This is the second installment of a discussion that seeks to discover how post-critical believers have come to reject the infallibility of the Scripture while believing it is God’s Word and through whose truth the Spirit brought them to salvation. The first installment dealt with the intuitive contradictory mindset that codifies knowing without understanding what the Scripture means. This entry speaks to the personal ramifications of believing in the validity of contradictions.
Chaos is the “state of utter confusion.” How one or a society arrives in such a state is through the breakdown of controlling factors. For the believer, the primary controlling factor is adherence to Scripture. When the believer is no longer controlled by Scripture that contradiction is the platform for self-imposed personal chaos, or homo mensura, man is the measure. For the unregenerate, homo mensura is expected, but for the believer, homo mensura is intuitively contradictory to the Lordship of Christ.
Chaos by its nature is intolerant of control, reasoning, or logical discussion. Chaos responds viscerally and harshly to calls for discussion and reason and demonizes efforts to introduce controlling factors to correct the state of confusion. The response is visceral because the question is not simply of what they know but of who they are, what kind of person they are – irrational, confused, immoral? The conscience cannot agree that holding the contradiction is right resulting in guilt and shame and an unamiable response to anyone who unknowingly touches the nerve.
Chaos manifests itself in the intuitive knowledge of a believer when such knowledge is the synchronic acceptance of contradictions as valid. Normalized contradictions on the level of the new birth introduces chaos into every sphere of life because a Christian cannot help being a Christian, no matter how compromised. This paradigm shift for the believer brings about the uncritical acceptance of murder (e.g., abortion), immorality (e.g., homosexual marriage), theft (e.g., serving mammon, avarice), lying (e.g., Scripture is fallible) and coveting (e.g., envidia, envy, wanting what belongs to another) as the second tablet of the Law written on their hearts is compromised permitting the acceptance of a contradiction such as “Thou shalt not commit adultery, etc., ” and the questions that arise from the science of textual criticism and whether “Thou shalt not commit adultery, etc.,” is actually God’s Word and His holy moral standard. Furthermore, the normalized contradictions of personal chaos engender the distortion of traditional Biblical categories. The importance of preaching is denied, evangelism ceases, and separation from the world and sin is refused. Personal and ecclesiastical salt and light ceases as the post-critical Christian lives a synchronic life of maintaining two contradictory claims as valid in the new man. And lest someone quibble as to the efficacy of the textual critical approval of the Decalogue, the point is not the credibility of specific texts but the believer’s intrinsic capacity to accept the validity of contradictions per se. Specifics and evidence in support of or in rejection of the paradigm of normalized contradictions become irrelevant simply because the contradictions are at the core of the believer’s noetic equipment, the “presupposition” from which everything is gauged. Normalizing contradictions in the noetic equipment, the sixth sense, is no less real than saying a blind person is visually challenged. In each case, a sense has been compromised and is not functioning properly.
And so, for the post-critical saint and ecclesiastical gatherings, anything goes, and to say otherwise is to feel the pain of the internal chaos that dwells in those who live an intuitively contradictory life.
Standard Sacred Text.com 