Thursday, February 29th, 2024

 I haven't written a Ramble or a blog post for a little while. The truth is that it still feels to me like I'm repeating myself over and over again, and not adding anything new.

     I'm almost done with the first full draft of my new novel, "The Missionary," to be published through Amazon KDP when completed. Inspired by the Fallout RPG series by Bethesda, it follows the journey of Jeremiah Smith, a pastor and former missionary, in the year 2254, over two hundred years after multiple apocalypses (nuclear, viral, civil war, and climate) have decimated and changed the earth, and America in particular. Jeremiah is the descendant of those sealed within Cheyenne Mountain's complex "when the bombs fell." In his journey across western America and back, Jeremiah must confront his perceived failure as a missionary, and become an involuntary ambassador to the newly contacted Republic of California to determine if they're on the level about why they want Cheyenne Mountain's help. Suffering catastrophe at the outset, all he wants to do is to return home to his family and keep his promise to his eldest daughter when he is caught up in post-apocalyptic politics, espionage, and the remnants of a civil war which refuses to end.

     Things are going well on the farm here in Kentucky. We've all pretty much survived the winter, and we're expecting our pregnant does to kid in April. Egg production is back up to about two dozen eggs a day on average. Heidi and Cindy are preparing the front gardens for planting. Tressa has completed her purchase of her tiny house, and the builder, an Amish man, has finished it. All that remains is for us to find a contractor who will lay the foundation for it in the east pasture. This is proving to be more challenging that it should be. Aidan and Arcadia, my son and new daughter-in-law will be visiting next week. Phoenix is making good progress on his YouTube channel, something he's been agonizing over for two years now. Aside from my new novel, I've reactivated my Facebook group, "Wounded Sheep, Wounded Shepherds," and am trying to do a better job with being its admin. I may collect all of my more recent Rambles into another book after my novel is finished.

     That's pretty much it for now. 

     

What is the Actual Ancient Christian Faith?

"There are two Paths. One of Life, and one of Death, and there is a huge difference between the two Paths. The Path of Life is this: You will Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of you strength, and with all of you mind, and you will love your neighbor as yourself. Do to others what you would want them to do to you, and whatever you don't want others to do to you, don't do likewise to them."

      While not a direct quote, these are the first lines of the Didache, the oldest known Christian catechism, or teaching manual for new initiates. In the mind of the author, these were the understanding, practice, and commitment of what Christianity was all about. These were the first and most important things to teach those new to the faith. These things are what defined a Christian, and everything else was explanation and commentary.

      Today is Sunday, and as I was thinking about what to write, I wrote down a sentence and then deleted it. I wrote down another sentence, and then deleted it. And then this came to my mind again. What was understood in the first century church to be the most essential thing for new Christians to understand? That there were two paths a person could take, one of life and one of death. Paul also talked about these two Paths frequently. He wrote in Romans that one could either enslave themselves to their own malfunctioning flesh leading to death, or they could enslave themselves to the Spirit of Christ and the right state of being resulting from it which leads to life.

     The author then describes what the Path of Life is, and anyone who has read the Gospels will recognize this as the core of what Jesus taught: Love God, love your neighbor as yourself, and treat others the way you want to be treated.

      These lines described the core understanding of the ancient Christian faith hundreds of years before Nicea and the Ecumenical Councils were even a random thought in Constantine's mind, and over fourteen hundred years before Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Before the practice of the Path of Jesus Christ was turned into Orthodoxy and theological doctrine, before penal substitutionary atonement was even a glint in the Reformers' eyes, within the living memory of the Apostles and Jesus Himself it was about the two Paths one could take and what they looked like.

      And the Path of Death? He writes, "first of all it is derangement and full of curses, murders, adulteries, cravings, prostitutions, thefts, idolatries," and so on right down the same lists of the works of the flesh which Paul gives in many of his letters, especially Galatians 5, but also Colossians 3. The Path of Death is what happens when one disengages from the Spirit of Christ and through engagement with their fear, aggression, or bodily craving responses submit to the control of their malfunctioning flesh.

      This understanding is the ancient faith, the true ancient creed taught to initiates and catechumens and explained further in the writings of the Apostles and their successors, the Early Church Fathers. For those who truly want to get back to what was originally taught, this is where you start, by following the Path of Life and turning away from the Path of Death; by cooperating with and submitting to the Spirit of Christ so that He is the one who acts and speaks through you, and by disengaging from and thereby neutralizing one's own flesh's malfunctioning survival responses.

When Death Entered the World

      Paul wrote that death entered the world through "sin," that is, through the malfunction, and that it entered through one human being. But what was the actual scope of that death which entered the world? Traditionally, the scope has been death in general, that is, nothing died before that one human being's doing what they were told not to. But is that really what Paul meant?
     Here's the problem with this interpretation, death is a part of life. That is, without something dying, nothing can live. Think about it. In order for one thing to eat, something else has to die whether it is an animal or a plant. The fruit which is picked from the tree is dead almost immediately because it has been severed from its source of nutrients, its source of life. Plants cannot grow without the nutrients derived from the decay of other dead plants and animals. There cannot be a functioning ecosystem without death of some kind. This is a known, observable fact.
     So then death entered the world through the malfunction of one human being, but death for whom? The only answer which satisfies all known data is death for our human ancestors in the garden. That is, instead of death entering globally for all of creation, its entry here was a special entry localized to our ancestors and their descendants.
     Adam was told he could eat from any tree in the garden except one. The tree of life was in the garden. It's not too much of a stretch to assume that he, or they as "'adam" literally means "human being" or "humanity," was already eating from the Tree of Life. It's clear from Genesis 3 that perpetually eating from this tree would lead to an indefinite and potentially unending lifespan (how that could be possible is a topic for another time).
      It's also clear that human ancestors lived and died for hundreds of thousands of years, including potentially prior to this event assuming that it occurred around the time human beings started wearing clothes between 70kya and 100kya. This suggests that those in the garden were an isolated group from the rest of our genus of homo, and even possibly isolated from other groups of homo sapiens.
     So, upon the ingestion of the toxic and brain chemistry altering piece of fruit, death was introduced to our ancestors in the garden. How? After their brains were altered and they malfunctioned, they were forced to relocate away from this "Tree of Life" food source and forbidden to return to it. Thus they were allowed to die naturally, each successive generation losing the longevity effects through either mutation, interbreeding with other species of homo, or both. By by about 30kya-40kya, there were no unaffected species of human left.
     So, death did enter the world through one human being or group of human beings, but it was a death specifically for our ancestors which those ancestors were never meant to experience.

On Tithing and Giving Obligations

      I don't usually talk about tithing and the obligations of giving within the churches, but this has come up in my own life recently, and I wanted to share my thoughts and perspective.
     The practice of tithing, giving ten percent of your income to the church, isn't as Biblical as many churches teach. In fact, it's not a part of the New Covenant at all. Tithing in the Bible was really a part of the Torah, the Mosaic Covenant, and it was essentially a tax upon the people of Israel levied for the support of the priests and Levites who had no land inheritance and thus no way of supporting themselves otherwise. In reality, when the complete tithe was added up, it was something like 30% of one's income throughout the year or so for the support of the Levites, the priests, and the Tabernacle/Temple as described in the Torah.
      The New Testament is clear that the New Covenant supersedes and nullifies the Mosaic Covenant. There is a large portion of text in the New Testament dedicated to explaining this fact in no uncertain terms.  It is clear that those who are "walking in the Spirit" are not subject to the Torah. And when the Apostles met in Jerusalem to figure out what the Gentile Christians should be practicing in order to get along with their Jewish brothers, the only things they told them was to keep away from eating blood and things strangled, and to keep away from prostitution and illicit sexual activity more broadly. That was it. The tithe never came up.
     What did Jesus say about it? When asked about whether He and His disciples paid the temple tax he responded, "What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth receive custom or tribute? From their sons or from strangers?" Peter said to Him, "From strangers." Jesus said to him, "Then truly the sons are free." The only reason why He then paid the temple tax was so that He and His disciples didn't cause offense. But it was clear that He didn't teach they were required to.
     So then what does the New Testament teach about giving to the church? What Jesus taught, and what was even a condition of discipleship, was that His disciples were to let go of everything they started off with. As He sent them out first twelve, and then seventy, He was explicit when He said "take nothing with you." In the book of Acts, the disciples of the first Church held everything in common. There was no need to tithe anything, because everything went into a common pool and distributed to everyone so that no one was in need of anything, not the Apostles, not the Deacons, and not the "laypersons." This practice continued throughout the first century among all of the churches which were established, and was one of the reasons why Paul wrote to Titus about the Cretans that if they didn't work, they didn't eat. That is, if they didn't contribute to the common pool of resources one way or the other, they weren't going to eat from it either. This was practiced both locally among the members of the local gathering, and it was practiced as much as possible between churches when they knew a famine would occur and Paul took up collecting a common purse for those churches which would be impacted the most.
     Furthermore, while Paul himself chose to support himself with his own hands and not draw from the common pool of the churches he started or visited, he argued repeatedly that the Apostles and pastors of churches had every right to share in those common resources because of the work they were putting in overseeing and ministering to the other disciples within the churches. As Paul recalled the analogy from the Torah, "Don't muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain," summing it up as "the worker is worthy of his wages."
     Our problem and misunderstanding about tithing in this day and age is that our modern churches don't work along the same economies that the churches described in the New Testament did. Like with much else, our modern congregations are far removed in both teaching and practice from our ancient spiritual forefathers so as to be completely unrecognizable one to the other as Christian, and I don't see this situation as changing any time soon.