Judaism and the Mystical Christ, Ch. 2: The Bible and Communication Theory

Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "Judaism and the Mystical Christ".  I have created a blog entry containing the table of contents linking to each article which may be accessed here:
 
Table of Contents

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The Bible and Communication Theory
In my last post, I explored the topic of what is called a paradigm shift, and mentioned that I had experienced a few of these myself.  The overarching theme of this series has to do with how gaining a perspective on Judaism reshapes the way we perceive the meaning of the Bible, Jesus, and faith itself, and leads us towards what I will call "Mystical Christ".

But before I begin to explore these ideas I would like to address the elephant in the room - namely, the way that we read the Bible.  It has become a very popular notion within Western Christianity that the Bible functions in a way that is very similar to a gavel - one slams down a Bible verse taken out of context and then triumphantly shouts "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!"  Case closed.  The one who struck the gavel now expects their "opponent" to walk away in shame while they may now hold their head high.

This attitude and behavior is usually the result of being steeped within a culture that teaches that the Bible is "inerrant".  But there are a few problems with this starting point - the first of which, I'd like to point out, does not require that we reject the term "inerrant" when describing the Bible.  It has to do with a theory for how communication works.

J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language who lived in the mid 1900's, and whom developed a theory of speech acts.  The theory states that when a "speech act" occurs, there are multiple things happening simultaneously.  The first part of a "speech act" is referred to as a locution, and this is the "material" of the act.  It could be a physical and audible utterance of words, a writing of some sort, or some form of art (such as a painting or play).

But for this locution to be a speech act, it requires a bit more.  First of all, it cannot be a speech act if there is no audience.  But secondly, there must be some meaning which the locutor intended to convey to his or her audience.  This intended meaning is the second part of the speech act, and is referred to as the interlocution.  But interlocution is a bit more than the intended meaning - because in order for a speech act to be considered successful, we must endeavor to ascertain whether the meaning intended by the locutor is the same meaning that was perceived by the audience - so the interlocution is not only the intended meaning but it is also the perceived meaning, and these may not always match up.

The final part of a speech act is called the perlocution.  The perlocution is also broken up into two parts, as in the case of the interlocution - it is both the desired effect or result of the speech act, and the actual effect or result of the speech act.  So for us to deem a speech act to be successful, we ought to try to match up the locutor's desired effect with the actual effect it had on the audience.

One of the common fault lines where a speech act breaks down and fails to be successful is when it is "taken out of context".  Let me give you an example: let's say that I dramatically blurt out with a tone of despair "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  The locution is not merely the collection of words, but it is also the mannerism in which I said these things - my dramatic tone of despair.  Without this context, one might miss the point and incorrectly perceive the interlocution, as well as failing to perform the correct perlocution.  But the problem of correctly perceiving interlocution and applying perlocution does not end there - we should also ask where and when I made this speech.  

Let me give you a few examples where the context completely changes both the interlocution and the perlocution of the statement I mentioned.

In the first example, I'd like you to imagine that I have been having dinner with my wife and some good friends at my house, and we have been having a very enjoyable time.  At some point during the evening, I ask for the salt to be passed to me.  When it arrives, I turn the salt shaker over only to discover that no salt comes out.  This is the lead up to my dramatic exclamation of despair: "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"

With this setup, one might guess that my tone of dramatic despair is hyperbolic and meant to be humorous. Thus, my interlocution - or intended meaning - could be a joke, meant to result in a multifaceted perlocution.  If the result of my utterance is for everyone at the table to laugh, and for my wife to refill the salt shaker, this actual result is very likely a good match for my desired result.

Now, before I move on to my second example, I'd like my readers to imagine that one of the people at the table decided to quote my exact words on Twitter or Facebook without any of the setup.  How likely do you think it would be that the online audience would perceive the correct interlocution and perlocution?

In my second example, let's say that we place my words in a completely different context: I have been participating in a Bible study group that has just been studying and discussing Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount", and after discussing Matthew 5:13 where Jesus says that his disciples are "the salt of the earth" for a bit, we begin to discuss how so many people who claim to be Christians do not resemble the things Jesus mentions in the rest of his sermon.  It is within this context that I then dramatically blurted out "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  Within this new context, do you think that I am hoping that everyone in the room will laugh, and then someone will run home to grab a salt shaker and bring it back to me?

In addition to the context in which the locution occurs, we might also want to pay attention to the context of the locutor - the character we are able to know about the person who spoke.  In the example I gave of the dinner party where I dramatically and despairingly uttered "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?", those who know me (perhaps even just from one dinner) might have perceived that I have a certain sense of humor, and this context might have given them more of a foundation on which to build the assumption that I was being hyperbolic in an attempt to cause laughter.

Another example of how context changes meaning - I'd like you to consider the following conversation:

Jane: Would you like some coffee?
John: That would keep me awake.

Do we know at this point whether John wants coffee?  The answer is that we don't, because this conversation is too ambiguous.  Even if we had access to John's tone of voice and facial expressions when he answered, it would still be very difficult.  However, if we knew whether this conversation occurred in the morning or in the evening, this context would give us a fairly accurate idea of whether John actually wanted coffee or not (keep in mind there could be other factors, i.e.: is this in the evening, and John and Jane are on a road trip and need to stay awake?).

In the case of the Bible - if we wish to ascertain the interlocution and perceive the desired perlocution of a writer such as Paul, we might want to pay careful attention to his other writings so that we do not make a judgment call on one statement that contradicts a large portion of his other writings - to do this would be to completely ignore the context of his character.  But we also need to know as much as we can about Paul's Jewishness, as well as the history of the time period he lived in, and the common traits of the environments of the various places his audiences resided in.  Because without this context, we may have completely missed the desired interlocution and perlocution and substituted our own.

One final and very simple illustration might help drive the point about the importance of context home.  In the parable of "The Good Samaritan", Jesus says that "a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho" (Lk. 10:30).  With our modern context and the access we have to maps with north being located "up" and south being "down", we might assume that Jericho was located to the south of Jerusalem.  But one look at a map challenges this:

Now what do we do with this challenge to our assumptions?  One option might be to declare the mapmaker a heretic who has challenged the integrity of God's Word™ and is denying the authority of the scriptures (hey, the Church did this to Galileo and Copernicus).  We might demand that people ignore such maps and draw maps placing Jericho to the south of Jerusalem.  Another option would be to say that Jesus was ignorant, and thus was wrong.  Another might be to say that Jesus never said this, but rather it was Luke who was ignorant and wrong.  And yet another option might be to say that either Jesus or Luke were trying to deceive us.  Or, we could attempt to place ourselves within the historical context and realize that because they did not have the access to maps in this period that we do, and because Jerusalem was at a higher elevation than Jericho and thus the experience of walking from Jerusalem to Jericho was a journey down a very long hill, the assumed meaning of down in that culture had more to do with elevation than with geography.

It is for this reason that I will be attempting to enlist the help of Jewish thought throughout this series - because I believe that without understanding Jewish thought, we cannot help but misunderstand the Bible.  Westerners - thinking through a very Western lens - cannot possibly understand the very Jewish and Eastern Jesus if we do not attempt to immerse ourselves within their thinking.  The modern Western versions of Christianity have all too often suffered from the arrogance of thinking that they hold a monopoly on truth and do not have to listen to any outsiders.  And when we do this, we forget how our traditions have grown out of much older traditions.  As the English writer Aldous Huxley once put it:

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness.

The Finger is not the Moon

I have written before on why I reject the idea of "inerrancy" (see here, here, and here), so I am not going to rehash this debate again here.  But I would like to try once again to offer an alternative vision for the purpose of the Bible. 

I believe that we are meant to see an overarching story within the Bible - an ongoing narrative the leads up to the person of Jesus.  But it doesn't even stop there!  I believe it continues on in the narrative of the "body of Christ" - the church!  We are meant to carry on the story! 

So for me, I believe that if we take any section of the Bible and treat it like a "stopping point", we have made an idol out of that scripture.  Consider the Bible as if it were a telescope - the point is not the telescope itself, but what it enables us to see!  If we revere the telescope too much, we will completely miss the point!  I believe that "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" is essentially holding a telescope up to our eye while covering the end with our hand - at that point, you're really just making up fantasies about the heavens in your own head.

This idea is very similar to something the Buddha said: 

[M]y teaching is a method to experience reality, and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. An intelligent person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon. My teaching is a means of practice, not something to hold onto or worship. Only a fool would continue to carry his raft around after he had already used it to reach the other shore, the shore of liberation.

If we do not open ourselves up to the various possibilities of what the symbolic language of the Bible is pointing to, it is like worshiping the finger that is pointing to the moon.

I think it helps to understand that all our words are symbols.  Louis Chauvet describes the meaning of symbol in "Symbol and Sacrament" as follows:

If one construed it transitively, one would translate it, according to the context, as "gather together", "hold in common", or "exchange". The substantive symbole designates the joint at the elbow or knee and, more generally, the whole idea of conjunction, reunion, contract, or pact. The ancient symbolon is precisely an object cut in two, one part of which is retained by each partner in a contract. Each half evidently has no value in itself and thus could imaginatively signify anything; its symbolic power is due only to its connection with the other half. It (can thus be described) as an agreement between the two partners which establishes the symbol; it is the expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity.

The idea that the words we use are always inadequate for describing the reality they symbolize is even a concept many scientists have grasped - as is illustrated by the following quote by Sir James Hopwood Jeans (known for the Rayleigh-Jeans Law):

The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures. Most scientists would agree that they are nothing more than pictures - fictions, if you like, if by fiction you mean that science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality. Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality.

To apply this to the Bible, I would like my audience to consider that the Bible may function as a scatter plot pointing off into infinity.  A scatter plot is a tool that enables us to see how many samples of data over time show a trend that is occurring:

To use another, similar analogy, if you have seen the movie "Gravity", there is a scene where Sandra Bullock's character is trying to reach a space station.  Before firing thrusters, she lines up her cross-hairs with the tiny speck that she sees of the space station in the distance.  She does this very carefully - making sure to get the sights lined up perfectly before firing her thrusters.  And yet, when she is close to the space station, she ends up having to jump out of the ship's side door and do some tricky maneuvers in order to get to the station because her course was not perfect.  I believe that what many people do with the Bible is like sailing right on past the space station while insisting that your course was perfect and therefore while it may look like the space-station is over there, that's just Satan lying to us!  This displays a remarkable arrogance!

As I spoke of in the last section, I believe that God may be described best in various terms of infinity.  And thus, logically we may conclude that any single description which tries to solidify the infinite concepts of God into a solid form will ultimately fail.  This is why I believe that over the course of the narrative of the Bible, we will see a trend developing that points off into infinity, much like a scatter plot.  But if we take one of those points of data and solidify it into a definitive concept, we couldn't possibly understand the path of the trend.  Or, if we point the line of the scatter plot trend in the wrong direction (as in, we take "the wrathful God of the Old Testament" as our defining image rather than the God Jesus shows us who loves enemies perfectly), we have also missed the trend of the scatter plot.

To say this is not to say that the Old Testament passages have no value or do not help us to see God!  Rather, we must understand that God is present within the Old Testament, but as God is infinite, these old understandings had to be transcended - and we see these understandings continually being transcended, just as we are called today to transcend old, limiting understandings of the infinite.  I believe this attitude of recognizing the finitude of our current understanding in order to transcend it is what Paul was speaking of in I Corinthians 3:18:

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise.

Paul recognized that "for now we see in a mirror dimly" (I Cor. 13:12), and that God - being infinite - was fully outside any man's ability to grasp truth.  And so in order to continually grow closer one must become "foolish" in the eyes of the world, in order to, paradoxically, become wise.

This attitude of continually transcending our limited understanding transforms the language of the Bible from a dead, rigid form of stone into living, breathing truth.  And for those who have been trained their whole life to be dogmatic, while treating the Bible in this way may be difficult, I would like to remind you that Abraham negotiated with God (Gen. 18:23-33), Jacob wrestled with God before he was blessed by Him (Gen. 32:22-31), Moses negotiated with God more than once (see Ex. 3:12-16 and Num. 11 for two examples), the Psalms and Lamentations are full of pleading and even accusation against God (shocking!), and even Jesus is said to have plead with God to change the course he was on.  

I think that the Jewish attitude towards the Bible is much healthier than "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - recognizing how various figures in the Bible negotiated with God as I've just mentioned, they seemed to understand that the Bible is up for interpretation and that newer understandings may trump older ones.  We'll get into that a bit more as this series progresses, but for now I'd like to share a story from the Talmud.  The Talmud is a very interesting collection of commentaries on the Torah, and is revered by modern Jews as being a work every Jew should study.  And what's interesting about it is that the Talmud doesn't hide disagreement, but preserves it - often polar opposite views of a passage or idea are kept side by side.  And there is one beautiful story that demonstrates perfectly how the Jewish view of the Bible flies in the face of "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven, which I will retell in my own way.  

The story goes that Rabbi Eliezer had a disagreement with a group of other scholars over whether an oven was pure or impure.  Rabbi Eliezer brought the other scholars all sorts of proofs to his point of view, but they still disagreed.  At one point during the disagreement, Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, let the river prove me right!"  Instantly, the river reversed its course.

But one of the other scholars said "one cannot prove a matter of Torah by the flow of water!"

So Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, may the walls of the study hall prove me right!"  Instantly, the walls of the study hall began to cave in, but one of the other rabbis, Rabbi Joshua, stood up and rebuked them: "if Torah scholars are debating a point of Jewish law, what are your qualifications to intervene?"  The story goes that the walls, in respect to Rabbi Joshua, did not cave in, but in respect towards Rabbi Eliezer they remained at a permanent slant afterwards.

So Rabbi Eliezer tried once more: "if the law is as I say, may Heaven prove me right!"  A booming voice filled the room and reverberated around them all: "why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer?  Don't you know he's always right?"  But once again, Rabbi Joshua stood up and intervened, saying "the Torah is not in Heaven!"

We might fail to follow the logic here, given the Christian over-reverence of the Bible that turns it into an idol.  But Jews interpret Deuteronomy 30:11-14 to mean that Torah was given to us so that we could interpret it.  In other words, the popular understanding of this tale from the Talmud is that Rabbi Joshua was rebuking God for not allowing them to do the job He'd given them to do!  Note how Jesus actually supports this idea when he tells his disciples in Matthew 18:18 that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" - in Jewish terminology, when a Rabbi "binds" something, he is declaring it forbidden by his interpretation of the law, and when he "looses" something he is declaring it allowed.  So here, Jesus is giving us permission to interpret!

The story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven goes on from there to arrive at a conclusion many "Sola Scriptura inerrantists" might find shocking - Rabbi Nathan is said to have experienced a vision wherein he meets the prophet Elijah, and at one point Nathan asks how God reacted at the moment that Rabbi Joshua rebuked Heaven.  Elijah responds: "God laughed and said 'my children have bested me!  Haha, my children have bested me!'"  

This picture of a God delighted with His children for exercising their wits and even disagreeing with their Heavenly Father is altogether foreign from many forms of Christianity, sadly.  We cower in fear underneath a tyrannical Molech that we've slapped Christian branding over.  But the God of Judaism wants us to negotiate with Him.  This God wants us to think for ourselves!  This God wants us to cry out for justice - because it is at this moment that He can invite us to join him in the cause!

Dr. Ismar Schorsch, the sixth chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, put it this way:

[I]n Judaism precisely because the Torah is revered as divine, it becomes susceptible to unending interpretation. It would be a denigration of God's word to saddle it with just a single meaning. In contrast to human speech, which carries a finite range of meanings, the language of God was deemed to be endowed with an infinity of meanings. This theology freed the Rabbis to do midrash, creating the anomaly of a canon without closure. The vessels kept changing their contents. New challenges elicited new insights into a text inviolable only on the surface.

If we can just remember that the words we use for Theology are not what they represent, but are symbols for what we are speaking of - like a finger pointing to the moon - we can ease so much tension.  And then we may not feel the need to demonize those who use different words.  If we could just remember that the point is not the words themselves, but the way of life that these words are supposed to lead to - maybe we'd stop judging people by what words they use but put emphasis on conduct instead.  Because the point is not words or "beliefs" - as James 1:27 points out:

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And later on in James 3:13, the author writes:

Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.

George MacDonald - a member of the Inklings whom C.S. Lewis called his "master" - picked up on this principle and wrote in one of his "Unspoken Sermons" titled "The Truth in Jesus":

Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by; and that which the man I mean lives by, is the love of God, and obedience to his law, so far as he has recognized it. [...] What a man believes, is the thing he does.

In "Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian", Dr. Paul Knitter writes about this attitude of allowing words to be symbols that point to a way of life:

[I]f a new interpretation of – that is, new words for – a traditional Christian belief enables people to live their lives according to the spirit of the Gospel, it’s probably a faithful “reinterpretation” or a valid new understanding of that belief, no matter how different the words may be. In theological jargon, right acting (called “orthopraxis”) is more important than, though it is dependent on, right believing (“ orthodoxy”). Or in contemporary jargon, walking the talk is more important than talking the talk. So, if the new “talk” enables us to keep walking, it’s probably okay. It’s probably “orthodox.”

To illustrate even further how the Bible is not "The Truth" but functions as a finger pointing to the moon, I'd like to consider the words of Jesus in John 5:39:

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.

We see here that Jesus himself challenged an idolatrous relationship with the Bible, but tells us that the Bible functions as a finger pointing to the moon.  As George MacDonald - who is credited with the conversion of C.S. Lewis - puts it:

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

This idea is further reiterated by authors John Kronen and Eric Reitan in "God's Final Victory":

[W]e think that the way in which Scripture contributes to the formation of doctrine is far more complex than the 'plain sense' view would have us believe.  The whole text must be read in light of what is central, namely Christ, and in light of the theological tradition that has struggled, and continues to struggle, to integrate the experience of the Christian community and its members as they have endeavoured to live out their understanding of what it means to be the body of Christ.  Reading the text in the light of these things requires a practice of receiving inherited theological conclusions with respect and honour; but it also requires critical engagement with that inheritance.

Even Augustine saw that we must identify the guiding principles of Scripture which take precedence over the peripherals:

But any who understand a passage in the scriptures to mean something which the writer did not mean are mistaken . . . but all the same . . . if they are mistaken in a judgment which is intended to build up love . . . they are mistaken in the same sort of way as people who go astray off the road, but still proceed by rough paths to the same place as the road was taking them. God spoke the true word, in spite of the reader’s error.

Here we see that Augustine paid careful attention to the priority of love - as both Jesus and Paul said that the principles of Scripture are summed up in love (see Mt. 22:36-40 and Gal. 5:14).  If the thought of prioritizing principles in the Scriptures that take precedence over peripherals makes you uncomfortable, I'd like you to understand that you do this as well even if you're unconscious of this.  It's highly likely that if you're reading this post in 2015, you prioritize monogamy over the passages within Scripture that seem to support polygamy, you don't support slavery (even though Scripture seems to be ok with it), and if a male joins your church you probably don't take him into a back room and have him pull his pants down so that you can make sure he's circumcised before allowing him to join.

If you're still not sold on this attitude towards the Bible, I'd like to come at this from one more angle before we break.

Paradox
One of the ways that the Bible - and not just the Bible, but all Eastern religions - hints at a "truth beyond words" is through the use of paradox.  To illustrate how a paradox works, I'd like you to examine a famous illustration called "My Wife and My Mother-in-law":

You've probably seen this before, and the question that is asked is: do you see the back of a beautiful young woman's head or the side of an old woman's face?  And the answer is: it depends on how you're looking!  It's actually both.  Now we could say "well, it's supposed to be one or the other" and then explain how one view must be the correct one - but that wouldn't do the illustration justice!  Because the illustration is meant to illustrate a profound truth - that the mother-in-law has characteristics very much like the daughter, and the daughter has characteristics very much like the mother-in-law!  Or to put it another way - one can see the daughter in the mother-in-law and the mother-in-law in the daughter!

Now what many theologians all too often do is very much like insisting that the illustration above must be either the daughter or the mother-in law.  And so they'll often try to pretend that Biblical evidence doesn't exist - much like if we were to erase a few lines from the drawing above (maybe the red part) and then insist that it is only the daughter.  But what if the only way to communicate the profound mysteries of spiritual truth were to use two seemingly opposing ideas (a paradox)?

There are many paradoxes within the Bible, but I am going to focus on one very important one - a paradox that is foundational for "Mystical Christianity".  It is the paradox of kenosis and God's sovereignty.  

I argued in the first "chess move" of my series on Hell that verses like Job 42:2, Psalm 135:6, Isaiah 14:24-27, Daniel 4:35, Matthew 19:26, Romans 11:36, and Ephesians 1:11 imply that in the end, God gets everything God wants - or in other words, God is sovereign.  Another way of saying this is that God is omnipotent - this is a popular way of putting it in theological terms.

But an interesting paradox presents itself when you consider that Jesus is, as Colossians 1:15 puts it: "the image of the invisible God."  Because we know that Jesus emptied himself, as Philippians 2:7 puts it.  The Greek word used in this verse is kenosis, and it implies a self-emptying.  The passage in Philippians goes on to explain that because Jesus humbled himself, he was exalted - which matches quite well with Jesus' saying that "whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted." (Mt. 23:12 and Lk. 14:11).

If Jesus is indeed "the image of the invisible God", then would this imply that God's nature is a self-emptying one as well?  Many theologians have concluded that the answer to this is: yes!  And this presents us with a profound mystery - because in God we see power in a way of being that looks to us like weakness!

If this sounds like nonsense, then I suggest you re-examine Paul's words in 2 Cor. 12:10 - he implies that Christians are to emulate this strength through weakness!

Let's come at this from another angle - I John 4:8 and 16 tell us that God is love.  If you have a hard time with this idea, I'd ask you to read another post I wrote titled: "Yes, God Really IS Love!"  But if this is true, then I believe that, logically, when we read Paul's wonderful poetry on the nature of love in I Corinthians 13, we can take this as a description of God's character - in other words, wherever it says "love", we can substitute the word "God".  And if we do this, we find a profound paradox - because God does not demand His own way (verse 5 in NLT, or as the NASB puts it: "love does not seek its own"), and yet God never fails! (I Cor. 13:8)

Somehow - though it may make no sense to human logic - though God does not force His way into being or coerce others to do His will, God still gets everything God wants in the end!  And as Christians who are to be followers of Jesus, I believe that if we align ourselves with this way of being - by taking on the nature of a servant and gaining through losing (Phil. 3:7-8) - we will have aligned ourselves with the will of God and will receive the inheritance of the kingdom of God (Col. 3:23-24) - which is the realm in which, as the Lord's Prayer puts it (Mt. 6:10), God's will is done.  Through kenosis - the self-emptying nature of love - we may become conquerors (Rom. 8:37) - just as Jesus conquered through emptying himself even to the point of death!

To see the truth in the Bible, we cannot deny one side of the many paradoxes it contains - but rather we must see the "radical middle" - the truth that is communicated in between the two seemingly opposing ideas.

There is another Buddhist story that illustrates what I've been trying to get at.  The story goes that a young, single father had a son whom he loved more than anything else in the world.  One day, while he was away, some plunderers came to the father's village and burnt most of it down - including the father's house.  When the father returned, he could not find his son, and mistook one of the burnt corpses for his son's body.  He was completely devastated, and during his mourning he had the body cremated and the ashes put into a silk bag that he kept with himself at all times.  But what he didn't know was that his son was alive - he had been kidnapped by the plunderers!  

Later on, the boy managed to escape and returned home to his father.  But the door of the house was locked, and so the boy knocked.  "Who is it?" the father asked.  "It's me, your son!"  The father had been sitting in the room weeping while holding the bag of ashes, and he said "you wicked boy!  How could you play such a horrible trick on a heartbroken father - go away!"  The boy continued to knock and cry and plead to be let in, but the father continued to rebuke him until finally the son left and never returned.

In "No Death, No Fear", Thich Nhat Hanh tells this story and concludes with this thought:

The Buddha said that if you get caught in one idea and consider it to be “the truth,” then you miss the chance to know the truth. Even if the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will refuse to open your mind. So if you are committed to an idea about truth or to an idea about the conditions necessary for your happiness, be careful. 

Likewise, the medieval German mystic Meister Ekhart once said:

If you want to get at the kernel of something, you must first break the shell. Only then can you enjoy its true benefits. Symbols of reality are not the same as reality itself, so they must be destroyed. Then you will come closer and closer to what truly is. When you finally reach the One, there your soul must remain.

Next Chapter: What is Christian Mysticism?

Oneness: A Collection of Quotes Illustrating a Common Theme

"I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be One. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be One, as we are One."
- Jesus in John 17:20-22

"We will never find God until we learn that He exists in every living being, including ourselves."
- Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta Hindu

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all."
- Paul in Ephesians 4:4-6

"I seek only One thing: the All that exists in everything. All things are born of the One. All things flow from the One. The One is not just in all things, but above all things. This God holds me within my own heart."
- Dame Catherine Gascoigne, Roman Catholic

"All that is, is One Mind. It is eternal and clear. It embraces all realities - both the visible and the invisible."
- Padmasambhava, Tibetan Buddhist

"How does one seek union with God?
The harder you seek, the more distance you create between Him and you.
So what does one do about the distance?
Understand or recognize that it isn't there.
Does that mean that God and I are one?
Not one. Not two.
How is that possible?
The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song. --
Not one. Not two."
- Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest and Psychotherapist

"Walking upon my path, I found that my former friends had become enemies. But I received solace from the One True Friend. When I realized Oneness, I became free of the many. Now I am His and He is mine."
- Sarmad, Sufi, Jewish

"Be joyful and behold the One in all things."
- Mother Julian of Norwich, Roman Catholic

"One master asked his teacher: 'Where can Tao be found?' The teacher replied: 'Where can't Tao be found?'"
- Chan Buddhist Story

"'Do not I fill heaven and earth?' declares the Lord."
- Jeremiah 23:24

"Where is Tao? If you look for it, you won't see it. It comes in and goes out, but doesn't use doors. It is the very smallest of all things, yet it is everywhere. If you fail to recognize it, you will meet it without knowing."
- Han Shan, Taoist, Chan Buddhist

"I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all."
- George MacDonald, Christian minister and author

"For from him and through him and to him are all things."
- Paul in Romans 11:36

"Having examined all religions, I have realized that God is the Whole and I am His part. We are One. He manifests Himself in never-ending forms to fulfill the desires of those devoted to Him. But He, Himself, is formless. He cannot be divided because He is the Absolute."
- Sri Ramakrishna, Vedanta (Hindu)

"You have no beginning or end, yet have become He who preserves and protects us. You are the All, beyond comparison, beyond limits, without visual essence, without attributes, beyond division, beyond description, beyond understanding. You are imperishable. You may only be seen by those with spiritual eyes, even though you are everywhere and within everything - both manifest and un-manifest simultaneously. No one can see you without divine eyesight, even though You are everywhere and in everything. You are both manifest and un-manifest. You are infinite power and bliss. You are the Knower and that which is known. You are Truth, Bliss, Love. You are beyond the beyond."
- Meher Baba, Sufi

"He is the knowledge, the knower, and that which is known. All things are united in Him, and are imbued with His essence. He is Being - in which all things have their existence and perfection."
- Moses Cordovero, Jewish

"What we are looking for is what is looking."
- St. Francis of Assisi, Roman Catholic

"God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."
- I John 4:16

"Only that which is in you - which is also in me - can hear what I'm saying."
- Ram Dass, Vedanta (Hindu)

"For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’"
- Paul at Mars Hill in Acts 17:28

"God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. To argue that God exists is to deny him."
- Paul Tillich, Christian Theologian

"The many do not exist; there is only the One. At-one-ment is the realization that duality is an illusion."
- Padmasambhava, Tibetan Buddhist

"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere."
- Plotinus, Greek Philosopher

"At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every-where."
- Thomas Merton, Roman Catholic (Trappist)

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."
- Meister Ekhart, Roman Catholic

"Wherever I wander, there is only You. Whatever I think about, it is You. Everywhere, there is only You. In the sky, upon the earth, above us and below us, in the beginning and at the end, there is only You!"
- Levi Yitzchak, Jewish

"I sang with You during the day, and we slept together at night. But I am confused; I thought I was I, but it was You."
- Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Sufi

"Studying Buddha nature is the same as studying yourself. Studying yourself requires forgetting yourself. To become enlightened is to become free - which means being free of one's own mind and body as well as the minds and bodies of others. Once achieved, even this enlightenment disappears, and cannot be found anywhere even though it exists forever."
- Dogen, Zen Buddhist

"When self-love ceases, and love of goodness takes its place, then you will be One with the Beloved. Loving Him, He must also love you. That love draws you to Him and Him to You. And the two become One. In such union there is no division."
- Jacopone Da Todi, Roman Catholic

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me."
- Paul in Galatians 2:20

"The only thing that God expects from you is that you leave yourself behind and realize that you are made of Him."
- Meister Ekhart, Roman Catholic

"You are the absolute Light which can see with pure eyes beyond the haze of our limitations. Your light is hidden everywhere in the world, and the world reveals Your beauty. Your gift to me was to become one with You. It is Your blood that runs through my veins. I have become one with Your pure body - transparent, holy and filled with light."
- Symeon the New Theologian, Eastern Orthodox

"Where can I find you Lord? Your place is grand and undisclosed. And where can I find You not? Your glory is everywhere upon the earth."
- Judah Halevi, Jewish

"We could say many things and never say enough. The final word is: The Lord is 'the All'."
- Sirach 43:27

"This world is not merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but it is an expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself."
- George MacDonald, Christian minister and author

"Throughout eternity, that which we call Mind has never been born and has never died. Changeless, it has no past or future. It is not subject to cause and effect. It is not good or evil, true or false, male or female. Mind is no one's property and it does not seek liberation. It is formless and hard to perceive since it is not subject to the senses. Many are those who seek It, yet they do not realize that it already lies within themselves. It is what gives them life."
- Bodhidharma, Zen Buddhist

"Our lives are in God, as God is within us. He nurtures all creatures, and even though His splendor is often hidden from us, it abides in all life. God is the life of all that exists."
- Hildegard of Bingen, Roman Catholic

"That which dwells in all creatures - the Self - is that which controls the universe. He is manifest in all objects and creatures, and those who find it within themselves have eternal Bliss."
- The Katha Upanishad, Vedanta (Hindu)

"Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?" 
- Paul in I Corinthians 3:16

"I will know that I am free from bondage on the day when I can finally see God in every human being, and every being as the temple of God, When I stand in reverence of the One in all, all else will vanish and I will be free."
- Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta (Hindu)

"When you perceive that the two are One, that the outer is the same as the inner, that which is above is the same as that which is below, that the male and the female are one and the same - then you will enter the kingdom of God."
- Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas saying 22

"If one does not recognize God, the barrier lies within his own mind. For God is all things, and has become all things within the individual."
- Meister Ekhart, Roman Catholic

"God is in you and God is in me. He is hidden in all things, so let go of your pride and vanity and seek Him within yourself."
- Kabir, Sufi

"I am you and you are me. We exist interdependently. As we work on ourselves personally, others benefit at the same time."
- Thích Nhất Hạnh, Zen Buddhist

"Abide in me as I abide in you."
- Jesus in John 15:4

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.  It is the sower of all true science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.  To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness."
- Albert Einstein

"I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together...I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob."
- John Lennon

Additional reading:
Love is Like the Wind
Paul and the Greek Poets

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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Bow Down to the Domination System
When I started exploring the trials of Jesus in the desert, I introduced the idea that these trials were not coming from a being of pure evil, but were in fact the conventional wisdom of the day on what a Messiah should look like - and Jesus had to wrestle with this ethos and counter it throughout his entire ministry. 

The third, and final temptation in this story may be the most important - it defined Jesus’ entire ministry.

In this trial, the Accuser shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” and says: “All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me.” (Mt. 4:8-9 - parallels Lk. 4:5-7). 

Once again, if you are observant, you can find this same trial coming from Jesus’ followers in the gospel of John!  John 6:15 has them coming with the intention “to come and take Him by force to make Him king.” 

You see, if you understand the context of the Maccabean revolt, then you understand that because Judas Maccabeus was understood to be a success, the Jews expected their Messiah to establish a physical “kingdom of God”, and to do this through violent revolution.  Israel believed that the messiah was coming to place them over all other kingdoms - as the new and biggest ever empire!  Now, the “kingdom of God” was a dominant theme throughout Jesus’ ministry, as I’ve explored elsewhere - but it contrasted the popular view of Israel’s restoration to the status of a physical kingdom.

In Luke’s version of the story of the third temptation, the accuser says that the kingdoms of the world have been “handed over” to him (Luke 4:6) and he gives them to whomever he wishes (you just have to bow down).  This language has a very striking parallel that Walter Wink picked up on in “Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination”:

Hence the refrain all through Revelation 13-the Beast "was allowed" to exercise authority (v. 5), "was allowed" to make war on the saints and to conquer them (v. 7), "was given" authority over every tribe and people and language and nation (v. 7). The Second Beast, likewise, "is allowed" to perform miracles (v. 14), and it "was allowed" to make the image of the First Beast speak (v. 15). I am not aware of such a concatenation of permissions stated so repetitively anywhere else in Scripture. Luke's temptation narrative, however, reflects the same concept. Satan boasts (accurately, I believe) that all the kingdoms of the world have "been delivered" to him (Luke 4:6).

War is Hell

The language of the kingdoms of the world being “handed over” to the Accuser is echoed later on in the Gospel of John (see John 14:30 and 16:11, as well as 2 Cor. 4:4 and I John 5:19), but we are told that his days are numbered and he will be driven out!   (See John 12:31)

But nevertheless, at this time, the Accuser rules, and promises to give Jesus the kingdoms if he will bow.  This may be the most insidious of the three temptations - here, the one in the role of accuser/adversary is offering Jesus all the power of the Domination System itself, if only he will surrender himself to the spirit of that system.

But this was a voice that was repeated by the culture in Jesus’ time repeatedly.  So if we realize that Satan is not the voice of pure evil, but is actually repeating the conventional wisdom of the day, and that Jesus had to be tested by this commonly held view and come out on top of it, then we can see how this was a necessary trial for him to overcome before he began his mission!  We can see how Jesus had to hear the voice of this temptation and rebuke it - that this was actually the mission he modeled throughout his entire life’s ministry. 

You see, Jesus saw that when we engage in accusing behavior - refusing to come alongside those we accuse and admit our own weakness, our own tendencies to err in often the same ways, and/or our own share of the blame in the situation at hand - we assert ourselves over others in a relationship of domination.  And that domination relationship acts as a sort of viral infection that spreads - the person we Accuse goes on to take out their pain on others in the role of Accuser.  This grows until it infects an entire society, and becomes the Domination System!  And so often, there is a voice within the societies of those being dominated that tells them that the only way to get out from under the thumb of the Domination System is to turn violence back on them - but as we saw in the story of the Maccabees, this is a self-defeating method that only seeks to replace one Domination System with another, which eventually turns on itself and crumbles under its own weight!

Gregory Boyd has an interesting way of expressing the power of the third temptation in his book "The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church":

The lesson of history, a lesson the Devil has known all along, is this: The best way to defeat the kingdom of God is to empower the church to rule the kingdom of the world — for then it becomes the kingdom of the world! The best way to get people to lay down the cross is to hand them the sword!

Jesus’ entire life models the rejection of these three temptations:

1. The people of God must be able to deny their physical needs in order to serve, and must live in a spiritual manner, nourishing the rest of the world through the outpouring of their living water (see John 7:38)
2. The word of God is not a constitution that we use like a lawyer would - taking phrases out of context in order to assert our own authority and superiority over others.  Rather, it is a way of life that makes room for others and redeems the sinner through radical, inclusive love.
3. The kingdom of God is not a model of exclusive, authoritative, tyrannical power whereby the people of God are held in a position of superiority and exclusivity, but are rather to be exalted through servanthood (the way up is the way down.  Or as Jesus put it: the first will be last and the last will be first: Mt. 19:30, Mt. 20:16, Mk. 10:31).
   

So the three temptations are actually an archetypal model of Jesus’ ministry.  The story serves not to introduce new problems into the mix - rather, it is a revelation.  It is an unmasking of the systemic issues within that culture’s paradigm.  And one of the hard things to understand is that in many ways, these temptations were not actually evil - they were more accurately yesterday’s conventional wisdom, which at the time of their origination served the community well.  At one time, Israel was a physical kingdom, and it was glorious!  It was the envy of the world in Solomon’s days - kings from all around would come to visit and pay homage to the glory of the temple as well as learn from Solomon’s wisdom.  So the temptation is often a desire for regression - to go back to the ways that once were, which at one time in history served the community quite well.

One of the hard lessons that I think is missed from the three temptations is found in the way the Accuser role points scripture at Jesus like a lawyer.  Throughout Jesus’ life, we see the Pharisees doing the same thing even to the point of calling Jesus a blasphemer for forgiving sins (see Mark 2:6-7 and Luke 5:21).  They said he was a lawbreaker (Matt. 15:1-3, Luke 6:1-4), crazy (Mark 3:21), and accused him of being in league with the devil himself (Matthew 12:24).  Did you catch the irony of that last one?  They accused him of being in league with the Accuser. 

All too often we miss the irony of these accusations when we legalistically accuse others of these same things today, rather than finding Jesus within the “least of these”.  This highlights a particularly perplexing problem - not only does evil disguise itself as divine, but the divine disguises itself as "evil" (or to put it another way: the divine becomes what we thought was evil).  William Blake summarized this concept with the following quote:

Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sin is the Religion of the Enemy and Avenger and not the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, named by the Divine Name.

Blake is not talking about Satanism here, but about a legalistic version of Christianity that behaves satanically under the banner of the cross.

In contrast to the legalism of the pharisees, we find that Jesus’ model of life is not a rigid, lifeless idol of legalistic concepts, but is rather very fluid.  I think Richard Rohr sums this up quite nicely in his book “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”:

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

The irony of turning Satan from a servant of God who serves a function as sifter into pure evil is that we end up playing that very accusing role ourselves!  And when we do this, Satan almost ceases to be under God, but becomes a sort of rival deity with godlike powers himself.  But this causes huge logical problems for us if we believe that Satan was created by God, and God predestined his mission - how does this fail to make God the author of evil?

Another ironic effect of the legalistic version of God is that Satan and Satanism become more alluring - it is not so much that the Satanist is rejecting the idea of God, but rather that he or she hates this legalistic God, who very well may deserve it!  Remember the story of Matthew Murray from an earlier section of this series?

The Weakness of Rules
In his brilliant book “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants”, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Vivek Ranadivé - who had decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team.  Ranadivé had decided on two principles - the first that he would never raise his voice.  The second had to do with strategy.  Gladwell wrote that “Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball”, and goes on to write:

He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. 

Ranadivé noticed that sometimes, a team would use what is called a “full court press” - that is, after scoring, the team would pressure the other team for the entire length of the court.  And he noticed that there was no rule against using this method all the time.  Ranadivé realized that the fact that teams did not use this method only widened the gap between teams with tall players who were good at shooting, and teams with what seemed like weaker players - girls who were not as tall and couldn’t shoot as well.  So, Ranadivé wondered, why did the “weak” teams play in a way that gave the “good” teams an advantage?

By training his team to have the endurance to be able to use a “full court press” all the time, every time, Ranadivé was able to advance all the way to the National Championships, where they lost because an overzealous referee started calling Ranadivé’s team for every touch they made, and Ranadivé was forced to tell them to stop using the full court press.

You see, the lesson Vivek Ranadivé teaches us is that “outsiders” are able to see the weakness of playing the game the conventional way.  Outsiders see that some of the “rules” are not really rules at all, but unspoken agreements which do not need to be followed, and actually create weaknesses.

Gladwell writes in one place:

Vivek Ranadivé stood on the sidelines as the opposing teams’ parents and coaches heaped abuse on him. Most people would have shrunk in the face of that kind of criticism. Not Ranadivé. [Said his daughter, Anjali:] It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before. Why should he care what the world of basketball thought of him? Ranadivé coached a team of girls who had no talent in a sport he knew nothing about. He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

Jesus’ response to the trials of the Accuser - and the way he conducted his entire ministry - shows us that he had also noticed the weaknesses in the legalistic, conventional wisdom of his day, and as an “outsider”, he had found an unconventional way to play the game.

Mara and Satan

Perhaps one of the greatest issues with taking the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert literally is the striking parallel that can be found in a Buddhist text:

Then Mara the evil one drew near to him, and said: “Let the Exalted One exercise governance, let the Blessed One rule.”

“Now what, O evil one, do you have in view, that you speak this way to me?”

“If the Exalted One were to wish the Himalayas, king of the mountains, to be gold, he might determine it to be so, and the mountains would become a mass of gold.”

The Exalted One responded: “Were the mountains all of shimmering gold, it would still not be enough for one man’s wants. He that has seen suffering—how should that man succumb to desires?”

Then Mara the evil one thought: “The Exalted One knows me! The Blessed One knows me!” And sad and sorrowful he vanished then and there.
Samyutta Nikaya 4.2.10

The striking similarity between this passage and the story of Jesus’ trials in the desert might cause some discomfort for people who take the story literally.  But if it is taken as a mythical story which uses symbolism to convey spiritual truths, one will not be surprised at all that a completely separate culture stumbled onto the same truths and wrote about them in similar words.

In science, we use mathematical formulas to express physical truths.  One must wonder - if we were to discover another culture on the far side of the galaxy that had arrived at a similar scientific understanding, would their formulas resemble ours, though slightly different?

And why would it be so surprising that another religion had discovered truth?

Perhaps because the accusing voices within have tried to put us in a relationship of domination over all other cultures, believing that we hold the monopoly on truth and righteousness, while they hold a monopoly on ignorance and stupidity, sin and evil?

Paul Carus, a scholar of religion and philosphy who lived from 1852-1919, has something of interest to say about the similarities between Satan and Mara in his book "The History of the Devil":

Mara is also called Papiyan the Wicked One or the Evil One, the Murderer, the Tempter. In addition he is said to be Varsavarti, meaning “he who fulfils desires.” Varsavarti, indeed, is one of his favorite names. In his capacity as Varsavarti, Mara personifies the fulfilment of desire or the triple thirst, viz., the thirst for existence, the thirst for pleasure, the thirst for power. He is the king of the Heaven of sensual delight.

There is a deep truth in this conception of Mara as Varsavarti. It means that the selfishness of man is Satan and the actual satisfaction of selfishness is Hell.

This reminds us of one of Leander’s Märchen, in which we are told that once a man died and awoke in the other world. There St. Peter appeared before him and asked him what he wanted. He then ordered breakfast, the daily papers, and all the comforts he was accustomed to in life, and this kind of life lasted for many centuries until he got sick of it and began to swear at St. Peter and to complain of how monotonous it was in Heaven, whereupon St. Peter informed him that he was in Hell, for hell is where everybody has his own sweet will, and heaven is where everybody follows God’s will alone. Similarly, according to the Buddhist conception, the heaven of sensual delight is hell, the habitation of the Evil One.

In my next post, we will explore how Jesus’ first sermon answered the accusing voices within the Domination System of his day, as well as exploring “Satan’s” development further.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?