Biblical Inner Healing
Three notions have guided my thinking and commitment to emotional healing or Biblical Inner Healing.
First, I was determined that faith must make sense.
It must be related to everyday life in a manner that does not fly in the face of logical common sense. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, once you see it, seems mind-bogglingly common sense. That does not rule out mysteries or the unexpected. But it does rule out flat contradictions.
God is a God of reason and order, not chaos, not intellectual chaos any more than emotional or spiritual chaos. God, not secular philosophers or secular scientists, holds the intellectual high ground.
Secondly, something in me rebelled against the idea that the truth was the domain of the "experts". The Bible never gives any hints that it is the experts in anything that get into heaven, not, at least, by reason of their expertise. They get in by being in touch with the basic reality of the sort with which any one of us can be in touch.
For Biblical Inner Healing that meant that basic Biblical theology must be within the grasp of a fairly ordinary sort of mind. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is common sense -- of a sensibleness common to the human race (that to which Paul appeals in 2 Corinthians 4:1-2). I am hoping that the following will recommend itself in that way to the reader. Again, that is not to rule out grappling with difficult and abstruse problems by the experts. But the basic understanding of the revelation of a personal God is not something one needs a college degree to grasp. One needs only to be a reasonably healthy person.
Thirdly, and related to the above, something kept telling me, in often strange ways, that truth is inherently sacramental, that is, that spiritual truth is fundamentally related to this world of space and time, that the invisible and spiritual is quite at home in and manifested through the physical and material. The whole Judeo-Christian worldview, including the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is common sense intellectually, and also sensorily. We are made in the Image of God -- in (of all things) our sexual nature.(1) The physical manifests the spiritual.
These three notions seemed to me to be fundamentally related to the Biblical doctrine of creation, that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and ourselves in His image. A theology of the Imago Dei is absolutely fundamental to our conveying the Gospel to a modern world. That means that no theology can be Christian without first being Judeo. The Hebrew doctrine of creation, which is the foundation of all true monotheism, separates the Biblical worldview from all other philosophies, religions, psychologies, and anthropologies.
(The single exception to that is Islam, which is, in a sense “Biblical”, but being its own special case -- is incapable, I believe, of the kind of theology or psychology to which this book points. But that is an issue for another book.)
Today I am absolutely sure that these things are true. All of this was poured into the crucible of my life, along with the content of an extraordinary education at a (more or less) Episcopal college where I received a BA in philosophy, a beginning-to-deteriorate Episcopal seminary, and a (more or less) Anglican university where I did my doctorate on the relation between science and theology.
The Genesis account of creation is on the principle that the basic entities in the cosmos are persons, not things (atoms, molecules, etc.) or essences or abstractions, and that the primary value in life is a personal relationship. Our primary relationship is with God (first Great Commandment) and our secondary relationships are with each other (second Great Commandment). Our brokenness and wholeness all have to do with holiness, our being made in the Image of God.
The specifically Christian part of this book has to do with salvation and the healing of the brokenness, how, through Christ, God makes Himself present to us.
In this way desiring to declare more fully to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, God interposed by an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us, which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters into that within the veil, where the Forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. (Heb 6:17-20)
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