I’ve written a lot about the non-Greek Hebrew way of thinking. In this post from last year, I evaluated one mystic’s claim…
The whole point is the purpose of the thing made, not some abstract idea regarding its form. Boman takes us back to the disagreement between Greek and Hebrew thinking on this issue. To the Greeks, a cooking pot is the basic idea, the material is a separate matter. To the Hebrew, the material defines how the cooking pot can be used, so that each pot of different materials is a different idea. There is no abstract concept of cooking pot; they need to know what the material was or it has no useful meaning.
…and determined that this was completely inverted from reality. The fact of the matter is that the Hebrews were very good at abstract thinking and often preferred to think in terms of general categories rather than only dealing with discrete ideas. This preference for abstract, categorical thinking is the hallmark of a higher IQ population.
Contrary to the claims made by Radix Fidem mystics, the Hebrews were quite capable of thinking abstractly in categories. They did so regularly. Abstract thinking is not a unique hallmark of “Western thought” or “Aristotelian philosophy.” In fact, a great many doctrinal errors of the later church were produced because later writers were unable to conceive of the Hebrew abstractions. For example, the canonization of scripture:
The Jews viewed the canon categorically and qualitatively as well. There were three categories of scripture. They were viewed as a kind, not a count.
If you’ve ever engaged in a debate with Roman Catholics over the inclusion or exclusion of the Deuterocanonicals/Apocrypha, you’ll know why this is relevant. When discussing the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament, we rightly note that each category of scripture was quoted from as scripture even though not every individual book was quoted. To the abstract categorical Hebrew thinker, the unquoted books are included with the quoted books by nature of being in the same abstract category. Furthermore, the Deuterocanonicals—as a category—were never identified as scripture, and so are rightly excluded.
The Hebrew language is full of colorful figures-of-speech, including a language that lends itself to making puns. These are linguistic abstractions. One example I’ve cited on a number of occasions is how the Hebrew (and Aramaic) word for ‘flesh’ is identical to the word for ‘good news’ if you remove the vowels (as in the original Old Testament texts). Multiple different forms of the word may be legitimately intended by a single written instance of the word in the text. This, of course, makes translation really difficult! But, ultimately, the point is to convey the idiomatic meaning of declaring the good news of the birth of a child. Thus, when a Hebrew (or Aramaic) speaker hearing about Jesus coming in the “flesh” and preaching the “good news,” they could immediately grasp the pun and understand the common idiom.
A while back, Timothy Kauffman was discussing the “Ten and Three Horns” of Daniel 7 with some Roman Catholics on Twitter. I weighed in:
When the Greek-speaking Gentile read about the 10 and 3 horns in Daniel 7 they would have approached it differently than a native Hebrew. There is a major cultural issue at play.
The Western Greek-style discrete, quantitative thinker will pick up his calculator and read it like this:
“10 minus 3 equals 7,” he says to himself.
But the Hebrew-style thinker will consider this categorically and qualitatively, reading it like this:
That is, there are 10 of a kind of horn and three of the same kind of horn (or 13 in total).
If you fail to appreciate that the Hebrews thought categorically, you’ll do as most Christians have done over the centuries and you won’t understand Daniel’s prophecy. Using only your calculator, you’ll look for when in history the Roman Empire split into ten segments and you won’t find it. Ultimately you’ll be forced to conclude that the prophecy was wrong or that it must still be in the future. You’ll never look for when the Roman Empire split into thirteen segments—which occurred in the 4th century—because you don’t even recognize your methodological error.
Around that same time, I was listening to a James White video on atonement, where he said (at the 13:00 mark):
Yes!