Lie and Change (edited)

The mind is epistemologically subordinate and teleologically subsequent to the heart. Concerning these things, I wrote extensively in the years of my apostasy. All things find their origin in the unseen when the unseen makes an impression upon the sensual faculties of man with a sufficient stimulus (or surprise) to warrant the sense’s acknowledgment of the stimulus. That acknowledgment is almost always expressed through emotion, “emotion” here being the awareness of the discrepancy between one’s hitherto predominant state of being and that altered state that the stimulus provoked. Emotion is ventilated and only after it has run at least most of its course does the mind interject to make sense of the emotional reaction so as to perhaps understand the stimulus in the form that it appeared, all with the hope of later integrating such sense and understanding into the overarching, ongoing existential narrative of one’s nominative I.

If this is in any way true or “actual”, we can clearly see that the heart, as the nexus for all emotional expression, is primary while the mind is secondary. Further, if we have the mind of Christ, our minds are entrusted with “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” {2 Cor 10:5}; those thoughts which are, of course, first experienced in the heart with the hope that the mind will integrate into the existential tapestry of a man’s nominative I the ongoing truth of Christ who is all on all.

Yet, I say again, the battle between “what-is” and “what-is not” is waged in the heart, and it is here where salvation both begins and “ends” so to speak and it is here in which the wondrous Truths of the Gospel might be gleaned, only later to be “comprehended” by the rational faculties. God does not desire “disembodied intellectuals” as the bride for His beloved (for we all know what kind of impotent, dialectical weaklings such “disembodied intellectuals” are, and what bad company too!), but passionate lovers that will move even Christ’s heart to exclaim: “How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!” {Song 4:10}

One’s “emotions” – even those which are particularly powerful, moving, and seemingly decisive – should nevertheless not be blindly used as the arbiter to decipher between “what is” and “what is not”, whether crucial, vital, banal, or otherwise. Instead, they should, as with all things, be freely allowed to come under the dominion of Christ,  His Spirit, and their written testimony to man. That written testimony, given that it is written and has come down to us little changed from the time it was composed (a marvel in and of itself), which, as written, presents itself as the standard and plumbline for whatever “truth” man might effectually glean from a transcendent God at all, is, in every way, the standard and exemplar that must be used, among many things, as a means to successfully integrate said emotions into the overarching narrative tapestry inexhaustibly narrated by one’s nominative I. Without the written Word which is Christ and speaks of and for Him in ways too innumerable to mention, and also without the ministry of the Spirit who helps us in our weakness to overcome our natural reluctance to glorify Him in spirit and truth, man would have no ground nor basis to be able to consistently “make sense” of his emotions in a manner that might prove “productive” at all, which is to say, “teleologically oriented upon a certain fixed point toward which the sum of a man’s works might build and be measured by”; that fixed point which is Christ Himself, His image we are being daily conformed if, in fact, the Spirit dwells in us in the first place.

Man must live in that way which only finite man can, which is to say, as one who has full freedom of will, absolute autonomy, and complete and total responsibility but with ever his mind inclined to that “greater and much more emphatic truth” that he has no such free will but only lives and does at the sole behest of He who alone has the power to will and do and act in an ultimate and transcendent capacity. Having this mind, a man will more be able to readily assume responsibility for his damnable sins and also more likely to give glory to God when good and right find him by the hands of He who alone has the power to abound such things for His glory and good pleasure.

God does not change. Only man changes or at least perceives he changes.

Change is an innate form of lying that is solely the province of man; that man tells lies about who he is in order to distance himself or even escape from the lie of one’s past so that he might project another lie into the future, of which, when he eventually catches up with that lie, he will then have to repeat the revolutions of his lies so that he might distance himself from that lie and so on and so forth. Such is how man who is himself a deception “moves” or “progresses” through life, or at least believes he moves and progresses.

God, however, does not lie, He is not a lie and does not progress.

God the Father, as everlasting, eternal, timeless, and spaceless cannot at any single time change because He is not singularly at or in any one time or place but is, in fact, beyond finitude and form and is everywhere and at all times forever.

Time and space are mutually contingent on the other for their actuality.