The Soul Comes First: Spiritual Literalism and Christian Theology

By Brian Balke

In considering the dance between God and Humanity, attempts to interpret the Bible as historical fact have led to unfortunate confusion and dissension. By looking at the Bible as a spiritual history, another interpretation becomes clear: the Bible records the Divine effort to prepare Human Nature for a privileged role in healing the wound of selfishness.

Join us on a journey from Genesis to Revelation, a journey that demonstrates complete consistency with Darwinian evolution, and offers the heartening conclusion that flawed Humanity is not the source of all evil in the World, but actually the best hope for its healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490738444

Brian Balke

Dr. Balke would like his peers in physics to embrace spirituality as a phenomenon that deserves theoretical explanation, and understands unconditional love as the foundation for all of the deepest joys in our lives. For fifteen years, he has been laying out signposts to guide others into such experiences, and encouraging people from all walks of life to realize that attempting to prevent sin is a shallow substitute for the transformations that occur when our living is suffused with love.

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Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

© Copyright 2014 Brian Balke.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4907-3846-8 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4907-3845-1 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4907-3844-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910022

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Contents

Hospital of the Soul

In the Realm of the Almighty

The Disease of Selfishness

Antibody Matter

Out of Chaos—Intelligent Design!

Interpreting the Bible

First Things First

Integrating Spirit

Predation

Working with Humanity

Boys to Men

Momma Knows Best

Standing Up for Love

Out of the Harem

Planting the Seeds of Monotheism

The Brain’s Journey

Nation Building

The Nature of the Beast

Try to Be Reasonable

Living by the Sword

Just Us

Faith Renewed

Shift of Focus

Existence Proof

Selections from Scripture

The Synoptic/Johanine Controversy

There is No Law but Love

Women Rising

Man Up!

Self-Awareness

Selflessness

Discipline

Compassion

The New Covenant

What Was and What Will Be

Other Traditions

Talking in Ideas

Revelation

Investiture

Extinctions

The Era of Humanity

Skirting the Shadow of Misogyny

The Era of Truth

Afterword

Hospital of the Soul

A t the cultural core of every great and lasting civilization is a religion that holds that the universe manifests divine love. Moreover, the most potent cultural figures in human history have been men and women that prove, through word and action, that placing ourselves in the service of that love is a source of great power and liberating strength.

Conversely, the skeptic looks at the human condition and the history of religious warfare and concludes that saintly martyrdom proves the rule. The universe is a random place, full of cruelty. The faith of the believer is misplaced foolishness.

It is this great gap between heart and mind that I first attempted to fill at www.everdeepening.org. From the perspective of a particle physicist and software designer, the material there and the book Love Works lead from reason into compassionate faith.

Since completing that work, I have wandered in the wilderness, talking with people of simple faith. In the journey, I was deeply impressed by the power of Christian conviction to guide people from darkness toward light. For the man trapped in substance abuse, this can be an inward journey. For the volunteer building a learning center in Africa, it is a journey that shines light outward.

But the simplicity of these relationships of love is bounded by a theology of rules and constraints that I believe would have wounded Jesus’s heart. The logic of this theology is simple:

1. God is perfect.

2. Because God is perfect, he must be the origin of all things—because otherwise his perfection could be challenged.

3. Since God is perfect, his Creation was perfect in its conception.

4. Since life is not perfect, the source of imperfection must be human disobedience. In our little, weak way we seek to challenge God.

5. The only way to restore the perfection of Creation is to learn obedience—in other words, to follow God’s rules.

As many critics of religion have pointed out, the net result of this chain of logic is that far too much power is ceded by the faithful to those that claim to know the rules.

The more serious fault of the logic is the conclusion that Humanity is a flaw in Creation. This is completely in opposition to the actual truth. Humanity is an essential and valued part of Creation, an element that is held with the most tender concern and honored regard in recognition of the difficulty and importance of the work that we must perform, the pain and sacrifice involved in accomplishment of that work, and the joyous consequences of its eventual completion.

The goal of this book, then, is to heal the confusion and shame that informs so much Christian dialog, replacing it with a sober understanding of our role and the tools given us to achieve it. That understanding will be supported by the evidence of Scripture, which is best interpreted as a history of the work done by Divine Love to prepare Humanity for its job.

In the Realm of the Almighty

If the Bible is the record of the Almighty’s work on Humanity, then the only way to make sense of it is to understand the motivations of the Almighty for taking on the work. So I am going to propose a story. It is a story that will be familiar to us, because it involves the angel Lucifer. It also matches the experience of those that have achieved a degree of spiritual maturity in their journey as Christians.

To an infant, a mother must seem a god from whom all things come. But outside the nursery, we know that she struggles with worries that sometimes have no easy solution; thus, it must be with the Almighty. While I am certain that this Creation could be destroyed without great effort by the Almighty that would have undesirable consequences in his Realm.

Note how that metaphor works. It starts with the idea of a relationship—the relationship between a mother and a child. With that image in our minds, it places the Almighty and Humanity outside that relationship as a sort of magnified image of it; then, it makes it clear that there is much more to the Almighty than that relationship to Humanity.

This is the essence of the Realm of the Almighty. It is a place of pure ideas: ideas built upon and around ideas, ideas exchanged and merged and transformed, and ideas evolving into ever larger and more glorious imaginings of possibility. As they merge, these ideas manifest personalities that we name as angels.