We are modern people. […] This [comes with a] sort of lurking assumption that we just know how everything works. We are primed, just culturally primed to look for alternative explanations other then something supernatural. If you´re a materialistic culture that´s understandable. If you´re a Christian, I guess I am a little bit bold by saying it´s not understandable. You know, we have a flawed hermeneutic in this regard. Most Christians will accept the reality of God, and the Trinity, and you know, angels and demons and Satan (maybe), that sort of thing. And that´s where they draw the line (if they admit they´re there). That is not the Biblical picture, but people will gonna sorta go that route, thinking they can preserve their modernity and sort of preserve their faith in the supernatural, that those beliefs are alignable and acceptable in a modern context. And that´s just a self-deception. There is nothing that we believe that is acceptable in a modern framework, NOTHING. The deity of Christ is not, God is not, the incarnation is not; the idea that someone dying on a cross can take care of a spiritual problem, even the concept of a spiritual problem not deriving from a material world, is antagonistic to a material worldview. But somehow we draw a line on certain spiritual beings or certain spiritual events or activities that we´re safe in our modernity, that our supernaturalistic beliefs at this point are still acceptable in a modern world. That´s a self-deception. What I would like to ask is: On what basis do we feel that we can decide what parts of the supernaturalistic worldview of the Bible are legitimate or not? What´s our basis for that? I don´t talk about ancient misconceptions of the natural world because we can test this with science and God has given us the tools of science. I think science is part of the dominion mandate given in Genesis to stuart the earth so it might help us to know how it works. I´m talking about the supernatural world: On what basis do we deny parts of the Bible, we can´t test these things with science, we can´t probe them. […] They can only be tested by the idea itself being logically coherent. So we have to approach claims about the spiritual world […] with a different set of tools, the tools of logic and coherent thought. And you know, for millennia the claims of a spiritual world, and a God, and a spiritual world that is inhabitated by other beings that this God creates, that´s done pretty well.Mind you, our current problem will only get worse when the Fallen Ones reappear openly and throw all the fringe stuff they got in everyones faces. It will be a great irony that the believers who tried so hard to appear normal and draw a reasonable line to stay away from the stranger things will be instantly even less believable to the public, whereas some non-believers will remember the weird Christians who were rambling about these exact signs and wonders and freaky creatures and who suddenly might have had a point in retrospective. And since the Fallen Ones will prepare complex answers to all the complex questions people will eventually ask when a great multi-dimensional visitation is taking place, we should anticipate the questions and the false answers now, and prepare and put out our own complex answers right now as a vaccination. So that even readers who don´t believe like we do right now will at least have this memetic vaccine in their minds and the antidote to the coming lies will be activated in an encounter. The Fallen Ones have already written cover-stories for all eventualities that might very well be 90% truth. So for us to be able to point out the 10%-holes in their versions we should be aware and knowledgeable of the strange facts that are actual facts they will bring forward. Of course right now we will have the irritating situation that brethren who are reductionists (because one doesn´t have to think too hard about simple answers like "It´s all demons / all illuminati; case closed!") will lash out against brethren who say that a given situation is far too complicated or nuanced to justify serving people only an one-liner and expect them to actually swallow it. I start this topic to hopefully comment from time to time on a lot of different but ultimately related subjects. I will also bring up the work of authors or researchers who either already spoke out against reductionism or succesfully managed to upset other Christians in internet comment sections because they dared to formulate theories that may not fit on a beer mat.
Against Reductionism
Against Reductionism
Multiple researchers and authors showed themselves to be critics of what can be called Christian reductionism.
Here reductionism is a derogatory term for the unfortunate tendency of analysing and describing complex phenomena in a simplisitic way and then claiming it to be a sufficient explanation which could or should be used to just end discussions inside the church or with outside investigators interested in a certain subject.
And the more complex our world and the things out of his world coming into our world are getting, the more this reductionism becomes a problem. In the past the church had the luxury of discussing the stranger things on a need-to-know basis because these things were not part of normal life and the human experience in general. But we are now at a point where the word "normal" is about to leave everydays life for good. The very last days will be a lot of things but certainly not normal and all the phenomena that accumulated over the years in the X-files so to speak will soon show up on everybody´s doorstep like the daily newspaper.
When the body of Christ was confronted with a phenomenon for the first time it was perhaps adequate back then to just put up a warning sign "Deception ahead. There be demons. Stay away" and leave it be. Probably was a case of "I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for solid food." (1 Corinthians 3:2).
See, it's not like we don´t have things to spread that are indeed simple and completely true in their simplicity. Like the Gospel, the Good News, the message that is getting people saved. So if you want to get people saved, it´s adequate that you work with the four gospels and some following letters in the Bible. But the thing is that your local church should be the congregation of the people who are already saved and who now should be given all the solid food of the whole Bible. Sermons in church for believers should by nature be different from soul-winning activity outside the church for non-believers. This model is fundamentally broken today. There is basically no real learning or higher education going on in your local church. The worldwide church on average is an ocean with the depth of a paddle. You can literally walk around in it aimlessly and disoriented from horizon to horizon. How could you expect this church to teach and warn you about seismic activity in deep sea trenches?
The believers who wonder and doubt that the depth of the waters we´re in can be really reduced to a couple of centimeters usually head for the internet to search fellow believers who also want to get to the bottom of it. I didn´t expect to have to look as far as the literal opposite side of the globe to find a project like Aminutetomidnite. I once told Tony that Elijah wouldn´t have felt like he was the last man standing if he had the internet back then and got at least 7,000 views for his show. So thank God for the internet so we all have a place to collectively sit down and have a great nutritious meal from time to time.
One of our great scholars, Dr. Michael S. Heiser, recently said this about our current problem on the True-ID podcast (on-the-fly transscription by myself):