. As they merge, these ideas manifest personalities that we name as angels.
At the center of the maelstrom of ideas is the principle that we know as Unconditional Love. In that Realm, Unconditional Love makes the promise that every idea has value, has its place, and has the right to survive until it chooses to surrender itself in service to an idea that it accepts as greater than it. In recognition of the worthiness and benevolence of this principle, the angels choose to place themselves in obedience to Love's judgments, and in service to the expansion of its dominion. The means they use is to sing its praises so that all other ideas feel its presence.
The Almighty is the sum total of ideas great and small held together by the compact of Unconditional Love.
The Disease of Selfishness
There are diseases in this Realm just as there are diseases in ours. The most serious is the absolute contradiction of Unconditional Love. This is not destructiveness, because destruction is easy to flee when Unconditional Love calls as a refuge. No, the most serious disease is selfishness. It is the assertion "I am most important." It is the tendency of the greater angels to say to the lesser, "No, you cannot leave me to associate with other angels—you are mine, and I decide where you go."
Now obviously in the competition for relationship amongst ideas, selfishness is always going to be a problem, and its management is going to be an ongoing concern. But the concept that would be both most vulnerable to infection and most dangerous as an agent of transmission would be the concept of exchange. In the Creation we inhabit that exchange occurs through light, and thus we...
