Tradition

The last post concluded with a note that what plagues many doctrines is their incorporation of  arbitrary extra-biblical information. Whether it be Headship, Complementarianism, Egalitarianism, Roman Catholicism, or Feudal Christianity (of Radix Fidem), all go beyond the words of scripture to incorporate the traditions of men that the proponents think is as critically important as the Word of God.

The first example is Headship. Headship is largely based on a cultural tradition of a patriarchal standard that extensively described throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. These traditions are granted the weight of God’s law in the form of “God’s plan for mankind.”

The second example is Feudal Christianity. This type of Christianity is based on the traditions of the Ancient Near East. In this mode of thinking, Jesus should be evaluated exclusively in terms of his cultural context: as a feudal Lord, and he our master.

Each of these has its roots deep in scripture, but it adds to (or subtracts from) scripture, adding tradition at various points to justify and develop the particular doctrine. While the incorporation of this information is usually thematic, it can be arbitrary: cherry-picked specifically by the proponents to support the goals of that doctrine.

The Heart

Over at Catacomb Resident’s new substack blog (see “Let’s Review a Review“), he explains how Jesus is our Feudal Lord and we must be under his Lordship. Resident is part of Ed Hurst’s movement Radix Fidem, a small body of Christians who incorporate the precepts of Ancient Near East feudalism. The movement promotes Christian mysticism as the primary spiritual discipline. It explicitly and fervently minimizes the role of individual intellect. Here is a quick peek inside:

“Throughout the Ancient Near East, and for a time at least, the Greco-Roman Civilization operated under the assumption that every human was under some kind of feudal authority. The only question is whom you claim as your sovereign. The notion of political democracy is from Hell; it confuses things and deceives people into thinking they aren’t under someone else’s authority.”
— Catacomb Resident, “What’s Showing“

Resident believes that the political organization of the Ancient Near East is directly applicable to us, at the level of importance of any law of God. It has direct bearing on our notions of good and evil, and ultimately salvation. The idea of Radix Fidem is that Christian Mysticism (which is Godly and spiritual) is opposed to reason and intellect (which is fleshly and fallen). The former must master the other. Intellect is subservient and at best only occasionally somewhat helpful, merely supplemental to being a Christian. And so we arrive at today’s point of contention:

Now, at this point we always have to stop and note that if English is your first language, talk of “the heart” is loaded with false baggage. In the Hebrew world, your heart was the seat of your will, your faith and commitment to God. It’s a part of your eternal nature, whereas your intellect is part of your fallen fleshly nature. In English, “the heart” refers to sentiment, the accretion of experiences, emotions, traditions, customs, etc. It’s your fleshly value system that you cannot explain easily. That’s not the same thing as what’s in the Bible. [ ¶ ] So, referring to the biblical symbol of the heart, we talk about how we can build a covenant community of people who demonstrate a testimony that their hearts belong to Christ.
— Catacomb Resident, “What’s Showing”

Catacomb Resident is only speaking in weak hyperbole when he says he always has to stop and note this. It is a common claim, repeated often. Resident is trying to separate intellect and emotion from the will, as if only the latter was important and heavenly and the former were corrupted, fallen, and of limited (if any) use.

As you can see, he views this as critical: that a correct understanding of heart is required to “build a covenant community of people.” Yes, it is considered that important. Without this specific understanding of heart in the context of the Ancient Near East, he says we cannot have a covenant community of Christians.

Now, let’s see Hurst’s comments, as he minimizes the intellect, the working of the mind (emphasis added):

“One of the things I run into is the false dichotomy between two extremes that seem to crop up all the time. On the one hand is the notion of “objective truth” as if it were a god in itself, something that is static, hard and cold. It’s a false view of the nature of reality that dares to hold the God of the Bible accountable to a rational standard visible only by fallen intellects. They posit that the only alternative position is subjectivism, which is then conflated with solipsism.”
— comment by Ed Hurst @ Sigma Frame under “The Evils of Solipsism“

…and…

““Going to Hell” means entering the Spirit Realm as an enemy of God. Everything we find in Scripture on those two destinies is uniformly non-literal — the descriptions are parabolic because those things are ineffable to the human intellect. You simply cannot use human language to explain it directly. When you leave this fallen realm of existence, you go to the Spirit Realm; you enter the Presence of God and His domain. If you go there as His enemy, it will be Hell for you. How that plays out is impossible to state, except that we can surmise “separation from God” is a condition of the eternal soul, not a geographical distinction. [ ¶ ] The consistent symbolism God uses in the Bible is Himself in the role of nomad sheikh.”
— comment by Ed Hurst @ Sigma Frame under “Come and See Hades“

To Hurst, one’s intellect is extremely limited and of practically no use at all in spiritual matters: the mind cannot comprehend matters of spirit. With these comments in view, let’s revisit what Catacomb Resident has said:

“In the Hebrew world, your heart was the seat of your will, your faith and commitment to God. [The heart is] part of your eternal nature, whereas your intellect is part of your fallen fleshly nature.”
— Catacomb Resident, “What’s Showing”

As I will show, this view is incorrect, and it is incorrect because it involves taking the what he wants to and must believe—lest the worldview of covenant community crash down—and inserting it back onto scripture, rather than trusting the Word of God. There is no way to avoid this conclusion: the Word of God in scripture flatly contradicts what Catacomb Resident has said.

The first indication of a problem comes from George M. Lamsa, a Semitic Assyrian raised in a local religious community^[15] that spoke Aramaic (as did Jesus) and lived in a manner quite similar to those who lived in the Ancient Near East at the time of Christ. Lamsa specialized in the study of Hebrew idioms. In “Idioms of the Bible Explained”, he explained that the phrase “pure in heart” in Matthew 5:8 is idiomatic for being pure in mind. How can this be? How can someone so close to the original culture and language equate “heart” idiomatically with “mind”, when Catacomb Resident and Ed Hurst are claiming that “heart” excludes the mind and intellect, which they claim is irredeemably fallen.

The heart in the Hebrew world was not as Catacomb Resident describes, and this fact is straightforward and obvious. Why? Because the ‘heart’ is central to the most important, most quoted, and most well-understood passage of scripture used by all Hebrews of the Ancient Near East: the Shema Yisrael. If the traditions of Hebrews of the Ancient Near East feudalism were what we should be following, then we should follow their strongest tradition.

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (NIV)
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

The Shema is so important that three gospels recorded Jesus’ conversation with a teacher of the law where they declare it to be the greatest of God’s commandments.

Matthew 22:37 (REV)
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

Luke 10:27 (REV)
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.

Mark 12:29-30 (REV)
Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone, and so you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

Note that the mind is not mentioned in Deuteronomy, but just as with Aramaic-speaking Lamsa, both Jesus and the teacher of the law confirm that the addition of “mind” alongside “heart”, and “soul”, is a correct quotation. So is leaving out strength. Jesus freely associates both the heart and mind together. This is not a mistake, but is fundamental to reality.

In his Hebrew Bible translation and commentary, Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew in the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley since 1967, and author of a number of books on Hebrew, commented on the Shema’s use of ‘soul’:

with all your being — The Hebrew nefesh means “life-breath” or “essential self.” The traditional translation of “soul,” preserved in many recent versions, is misleading because it suggests a body-soul split alien to biblical thinking. — Robert Alter, “The Hebrew Bible: The Five Books of Moses”, p. 641.

Let’s be perfectly clear. The reason why loving God with “heart, soul, strength” is equivalent to “heart, soul, mind” is equivalent to “heart, soul, strength, and mind” is because they are equivalent and inseparable aspects of one’s being. No matter the combination, the elements of the Shema form an idiom that one should love God with one’s entire being. The specific elements highlighted (heart, soul, strength, mind) are essentially interchangeable and changing them does not alter the meaning in the slightest.

To paraphrase Alter, to suggest a split in a person between the various elements of the Shema is utterly alien to biblical Hebrew thinking. It is a foreign concept to say that the heart is the seat of your will—faith and commitment to God—while the mind with its knowledge and intellect are no more than a part of the fallen fleshly nature. At creation, God created all the elements in one body, one soul, one life. To divide them is to spit on the Word of God and on the Hebrew traditions. The Hebrews understood heart as an idiom for the seat of emotion and the mind and the intellect and the will. This is true, even though the will is not mentioned in the Shema. Had Jesus or the teacher of the law restated it as…

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and will all your will and with all your emotion.”

…it would still have meant the exact same thing as the original (and been even more redundant).  Alter confirms the historicity of this:

with all your heart — The heart is the seat of understanding in biblical physiology, but it is also associated with feelings.
— Robert Alter, “The Hebrew Bible: The Five Books of Moses”, p. 641.

The heart does indeed include feelings and emotions, because the heart is a metaphor for the core of one’s being and the core of one’s being includes feelings and emotions, in addition to the will, intellect^[1][2][3], knowledge, etc. That the heart includes the mind is plain from scripture itself…

Deuteronomy 8:2,5 (NIV)
“Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. [..] Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.”

…which teaches that knowledge resides in the heart. A man knows with his heart.

When we examine the Hebrew word for ‘heart’ (Strongs #3824 lebab), we find more confirmation of what ‘heart’ means:

• soul, comprehending mind, affections, or will.
• one’s conscience
• one’s moral character
• seat of naughtiness, pride, or trouble
• seat of emotions, passions, joy, and courage

It is not an Ancient Near East tradition that the heart represents the spiritual eternal nature while the intellect represents a part of the fleshly fallen nature.

Body and Soul, Flesh and Bone

That a person’s being is indivisible is a central tenant of the Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. One’s being includes emotions, passions, the will, mind, conscience, and more. It is an utterly alien, Hellenistic idea that a person has a separate and divisible soul from their life, or that one’s intellect is divisible from their spirit. When Jesus said…

Matthew 10:28 (REV)
And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul. But rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.

…he was not ascribing a Greek body/soul separation. Rather, Jesus was speaking through the Hebrew understanding: one can experience bodily death and decay (i.e. Gehenna), but death and decay cannot destroy the life—body and soul—that is one’s being. Anyone can kill a body and destroy it, but this only returns a person to the dust from which they were first formed. Only God has the power to destroy one’s being. The paraphrase of the Bible called “The Message” makes this interpretation quite clearly:

Luke 12:4-5 (MSG)
 “I’m speaking to you as dear friends. Don’t be bluffed into silence or insincerity by the threats of religious bullies. True, they can kill you, but then what can they do? There’s nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear for God, who holds your entire life—body and soul—in his hands.”

When you die, your soul and your body remain in God’s hands. Killing your body does not destroy it. Life does not end with death. They are not opposites.  This foreshadowed a resurrection where one’s decayed body is restored into a real physical body. Resurrection is not merely spiritual, it is robustly and abundantly physical. The body we have now will decay to dust, but the dust remains. Resurrection is the restoration—not replacement—of the body, which will be made incorruptible in the process.

Paul was specifically asked by the church in Corinth about what the resurrected body would be like:

1 Corinthians 15:35-46 (REV)
“But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?” [..] But God gives it a body just as it pleased him, and to each of the seeds he gives a body of its own. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of humans, and another flesh of animals, and another flesh of birds, and another of fish. There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one kind, and the glory of the earthly is another. [..] So it is with the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a soul body, it is raised a spiritual body. Since there is a soul body, there is also a spiritual one. So also it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living soul. The last Adam has become a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual is not first, on the contrary, the soul body is; after that is the spiritual.”

Paul states that the bodies of those resurrected are spiritual (pneumatikon), not natural (psychikon). But those bodies are still flesh.

Luke 24:39 (REV)
Look at my hands and my feet, and see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you can see that I have.

As Luke plainly attests, Christ had hands and feet that natural flesh could interact with. A purely spirit being does not have flesh and bones, but Jesus does. Paul agrees with Luke when says: all flesh is not the same flesh, and different beings have different kinds of flesh and bodies.

After Christ’s resurrection, the church attested that Christ’s resurrected body was physical flesh. Writings that attest this are found in works attributed to Clement of Rome, Justin the Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Methodius, and Gregory of Nyssa. It was not until the third century that Origen—of the Alexandrian philosophy—first introduced the idea of a purely spiritual ‘body’ without flesh. Such an idea is distinctly Hellenistic or a Gnostic corruption. (see: Kakavelaki, “The Resurrected Body, Will it Be of Flesh or Spiritual“)

Dualism and Resurrection

In contrast to the Hebraic understanding of the Ancient Near East, Gnosticism asserted a Greek-influenced dualism of the soul and flesh, where the flesh was inherently inferior to the soul. Gnostics denied the resurrection of the flesh.^[4] But the Bible attests that physical flesh is not always evil. One’s physical flesh is not equivalent to one’s fleshly nature. The origin of physical flesh (i.e. literal flesh) is God who created it, but the fleshly nature (i.e. ‘flesh’ as idiom) represents the fallen human nature.

Paul attested in 1 Corinthians 15:50-57 that the resurrection is the victory over death. Recall that Jesus said that anyone can cause death, but of the body and soul only God can destroy? Resurrection is a returning to life, albeit changed and incorruptible, but it is not the destruction of the body and soul. To deny Christ’s flesh is to deny his resurrection: a denial that his dead body was raised anew, changed, and now incorruptible, but still a body of flesh that could be seen and touched: one that went into the tomb and then came out.

Through the influences of neo-Platonic thought and Aristotelian logic, Origen and ­Philoponus embraced a kind of dualism and concluded that the “spiritual body” described by Paul must have had no flesh.

Testing the Spirits

No Christian or spirit sent by God may deny that the body and soul, heart and mind, are one life. None may deny that the flesh of Christ is resurrected. Scripture plainly states:

Every spirit must acknowledge that Jesus has come (or “is come”; not “had come”, “came”, or “was”) in the flesh or else it must be rejected. They must not deny that Jesus came in the flesh (i.e. was born fully human), has come in the flesh (i.e. is raised in a resurrection of that flesh after death), or that his flesh remains. This is what the early church asserted and it is what John witnessed.

As Christian mysticism itself is fundamentally spiritual, …

…what is revealed by mystical means through the spirits must be tested.^[5]

Without a test showing otherwise, revelations revealed through Christian mysticism must be presumed to be demonic and not from the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t matter if the revelation is personal and intended for just one person. Without validating its source, it cannot be trusted, even if the revelation comes from one claiming to be an angel, an apostle, a prophet, or a teacher sent by God.^[6][7] We are commanded by scripture to test the spirits. The Bible plainly states that the first test of knowing that spiritual revelations are valid is the acknowledgment that Jesus has/is come in the flesh. Another is that anything conflicting with scripture is not from God. Still another is the test for prophets.^[8] We are obligated ask the questions and seek out the answers.^[9]

In “Reviewing Wright’s Universal Apologia: Part 10“, I mentioned Maureen Hinko of Seven Hills, Ohio. On September 21, 1993, she tested the spirit that was visiting her in the form of Mary. The spirit refused to answer the question, deflected, and soon departed. It failed the test.^[10]

In the early 1980s, psychic Johanna Michaelsen became a Christian. She had been visited by spirits for many years, but only after she became a Christian did she discover how to test the spirits. So one day she challenged the spirit of ‘Jesus’ before her, commanding in the name of Jesus that he attest that “Christ is God uniquely incarnate in human flesh.” Without answering, her visiting spirits immediately departed in a violent flash. They had failed the test.^[11]

Radix Fidem makes two key claims:

Paraphrasing, first “that Jesus had to die to free his spirit from the confinement of his flesh” and second “that being no longer in the flesh now enables knowing Christ, through spirit alone.”^[12] This is what Gnostic dualism implied: the flesh was a hindrance (or at best of no consequence). It is why the Gnostics denied the resurrection of Christ’s flesh.^[4][13] But, as shown above, the early church believed that Christ has retained his flesh in his resurrected body because Jesus himself said so and the apostles witnessed it firsthand.

Pay very close attention to this. The claim asserts that Jesus was [past] in the flesh, which is true, but incomplete. It does not say that Jesus has come or is come [present], nor does it assert that the fullness of Christ’s divinity dwells [present] within his bodily form (his flesh)^[14], nor that Christ is [present] revealed to us through that fullness. Indeed, it is very explicit that Christ was freed from his body. This too fails the test of the spirits.

By the word of scripture—the word of God—we must reject any spiritually revealed teachings that fail the test of spirits.

Additional Reading

Dr. Glenn Andrew Peoples @ Right Reason, “Where did all the souls go?” (January 12, 2022)

Footnotes

^[1] In Job 12:3, the NASB and NAB translate ‘heart’ as ‘intelligence.’

^[2] This commentary on the heart states “… But in Hebrew it also represented the seat of intelligence, …”

^[3] Abarim Publications, “The Hebrew Heart” calls the heart “The seat of intelligence and determination”

^[4] Ignatius stated that this is why the Gnostics did not participate in the eucharist (thankgiving tithe offering) or the Lord’s Supper. See “The Original Meaning of Eucharist.”

^[5] The Spirit Realm is real and beyond comprehension. But what is revealed is not beyond comprehension, and it can and must be tested.

^[6] 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 (KJV): “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”

^[7] See 1 Kings 13

^[8] The test of prophets is that they do the will of the Father.

^[9] The test of the spirits applies to spirits—specifically to the ones that reveals teachings. A person can—presumably—lie and say that Christ has come in the flesh while simultaneously not repudiating the false teachings that deny that Christ has come in the flesh. This is why a second-hand recipient of revelation (i.e. myself or a reader) must use discernment to determine if a revelation violates the test of the spirits. It is not enough to simply get an answer to the test.

^[10] The spirit wouldn’t even declare that Jesus was born of the flesh. Maureen continued to listen to it anyway.

^[11] Timothy F. Kauffman, “Quite Contrary.” (1997) p.68-69

^[12] Christ’s literal body is his spiritual body in its resurrected flesh. Christ’s metaphorical body is the membership of his church, with him as its metaphorical head. “Once he took up his eternal form, His Spirit could come and dwell in the members of His New Body” seems to imply that Christ’s spirit is in heaven and his literal body is the membership of his church. This in no way confirms that Christ has come in the flesh. See “The Head-Body Metaphor.”

^[13] Not all Gnostics denied Christ’s body, but all denied the resurrection of Christ’s flesh.

^[14] Per Colossians 2:9-10. See “The Meaning of Head in Colossians 2:9-10” for more information.

^[15] A Nestorian sect