A NON-SITUATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Generalizations from the Book of Daniel

PART 2

By J. Michael Strawn

Continuing with our study of the book of Daniel, what we want to do is to make a generalization from the text. It is a little difficult to talk about, not because it is not true, but because it is certainly counter-intuitive. Here is the way we can begin.

Let’s again refer to our drawing, where we have "non-situational intelligence" on the left-hand side. We have a little pipe, which is the index action marked "pushed." God pushes (and presumably the Spirit of God is involved in that because he always represents the linking of the eternal and the temporal realities) into this huge square that we call the "world situation." Now when he gets in there, it branches out in at least two ways. It branches out into a non-situational explanation. That is to say, understanding that could not be gained by man unless it had been revealed to him. But it takes place within the world situation; and, therefore, one would think that when we pray for wisdom that is what we are asking for—the wisdom of the Lord. It is not good old common sense. It is a non-situational understanding of the world situation.

The second branch we will call "non-situational outcomes" and we have suggested that it is synonymous with power. Power is extruded, pushed, into the world situation. That is how Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah got out of the fiery furnace. That is how Daniel got out of the lions’ den. It is also what explains the various kingdoms that were revealed to Daniel in Chapter 2 when Nebuchadnezzar has his dream. Daniel indicates that there is going to be a successive wave of kingdoms. Why are those kingdoms there and why are they known? Because they are the result of power being extruded from heaven into the world situation; and the prophecies that are made all through the book certainly manifest power of God into the world situation. Now, let’s draw a generalization.

Let’s use the word "spontaneous" and let’s define "spontaneous" or "spontaneity" in this way. It involves (1) the absence of time and (2) the absence of physical and natural causation. Let us suggest that the relationship between the non-situational intelligence, which is God, and the world situation where we live is a spontaneous relationship. Here is why we say that. From the early part of this century, when Einstein developed his theories of relativity, it became acceptable to man to think that all interactions on the earth take time. They do not happen spontaneously. That is to say, without the presence of time. If one drops back to strike one’s neighbor, it takes time to bring the fist back and then launch it and finally to make contact with the neighbor’s nose. A rock falling down the mountain requires time to get to the bottom. All interactions require time to take place. This is something with which we are very familiar. However, time is not a factor for the Lord. For he understands all things, sees all things.

Suppose we illustrate this. On one side of the page let’s put "spontaneity." Let’s call that a "non-situational understanding." On the other side of the page, let’s write, "time." And let’s call that a "situational view." Now I’m going to suggest that time and spontaneity are antipodes, opposites of each other. I could make a case that time and eternity are antipodes. But let’s look at time and spontaneity. When we deal with time, we know that there is a distinction between the known and the unknown. Our intelligence is very much gripped by the factor of time. Because of that, we have a tendency to read the text from within the framework of the demands that time makes on us in the way in which we think. That is a situated intelligence. I’m going to propose that the scripture is there to help us wrench time out of our thinking. Now perhaps we can’t do it totally; but we could do it enough in order to think in a non-situational way.

Here’s how we will try to depict this. We will do a little drawing. In the middle of the page lettering from top to bottom, let’s write the word "REVELATION", with the "R" at the top and the "N" at the bottom. Let this be a dividing point. We often think of the text as being written before the fact because of the prophecies. For instance, in Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. This is a revelation. We would say that the successive kingdoms are not facts, therefore revelation is written before the fact. To the right of the word revelation and some distance over write the word "fact." Here is a manifestation of what I suppose we generally think of as the relationship of the word of God to the facts of material existence—that it is written before the fact. Matthew Chapter 6 tells us not to worry about what we will eat, drink or wear. Now later, the fact, we believe, will be addressed by the power of God.

However, suppose we redefine the word "fact." This time instead of defining the word "fact" as something which man experiences, suppose we define the word "fact" as only that which God himself experiences. It must certainly be understood that the Lord had already experienced all of these successive kingdoms mentioned in the revelation in Daniel Chapter 2. The people in question had not experienced it, but God had. Because time is not a factor for the Lord. All things are spontaneous in their relationship to him. Neither time nor physical or natural causation are factors. To the left of the word "revelation," some distance over, let’s write that word "fact." And this time, let’s say that the revelation is written AFTER the fact. Suppose we take this position. The prophecies strung throughout the book of Revelation are written after the fact. We can say that because God had already experienced these things. To him they were facts. God has already experienced my death. I haven’t, but he has. Because he is not subject to time. Therefore, revelation written in this book is after that fact and not before that fact. This works if, and only if, we redefine the word fact as that which God himself experiences.

When we think about facts, we deal with the question of the known and unknown. We deal with questions of predictability and probability. How is this going to work? Will it take shape? How is this particular need of mine going to be resolved? The Lord said in Matthew 6, he is going to bless me but when, where and how will he do that? We have prayed that our loved one might be brought up off the bed of sickness and infirmity. He tells us to pray for that end, but will he do it? We proceed as if first comes the word and then later the fact. But we know that God knows all things and, therefore, God has experienced all of these things from before the creation of the world. I am known by God before the fact of my existence because my life to him is a known and established fact. We can see that exhibited in the life of Jeremiah. He told Jeremiah in 1:5, "I knew you before you were born." (You were a fact to me before you were born. Your life and your ministry were a fact to me, therefore what I give to you--the revelation that you will bring to these people--is written after the fact and not before.)

Now that changes things appreciably and here’s why. From the eternal view, facts take shape because of revelation. On the temporal side, the relationship between revelation and fact is always shifting. We wonder how God is going to do something? That leaves a lot of room for human appraisal. Furthermore when we assume the revelation is written before the fact, we deal with such entities as "then" which is revelation is and the "now" which would go under the categorization of "fact." That seems to involve a time lag. But take note that if we consider facts as being experienced by God and therefore the revelation is written after the fact, the relationship of revelation to fact is a spontaneous connection—not a time connection. Here’s why. Fact is a manifestation of eternity. This is what God has seen; this is what God has experienced in his own mind. Revelation comes from God but it shows up in the temporal as something that he himself controls. This fact is uniquely God’s experience and the revelation is something he uniquely symbolizes. These are his symbols of every fact in the material world. There is no time lag there whatsoever. I believe that if we were to read the revelation as after the fact in just this light that we would be forced to wrench time out of our consideration, to wrench time out of our thinking.

In the Exodus sequence, when the Lord had brought the Israelites down to the Red Sea, they were concerned about the text or the revelation being given before the fact-- the fact that they would be rescued out of Pharaoh’s hands, they would be brought out of Egypt. God had said this, but there appears to be a time lag. What happens now that they are up against the Red Sea with no apparent way out? But if they had known that what they had been told by God was after the fact (God had already experienced their extraction, rescue this event at the Red Sea, and their deliverance), this would have changed how they looked at that situation. Because they would have known time is not a factor.

But for human minds, time always is a factor. In every sense of the term it is a factor. In the case of the Israelites at the Red Sea, they are thinking, "well there is not much time left now. I see the chariots of Pharaoh coming. Within a matter of moments perhaps we’ll all be dead out here on the banks of the Red Sea because we are running out of time and there is no way out." But the Lord sends the pillar of fire that night and he keeps the hoards of Egypt at bay while he leisurely opens a dry path through the Red Sea because all things are spontaneous to the Lord. He’s already experienced these as facts. They haven't. They had the promise of God, so they knew what was going to happen.

Time is not a factor here; time does not enter in to how God looks at the situation. So we shouldn’t be concerned about that either. Sometimes in terms of retirement, people ask me, "How are you going to be able to retire? You don’t have any money. It doesn’t look like it is going to be falling into your lap any time soon. Time is a factor. Time is running out." Everything acts as a clock. But if we read this book correctly, it seems that we are supposed to wrench time out of our thinking, and spontaneity must be the key that we use to read the scriptures.

In Exodus Chapter 17, at Rephidim, once again they sense the clock ticking. God has said, "they’re going to be given the land of Canaan. Now we are out here in Rephidim. There is no water. We can’t get any water. We didn’t bring enough reserve. It is only a matter of time now and then we are going to die." They turn in anger on Moses. And he says, "I don’t know why you come to me. I’m in the same position you are." He had no hidden reserves and had no ability to make water. Time was a factor to them. They are running out of it. They can’t get back to Egypt quick enough. They are worried because revelation in their minds was written before the fact. Time became an element. There is what God said, but now here is the situation. Or God said that "then," but what about this "now" situation? Time involves itself and it looks like it has this insidious ability to direct us away from faith.

Now on the other hand, if at Rephidim, they understand that God had already experienced this episode of theirs, they would have been comforted and said, "The revelation is given to us and God says he will take care of us, we must trust him, and he will give us the land of Canaan." That would have changed their appraisal of the situation because they would realize that spontaneity is key in understanding their circumstance. Time is not a factor here. It never will be factor. In the New Testament, in Matthew 8 we have the example of this great man of faith, the centurion. He had apparently learned this dramatic lesson that we are supposed to learn in our relationship to God. Time was not a factor to him. When he approaches the Lord and asks him to heal his servant, Jesus offers to go with him and he tells him not to bother, time is not a factor. He knows that Jesus relationship to all things is spontaneous. He would say, "Your relationship to non-situational explanations (God’s revelation about the situation) and to non-situation outcomes (God’s power working in the situation) is spontaneous. Time is not a factor, just speak the word and my servant will be healed." And the Lord said that is great faith.

Time is a constant problem to the Israelite nation and time is a constant problem to us. This has filtered down to the way we look at the situations that confront us on a regular basis. Time and its effects are enormous. They have the ability to limit our appraisal of God and limit our appreciation of the role of scripture and the way in which the revelation of God works. If you and I look at all of our situations and we know that God has already experienced these situations for us, God has already experienced the way that these will be resolved, then we understand that time is not a factor and we are not constantly saying well "when and if and how is he going to do this?" Because those are questions associated with time. We are no longer interested in making appraisals of things on the basis of time. Spontaneity is a unique gift that the Lord has given us.

There is an interesting article in the recent issue of Atlantic Monthly by E. O. Wilson. Now Dr. Wilson is an atheist, or at least gives that impression. He is an elderly gentleman now. He has been doing a lot of biological research through the years and is quite well known in that field. He specialized in ants and the socialization of ants and how those communities operate. He writes in this recent issue of his appraisal that morality is based in our genetics. It is what he calls epigenetic—it depends upon genetics. He furthermore goes on to state that there are people who are gripped by a brain disorder that he calls hyper-religiosity. And he describes a thing called dominant hierarchy which he says is a trait that is regularly depicted by organized mammalian societies, where you have two wolves fighting over the same resource or same she-wolf. One flexes and shows its teeth and snarls and is prepared to fight. The other one gives in, turns away allowing the other to be dominant.

Dr. Wilson suggests that this is the way we are in relationship to God. We have a dominant hierarchy here and those of us on the earth just sort of turn away, letting this invisible God (which he would believe to be a myth) to have dominance. He would take that position because Dr. Wilson doesn’t want spontaneity. He doesn’t want something that can’t be explained genetically. He is not interested in something that cannot be understood physically. He’s not interested in understanding behavior that is not biologically based. He would say that religion is a sort of cultural or social elaboration of these fears that we have.

Now what happens if we allow the text to be socially elaborated? Would it not be the case that our thinking is no longer non-situational but quite situated within the framework of man and what he thinks to be wise? Suppose we drew a unity this way. On the left-hand side of the page we write the word "text" and we draw a line and at the end of the line we put "socially and culturally elaborated." The text of scripture is socially and culturally elaborated. I have not a doubt in my mind that that is exactly what has happened to us in the churches. Certainly to us in the churches of Christ if not all churches. We have allowed the revelation of God to be socially and culturally elaborated. We have put it within a situational framework.

I think there are two reasons why we want to do that. One of these is that adaptation is close to our hearts. We adapt ideas on a regular basis. For instance, conflict resolution, which comes from the legal field now is being brought into the churches as a way of trying to deal with various conflicts within congregational life. Or the way we have used the term "community" to try and describe the nature of the church. The fact is that the term "community" and the concept of community is a sociological term. The church, according to the text, is not a community; the church is a vine. We have an organic relationship running over the hinge into eternity. We are not a community. We are a vine. And we ought to act as a vine, with every part connected inextricably to the life-giving flow that comes from the Lord. Adaptation is not what we are interested in. And yet suddenly in many ways, unaware of the fact that this is taking place, we become subject to adapting to the ways of the world. Because we have adapted common sense to the text or the text to common sense. We adapt the psychological investigations of man to the text, or the text to psychological investigations of man. And so we have no choice but to admit a foul practice on our part. Maybe not in every case by everybody and in every way; but the fact of the matter is we are guilty in an aggregate sense of social and cultural elaboration of the revelation of God. Adaptation is one of the driving forces of that.

A second driving force of the social and cultural elaboration of the revelation is that we want to retain credibility. We sense that unless we formulate our response to things on the basis of how men see it, we cannot retain credibility. Now we can do that, we can adapt and we can push for the retaining of credibility. We can allow for a socially and culturally elaborated biblical text and still hold on to doctrines, ethics and soteriology and not have to take our hand off of these things at all. Adaptation and retention of credibility are key concepts because they are important to human thinking. We can’t adapt unless we are involving ourselves in incorporating the ideas of the world in small ways and in larger ways. That is what is going to happen if we see revelation as having been written before the fact. But my persuasion is that it is written after the fact, and therefore, it is not subject to cultural or social elaboration.

Now in episodes that sometimes we run into in the church where we talk about these things and people run screaming from the room in anger or being dismayed or shocked. I suggest it is because we have a confrontation between intelligences here; and it shows up precisely at that point. We are talking about a non-situational intelligence being pushed into the world situation, and showing up in those two precise ways: non-situational explanations (which we have trouble accepting) and non-situational outcomes (which are difficult for us to expect because the way in which we understand the relationship of revelation to human intelligence.)

Throughout the book of Daniel, there is this constant conflict between these two intelligences and the frame of reference that this poses for man, the change that this requires of him. We know several things about the Lord from the book of Daniel. We know that he is superior. He is depicted as superior to man in every way. And he is also superior to history and we know that in all of the statements that were relayed to us through Daniel about how these succeeding kingdoms would take shape and what would become the destiny of certain men. Belshazzar was warned the kingdom would be taken from him. Nebuchadnezzar was warned. Darius began to learn that he was not in control of events. So God is superior to man and to history.

We furthermore learn that God is good and that his goodness shows up in several ways. We learn that he protects those who cling to him, who trust him. We learn that he provides for those who wish to shelter under his wing. And we know that he guides them with this non-situational intelligence. They become footprints. Footprints go where the guy walking through the wet sand is headed. They are not going to go in another direction from the man who left them. There is going to be absolute coherence between the footprints and the guy walking on the wet sand. This is irretrievable. It is a fact built into the universe. And so it is in our relationship to the Lord. We are as footprints following the one whom has left us here.

The church in the way they suffered persecution, seen in 1 Peter Chapters 1 through Chapter 5, were footprints of God who had left them there. They had to maintain that posture. They have to know who they are. They are footprints and that is all they are. We could say it is a little bit more than that, a little richer than that. That is true. But what we are trying to do here is to give the maximum glory to the Lord and to get any focus off of ourselves. In just that precise way, we are dealing with the unseen reality. We, on the temporal side, are the footprints and on the eternal side we have the unseen power that is making us what we are. So we have to stay in this disciplined relationship of footprint to the one walking. Now if we allow for cultural and social elaboration that is going to become a problem.

The third thing that we learn from the book of Daniel about God is that he redefines the world of facts. We live in the world situation as we have tried to describe it. And spontaneity is accounted for by the presence of certain ideas in our minds. We are told that in Romans 1. We know that God exists and that he is powerful, and that he is the creator of all things. Now later as adults we act to break that spontaneity that exists. As we were discussing earlier, Dr. E. O. Wilson in his article, "The Biological Basis of Morality," published in the Atlantic Monthly, May, 1998 draws a contrast with us on that particular point. He says that morality has to do with definitions of moral sentiments. That these could be accounted for by the neurological sciences and by looking at certain endocrine responses to see why those sentiments are there. He says that there is a genetics of moral sentiments. There is an inheritability of psychological and physiological processes. He is attempting to deny that there is any spontaneity between our minds and God; and that this could account for ethical behavior. He also talks about a prescribing gene and that if we could isolate the gene that houses all of these moral sentiments, then we could understand morality. He talks about the development of moral sentiments as products of the interaction of genes and our environment. Then he describes what he calls the "deep history of moral sentiments" (why do we respond the way we do?) His conclusion is that these things have often helped us to survive. So the idea is that man and his morality is an interaction between himself and the world situation.

Now in the scheme that we are posing here, no such interaction is the key. Quite opposed to that, or much in contrast, we are living in a world situation as believers, linked to this non-situational intelligence not through any effort of our own. We have not the ability to develop this linkage. Quite the contrary. It is pushed upon us. There are ways in which it is pushed. Some we understand and some we do not. We know that revelation is pushed on us. It comes from outside the system. It is monitored and sponsored by the Spirit of God. It could not have been had apart from the Spirit’s indexing operation. It is shoved at us. He also shoves ideas at us, shapes things and gives us understanding. We pray for wisdom. We pray for insight.

So when we set up this diagram of the triadic structure. On the left-hand side of the page is represented the non-situational intelligence being manifested as eternity in our thinking. Then you have this tube being pushed (that’s the index action) from eternity into the world situation. This also reflects the index column between the two worlds at this point and the involvement of our manipulation of symbols based on faith in the revelation of God that is pushed into us by the Holy Spirit. Then we see that this extrusion into the world situation is manifested in at least these two ways that we have been discussing, i.e., non-situational explanations about things, about man, about his condition here—things that he could never understand on his own, never divine or define by his own involvement within the situation; and secondly as non-situational outcomes. (Determined by God’s power according to his will.) We need non-situational outcomes in our life. Without them, we are going to die.

This is something that we see also in Genesis 3. From that point on it never changes. What the pair needed in the garden was a non-situational explanation of the tree and of their life and of their well being. They had that. It was pushed on them. It was given to them by God. They denied its import, because they preferred to operate on their own intelligence, on a situated intelligence. They depended upon a situated intelligence, which was the serpent who provided an opposing interpretation of their lives and of what was happening there in the provisions of God for them and the prohibition against eating of the tree. Of course, there is the necessity of a non-situational outcome to resolve the problems they initiated because of their failure.

Christians learn a great deal from the Old Testament and the New Testament about the nature of what it is to live as a spiritual person, what it is to live as a human being. We are told that we cannot live unaided on this planet on our own, left to our own wiles. The Lord has been good enough to us not to allow that to happen. We look to him for results. We look to him for power over circumstances, power to sustain us because without him, it is not possible. The book of Colossians says in a mildly stated form that all things are held together by the Lord. He is the pivot. He is the glue that brings all of these aggregate parts together, holds them together in one unity. That is a non-situational outcome.

Man operating on a situated intelligence does not have the ability to understand that completely. Suppose we as users of the text, readers of the scripture, operate thinking that revelation is written before the fact. Then all the things that we have experienced largely in many forms of theological education would be present. For example, the idea that we need to return supposedly to a past or an historical context or perspective of the text. And that if we could define what it meant within that framework, then we would be able to understand its central meaning, and therefore, periodicize the text. Then along with that comes the dependence and the beginning point which is human intelligence. Here is the problem--a situated intelligence coming to bear on the revelation—cannot lead to a unity with God’s non-situated intelligence for our understanding of the text.

If and only if the scripture is understood as being written after the fact (the fact being experienced by God first) can we then say as we learn from the book of Daniel that Gpd redefines the world of facts. Then time is no longer a factor in our understanding of the text because we eliminate it in favor of spontaneity. That is very difficult for human beings to fathom. Even when we are using the words before the fact and after the fact, these are terms relative to us locked down in time. But I believe if we think of it as after the fact, it gives us a better handle on spontaneity and its relationship to all things than the other alternative. We may not be able to completely remove the aspects of time that have contaminated our thinking totally, but perhaps we can do it enough to satisfy the Lord's’ need for that in our own lives.

Everything acts as a clock. If we buy a set of tires, we will watch to see how much wear we can get out of the tires. So we will go in and they will say this set of tires here is rated at 35,000 miles or 50,000 miles, this is how much with reasonable use we can expect to get out of them before we have to buy some new ones. So the minute you put tires on, it begins to act as a clock and a year or two later we will go out and look at the tread and say well, it won’t be long before we are going to need to buy another set of tires. It begins to act as a clock.

Paychecks act as clocks. We have a paycheck that comes every month. We try to get to the end of the month before we get to the end of the paycheck. It acts as a clock. Bills act as clocks. In fact that is virtually what they are. We have so much time to pay a certain amount of money before something else happens, before some utility is cut off or something else is shut down. It acts as a clock.

Food acts as a clock. Refrigerators act as clocks in the sense that when you put food in the refrigerator you can extend the life and the value of the food quite a bit as opposed to not having one. The time is much shortened without it or unless you find some other way to preserve it. So preservatives act as clocks. It is very difficult for us to think about any aspect of life that isn’t a clock. Including, of course, the clock itself. I am using the clock as a symbol of something that is a general appraisal of time. We have a lot of feelings about time. We are constantly faced with it. In emergency circumstances, it is generally held to be true that "time is of the essence." In any emergency or crisis, we rush to the scene and so that is why we mount sirens and lights on all of our vehicles of an emergency type to get other people out of the way because a clock is ticking. Lives, we believe, are hanging in the balance. Life is ebbing away. If you cut a vein, or an artery, then it acts as a clock. You have so many seconds or minutes to stop that bleeding or death will ensue.

In our experience, here in the world situation, everything boils down to time. Yet when you think about clocks, and use the clock as a symbol of that, it becomes very nerve racking because there are demands associated with all of those things. It is hard for us to get outside of the sentiments of those demands, especially when illness ensues. We have all been ill and we know how "time" drags. But beyond the psychology of time, everything could be said to act as a clock. Time becomes a major factor in the way we think about ourselves and about scripture and about life, about our own well being, and how we are going to deal with all of those things. How interesting it would be to find a way, if it is opened to us, to wrench those conceptions out of our minds so that time for us is really not a factor.

Suppose if we thought that revelation is written after the fact in precisely the way that we have described it. We come to an understanding that our circumstances, our individual situations, are all after the fact. They are after the fact of God’s experiencing of them and not before. It looks like the revelation is before. But actually, what would have to take place is that the fact within the world situation, and the fact that has already been experienced by God in eternity before we were even born, are now brought together and merged at the index position because of the role of the revelation of God. Therefore, there is an overlapping where the fact as we understand it being experienced by God and then the fact that we deal with here in our temporal limited basis are one and the same. If that were the case, all things being considered and time being wrenched out of our thinking about it, our worries would be largely overcome and precisely because of the fact that time is removed.

I would suggest that spontaneity has to replace a view shaped by situational intelligence of things. Spontaneity is the way we handle all things and the way in which we conceive of these things. What we mean to say again, by reiteration, is that as an intellectual posture, among other things, we know that the relationship between God and the world situation has nothing to do with time. It has nothing to do with physical or natural causation, but rather these things are spontaneous. We need to wrench from our thinking the factors of time. The belief, the experience and the intuition that tells us that there are no spontaneous interactions, but that everything requires time, is quite wrong. Matthew 8, among other passages, certainly proves that to be the case. The centurion believed that time was not a factor, believed that physical and natural causation were not factors in any of this circumstance that his ill servant, whom he loved and cared for, was facing. He opted to walk away from a situational view, from what could be described as an anthropocentric appraisal of the whole situation, in favor of operating on a theocentric view or a non-situational view.

Well Daniel in the totality of this book really does the same thing. It is a manifestation of this different kind of intelligence. I suppose its true that when we talked about adaptation earlier and the retention of credibility by culturally and socially elaborating the text of scripture, that these are defense actions. They are calculated to defend us against the world. But Daniel didn’t do this. He wasn’t interested in taking defensive actions. Nor did his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. They were not interested in adapting to the Babylonian thought forms. They were not interested in the retention of credibility by allowing the Ten Commandments, especially in Daniel Chapter 3, to be subject to cultural and social elaboration. They had to maintain their intelligence in its purity, in its separateness, as a footprint of the non-situated intelligence, who is God himself.

Instead of opting for adaptation and credibility, Daniel preferred spontaneity, which is always something beyond the social and the cultural elaboration and it certainly always must defy the forces of adaptation. We realize that there is a movement that people are coming to believe, if they have not accepted it already, that intelligence is an emerging social property; or perhaps an emerging social reality. This is not a new movement; it has been going on for along time. Who’s to say at exactly when or where it started or by whom? But it is enough that we recognize it. This, among other things, is why Washington is so concerned about public education and about the funding of public education knowing that public education in this country is a monopoly of certain unions. Why are they interested in maintaining these structures? It is far more than just an altruistic view of the future of our young people. We believe in this country that intelligence comes from the aggregate. It is a social property—not an individual property. But it is a social reality developed in all of us as we share among ourselves. Therefore, this is explicable by rationalization. Perhaps it is not understandable if we just try to relate the parts to the whole; and many theorists in education would take that position. But nonetheless, it is a social reality.

We are looking for something much different than that. As believers of God, followers of his, those committed to revelation, we have to take a position that is not popular; that is not very politically correct by any stretch of the imagination and is not considered to be rational by the world of situated intelligence. We believe that our intelligence must be a footprint, a manifestation, a projection of a non-situated intelligence, which is the Lord himself. We are not that intelligence, but we can manifest and possess some of it because the Lord has been good enough to push it into our lives and into our hearts and into our minds. On that basis, therefore, as we act within the world situation. The world, which takes a position that all intelligence is situated, could not possibly find us intelligent, wise, or very thoughtful. They might not even find us considerate or even loving from that point of view because we would stand outside of all of the norms by which intelligence is graded.

But Daniel had a very different way of grading intelligence. That shows up decisively in the prayer that he makes to the Lord in Chapter 2 of the book. Daniel says of God, "He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him." (Daniel 2:22) He knows that intelligence is graded on the basis of God in relationship to man. He knows that these two intelligences are not the same. I believe we are going to have to let go of the pretense or of the idea or of the ideology that human intelligence on its own, unaided by God, is an extension of the wisdom of God himself. This would lead us to think that common sense is indicated because it is a manifestation of God’s wisdom. This is an act of pride. It might be an act of arrogance. It may be a sinful act to believe that common sense and the ability that man has to reason is an extension of the intelligence of God. We don’t have the indication of that in scripture.

Human intelligence must be used appropriately; and that means that it has to be subordinated to the non-situational intelligence. If we operate on our own, based upon our own appraisal within the world situation apart from non-situational explanations; and the expectation of non-situational outcomes, then we have severed our relationship of spontaneity to the Lord. And as a result, we find ourselves in defiance of him. It is within that framework of the world situation and of human intelligence being situated within it, that we begin to constitute all of these various symbolic structures. We erect them, we create them, and we elaborate socially and culturally. That is what the exiles from Judah faced especially in Daniel Chapter 6 as was demonstrated when Darius comes to the throne. "Let it be written, let it be done. Thus it is the law of the Medes and the Persians."

When they constituted these symbols and when they got them the way they wanted them, their belief was that then they were greater than man and greater than the king and greater than themselves. They believed that they owed something of themselves now to this collection of symbols, this symbolic structure and they bowed down to it and became its slaves. If we allow for social and cultural elaboration of the text, we are guilty of the same sin and we will be dealt with accordingly. It is only appropriate to believe that. It is only realistic from the biblical point of view.

Let’s talk about that term "appropriate." More and more in the media, whether stated by representations of the media, or someone being interviewed; whether we are hearing or reading about others and their reactions to things, we will say that a response is "appropriate." "Our reaction to this is appropriate." "This action is not appropriate." It is a code word. It has been taken over the by the world. It is a euphemism perhaps that describes the world’s way of seeing things; that our actions must be culturally and socially elaborated. Now if we come to a position where we in the churches in our actions as individuals, as families, in the way in which we think, in our hearts and souls and minds are to be elaborated by the world situation and the people in the world situation, we are idolaters. We have to break the hold of this idolatry—perhaps the greatest form of idolatry ever created and embraced by man in his ability to symbolize.

We have a revelation from God and there is promise made to Daniel and by right of generalization of that text, it should be extended to all of us. Actually, there are two parts to the promise. The first is in Daniel 6:23. It says after Daniel has been found alive in the lion’s den, that "the king was overjoyed and gave orders to lift Daniel out of the den. And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him, because he had trusted in his God." This should be an anthem for us. We are going to live in this world situation; but we will not be ultimately wounded because we have trusted in our God.

The second part is in the passage Daniel 10:12. It talks about ultimate motivations and then it continues, "Do not be afraid, Daniel. (Fear is removed because you are now spontaneous in the non-situated intelligence.) Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them." Daniel refused to be the subject of social and cultural elaboration, as did his three friends. We in the church that belongs to the living God do not believe that intelligence is an emerging social property or social reality. We believe that it is a footprint of the non-situational intelligence of God that is beyond man and beyond his world circumstance