The Superinflected Personality – Part 1
THE SUPER-INFLECTED PERSONALITY
A STUDY OF THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH
By J. Michael Strawn
The eternal Word of God inflects the temporal side of reality. Objectivity is a myth. There is no such thing as objectivity. There are only inflected realities. If the revelation of the Lord inflects something with meaning that is “right” and other inflections are not the same, that led me to ask the question, “Well who was the super-inflected personality?” Of course, Jesus himself would have been the most highly inflected personality ever—before, since or during. But I turned to Jeremiah, and later I want to do a full-blown study of Jesus while he was here in the context of that whole concept of super-inflection and how that opposed what I am calling hyper-inflected.
So I use two terms: “Super-inflected” refers to the way that the Lord inflects and “hyper-inflected” is the term I use for human ways of making an inflection, from the idea of hyperbolic. Anything that is hyperbolic is exaggerated. Our confidence in our ability to inflect correctly, and in the adequacy of that inflection, is enormous. Jeremiah on the other hand was a great case of a guy who had been inflected by God’s meaning for his life; and that inflection was a pervasive kind of thing.
(Thematic 1) Jeremiah as a Super-inflected Personality
In verse 1:4-5 he says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” I saw three words in there that captured my attention. One is “before.” Before he ever existed, so presumably before the world existed, God knew him. There had been an established plan and purpose for his life. Of course, he was not around to know anything about this. Then he was “born.” This is the advent of his days on the earth. And as a newborn child, he knows nothing of the surrounding environment of absolute abstractions that have allowed him to come into the world; and how those abstractions had protected him.
I assume perhaps that when his mother watched him when he had a high fever and she wondered “is this going to take the life of my child?” Or perhaps there were childhood accidents. Presumably he was like everyone else—a kid growing up, getting into trouble, getting into things over his head. Or maybe one day he was in the creek swimming and almost drowned. She would not have known, I don’t suppose as she dealt with him growing up anything about the fact that his life had been inflected.
Then we have the word “prophet” which demonstrates the reason for which he has come into the world. That office of prophet is going to cost him a lot. He is going to suffer. But before his birth, until the end of his life, these three words distill it all. In fact, it turns it all into a totality. Now I don’t think that I am able to believe that this is the only child ever born that was seen as a totality by the Lord. I would rather think that Jeremiah is an illustration to us that children are to be seen as totalities, that God has a purpose for all of us, and the difference is that some of us yield to that purpose, pursue that purpose and some of us don’t ever do this. The reason why the world is in its current shape is that we don’t pursue being a part of that totality.
That totality for Jeremiah was much greater than anything that he could have imagined until the revelation comes along at this point in his life when he is an adult and says to him that his life is a totality. Now the three parts of his life, i.e., the “before”, the “advent” and the working out of his days upon the earth as a “prophet” are all linked together (or I use the word “conjugated”) by the Lord. It says in vs. 4, “The word of the Lord came to me.” It would have had to be the word of the Lord, the will of God, that connected what was in the mind of God (the rhetorical reality) to the fact that he was going to be born at a certain time in a certain place and among a certain people; and that advent would also be connected to the thing that would collectively make the substance of his life as a prophet later. The word of God would have connected all of that together to create this totality.
So all of his life was one lump of totality that had been orchestrated or “super-inflected.” He is a personality. What kind of a personality is he? He is going to be a super-inflected personality. He is going to be shaped by God to do certain things. Now if that were the case, I would assume that this totality would have been the primary point of reference for his life. This is where he focused. He doesn’t look just at particular events. What we do if we don’t respect the fact of a totality, only seeing a chain of sequential events, we just take the events as they come and deal with whatever the next event or circumstance is going to produce in our lives. Yet, if we see our life as a totality, then we would see each event, the good and the bad, as simply part of a much larger thing, a much larger picture; and that is how we would deal with it. Instead of being nervous, overwhelmed, depressed because of the single event that has come upon us, we would know because of revelation, that since we are a totality that event fits in with a larger picture. That event is not the controlling substance. That event is not the “hub” of anything. The totality is the point of reference. So we take all the events of life and see them as a larger whole. We see our personality as being constructed by God.
Now at Rephidim, when the Israelites arrived, if they had seen themselves as inflected by the Lord, they would have seen that the situation was interesting because without enough water they could not keep alive; but yet they would know they had to stay alive because God had promised to give them Canaan. Well you can’t be dead and receive the promise. Therefore, inflected minds would have said “let’s sit in the coolest spot in the desert and wait and see how the Lord is going to inflect the desert, or inflect our bodies, or inflect the situation here to keep us alive.” But that is not what they did. They didn’t see that event as part of a much larger whole.
The same thing would have been true at Kadesh Barnea when the representatives of the 12 tribes came back with all the details. After coming from the desert experience, and the way God had brought them up as referred to in Deuteronomy Chapter 1, they had seen the Lord in operation. They had seen him champion the cause of the Israel. They knew and they had been told by revelation that the deliverance of Israel had been inflected and was part of a much larger whole. Therefore, when they got the Red Sea, this incident as great as it might seem on the human level, was of no consequence to the well-being of Israel, because God was going to protect them from the chariots of Pharaoh, which is in fact what he did. Later, his protection is extended through the 40 year wandering. So all of these events are part of a much a larger whole.
The hyper-inflected personality, which I would think would be the antipode of a super-inflected personality, would only be able to look at one event after another in sequence. Then the temptation is to try to produce a totality out of all of those individual elements. We may think “I can orchestrate this one way”, “I’ll put that over there”, or I’ll try to maneuver this event a certain way”. The consequence of this thinking (an attempt to orchestrate things in a way that we believe will produce for us the kind of totality that we want), but that is the opposite of what the Lord has called us to be and to do. I would think also that that is why the pagans were depicted as driven personalities in Matthew 6, where this struggle for life’s existence, for the basic necessities was all-consuming because they just took one event after another. They were not part of this totality; they did not see it.
The action of a personality is to see every event that comes along as part of a larger totality. The Lord can say that to us in one way or another and we can grasp the point. But unless we are willing to take the individual event and put it into a much larger whole, then we have personally failed. So we have a string of bad events. In Jeremiah’s time, he faced a very rigorous test as a person. He had to bear a tremendous weight. There were great repercussions that fell down upon him because he was a prophet of the Lord. But he had to take that bad event and say, “This is not the end of the world. This is not the be-all or the end-all. This is merely one event. I take this event and put it into this much larger square of events. I know that it is consumed by the totality of the Lord’s purpose for me.”
As we deal with individual events, good and bad, and put them into the context of a larger eternity, we let the individual event be subsumed by the totality. This is exactly the replica of the eternal subsuming the temporal. That is how we would deal with these issues. This is another reason why we would say that we don’t worry about any situation. We are warned against anxiety in the book of 1 Peter. He says, “Don’t be anxious. Cast your concerns upon the Lord because he cares for you.” Well in that sense, and in all other senses we find in the text, we find this model, this copy of the relationship that exists between the temporal and the eternal. That is to say that we have the totality and we have the individual event. As the eternal subsumes the temporal, so the totality subsumes the individual events. That is how we deal with things. So as totalities, we would become ideals.
Now we have to be precise about the term “ideal.” It may not be ideal in terms of what we would desire or want or an outcome that is sought. But it is ideal in the sense that this is what the Lord wants for us. Since he is the only one who can posture for us what an ideal is, then that is the ideal. We need to say to children, “God has a purpose for you. He knew you before you were born, and now you are here. He has a purpose for you. The totality of your life is held together by his will and his word. Are you going to subordinate yourself to that totality or not?” However, we don’t speak this way to children. We are most likely to say, “The Lord loves you, so go out and choose your own course of action, just don’t rob, steal, rape, loot and all that. Live a good, moral and upright life. Go to church and meet your doctrinal obligations. If you do that we will all die and go to heaven and be there one day together.”
We seldom see life as a totality, which changes the strategy for life. We are inclined to say, “Well I’m going to go over here and get this degree, and move up the ladder in that corporation, and when I accomplish this, I’m going to commit myself to becoming all I can be and achieve the apex that I can achieve because I have all this giftedness and talent; and I am compelled to use it.” They are still missing the point of becoming a kind of totality. They haven’t broken out of this perception of their lives being a chain, a sequence of cause and effect events. So, they do not achieve the purpose for which God has called them into the world.
I take the position that Jeremiah is a grand illustration, a grand symbol of this ideal. If we have achieved the totality. If we see the totality. Now, we don’t need to know the details of it, we don’t have to be told we are going to be a prophet. We could be something else. But the essential aspect of this is that we are this totality and that God has given us such a wonderful view of what life is supposed to be. So if we wanted to correct so many of the ills of the world, we would say, “Well you know what is happening here. You haven’t grasped the fact that the purpose for which you were born is being prostituted to other things or is being wasted. The reason is because you have not subordinated yourself to this totality. Now you have to do this if things are going to change.” We are talking about something way beyond behavioral remediation.
(Thematic 2) Jeremiah as a Super-inflected Discourse
Discourse and personality are synonymous. This idea is derived from 1 Corinthians 2 where Paul says that nobody knows the thoughts of the man except the spirit of the man within him; and no one would know the thoughts of God, the personality of God except the Spirit within him. So in order for us to know each other we have to have each other’s discourse. As limited as I am to know anyone I have to have their discourse; and as far as we can see, the person’s discourse and their persona are exactly the same thing. Perhaps the Lord can make a distinction between the two; but I doubt that we can due to human limitation.
In Jeremiah 1:6-10, he talks about this discourse of his:
“Ah, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak. I am only a child.”
(Then God reprimands him for that). But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everywhere I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you, ” declares the Lord.
Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”
So God comes along and he subsumes the discourse. God is the totality and the individual discourse of this man is the element that is to be subsumed. So the Lord reached out, touched his mouth, and put his words into the mouth of Jeremiah. So we know that this man has a super-inflected personality and we are going to see that personality in his discourse. To change people, I think, we have to change their discourse. No change of discourse—no change of personality. Furthermore, it appears that the way to change personality is through generalization. If you are generalizing from the text about the material world, and then pressing that generalization out into the world, then your personality is changing. That is the way it changes. It doesn’t change through just behavior modification or any of these other tactics or by expressing yourself to a therapist and “getting it all off your chest.” The real change comes when you generalize from the text.
What is the difference between an assumption, a presupposition, and a generalization? If the generalizations we teach have an organic and direct connection to the revelation of God, this cannot be called an assumption. A lot of things people hear as assumptions or presuppositions are really generalizations. We are not teaching assumptions; we are proffering generalizations built on the revelation of the text. This comes out in the discourse. And if that discourse is a demonstration of generalization being organically connected to the text; that is, being subsumed by the grammatical structure of scripture, then our discourse has been super-inflected. Therefore, you have a contest between hyper-inflected discourse and the discourse that is inflected by God. So what would happen if we looked at other modes of discourse, e.g., art, literature, and all that–the contemporary sociology’s knowledge? We would know that they are hyper-inflected.
God and a super-inflected discourse from our point of view are synonymous. His word is synonymous with his personality. Now that super-inflected discourse and Jeremiah’s personality once they merge are synonymous. So what we have is a massive synonymity between Jeremiah’s unique personality and God. That is all orchestrated in the index position between the eternal and the temporal by this super-inflected discourse. That is an action, it is a creative thing. Of course, we are there in the index position, with the Spirit of God, and with our conscience, and with our ability to act and manipulate symbols.
Now if this super-inflected discourse creates synonymity between God and the personality of an individual, creates a unity, then it becomes a tremendously powerful kind of unity—a powerful agent. There are at least four areas affected by this powerful agent, by this unity.
1. It displaces inherency. In vs. 1:6, we see Jeremiah operating on this idea of inherency. “I don’t have what it takes.” It is the same kind of rhetorical question that Paul asks in 2 Corinthians 2, “Who is equal to such a task?” Well, no one is. So it is impossible to be objective about this. There is no such thing as objectivity. This powerful discourse, acting as an agent linking the eternal and the temporal, is more than just a source of doctrines, ethics and soteriology. It is more than just a wonderful encouragement of a devotional nature when we are in trouble. It is a powerful, pulsating, dynamic agent, with rays of energy coming out from it.
Now the same thing is stated when they are at Mount Sinai and the Lord comes down on the mountain and his presence settles with a black cloud. The mountain burns up to the sky with fire and they hear a voice and the earth quakes. Then they ask him not to speak directly to them anymore. God tells them that he will just give them his word indirectly. But he warns them that when they hear or read the word it is not any less powerful an entity than what they witnessed with their senses at the mountain. They began to think of it as a collection of words, but it is more than that. It is this conjugating power that brings the two worlds together and the two personalities of history together—the personality of God and the personality of an individual.
1. It overtakes the temporal. God tells him to “go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you to say.” (Vs. 1:7). He is going to go out there and this unique discourse is going to overtake the situation. The discourse does not originate with Jeremiah. It originates from outside the system. It originates with God. It is going to overtake the circumstances that he will face, whatever he is up against. The sins of the people are extensive, profound. Yet these words can overtake this situation. They overtake the temporal. That is why God sent him into the world. Now, of course, the people are not going to repent. Nevertheless, these words overtake the situation; and that is one of the great and remarkable things about this. We are also involved in this process of preaching and bringing this super-inflected discourse to bear upon the temporal. This discourse represents everything we are. We have accepted this discourse and it has shaped our personality; and people can’t draw a distinction between that super-inflected discourse and our own personality; and, therefore, there is no distinction between our personality and the personality of God. It is just that powerful a thing and it is from the Lord’s point of view.
2. It monitors the psychological configuration. In vs. 1:8, God gives him a direct
command: “Do not be afraid…I am with you, I will rescue you…” A key phrase follows “declares the Lord.” What is it that monitors our psychological configuration? It is this super-inflected discourse—”The Lord has declared.” When we are faced with some tremendous responsibility or threats come as seen by the people of faith in scripture. Elijah especially sticks out in my mind. After the big shoot-out on Mount Carmel, Jezebel puts a price on his head, and he feels the fear and he runs out into the desert. And the Lord tracks him down out there. And God pretty much asks him, “What are you doing here in this hole? This is not your place.” God was with him. We know what happens to Ahab and Jezebel (those who threatened him). The Lord was with him.
Now in the same way we have all these promises and we are under those promises. This is a tremendous sheltering that monitors our psychological condition. This is great if you believe it; if you assert these truths. If you say, “Now wait a minute. This man is threatening my life; but over here the Lord has said through this super-inflected discourse ‘don’t worry about that; I will take care of that.” You go on. Ignore the threats, ignore the recriminations, and ignore what people are going to say about you.’ This really does a job on self-image. I mean if there was ever a person who would have had low self-esteem it would have been Jeremiah because everybody—the king, the priests, the people–rejects him. They fight against him. He is not liked by anybody. He is rejected. They make fun of him. They are going to ridicule his word and his message and who knows what else they will try to say about him. He is told by God, “Don’t believe that.” He has to do that by an act of the will.
So we come to a point where we see that God monitors our discourse, what we say about ourselves. Our discourse is synonymous with the personality of God. Well, the personality of God is not going to be frightened because some men come along and say, “Oh, we hate you God. If we could get our hands on you, you would really be in trouble.” God is not subject to men. He is immune to these kinds of fears. In the same way, the enormity of the power of this super-inflected discourse is that it transforms our emotions to “feel” that come what may, the Lord has decided the outcome, and man can’t do unto us, which the old and biblical axiom about these kinds of things. It is stated in the psalms and in essence it is stated in the book of 1 Peter talking about persecution. “Don’t be afraid, hold on. Remember that your discourse has been subsumed. This is your personality remember.”
1. It is a key to a changed universe. In vs. 1:10, God tells him that there is going to be uprooting, tearing down, building up and planting. He is talking about changes he is going to bring about. He is talking about a transformation. What would be the key to this kind of a changed universe? The reason why the super-inflected discourse is the key is because it brings things together—it conjugates. So that the temporal is always inflected. Now it can be inflected by the Lord’s point of view in judgment; or it can be inflected in great blessing. As he said to Israel when they were there between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim, they are going to be conjugated. That changes everything. It would affect the totality of the universe, and would also affect all the substructures of which the kingdoms are a part. It is going to change everything.
So when we read in the Bible about the way the Lord sees his world (Psalm 119, for example, with all of his glowing statements made about the revelation), we are sensing the enormous power of the revelation. When the will of God links (conjugates) this super-inflected discourse on to man, like in the case of Jeremiah, that creates a unique kind of universe. It is a symbolic kind of universe. If the nation of Israel, the nation of Judah, had been willing to be inflected in precisely that way, a new symbolic universe would have been created and all of the substructures would have been devoted to God, to justice, and to righteousness. There would not have been any need for this uprooting, tearing down, rebuilding and this planting anew which is the reason Jeremiah was sent.
We are talking about something enormous here when we pick up the Bible and read it. If we allow it its role and submit to it—let our discourse be subordinated to it, be assimilated to it–then the Lord is setting loose a tremendous force in the world because of this fact of our synonymity. When we go into a situation, and our discourse is shaped by God, it is super-inflected; and it is one with the will of God. There is a power being asserted, being extruded, into that situation. The world may not believe it, like it or they may respond in a way that leads to faith; but in any event, they are being acted upon. We, as the church, as preachers of the gospel, as teachers, we are on the front lines of this action. So things will hit us first.
What would be the implications of this power being extruded into the world?
1. The super-inflected discourse is a lever of reconstruction. This would be the case of the individual as well as for the organized structures. What is going to create something new here? What is going to cause reconstruction? Only super-inflected discourse can. Human wisdom cannot do it. This is a direct slap in the face to the therapeutic community that says, “we don’t need super-inflected discourse. We have hyper-inflected discourse which is built on statistical regularity built on observation and the political mold, but not super-inflected by anything outside the system. The Lord is very jealous of his word. His symbols, once conjugated to the situation, to the temporal reality, force a reconstruction. They are like a big lever and will not be denied. That ought to give anybody hope. It wouldn’t matter how bad we are, or how nasty we become, how forlorn and hopeless—it is not the true and final reality. Once the super-inflected discourse is given an opening, it reconstructs. It always reconstructs. We have the marvelous picture of a dead body coming back to life because the Lord simply says so; or water coming out of a rock because the Lord says so. The desert will yield manna because he said so. The Jericho wall fell down because he said so. The Red Sea dried up simply because he said so. This super-inflected discourse we are dealing with here is absolute power over temporal realities. He is trying to get our faith to the level of the super-inflected discourse. Why would he allow for the persecution of the brethren in 1st Peter, if he didn’t want to say, “Now you need to get that faith up to the level of my discourse. We need to super-inflect your faith. The closer in proximity that your faith comes to this super-inflected discourse, the better it is for you; and this is the purpose for which you have been saved.
2. The super-inflected discourse vacates old opposing structures and then it builds new ones. He tells them “I’m going to uplift, I’m going to tear down. We are going to do some destroying and some overthrowing in order to build and to plant.” This is what the Word does. It tears down. It strips us bear. It takes it all the way. It is all good. It may be painful, but it is all good. The Lord breaks our will, breaks attitudes, and breaks connections to past circumstances, to the contemporary, with everything that has precipitated disaster in our lives. He removes it, scrapes it off, and then builds something very new on the base of it. The base is the super-inflected discourse. The base is not anything other than this. No wonder the superstructures had to be removed because the foundation was lousy, and he wanted to build something that had integrity from the ground up.
3. The super-inflected discourse builds a super-inflected structure. Here we can consider the concept of the “new man” that Jesus was talking about, that the apostles mention. The new man is a super-inflected personality. He is a new structure. Old things have passed away and behold all things have become new. Why? Because God says so. He must demonstrate some kind of power here because that is part of the extrusion to rebuild. We are not what we once were. We are not to think that we are what we once were. He makes a complete change. He puts to death the old. That is gone, we are not that, we are not to think of that any more. We are not the same.
This raises an interesting question. Psychiatrists have said that a child’s personality is fixed by the age of 3 or 4. That just couldn’t be possible. Now I could admit that he may like hot dogs and may have a hot temper by a certain age. But at any point that a child decides to turn to the super-inflected discourse and be conjugated (linked) to it by the power of God, he will change. It doesn’t matter if he is 4, 40, or 140. Because it all depends upon his coming into this enormous level of reconstruction. When the conjugating power, the discourse, is changed, we are changed. We are not the same people that we were before. And anybody can do that, whether they are an axe murderer, or whether they are someone who just lives a nice middle class life. It doesn’t make any difference.
God is going to create the one new man. In Ephesians 2, Paul describes the wall, the partition that had been built between the Jews and the Gentiles and says, “that is all destroyed now because something entirely different is being built so they could become the one new man.” How could they be one new man through Jesus, unless they had the same discourse and had the same personality? The are that which has been reconstructed by this unique force that is thrust into the world. The power of God, the word of God, is a huge factor in everything on the surface of the earth. The church, being the collection of new men would have to demonstrate this. Here is supposed to be a big fact, this group of people who are new men. In what sense? Well in every sense because their discourse is owed to the Lord. It is not obligated to anything else.
1. Super-inflected structures are baseline. They are normative. That has to be the case. What is normal? Our world has decided that normalcy can be defined however it chooses. That in a certain culture, a behavior is normative but in another it may not be. So National Geographic and others who have come around positing cultural relativism suggest that we can’t really criticize a certain culture because they happen to eat their children. We don’t do that, but who are we to decide that this is not the best way for them to handle things. We don’t have the right to impose our values on the rest of the world. Now what are normative structures? We have to ask that from the Lord’s point of view. When Jeremiah comes to the people, he will say, “What you have here is not the normative structure. The normative structure is very different. It is what the Lord himself has created, and you are not it any more.” So he is warning them that they better turn or they are going to significantly regret it. Well they didn’t turn and they did regret it.
What is the baseline? What is the normative structure? The normative structure, the baseline would be this super-inflected creation. That is supposed to be us. We are not the abnormal. We are not the “nuts.” We are not the odd, the peculiar because we do not operate on what the world considers to be normative any more. Their baseline is hyper-inflection. They start out with human thinking, they carry on from that point, they continue on from that point and they never vary. So we, as the church, are supposed to be the norm. If we are creating congregations that are built on hyper-inflection, then we are not the norm.
When we look at people, who operate on the basis of faith as we have defined it representationally, the Lord would say, “They think you are crazy. But I am telling you; you are the normal ones. They are the abnormal ones. You are normal. Cling to what you know.” (1 Corinthians 1:18 and following). If you go in to talk to somebody and they say, “Boy, that it really radical. I’ve never heard anyone live like this, think like this, talk like this—that is really not very normal is it?” One thing is they don’t understand the nature of the super-inflected discourse; and that the super-inflected structure, whether it’s a personality, or a kingdom, or something else, is the normative. They have failed to grasp that principle. It is not easy. It is not hard to fail to understand, because we always begin with a hyper-inflected starting point, which is what we call the commutative. We end upon inflecting the revelation of God in an unfortunate way so that those statements, those ways of symbolizing that are super-inflected never get the chance to see the light of day. We have suffocated them. We don’t allow our discourse to be subsumed by God.
Well if the normative is a human personality whose discourse is subsumed by God, then everything else that is not in agreement with that is quite abnormal. But this is a radical departure.
Jeremiah comes into a situation in which they would say of him that he is the abnormal one. He doesn’t fit. None of the priests agree with him. None of the kings agree with him. None of the trendsetters agree. He is not analogous to any of the normative types that they have any knowledge of. And he is coming to them from some little hole in the road and tells them what they are supposed to do. So they rejected him out of hand. The Lord knew they were going to do that and he encourages Jeremiah by saying, “don’t get chicken when you get into this. I’m telling you I will be with you, but they are not going to like it. They will fight against you, but they will not prevail.” This was a unique situation for this man who I wonder if he ever said, “well maybe I am not normal. Maybe I am the nut.” When you come back to the discourse that is inflected by God, you really don’t have any choice but to say, “No I am normal and those who do not operate on faith are crazy.”
1. Hyper-inflected discourse and its structures are degenerative, dangerous, misleading, and deceptive. Here we have a manifestation of that hyper-inflection throughout the book of Jeremiah; and they thought that they were doing well. They appeal to the fact that they still have the temple and the temple structure; and that as long as some work is going on down there that they were alright. But they were misled in profound ways. Hyper-inflected discourse always misleads. It always deceives. They think they are all right. Questions that need to be asked are not asked. Certain areas of relevance are not investigated because they don’t sense a need for this. Some things seem superfluous and they don’t want to be bothered. They wonder why Jeremiah is irritating them with these tremendous and bombastic statements of his. They went merrily on toward their own demise.
2. A super-inflected personality is indistinguishable from its discourse. It is a containment and a symbol because it always points to some sort of external reality and it would have to be considered as an asset to the world. Jeremiah under ideal conditions would have been recognized as an asset. The church often was persecuted. This did not happen because their biology was different, or color of hair was different, but because of their discourse. The world couldn’t stand it and they did not see it as an asset in the world. What would happen if members of the church don’t see a super-inflected personality as an asset? What if we get up and preach and we teach that this is what the Lord is calling us to—to be inflected by God’s discourse, and then some individual says, “Well that is great sermon material, it really is; but I don’t see that this is all that necessary?” In other words, he or she would be saying, “it is not an asset, not something that we really need, or that once we had it would be of great and multiple benefit to us. After all, we already have what we need—have a job, got the wife, the kids, life is pretty well structured for my well-being. And you come in here and you’re asking me to be super-inflected which overthrows all of the plans, purposes, structuring that I have already done. Well, I’m just not going to do that.”
Now why would they not be willing to do that? They might sit in a worship service, and sing “All to Jesus, I Surrender”, but yet if it came down to the specifics, they are some things they are not going to surrender. Is it an asset? If it were, then why would we not go out for it with full force? Why would we not want that as an asset? Relative to being ensconced within society (having a viable means to make a living, having our ducks in row, getting the kids through school, maintaining our health, planning for our retirement), becoming a super-inflected personality, a super-inflected discourse, is not really seen as an asset. That is where we have to draw a battle line. Ultimately, if you work representationally, someone is going to say, “Well you are really a pain aren’t you? You are tearing up this church. You have a lot of people asking questions that they never before asked. They were all happy and energetic and involved. Now you come along and you are just tearing them up. Do you think this is really worth it, what you are doing?” Of course, if it is just over a matter of assumptions or presuppositions, why bother? But if it is a matter of generalization from the text, then it is something else.
Why was the book of Jeremiah given? If it is just a moral treatise, then we really don’t have any business talking about this at the level of discourse and what that implies. But everything in his life was built around that discourse. The purpose for which he was born was because of that discourse. And the Lord knew him. He knew that here was a man, even before he set foot on the earth that would stick with my discourse all the way to the end.
(Thematic 2a) Rhetorical Devices
A sermon could be a rhetorical device. For example, if I want to make a certain point and therefor I am going to set up this sermon to accomplish that result—might be an emotional change or something like that. But super-inflected discourse is much more than a rhetorical device. Rhetorical devices are not sufficient to represent the world that we cannot see. They turn out to be insufficient in trying to represent the world that we do see. So something else has to do that. If it is true that the rhetorical device overtakes the structure, we have a problem. I believe in the years that I did some teaching and preacher training that the sermon serves as a rhetorical device. There are some thought forms that act as rhetorical devices, which really overtake the scripture. That was a problem because the scripture becomes trapped within that framework of rhetorical devices. It is easy to do that. One can write a book, or present a sermon or a lesson, and turn it into a rhetorical device in just this precise way. Or we can have a way of thinking within a local body of believers that constitutes a rhetorical device and so traps the text within it. There is nothing new here. It would be a useful study to read Jeremiah and isolate all the rhetorical devices that people used. We can look at some of them. For instance, they did not ask, “Where is the Lord.” There are other statements that the Lord sees as rhetorical devices. For example when they say, “Well we are not going to follow you any more.” How did that turn out? They did not go out in the stars one night and say, “we have all reached a consensus and we are not following you up there any more.” That is not the way it happened. It became structured somehow. It would be a very interesting study to go back through Jeremiah and try to isolate what those rhetorical devices are.
(Thematic 2b) Concept of Spiritual Assets
We have to believe that anything that is super-inflected is an asset. Therefore, if God has inflected your discourse, it is an asset. So you have a continuum here. You have a unity. You have a super-inflected universe and then you have a super-inflected set of personalities and a super-inflected discourse that allows you to know, to have a window on the super-inflected universe. We know that it is super-inflected because in Romans 1, we are told that the Lord has built it, maintains it, allows things to happen, prevents other things from happening, sends his rain, sends his sunshine, etc. So it is inflected. We have cases where the Lord used the weather in specific ways of judgment.
On the other hand, you have the super-inflected universe but a hyper-inflected discourse or set of personalities, and they can’t get into the nature of the super-inflected universe because their discourse won’t allow it. They can’t really see the difference. When we think about the hyper-inflected discourse, you have a bunch of people with a bunch of different ideas, all of which are hyper-inflected. They seem to all have to be interrelated since they lack a standard. They become intertextual. So the result is a competitive situation where one set of ideas is supposed to win out over another set of ideas; and that warfare is conducted in many different ways. It can be conducted literarily. Violence plays a part—why we fight wars. First comes the discourse, later comes the war. We end up with this massive swamp. There is nothing to be gained from that idea.
Furthermore, it exerts a great deal of influence. We can call this “rhetorical triumphs.” Now here is something that is won; and it is won in the rhetorical sphere. Evolution is a rhetorical triumph. There were men like Huxley, supposedly known as Darwin’s bulldog, who championed evolution and others in the press who did the same. So in spite of lingering questions in the scientific area, things that didn’t fit together, things that still don’t fit together, evolution has continued to reign as a rhetorical triumph—not a scientific triumph. But this is never discussed. There are a lot of questions. There is an interesting book that has just been a bombshell on the evolutionary camp—called “Darwin’s Black Box”. He reveals many gaps at the molecular level that Darwin could never get over, and no one has ever been able to get around these, but still evolution can reign as a triumph. What do you do when you present yourself to the media? We see images; we see all sorts of discreet realities up there on the screen. We have visualization. When my father had his medical problem, back in August, visualization was a rhetorical triumph. The doctors came in with charts, the visualization of his condition. This doesn’t stimulate questions like well “How does this molecule relate to that molecule, or how does that tissue structure relate to the overall behavior of the organism?” The visuals are rhetorically overwhelming to us. But a rhetorical triumph is not the same as a rhetorical reality. This is a big point. We believe that we have an inheritance that is kept for us in heaven, that will not perish, spoil or fade. This is not a rhetorical triumph. That is a rhetorical reality.
Now what won out to influence the people’s minds in Jeremiah’s time was a rhetorical triumph over a rhetorical reality. This cannot be emphasized enough. They believed that what they thought was right, i.e., that everything was going to turn out rosy in Israel and Judah; that they were on the right track; that things were going to get better. But that wasn’t the reality that was distilled in the rhetoric of God. The rhetorical reality was that Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians were going over there and they were going to be punished harshly. Yet that reality was rejected in favor of a rhetorical triumph
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We have a lot of experience with people, who will say, “Well, I don’t know. I just can’t handle that. I would rather think this…” We can clearly present them with the rhetorical reality coming directly from the text about their situation, and they will choose to reject it for their own ideas that they want to believe instead. They have been triumphed over by rhetoric, words, and ideas that are apart from God’s rhetorical reality. It is a rhetorical triumph. When people believe themselves or other people, instead of believing God, it is a rhetorical triumph. It has no basis in a kind of reality that is congealed for us, and exists for us, in this rhetorical form of the Word of God. Rhetorical triumphs may seem encouraging, may increase our enthusiasm but they don’t present the word as a rhetorical reality that runs the universe. Rhetorical triumphs do not force us to ask the question, “Do material circumstances determine outcomes?” And know that from the point of view of scripture that the answer is “No, they do not.”
Jeremiah comes along to the people and proclaims nothing but the truth of the rhetorical reality facing them from God’s view of the situation. He is not interested in rhetorical triumphs. When Paul, the apostle, gets to Corinth, he comes in exactly that same posture. He was not apologetic, but he felt that he lacked a little eloquence. In 1 Corinthians 2:1 he says, “When I came to you brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.” Now the testimony is not destined to be a rhetorical triumph. It is a rhetorical reality that cannot be denied. God is a reality. We know about him through the rhetorical message and what he thinks (his discourse). Paul says basically that he did not have the capacity to triumph rhetorically over them. He didn’t have the eloquence, or the superior wisdom of the orators. He just came bringing them a rhetorical reality. We all may wish that we could do a better job sometimes, and certainly there is always room for improvement. But we are sticking to the rhetorical reality in the mind of God over anything else.
Often what happens in places where big groups of people gather, there are more rhetorical triumphs than you have presentations about the rhetorical reality of God. This is a problem. Paul says in 1 Cor 2:2, “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (That is the crux and it encompasses every need and every failure.) “I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” (Vs. 3-5) Now doesn’t it seem obvious that faith rests on rhetorical reality? It does not rest on men’s wisdom. It does not rest on their rhetorical triumphs.
In Jeremiah 2:10-11, God says “Cross over to the coasts of Kittim and look, send to Kedar and observe closely; see if there has ever been anything like this: Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.)” Those gods don’t even exist. They are not rhetorical realities, they are rhetorical triumphs. This gives us a way to draw a finer and finer distinction. What we often hear are rhetorical triumphs—things that people have regurgitated, thought time after time, year after year—but there is no substance to them. They are not real in the mind of God. Jeremiah comes in at the middle of all this rhetorical triumph deceiving the people, where everybody has their minds made up, where consensus had been formed, and where everybody believed what everybody else knew to be true. And he says, “Well, we are going to uproot, tear down, destroy. When we get through with that then we are going to build and plant.” This is a great illustration of why this super-inflected discourse is so extremely significant.
(Thematic 3) Jeremiah as a Super-inflected Antipode
Jeremiah turns out to be a super-inflected antipode. In Jeremiah 1:11-19, he makes some rip-roaring statements about his relationship as a prophet to the world. We are going to call the world a “hyper-inflected environment.” He says, “The word of the Lord came to me:” (That is the trigger.) ‘What do you see Jeremiah?’ ‘I see the branch of an almond tree,’ I replied. Then the Lord said to me, ‘You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.’ (It is going to bud out.) “The word of the Lord came to me again: ‘What do you see?’ ‘I see a boiling pot, tilting away from the north,’ I answered.” (Now notice how it begins with the discourse God’s word is going to be fulfilled.) “The Lord said to me, ‘From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land. I am about to summon all the peoples of the northern kingdoms,’ declares the Lord. ‘Their kings will come and set up their thrones in the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem; they will come against all her surrounding walls and against all the towns of Judah. I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshiping what their hands have made.'”
We have an antipodal situation here clearly. Vs. 14 uses the phrase “all who live in the land.” Let’s look at this closer. “All” is referring to the people. “Who live in the land” is their sociology, the interconnections, the way in which they relate, the glue that holds their physical reality together, what is considered to be wise, common sense, what they operate upon. “Who live in the land” can be construed to be the economy. Because everything that they have is drawn from the land. Therefore, judgment is going to come upon what we can call the “biosphere” which is man on the earth and upon the “anthroposphere,” which is a term that indicates everything that man, knows or thinks. We combine these two together.
In vs. 18, he says that the “kings, officials, priests and the people” are going to fight against him. So you have a layered structure here, from the pinnacle to the man on the street. There is judgment and also there is this reciprocal rejection of the prophet. This situation apparently, created what we could call an “antipodal charter for life.” How were these people living we might ask. Here is the charter that was constructed by the hyper-inflected mind. We call it a “charter” because this guides the way they are going to live. This is the way they have chosen to live out their lives, and every aspect of that life. This was an act of the will, they were not forced to do this, but they did. They had the revelation; but they chose to ignore it. But this charter is antipodal to the charter for life that God had given them. We can look at three parts to this charter they have created and chosen to live by:
1. Abandonment of revelation (vs. 16). We know that if we abandon revelation, we abandon God. Because we respond first and foremost to propositions from God, or we respond to super-inflected propositions. If we decide to reject super-inflected propositions, then we are in rebellion. To reject the propositions is to reject God. To abandon the super-inflected, is to embrace the hyper-inflected, which is synonymous with abandoning God. So if we abandon these propositions, then all this other stuff flows from it. So everything depends upon the base of revelation. And they have removed, destroyed and thrown away this base. It was considered insufficient, not up to their contemporary standards, not up to their needs. They have heard the propositions, but yet they think there is a better way to do things. Nothing new here. Israel had a long history of doing this same thing. They had forsaken God. The Lord and his word was nominalized and eventually discounted all together. This explains the history of almost any society. There are many ways that the revelation can be abandoned. Somebody might abandon it, and yet hold on to a kind of hyper-inflected version of it and deny they have done it. This is exactly the argumentation against Jeremiah. But the Lord knew better. They had abandoned super-inflected discourse in favor of human wisdom. So if you elevate human wisdom to a par with the revelation of God, then you have in essence abandoned God. Now that is a pretty strong statement. But if you try to make the two co-equals, you really have subordinated the revelation of God to human intelligence. This constitutes the abandonment of God.
2. Creation of a Counter-Discourse (vs. 16). They burned incense to other gods. The reason they did that is because they had hyper-inflected ideas. They decided to burn incense first on the basis of some sort of discourse that has supplanted what God had said to them. We know that a counter discourse had been created–something that was antipodal to the grammatical structure of the text. These ideas had been passed from one generation to the next. It was shared among them so they have a counter discourse. Now Jeremiah comes against this counter discourse. He knows what he is up against. The Lord has orchestrated this clash, this conflict in a precise way.
1. Confidence in contrivance (vs. 16). They were worshiping what their hands had made. Idolatry is a human contrivance and anything that we fall down to and to which we subordinate the Lord is a contrivance. There are shades of a technological idolatry that is going on in our world, where things are subordinated to technology. We might say, “well we know a lot more than they did in King Asa’s day about foot disease, so we subordinate the revelation to that knowledge.” (2 Chronicles 16:12-13) Confidence in the contrivance, and confidence in man’s ability to contrive, (to shape) is involved in the worshiping of what their hands had made. We can call it a hyperbolic contrivance, and make the suggestion that it is very seductive.
Let’s take these three aspects that act as an antipodal charter for life. (1) Abandon revelation and think the way we want to think. Our thinking is not going to be corrected to correspond to the revelation of God. It is man, operating in his own environment, unaided by revelation and unheeding revelation. (2) A complete counter-discourse would take shape that would smother any consideration for the revelation of God. And that discourse would have to be removed for faith to flourish. Jeremiah was set for this kind of defense; Paul was set for this kind of defense. The church always is set for his kind of defense. The revelation always enters into conflict with counter-discourse. (3) Putting confidence in contrivance, in our own ways of thinking. There is a certain common denominator in all these aspects and that is the word “wickedness,” which involves a hyper-inflected class of things to which these people had given themselves over.
Also, you can see that they all did this. There is a sense of consensus. Almost all of the nations had accepted this consensus, this charter for life. They did not believe they had to seek out the revelation, or think about it, or ask God’s opinion or to rock the boat, or question what has been prevalent among them as conventional wisdom. This is the way they thought about who they were. It is also a hyper-inflected cosmology when you bring ideas to bear on the temporal; you have a symbolic universe. You have a cosmology. The ideas they were bringing were of human origin. A great shift had occurred from the time Israel was originally constituted until the moment that Jeremiah came along. The shift had to do with moving away from super-inflection to hyper-inflection.
Deuteronomy warned them about the penalties associated with hyper-inflected thinking. For example, in Deut. 28, and the great text that has to do with cursing and blessing. Cursing always was associated with where the altar was. He brought them a fully illustrated lesson from Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim about what would happen if they move from super-inflection to hyper-inflection. They would move from blessings to curses. The Lord arbitrates the gulf. A hyper-inflected environment has to be distinguished from something else. The antipode to the whole hyper-inflected environment is a personality (Jeremiah). This is a startling thing. The implications of it are rather weighty. It is one man. We will call him the super-inflected personality, but he knows himself to be the antipode to all that is entailed in a hyper-inflected environment—he and he alone. Imagine if every Christian took on this role. It is the individual who is super-inflected by God. He sees himself standing against the hyper-inflected environment, whether he is alone or joined by other brethren. Of course, Jeremiah wasn’t alone because the Lord stood with him. He was super-inflected. Now notice, that a super-inflected personality is not going to be overtaken by the hyper-inflected environment. That not only does not happen, it cannot happen. It cannot happen because our triumph is a rhetorical reality. The Lord told Jeremiah, “They are going to fight against you, you may not like it, but don’t worry about it, they are not going to win.” How did Jeremiah know this? Because the Lord said so. Jeremiah says in vs. 11, “The Word of the Lord came to me.” The word of the Lord coming to him, the union of the two worlds. He is established as a prophet.
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