The Levitical laws of uncleanness (Leviticus 16, etc.) generally have to do with the exposure of the “innermost man” to the outside world, especially in the context of participating in worship. The man who is walking in the flesh—the man who is lacking clean hands or a pure heart—is unwelcome in God’s house.
It is well known that the tabernacle-temple is a model of the human body. It is less well known that the high priest is a model of the tabernacle-temple, but Peter Leithart, James Jordan, and others observe this. The high priest’s garments are a sort of inside-out representation of the tabernacle-temple; starting with the ornate breastpiece, which appears to be a model of the ark. In fact, in 1 Sam 14:18, there is some uncertainty or equivocation between ephod and ark. Moreover, the ephod has two stones in it, just like the ark. As you move inward, the priest’s clothing can be said to correspond to the holy place and then to the courtyard.
What I find interesting here is the contrast between the inside-out of the high priest’s garments, and the inside-out of bodily discharges. You could say that the laws of purification are meant to teach what kind of inner life is forbidden to God’s people: a fleshly inner life. By the same token, the priest’s garments are meant to display what kind of inner life is prescribe for God’s people: an inner life of glory and beauty; an inner life that has a “heart of stone,” a heart that is tutored by God’s word and law. It is interesting, in this light, to consider that God wishes to replace our hearts of stone-law with hearts of flesh. God intends to transform our flesh to his purposes rather than to sinful purposes.
And Yahweh said to Moses, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says Yahweh: “Israel is my son, my firstborn. So I say to you, let my son go that he may serve me. But if you refuse to let him go, indeed I will kill your son, your firstborn.”’”
And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that Yahweh met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses’ feet, and said, “Surely you are a husband of blood to me!” So he let him go. Then she said, “You are a husband of blood!”—because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:21-26)
God requires the dedication of children to him. The children of the unrighteous are destroyed, while the children of the righteous are covenanted to him—on pain of death (in the case of Moses) or of excommunication:
And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant. (Genesis 17:14)
This is why the Westminster Confession of Faith reminds us that “it [is] a great sin to contemn or neglect” baptism, including the baptism of our little ones. It is noteworthy that Moses faces this opposition from God on his way to be rejoined to God’s people; in fact, on his way to make preparations for a feast: it is especially important for our children to wear the sign of God’s covenant with them when they enter into his presence in worship.
Likewise, it is a great sin to contemn or neglect our little ones’ participation in the Lord’s Supper. I have written of how strongly this is implied by the New Testament food laws (do not destroy or stumble your brother; you will either be eating at God’s table or the table of demons; examine yourself; discern the body; wait for one another; walk straightforwardly about the truth of the gospel). But this requirement also goes back to the time that the church was given the name of Israel:
But the man who is clean and is not on a journey, and ceases to keep the Passover, that same person shall be cut off from among his people, because he did not bring the offering of Yahweh at its appointed time; that man shall bear his sin. (Numbers 9:13)
Are you clean (1 Corinthians 7:14)? You must be baptized and you must participate in the feast. In neglect of this command, the evangelical church has largely excommunicated her children. Until she repents of despising God’s children in this way, God will oppose her just as he opposed Moses.
It is widely recognized that the Feast of Booths–Ingathering carries an eschatological symbolic weight. Unlike Passover, which was limited to circumcised Israelites, Booths is a feast in which the uncircumcised God-fearer was included (Deuteronomy 16:14). This anticipates the harvest of the nations into God’s house. The church’s celebration of the Lord’s Supper therefore stands in the line of Booths just as much as it stands in the line of Passover.
If you think of Booths as a type or prolepsis of the church age, it is quite interesting to observe that Booths also interrupts the weekly Sabbath calendar and temporarily introduces a new Sabbath calendar, obliquely tied to the festival time and not the old weekly cycle:
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days to Yahweh. On the first day there shall be a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work on it.For seven days you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Yahweh. On the eighth day you shall have a holy convocation, and you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Yahweh. It is a sacred assembly, and you shall do no customary work on it. . . .
‘Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep the feast of the Yahweh for seven days; on the first day there shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day a sabbath. (Leviticus 23:33-39)
In this new time, this church-time, the first and eighth days are the days of rest.
Now on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread . . . (Acts 20:7)
“Preterism” isn’t about an “end times position.” It is a matter of basic Biblical theology. It is about how and why Jesus could issue the Great Commission to people who were, at the time, what we now call “Judaizers” and read about in Galatians. It is about why the Bible would say that twelve people who didn’t believe Jesus would or should be crucified were authorized to preach “the Gospel of the Kingdom (Luke 9:6). It is about how Jesus could exhort people to “believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15) without teaching them anything about his necessary death and the resurrection that would follow (and knowing they would all react negatively to the idea just like Peter did later). Yet people were commended for believing that Gospel and condemned for refusing it.
Preterism is about growing up and not reading the Bible like a child. It is about maturing past the idiot notion that Jesus was a systematic theologian longing for the day when he could make us smart enough to articulate atonement theology, or justification by faith alone, or double predestination.
Preterism contradicts the error of a kind of soft dispensationalism that is rampant in Protestantism. While hard dispensationlism wrongly wants to make room for ongoing loyalty to Moses, the soft dispensationalism I have in mind wrongly wants to think that loyalty to Moses and loyalty to Jesus are different kinds of thing: that Jesus does not stand in thorough and proper continuity with Moses (contra Hebrews 3, etc.) as the one and only successor to Moses.
A good way to think about this is to realize that the gospels are recapitulating David’s time in the wilderness, and the rest of the New Testament is recapitulating the first few years of David’s reign. Believe it or not, people and their babies were truly saved before the coming of Jesus (e.g., Luke 1). During his time here, the anointed king Jesus secretly gathered people to himself much like David did. Just like David, Jesus endured suffering so that he and his people might be vindicated. Upon his resurrection and enthronement, a forty-year countdown started for all of his people to transfer their loyalty to him and to receive the blessings of his vindication. His people were already truly saved, but God presented a new loyalty test in order for them to continue in their salvation. It is now your loyalty to Jesus that saves you and gives you life.
Loyalty to Saul, though at one time a good thing, had an expiration date; after a certain point, your exclusive love for Saul or Ish-Bosheth would condemn you rather than save you, and even Saul’s own offspring had to find their salvation in David. Likewise, loyalty to Moses, though at one time a good thing, had an absolute expiration date (Romans 7, Hebrews 10); exclusive loyalty to Moses now in fact condemns you rather than saves you. But, equally, it is important to see that loyalty to Jesus is in complete continuity with the former loyalty to Moses. If your Moses is not in harmony with Jesus, then you have the wrong Moses (John 5)! This is one reason why we must baptize our babies, and why, with David (2 Samuel 12), we have full confidence that they belong to Jesus.
And he received the sign of circumcision, . . . that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, . . . and the father of circumcision to those . . . who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised. For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. . . . Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. (Romans 4:11-16)
Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. (Galatians 3:7)
What is promised to sons of Abraham?
And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you. Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. (Gen. 17:7-8)
Paul teaches us that, in Jesus, this promise is modulated from Canaan to the entire world. But it is clear that the promise still holds for sons of Abraham. If you are of faith, then you are a son of Abraham, and God has promised that he will be a God to your descendants.
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Now both Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding. And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, do.”
Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece. Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Draw out now, and take to the master of the feast.” And they took. When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom. And he said to him, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the [guests] have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!” This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2)
One thing worth highlighting here is that the arrival of Jesus marks the arrival of good wine. If you are serving grape juice rather than wine in communion, then you are play acting that we are still living under the old covenants.
But a second thing worth noting is that it is purifying water that is turned into wine; the one necessarily gives way to the other. If you are baptizing your children, then well and good. But if you are not serving them the Lord’s supper, then you are play acting that we are still living under the old covenants.
And he said to them, “How can they say that the Christ is the Son of David? Now David himself said in the Book of Psalms, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool.” ’ Therefore David calls Him ‘Lord’; how is he then his son?” (Luke 20:41-44)
For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him, to whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all, first being translated “king of righteousness,” and then also king of Salem, meaning “king of peace,” without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, remains a priest continually.
Now consider how great this man was, to whom even the patriarch Abraham gave a tenth of the spoils. And indeed those who are of the sons of Levi, who receive the priesthood, have a commandment to receive tithes from the people according to the law, that is, from their brethren, though they have come from the loins of Abraham; but he whose genealogy is not derived from them received tithes from Abraham and blessed him who had the promises. Now beyond all contradiction the lesser is blessed by the better. Here mortal men receive tithes, but there he receives them, of whom it is witnessed that he lives. Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak, for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him. (Hebrews 7:1-10)
John Knightley made his appearance, and “How d’ye do, George?” and “John, how are you?” succeeded in the true English style, burying under a calmness that seemed all but indifference, the real attachment which would have led either of them, if requisite, to do every thing for the good of the other. (Jane Austen, Emma)
Here we come to a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or personalist cosmological argument. Every person is dependent upon prior persons to be a person. But where does this end or where does this begin? Is it conceivable that there is an infinite regress of finite persons to account for the reality of any given personality? What accounts for each prior personality that gives rise to the one following? Is prior personality sufficient to completely account for any personality at any given time? We have two choices, and, ultimately, only two. Either we owe our existence to ourselves (which carries within it some manifest impossibilities), or we owe our existence to God. Now my contention is quite simply that we, on a daily basis, are faced with the starkest contradiction imaginable. If we do not acknowledge the reality of the God of the Bible—if he does not exist—then neither do we. On the other hand, if we do exist, then he does too. Now the introduction of this stark contradiction may be ab it breathtaking and perhaps even shocking. But I would contend that our very existence brings us to this cliff, and to this very sharp either/or. In real life, however, it is ameliorated a bit by the recognition that if he does exist, and if we exist, but we refuse to acknowledge his existence, we don’t go up in a puff of smoke and cease to be. Rather, the result (because of God’s mercy and long-suffering with our foolishness) is both cognitive dissonance and existential confusion. Our existence will be at best “thin,” and it will be incomprehensible. We will have no ground at all for our very being and personhood.
John Calvin opened his Institutes of the Christian Religion with this very beautiful paragraph:
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, whose blessings, which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.
Human consciousness necessarily involves consciousness of God. If the consciousness of God could be eradicated, then human self-consciousness would also disappear. Self-knowledge is possible only in God.
Of course, grant the premise of creation and a creator God, and everything I say follows. But why should I grant the premise? You should grant the premise because we either exist as a free creative act of this perfect God, and thus participate as created analogues in all of the real existent perfections of God, or we exist ultimately by chance, and partake in all of the analogues of that mistress. There is no third alternative. The analogues of God are (briefly) truth, goodness and beauty. The analogues of chance are chaos, confusion, and disorder. Pure chance is perfectly unknowable. If you or I, or everything and anything, is the product of pure chance, this would be completely unknowable, and the purely unknowable is no different from nothingness.
If you are driven mad by this conclusion this is exactly what the Bible itself would expect, and not a conclusion that the Bible would expect any man to take contentedly or serenely. the Bible (which is a long and difficult book) frankly diagnoses man, in his current state, as functioning everywhere with this epistemological glitch. To be an unbeliever is the natural state of man, and to be otherwise is attributed to nothing short of a miracle. A man’s unbelief is not simply neutral, or a state of being where one chooses to believe or not believe as one would choose a meal from a variegated menu. Unbelief occupies a religious position in a man’s life, and is as decisive for the unbeliever as belief is for the believer.
There are two accounts of unbelief. The first account is that of the unbeliever himself. This is a necessary perspective, and it is not a simple, completely unified voice that speaks. Unbelief has as many voices as there are unbelievers. Not every voice is unique, though, and the absolute variety is not infinite. There are a certain number of objections to the Christian faith that cohere together, and not an uncountable number. Then, there is the diagnosis of the Bible itself concerning unbelief. the Bible has its own internal theology of unbelief and its own X-ray to offer. While the voice of the unbeliever itself ought to be heard, the most important voice is the voice of the Bible. The reason the voice of the unbeliever needs to be heard is in order to demonstrate that the voice of unbelief is really the voice of caviling or of disputing with the judgment that God has already handed down in the court that he has called. This is what “doubt” is: diakrinomoi. The unbeliever is a “debater of this age” (1 Cor 1:20), and his unbelief is closely associated with bringing accusation and bringing charges of an ethical nature against God. The doubter is, in fact, someone who himself calls God to account before his own bar of justice. The doubter is a judge who dares to question God, or dares to question that God, rather than he, ought to be the final judge. In other words, when we doubt God’s existence and his governing power over all things, what we are really doing is ruling him out of court, and inciting that we have the final word. This brings us to all of the above contradictions and epistemologically reduces us to the necessity of self-existence, which is the same as nothingness. Undeniably, man almost compulsively wants to get on in life without this surrender and this necessary belief—man is ethically offended by this. Let me invite you to the next chapter, which examines man’s penchant to always play the judge, even over God. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 23-25)
In Rousseau, we especially find ourselves awash with so much that is modern. There is bathos, sentimentality, and the relish of pity that has its origin in self-pity. He nearly succeeds in making the self absolute as the feeling self, and then very quickly loses that same self as it drowns in its own self-felt concern. He is lost in self-pity and in self-importance in petty tragedy. Anything can be a tragedy—a toothache, the smallest unrequited love.
Rousseau didn’t invent anything absolutely new. He simply placed an emphasis on certain aspects of life that had never before been given such importance. Everybody has always known about feelings. Bathos and sentimentality have been around for a long time, but mostly as comedy. Rousseau made self-concern, in a deepened way, the end of life; for literary Europe, however, he managed to make it respectable. The importance of romance is not the glory of the beloved. The importance of romance is the glory of my own feeling of being in love. He was in love with being in love, and the beloved is a really quite secondary self-extension. He glorified the self’s importance by making the smallest self-pity seem as immense as the tragedy of King Lear.
What Rousseau accomplished was a lineage that is very old, and is deeply tied, ironically, to the love of death. The final glory, one begins to suspect, would be suicide over the tragedy of a toothache. Hopefully others will notice. My tragedy makes me overwhelmingly notable and important. . . .
Who was this lover and this beloved inside of Rousseau? Is this one who feels love for the self, sensing a prior self, or does he create this self? Did Rousseau exist before he felt himself in love, or did this love create this person?
There is a manifest contradiction here. Rousseau makes a good deal of “virtue.” The self is a “virtuous” self. But Rousseau is very interested in maintaining the utter independence of his existence. This good or virtuous self is only good because Rousseau loves this self. He creates himself by loving himself, and makes himself “virtuous” because he loves himself, and then “feels” this self-creation. He, in other words, creates himself out of nothing. Did he authentically exist before he loved himself? Where was he before he discovered this love? Apparently nowhere. He did not exist. Then he who did not exist began to exist and brought himself into existence by love. But how? By loving himself. Unfortunately, there was no one there to carry out the act of loving. Which is prior: self-love, or existence of the self? One cannot be without the other. This is creation out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. . . .
The United States—my own country—is, at this moment, in grave danger of falling into a final and irreversible sinkhole of Rousseauian sludge. Some years ago, the American education system adopted the “middle school” philosophy, which replaced the old-fashioned junior high school. The purpose of junior high was quite simply to prepare students for high school; the purpose of high school was to complete a basic and foundational educational curriculum that would enable one to enter the work and domestic force of the country, and also prepare some of those students for higher education at the nation’s colleges and universities. One, in other words, had to submit oneself to a particular body of learning. However, by the 1970s and 80s, America had been extensively psychologized. The purpose of education for adolescents ceased to be submission to a curriculum for life preparation, and was replaced with collective therapy to enable students to develop a “healthy self-esteem.” School, in other words, became “student-centered,” making the development of the students ego the central reality. The student, then, no longer submits him or herself to something larger than and outside of themselves, but the entire educational establishment submits itself to them. School became “ego-centric” in the most literal way. This was the essential purpose of middle school as opposed to junior high.
The middle school is an entirely Rousseauian institution, and has built into it all of the contradictions and conflicts that are outlined above. Not surprisingly, it has, over time, issued in all of the above contradictions. . . . If God cannot be one’s final and ultimate audience (as with Augustine in his Confessions, who gave himself to, but did not pander to, a public), then one can only “play to the crowd” as with Rousseau. The result is a world of constant offense, extensive hypocrisy, and a societal “anti-covenant” in which harmonious relationship is nearly impossible. In short, the Rousseauian “middle school” philosophy is a recipe for a completely neurotic society, one dominated by psychiatry and a legal profession with an inordinate number of people involved in lawsuits over absurd and petty offenses. What should have been a passing moment in the development of the adolescent’s personality in junior high school (with the constant sense of seeking to be “in” and “popular”) is now elevated to the final meaning of life and as grist for an everlasting therapy mill. It is a recipe for an adolescent society in which everything coalesces around nothing. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 14-17)
I gotta have my orange juice. 