NON-SITUATIONAL RESPONSES
A Study of the Book of Daniel
EXIT QUESTION: Am I Enough For You? (Part 2)
By J. Michael Strawn
This is the story of Belshazzar. There is specific interest in verses 22 and 23. Since the Lord puts himself in this position of being the corrector of human banality, we know several things that we can demonstrate from that appraisal alone. We know that the world is never out of control. We hear that phraseology a lot. "Someone is out of control." Wicked men are never out of control. Alcoholism isn’t a disease; it is a banality. Irresponsibility is not freedom; it is a banality. Suicide is not a right; it is a banality. Lack of shame is not maturity as many of our fellows in this culture think, especially as it is exhibited in our treatment of human sexuality, it is a banality. Many of the talk shows that come on and mask cynicism for intelligence and those who exhibit no shame in these kind of forums are not manifesting maturity, they are manifesting a banality. Surrender to contemporary entertainment forms is not harmless; it is a banality. These are just some of the obvious appraisals that we can make.
Daniel Chapter 5 teaches us that the Lord judges the banal. We are also told that at the heart, the core, or the essence of banality there is a loss. There is an absence of something. What is absent is the consciousness of God. Verse 22 says, "But you his son, O Belshazzar, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all this." This absence of the consciousness of God is manifested in pride. There was no humility before the Lord. Although Belshazzar knew what the Lord had done with his father during his reign—how he had been afflicted by the Lord because of his own banality--he operated in strict disregard of that. This created a sense of pride. It also is manifest of a mind that becomes a complete antipode to the God. In verse 23, he says of Belshazzar, "…you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven." It’s one thing to think thoughts that God doesn’t think. It’s one thing to think thoughts that he doesn’t want us to think. It’s quite another to become in life and in persona the absolute antipode to God, to set ourselves up against the Lord. This is precipitated because of the absence of the consciousness of the one who stands as the corrector of human banality.
There’s also a loss of the sense of the holy. When Belshazzar had the golden goblets brought to him and used them in such an irreverent setting, when he had distorted the high, holy and unique purpose for these things, he was judged. In the same way, the Lord has taken over our bodies as instruments. We are the kind of vessel that he uses, the sort of instrumentality that he uses in the world. We are told in the book of Colossians not to submit our members to just anything. They are to be submitted to the will of God. The reason we do that is because we maintain a sense of the holy. Peter would write in 1 Peter 1, "You be holy,’ the Lord says, ‘for I am holy." This absence of our understanding of God as the corrector of human banality brings many things. One of the things that it brings into creation that should never exist on the face of the earth is a loss of the sense of the holy.
It also involves a praise of human creativity. When they came together, when they lifted these golden goblets filled with wine in praise to the gods of silver, gold, bronze, iron, wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand, they were praising human creativity. It was human intelligence that had created these gods, that had turned these things of the material nature into gods to which they had bowed down that has put them in the idolatrous position, in a position of priority over their own minds. The absence of the consciousness of God brings on this thing that wishes to fill that vacuum which among other things is praise of human creativity. It also decentralizes absolute priority. In verse 23, Daniel would say of Belshazzar, "…But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways." He decentralized the absolute priority of God. We don’t live in a world that is out of control. No individual should ever put himself in a position as Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar did, to think that they stand at the peak of the pyramid and that all that they survey is under their control. Human ego must be brought under the corresponding control of the Lord. For if human will is not subordinated to the will of God then we run into all sorts of vast banalities, which lead to our destruction. We know that we live in a world that is controlled by the Lord, that he is the corrector of human banality.
(Daniel 6:1-23)
The idea of purview, sometimes used as a legal term involves extent, it also involves the aspect of meaning. The purview that the Lord has which will shape our temporal destiny is provided by the Lord because of his grace, because of his interest in us. If we drew a great block on the page and we decided to call this big block the extent of our temporal destiny, how far, how wide, what will be achieved. There will also be within that the concept of means. Human destiny is an entirety. The situation therefore, is not controlling. But it is a subsequency as we have previously discussed. There were no situational explanations for why it was that Daniel was not torn to pieces in the lion’s den because his temporal destiny was a purview of the Lord. It was under God’s control. Therefore, within this block of time that we have conceded upon the earth, we never look for situational logic as a means of navigating this particular set of waters. Because the purview of the situational is not located in the situation, has never been found there and never will be found there. It is found off the planet in the mind of the Lord. Our destiny is not the result of something, but our destiny comes about rather because it is known beforehand by the Lord and because he determines it. Therefore, that puts him in the position of being the cause of situations. Why Daniel was picked up in the situation presented in Chapter 1 is because his temporal destiny was a purview of the Lord. Why he escaped, along with his three friends in Chapter 2 from what appeared to be certain death was because their human temporal destinies were a purview of the Lord. That’s why the three young men escape death from the fiery furnace in Chapter 3. The destiny that we have been given will allow for certain situations to develop. This seems rather obvious although it does not always appear to us immediately. The Lord knows the extent and the meaning of our destiny because he is its purview. Since the Lord knows those things, he might put us in some very difficult circumstances. He might allow situations to develop to use for his own purposes, much as in the case of Job, a man whose temporal destiny was known by the Lord and determined by the Lord. Job was known by the Lord to be a man of faith, who in the midst of great difficulties and stresses and limited understanding would always respond non-situationally to circumstances. One might be persuaded to think that because the Lord had already known and established his destiny that he allowed those kinds of situations to develop in his life in order to be used for a greater purpose than perhaps Job himself could have ever imagined. So it could be for us. The Lord is the purview of our human temporal destiny. We are not controlled by situations. We are not operating on the basis of situational logic. We are operating on the fact that the Lord knows and has determined our destiny. Because of that since the destiny comes first, there will be situations develop that he will use for his greater purposes which may go beyond our own limited understanding. Certainly his purposes could even go beyond our own limited time upon the earth. So we have to respond again in the affirmative, "Yes, Lord, you are enough for us because you are the purview of human temporal destiny."
This context has to do with the various visions that Daniel was given. We discover in this overview that Daniel finds himself much in the same position as Nebuchadnezzar does in Chapter 2 and in Chapter 4. Nebuchadnezzar was given a dream, but he couldn’t understand the dream. An outside party has to come to him to explain the greater significance of the dream in both those instances. Of course, it was the profit Daniel. Then in Chapters 7, 8, the last part of Chapter 9 and Chapters 10-12 Daniel himself has visions. But like Nebuchadnezzar he cannot exactly understand the full import of the visions. And so an outside party is sent to Daniel in order to explain to him the greater significance of what he has just experienced. This is the angel, Gabriel.
That’s a very revealing situation for us to contemplate. We live in a kind of psychological present. That’s a legitimate term. The psychological present consists of the five senses, what we are able to apprehend through those senses and it will involve such thing as induction. We’ve had histories and experiences in the past that we try to remember and we attempt to create grand lessons for life from those inductions. So if we were burned previously six times by stoves, and we have a subsequent stove come along, we are very careful how we deal with the seventh stove. We want to know if the thing is still warm, if it’s been turned on recently, or if it is red hot or getting hotter. We want to be careful with that. But, in any event, all of life has to be converted into what we call the psychological present. When I look across the room from where I’m seated at the desk, I see the door to the office. The door is converted into a psychological present. Light rays hit the door, race across the gap that geographically (in terms of spatial distance) separates me from the door and I have an image of the door in my mind as the light waves come in and affect the retina. This is all translated into my brain and that is the door. That’s very important, that’s very significant. It’s very handy to have a psychological present. That’s why you can find the door and get out of your office and find where your house is that you can come back to after work. You know where the lawnmower is in the garage. You are able to move the baby away from something that might harm the baby and you can find your way to the grocery store. All of these things are helpful. It’s very helpful for David to be able to have the 9-foot image of Goliath converted into a psychological present so that he knows if Goliath is standing to the right, not to the left of the large rock. He also is able to know where the stream is. The stream isn’t in his head. All of this knowledge is converted into a psychological present. Of course this is a microscopic view of things in relationship to the whole, even if we do not take into consideration the Lord’s perception of these things. If we just look at what human beings are capable of knowing our psychological present is a microscopic view in relationship to everything that we can know about. This of course can amount to what we have referred to in another categorization as the "ignorance bubble."
Everybody has a psychological present. It is something that God has given to us. But we have to understand the nature of it. So we will address ourselves to that. Let’s use the term that we will refer to as situational time. Situational is an adjective. Time is something that human beings have to deal with. We find "time" very difficult to define. But because time is associated with situations, we will be able to refer to it as situational time. When we use the words "situational time" we will be talking about that almost in a kind of synonymity with events and circumstances. For unless we have events and circumstances to fill time as we think of it, we really have no awareness of what time is. So there was a situational time where these young men were under the sentence of death in Chapter 2. There was another situational time when they were confronted with the fiery furnace in Chapter 3. There was another situational time with the lion’s den in Daniel Chapter 6. There are circumstances in the life of Paul when he was beaten, when he was shipwrecked, when he was in prison, when he was cold and hungry. These amount to a situational time.
Let’s suggest that human intelligence is what we call "tensed." From a situational point of view, we think in terms of past, present and future. We have a sense of the "past"—those things that are no longer what we think of as present. We have some awareness of the present, but it is very difficult for us to define the present for the moment you say the word "present," it is already in the past. We also have the sensation of something that is upcoming. We don’t know very much about it. We may have some aspirations regarding it. But we will refer to that as the "future." If our minds, having been created by God are tensed, then that constitutes a rather monolithic and large limitation as far as we are concerned. We might refer to it as a disadvantage, but instead of that let’s refer to it as a kind of limitation. I will draw the conclusion from this that the mind of man, the intelligence of man as created by the Lord himself, is a tensed entity and that it will forever be tensed, that it will never be able to get out of its limitation of dealing with what it thinks of as the past, present and the future.
A lot of things are dependent upon that tensedness. One of the things that results is that it causes anxiety. In Matthew Chapter 6, Jesus would say to those who are operating on the basis of faith, do not worry about what you eat or drink or wear, God will give you these things—you pursue the eternal kingdom of God. In terms of the pagans, who did not operate on the basis of the nature of faith, they were concerned because their minds were tensed. They were concerned operating in the present about what was to come, about how other means of supplies could be added to their well being and about how they would be able to take care of themselves as time unfolds, as the future begins to unwrap itself before them. They were operating from a tensed position whereas Jesus would say to those who are operating on faith you are not to operate on your tensedness even though that is part of your human makeup.
In Luke 12, the rich fool was tensed in his interpretation of the way the universe operates so he goes about accumulating over a period of time. He is saying, "If I move from past to present to future with a common thread of accumulation, I will be able to get to a point where I can say, ‘Well, soul, take your ease. You have much laid up for many years to come.’ Of course the Lord refers to such an individual as a fool in that context. He is not a fool because he his mind is tensed. He is a fool because he operated on the tensedness.
In Exodus Chapter 14, when the people of God have left Egypt and now have found themselves trapped up against the Red Sea. They look up and see the chariots of pharaoh coming in attack formation. They come to conclude, "It’s only a matter of time before we are destroyed. Right at this moment we are alive, but here comes a time shortly when we will all be dead." It was the same kind of tensed interpretation that we see all throughout the scripture by minds that are situated. The fact that their minds are tensed didn’t cause the problem. They sinned because they operated (they chose to seek explanations of their situations) based on the their tensedness rather than seeking tenseless, non-situational explanations or interpretations from the Lord.
In Exodus Chapter 17, when the people of God arrive at a place called Rephidim and there is no water and they do not have sufficient provisions, they reach a conclusion, "Well it’s only as matter of time before we die. There are physical forces acting upon us. There are chemical realities that have to be realized here. Since not enough water has been brought with us and since there’s no chance of finding these kinds of provisions in the massive amounts that would be needed, there’s no other reaction for us to take except anger, indignation, discouragement and outright faithlessness." So they come to Moses and complain, "Give us water." And Moses might have said, "Well look over here in my hip pocket. That’s where I carry enough for you and for everyone else." That, of course, was not available to him either. So why is it then that they responded the way they did? They responded because they operated on the tensedness of their minds.
Another one of the things that this tensed condition that we have can produce doubt. We can often doubt the word of God, the power of God. As evidenced in Exodus 17 at Rephadim, the people doubted God and they were found to be in a position of doubting the statements that he had made to them. This certainly shows up in the book of Deuteronomy Chapter 1, as Moses rehearses what happened to them when they came to Kadesh Barnea. The 12 spies go over and spend 40 days on a reconnaissance mission in the land of promise and then come back and make their report to the people and to the leaders of Israel. We bear in mind that the men who were picked were leaders of the various tribes. 10 of these men, who had been on the reconnaissance mission, operating from a mental position of being tensed reached conclusions that bring the word of God into doubt. They manifested to the population all that they experienced. They talked to them about the fortifications, the walls that were up to the sky. They described the giants in the land, which would serve as a distinct advantage to the Canaanites and very much a disadvantage (from a situational point of view) to the Israelites as they came in on the invasion sweep. They talked to them about the populations. They were vastly outnumbered. Looking at this from a situational point of view, converting everything that they saw into a psychological present, brought doubt to bear in their thinking. So the statement could be made from Deuteronomy Chapter 1 that they all went to their tents and there they depended upon tensed interpretations and reached conclusions that were not warranted. They doubted the will of God. God interpreted that doubt as faithlessness.
Often we are given a suggestion by very well meaning people, and perhaps we have contemplated it ourselves that "God gives us a brain" or that "we need to seek a balance" between the scripture and human intelligence. All of my life being reared in the churches of Christ it was suggested to me that the scripture will always agree with human rationality. That simply is not true, cannot be true, never has been true. There’s nothing from a tensed point of view that can explain how a dead body, being in a tomb for four days can get up and walk out. There’s nothing rational from a tensed point of view about manna appearing miraculous on the desert floor or water by the millions of gallons flowing from a flat rock. There’s nothing to be found in agreement with human rationality as we think of it in this tensed posture that can explain how the Red Sea can open up and several million Israelites can walk across almost as one man and then why the Egyptians that follow will be bogged down in the mud that once was not mud and covered over by these tons of water. These simply do not agree with human rationality. Because we are like this—because we are tensed—and because God has created us like that, if we are going to make such statements, such as "God gave us a brain he expects us to act upon it" or that "we must balance" between his revelation an the operation of our own intelligence here in the universe, we have to recognize the fact that human intelligence—this brain that God has given us, this mind that he has placed in us is a tensed entity. What it always does, and the only thing it will be ever be able to do is to convert the things of its immediate experience into some kind of psychological present. If that’s true, as I believe it is, because we are like this faith carries with it a tension between two things. There is a tension between, on the one hand, tensed minds, and on the other hand, tenseless interpretations. When we open up the book of Daniel and begin to read we are not reading mere historical accounts of these events, we are reading tenseless interpretations--interpretations that are of a spontaneous nature that are not controlled nor determined by time nor natural or physical causation. Our minds will always be tensed I am persuaded. We will never be able to escape that condition. But in spite of the fact that we are tensed, in spite of the fact that we have knowledge really only of those things that we can convert into a psychological present, there exist also opposite us in the universe something very different. That thing that is very different amounts to a symbolic mass that purports to deliver tenseless interpretations of the same things that our tensed minds are trying to understand. There will forever and must be a kind of tension that will exist between a mind that is tensed and the fact in the universe of such tenseless interpretations. Situational time, therefore, simply cannot be reduced to the psychological present. Time is much more than the psychological present.
In Daniel 1:17, when we are told that this young man had been given special acuity to understand dreams and visions, we know that this as of necessity has to be beyond the psychological present. When he was dealing with all of these issues, or when all four of these men were dealing with circumstances, although the material content was converted into a psychological present, they operated and depended on tenseless interpretations to understand and to respond to the world of material content. When you stand before Nebuchadnezzar and in full view, or in full knowledge of the super-heated furnace, you can sense the heat radiation. This is part of the psychological present. As you listen to the king threaten you and tell you that certain death awaits you this is part of the psychological present. When Daniel is faced with Darius and he hears the roars of the lion and he thinks inductively about what has happened to such men who have been placed in the lion’s den, this has been converted into the psychological present. But notice that neither in Chapter 3 nor in Chapter 6 that these operate by reducing those situational times into psychological presents. Just the opposite, being tensed as they were, being limited to the psychological present, being limited by this tensed nature of their minds, they operated by an act of the will on something that was very much outside of situational time--the tenseless interpretations of God.
When we pick up scripture we have to get out of our minds this unfortunate appraisal of the text as nothing more than a collection of historical events from which we draw moral aphorisms and we can see a manifestation of great courage. We’re seeing here something very, very different. We’re seeing tenseless interpretations. When Daniel was given wisdom and knowledge and understanding, when he became absorbed by and a representative of the pushed intelligence, what he had been given certainly went beyond the limitations of the psychological present. The Lord gave Nebuchadnezzar a dream, but it required another party to explain to him its meaning. When Nebuchadnezzar had the dream, the prerequisite for Nebuchadnezzar’s understanding the dream, is that it had to pass through someone who had access to tenseless interpretations. Daniel will say of himself in chapter 2, "My wisdom is not greater than that of other men. Why? Because like other men, I am tensed. But he says, there is a God in heaven that reveals such things." The prerequisite for understanding Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams in Chapter 2 and in Chapter 4, and the prerequisite for understanding the visions that Daniel himself had in Chapters 7 through 12 is that they have to pass through some source of tenseless interpretations.
Perhaps we have made a mistake in thinking that situational time is tensed. Perhaps instead of time being tensed, it is simply those of us who appraise time who are tensed. I come to that conclusion because the Lord is spontaneous to all things, because he is the one who will determine the outflow of all situational time, and that is evidenced in all of these visions. Especially the ones that Daniel has, but that is also something that we see in Chapter 2. In the vision that Daniel is prepared to interpret for King Nebuchadnezzar, he says God is going to do this in world history. History is not tensed. Time is not tensed. The way you see it is tensed. But that is not necessarily situational time. When Daniel was looking into these visions that he was given in the chapters indicated above, it certainly is to be noted that from the Lord’s point of view, time is not tensed. The Lord is proximate to all of these occasions in history. But we are not. We are not because God has not given us that kind of proximity. We live with minds that are tensed, converting everything into the psychological present. But it would come to light that neither time nor the specific circumstances of our lives would inherently be tensed. It is the human mind that is tensed. Time is not tensed. Situational time is not to be understood as tensed. But we often do that. We talk about the passing of time when we are in moments of illness and moments of crisis when we are fever ridden or distressed, and the hours of the night seem to pass by slowly. When we are uncomfortable, when we have a sensation of pain, we have a sense of tensedness—when will this end? It’s getting worse. We have a tendency to think that time itself is tensed—this is someday going to come to an end. Perhaps that is because our minds have imposed the kind of tensedness on situational time, which in fact and inherently does not itself exist except in the human mind.
Tensed interpretations have to do a lot with things that we can isolate as initial conditions. The thought is if you have initial conditions of such a proportion that they can be understood as necessary conditions, then that will produce an enhanced future. This is also the way frequently that the past is interpreted relative to the present. Historians are fond of thinking that the past creates the present. What they really mean is that time is to be tensed if we are going to understand it. For example, that there were certain initial conditions, for instance, that were existent in Germany just prior to the opening of the twentieth century; and that these things were of such a variety that we could classify them as necessary conditions to precipitate World War I. Then World War I would precipitate what would ultimately result starting in September 1, 1939 as World War II. It’s a tensed interpretation of time.
Well, where is the source of such a tensed interpretation? Historians always write form the posture of the psychological present. But they see time as tensed. The Lord himself does not see it as tensed. We have a book that purports to give us tenseless interpretations. It’s often thought that the prerequisite for knowledge will be subjective conditions and objective conditions. We believe this to be the case. Subjective conditions have to do with human intelligence, the way in which the mind that surveys the circumstance operates. This is one of the suggestions that Descartes made although he is not the inventor of the concept of subjective conditions. That thinking had long been experienced before he ever came along and was able to articulate it this way. But it also depends we are told on objective conditions. It is suggested to us to believe that something like knowledge is objective if it is devoid of subjective conditions whatsoever and is uniquely dependent upon objective ones. Well, we can see this same kind of thing happening at Kadesh Barnea in Deuteronomy Chapter 1 and Numbers Chapters 12-14. They believe that knowledge is built upon this and so they acted accordingly on what they thought was authentic "knowing" but they were operating out of a tensed mental posture. It comes to light, however, from the book of Daniel, and from other passages throughout scripture, that knowledge is dependent uniquely upon non-situational conditions. Ultimate truth and invariant knowledge is dependent not upon subjective and objective conditions, but rather upon non-situational conditions. Those are provided uniquely by the Lord. If we decide that tensed minds are in a position of priority over the scripture, then we will turn the scripture from a batch, from a series, from a collection of tenseless interpretations into something of our own creation and it will not be salutary.
The whole idea of a periodicized text, a philosophy which we have long embraced in the churches of Christ and among other peoples as well, that the scripture was written long ago, in another historical framework, in another language outside of our own cultural cues and understandings is a concept formed by the tensed intelligence of man. Consequently there is a vast distance that sets itself up between those of us living in the present-- that’s part of the tensed application of our mind--and the past wherein the scripture was written. So the question then becomes how can we understand the past? The text is trying to say you don’t need to understand the past. You need to understand the present and that is the reason for the provision of tenseless interpretations. But you could never read scripture as a tenseless interpretation of the world in which we live while reading it with tensed minds and insisting that only the tensed intelligence of man is capable of being the prerequisite for understanding scripture itself. That makes no sense whatsoever.
So we come to a conclusion, or perhaps better said to an awareness that perhaps the human mind is tensed. And that it needs to recognize its tensedness and to operate on something entirely different. In Daniel 10:12, it is stated of him by the angel Gabriel, "From the day that you set your heart to know these things and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard." This is an admission of humility. This self-surrender of his mind before the Lord’s mind is an admission of his tensedness. He doesn’t understand everything. Operating form his own limited perspective, he would never be able to grasp the breadth of what needs to be known. So he comes before the Lord and he admits his tensedness. He would state, "I wish to humble myself before you Lord. I wish to humble myself before your tenseless interpretations of time and space and physics and physiology." So when we understand or come into proximity with crisis, we have two vantagepoints that are open to us. (1) We can try to behold the crisis, whatever it may be from the flatfooted position of a tensed mind holding on to human priority, or (2) we can operate from a complete antipode to our mental nature, which means by an act of the will, we accept the tenseless interpretations provided us by revelation.
Jesus himself, when he was in the flesh, apparently exhibited this kind of tensedness. As he prays in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest and execution, he asks the Lord, "Let this cup pass from me." A clear indication of his tensedness, not looking forward to that which was to come, wishing for the status quo to somehow be maintained, at least to avoid the pain of crucifixion. In Philippians Chapter 2, it is said of the Lord when he came to the earth that he "emptied himself" perhaps one of the things that is implied in that self-emptying is the taking on of a kind of tensedness. He operated on faith as well while he was here upon the earth and in complete trust in his heavenly father.
This tensedness that we experience in our lives has a tendency to promote something that becomes very dangerous. We can refer to it as human motility—the ability to move, to act. Humans cling to human motility. In James 4:13-17, we have a picture of these Jewish businessmen thinking to spend a year in another market and make money. They are criticized for this motility because of their tensed conditions and because they failed to recognize their tensedness. That was demonstrated by the statement of James to them. "You don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You are but a vapor that appears for a little while. You should have operated on something else—a tenseless interpretation of this particular agenda. This should have been submitted to the will of God." Because they didn’t they were accused of the sin of pride.
Situational time was never apparently intended to be subject to tensed intelligences. It was, however, always intended to be subordinated to tenseless interpretations. Therefore, we find ourselves in an interesting posture in the world. Being given by the Lord a kind of tensed intelligence and yet told by him that we can operate upon it only sparingly. It is helpful to me to find where the door is. It is helpful to me to find the car keys and where I left the car in the parking lot. It is helpful to me to pick out the cheaper brands at the market. It is helpful to me to recognize the face of my mother and other such nice things. I can even find the church building on Sunday morning. This is very helpful to me. But beyond all of that, if I lay upon my tensed intelligence a burden and an agenda that it simply was never designed to carry, then of course we can expect the kind of world to develop that has developed. We can expect this to show up in our societies at large. It will show up in our churches. It will show up in our families. It will show up in relationships between parents and children. It will show up internally as we deal with our own personalities.
Suppose that we think of situational time and scripture itself then being reduced to a psychological present. If Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 had been reduced to a psychological present, it would have told David nothing about the situation. If situational time is converted into a psychological presence at Kadesh Barnea then you end up operating on the basis of faithlessness. If we take scripture, the tenseless interpretations of the Lord, and we attempt to reduce them to the psychological present, then we have created a tremendous error—an error that is so devastating it can pose a serious problem to our ultimate salvation. Of course, when we are reducing situational time and scripture to a psychological present, this is an exact manifestation of representational movement. The fortifications, very much a part of situational time that the spies saw in the book of numbers, were all converted into psychological representations, psychological presents. They didn’t bring the fortifications back to demonstrate them to the people. They explained the presence of these fortifications and the significance of them in words to the population gathered that day and that night. Of course, scripture itself since we look at the words on the page and the words on the page are not on our minds but the thoughts, the impressions, the images of them are in our minds. This is an exact movement of a representational nature. However, this kind of exposition that is a conversion of situational time and scripture to the psychological present is wrong. It’s a sin; it’s a violation of the mental function that we call faith. What’s supposed to happen is this: Tenseless interpretations are to be thrown out over situational time, over the content of situational time.
Scripture is to fulfill its role as a tenseless interpretation of all things. Therefore, we end up with what we can refer to as the doctrine of coincidence. We have two things that are coincident—tenseless interpretations which originate in the mind of the Lord and have been broadcast live because of the revelation and to the other hand the psychological present or the tensed mind of the individual. These two things are coincidental and while they are coincidental, they certainly are not coequal. This doctrine of coincidence is taught throughout the scripture or so it seems very apparent. The psychological present on the one hand and tenseless interpretations on the other are both focused on exactly the same things and exist mentally coincidentally as possibilities for interpreting situational time. They are both focused on situational time and in the case of the tenseless interpretations, they are sourced and focus on scripture, the revelation of God. However, the psychological present is not the product of revelation, but the product of human intelligence. The psychological present can be extended beyond the individual and can take on sociological proportions. After all when we describe the movement of socialization, we are suggesting to those coming into our society, the foreign born, plus those who are born naturally to us, that there is a psychological present that we adults share. The interpretation around the psychological present is going to be made available to them and they are expected to operate on this shared psychological present as we teach them to operate on it. This would explain recent jargon that has developed in our society such as "what is politically correct" or this word that we hear almost in every instance directing types of behavior as "appropriate" or "inappropriate." These are determinations that are sourced by the psychological present not by tenseless interpretations.
Go to Part III of this study to continue our discussion.