Charlottesville, LARPers, and the Blame Game

Long term, what does Charlottesville mean for the nation? That's a big question and it's worth considering. I find myself doing so in my back yard as I watch the grass grow, high as balls on cold medication (I'm really sick right now). It's captured my attention in a way that nothing has since the Trump campaign.

The number one effect is that a fracture now exists between the Alt-Light and Nazi-LARP wings of the Alt-Right. Mild partisan bickering aside, the two groups were mostly willing to work together through the Trump campaign and indeed, up until now.

But for all the lumping together of the two groups (or three or four, or however many subgroups your taxonomy includes) done by the media, there was always a tension between them. It's difficult to put into words properly since there are so many splinter groups and individual opinions on each ideology, but there is an essential difference between a person who willingly calls themselves a Nazi and a person who does not.

"Saruman did nothing wrong guiz! Helm's Deep never happened!"

That's really the wedge of the issue, I think: are you willing to call yourself a Nazi? A Confederate? A Carthaginian? Any other of history's big losers? Regardless of whether you believe they were right at the time, or history would have been better if they won, or if their opponents were even worse, there's something inherently off about those trying to raise up these very, very dead causes while offering nothing new.

Part of the appeal of the broader Alt-Right brand was the bleeding edginess - the memes, the Rare Pepes, the devil-may-care attitude. As much as some might criticize them for being keyboard warriors, they got shit done, and that catapulted them above the trad-cons and neo-cons.

But for all of the losing that trad-cons and neo-cons do, at least they represent extant worldviews with some semblance of political power. The LARPers are 50% losers and 50% government informants. Their chances of overthrowing the Federal government or making an impact on the broader cultural landscape fall somewhere between The Nation of Yahweh and The Elf Queen's Daughters.

They are trying to get a movement up and running by shackling it to the corpses of America's enemies. They are determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat.

Nazi LARPers, gearing up for a run

But as fun as LARPer bashing is, what does this mean long term? There are basically two reads here. If AntiFa, BLM, and other Left-leaning violent mobs cool their heels, we see the Alt-Light gain ascendancy over the Alt-White as normies get turned off of the Nazi brand and anything even vaguely related.

The downside here is that Alt-Light is easier to infiltrate and turn into the next Tea Party. It's the Alt-White faction (as distinct from the Nazi LARPers) that makes it more of a personal risk to embrace the Alt-Right label. Even if you're not Alt-White, knowing that you're sharing space with them puts you on an edge with your normie friend, relatives, and coworkers.

If AntiFa etc. get even more violent, I think we see further radicalization of the normies. The Left is able to mobilize larger mobs with SorosBux, college kids, and motherfuckers who just want to burn shit down. The game here is in provoking the other side into making a bigger mess so that the normies hate them more.

Remember, at the end of the day, the normies hate whoever they see as responsible for disrupting their lives. Normal people want to go to work and enjoy themselves, not obsess over historical trivia or delve into the facts of the latest civil disturbance. They want a clear Good vs. Evil narrative (A New Hope), not a complex mess of nebulous motives and political trivia (The Phantom Menace).

If you give people Nazis - like, actual people calling themselves Nazis and throwing Nazi salutes to Nazi flags, not a little old church ladies who aren't sure about the public praise of sodomy - then they will assume that those people are Nazis and that Nazis are bad. And people fucking love it when there's a clear bad guy that they can hate.

I know it's not fair. The other guys can call themselves Communists or Dog Fuckers or whatever else and no one gives a shit. You can either whine about it to people who do not give a single iota of a fuck, or push the Commies into committing atrocities and ruining their brand just as deeply as the Nazis.

[BTT044] Conclusions

Previous: [BTT043] Luke 24:44-46 / The Entire Old Testament


Conclusion One: Some, but not all, prophecies can be intellectually grasped

Remember Matthew 2:1-6?

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”

When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.

So they said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet:

‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
Are not the least among the rulers of Judah;
For out of you shall come a Ruler
Who will shepherd My people Israel.’”

Unlike the apostles, Matthew gives us no indication that the chief priests and scribes were privy to any special revelation about the meaning of prophecy. They read Micah 5:1-4, thought about it, and correctly identified the birthplace of the Messiah.

Others, like Mat 27:3-9 / Jeremiah 32:1-15, seem to defy rational explanation. I have no idea how you would get "the betrayer of the Messiah will be buried in a field purchased with the money he got for betraying the Messiah" from "I'm investing in Israeli real estate because we're all coming back."

Maybe you can find a plausible chain of logic for that. I freely admit that I can't. Some prophecies can be intellectually grasped, but some require the eyes of God to understand.


Conclusion Two: Applying standard exegetical methods to prophecy is unbiblical

Let me very quickly specify that it is not sinful to apply standard exegetical methods to prophecy (ie, look at the context, look at the exact meaning of the original language). It is simply not what the Bible does. The Biblical method for interpreting Bible prophecies ignores context, time, exact language etc.

It is amusing that we used standard exegetical methods to arrive at this conclusion (we asked the question 'how does the Bible itself interpret prophecy in the Bible?'), but then, we're not saying there is anything wrong with using standard exegetical methods on other sections of the Bible. Standard exegetical methods still work fine for the historical sections/the letters of Paul/etc.

But we don't interpret the Psalms the same way we interpret Romans. And we should stop interpreting prophecy the way we interpret the rest of Scripture. It is simply not how the Bible treats itself.


Conclusion Three: Prophecy is written from the Divine Perspective

I'm going to break from my usual methodology here and make an inferred conclusion – something which seems supported by the text but is not explicitly stated. So take this with a larger grain of salt than usual.

It seems clear to me that prophecy (which comes from God) is written from the Divine perspective. God is the creator of time and is not bound by its laws. He exists outside of time, as He has from before the beginning. So one explanation for the way prophecy jumps around time is that it is written from a perspective outside of time – the God's Eye View.

Again, this is nowhere explicitly stated in Scripture. It is built up from what we know about God and what we know about prophecy.

Conclusion Four: Prophecy is Pattern

This one is another inferred conclusion, and one that may require longer explanation elsewhere.

The Scriptures do not present us with the types of prophecies that we may expect. There is no reason to believe that prophecies are primarily about the future. There is no reason to believe prophecies are primarily about singular events. There is really no reason to believe that prophecies are primarily found in explicitly prophetic sections (most of our prophecies with non-ambiguous fulfilments come from the Psalms).

We may flesh this out later, but for now, I consider most of prophecy as repeating patterns. The same thing happens once and then again, or even over and over again. This is part of why prophecies have multiple fulfillments.

"Prophecy is Pattern" is not absolutely true. But it's less wrong than our standard take on prophecy. It's a step to get us from an incorrect view to a more correct view.


Conclusion Five: Prophecy is about Jesus Christ
We know that all of Scripture is ultimately about Jesus Christ, and yet we still spend pointless hours agonizing over whether or not the United States appears in Revelation. Whether the Mark of the Beast will be a tattoo or a computer chip. If the Anti-Christ will rebuild the Temple or if the Temple will be rebuilt before the Anti-Christ.

This is all bullshit. It's not the purpose of prophecy and does nothing to bring us closer to Jesus or help us understand Him.

The primary purpose of prophecy and of all the Scriptures is to show us Jesus Christ and lead us to Him. So if you want to understand New Testament prophecy, this is absolutely, 100% the place where you must start.

[BTT043] Luke 24:44-46 / The Entire Old Testament

Previous: [BTT042] Plēroō Passage Review

Luke 24:44-46 / The Entire Old Testament

Fulfillment

"These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.

Original

Okay, so I'm not going to copy and paste the entirety of the Old Testament here.

Comparison


Jesus is continually fulfilling Old Testament prophecies throughout the New Testament, whether explicitly as in our plēroō passages or implicitly. We also see throughout the New Testament that Jesus' disciples are continually failing to understand Jesus' actions and how they relate to the Scriptures. Peter tries to fight off the Romans and Pharisees with a sword, not knowing why his Lord must die.

But here in Luke 24, the risen Jesus lays it all out for his apostles. He had told them before that all the Scriptures must be fulfilled, and they did not understand or believe Him. Now, after His work on earth has been fulfilled, they are finally able to understand.

And Jesus does something very interesting here - He does not simply give them a list of prophecies and how they were fulfilled. Instead, He opens their understanding. This implies two things. First, that the apostles did not have the ability to understand all of these prophecies until that point (there’s reason to believe they understood some of them). Second, that these prophecies can be mentally comprehended.

This seems similar to the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior, in that there is an intellectually component and a faith component. On one hand, there absolutely are rational arguments for Jesus being precisely who He said His is, as the eloquent defenses of apologists throughout history show us.

On the other hand, accepting Jesus Christ as who He says He is requires the opening of the heart to the truth. Pharaoh's heart was hardened, even after seeing display after display of the miraculous power of YHWH. Saul of Tarsus had his heart opened, despite his rigorous indoctrination into the intellectual system of the Pharisees.

As with all spiritual truths, the true interpretations of prophecy are not anti-intellectual. At the same time, they can only be truly grasped by the mercy of God in opening hearts and minds.

There is one other thing of note here. We divide the Scriptures into different categories: the law, the prophets, the poetry, history, etc. While there may be a genre divide between these sections, Jesus Himself says that parts of all are ultimately prophetic. Writings which on the surface seem to be descriptive of the life of David also point to the life of Christ. Kosher laws which seem to regulate the eating of food and the wearing of clothing also point to the purity of the coming Messiah.

Just as importantly, all of these things - "the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms" - are all ultimately about Jesus, not about describing the future. Daniel didn't say, "Hey Nebuchadnezzar, after your kingdom falls in such-and-such a year, there's going to be a Persian Empire starting on such-and-such a date, followed a Greek Empire started by a cool guy called Alexander, then a Roman Empire that will have dapper brush helmets, and then a Church that won't be a literal empire." Instead, he focused on the coming Messiah. Prophecy and Scripture are not for tickling ears, they're for preaching Christ.

Now all Christians understand that there are prophecies which have already been fulfilled and prophecies which are yet to be fulfilled. The first coming of the Messiah has been fulfilled, the second coming has not. Salvation has gone to the Gentiles, but the lion does not yet lie down with the lamb. Our many, many swords show no signs of becoming plowshares in the immediate future.

It is natural to want to know when these things will come to pass, not simply to satisfy human curiosity, but because they are the fulfillment of the deepest desires of the human heart. But the Scriptures say that only God can open the eyes of our hearts to fully comprehend the Scriptures.

The apostles had their eyes opened in this exact way. As we turn our eyes to the future, let us first look at how the apostles understood the past.

Next: [BTT044] Conclusions

[BTT042] Plēroō Passage Review

Previous: [BTT041] John 19:32-37 / Psalm 34:20 (arguably Exodus 12:43-46; Numbers 9:12) / Zechariah 12:7-10

Plēroō Passage Review

Throughout this series, we've looked only at specific fulfillments of specific Old Testament prophecies as explicitly defined by the authors of the New Testament. While there are references to Old Testament prophecy outside of these passages, the lack of the verb plēroō leaves it ambiguous whether the authors are alluding to the Old Testament or claiming a fulfillment or prophecy.

While our standards have been strict, this was only to rule out any possible misidentification of prophetic fulfillment. Our current data set is also valuable in that it is limited to how Jesus and the apostles understood textual prophecies from the Old Testament – as we attempt to understand textual prophecies in the Old and New Testaments.

With that in mind, let's review our five points of prophecy:


Point One: Prophecies usually have multiple fulfillments

This one should not be a surprise to anyone who has studied prophecy. I went into this expecting to see it and was not surprised.

I was, however, surprised by how few prophecies only have one fulfillment. I was aware that multiple fulfillments were not unusual. I was not aware that singular fulfillments are unusual.


Point Two: The context may be misleading in prophecy

This one was a huge surprise for me. I went in expecting the larger context to explain away all seeming inconsistencies, but the larger contexts of the originals and the fulfillments generally make the inconsistencies bigger. It's kind of shocking just how little attention Jesus and the apostles pay to the original context of the verses they quote, when we've been told all our theological lives that "context is king."


Point Three: Past, Present, and Future do not matter in prophecy. Prophecies solely about singular future events are the minority.

At first glance, the second part of this point may seem like a retread of Point One – and in a way, it is. But it is important to stress the high levels of chronological schizophrenia at work here. Past, Present, and Future are meaningless concepts in prophecy.

A prophecy already fulfilled may be fulfilled again. A prophecy about a future event may also be about a past event. One paragraph of prophecy may have one line about the past, one line about the past which also looks forward to the future, and another line about multiple past and future events.

Again, this is in complete opposition to the 'common sense' definition of prophecy as being about future events. Looking at the Bible, it is clear that prophecy is far more than prediction.


Point Four: The exact wording does not matter in prophecy, or we have a different version of the Old Testament than Jesus

I was utterly dumbfounded by this because it goes against every Protestant jot-and-tittle instinct I have. And yet it cannot be denied that either Jesus and the apostles had a different Greek/Hebrew text than us or they didn't give a flying flip about exact quotations.

Even if they did have a different version, God chose not to preserve it for us. So even if these are exact quotations of a different version, apparently God thought it was fine to not preserve that exact wording.


Point Five: A passage does not have to be explicitly prophetic to be prophecy

This one did not surprise me, since the Psalms in particular are commonly seen as both about the life of David and Prophetic. We might even consider this a subset of the 'context doesn't matter' principle. It should, however, give us pause about what other seemingly non-prophetic passages may be prophetic.


There are our five points based solely on the conditions mentioned at the beginning of this series (Old Testament prophecies with explicit fulfillment in the New Testament). But there's one more plēroō passage that's worth taking into account that we're going to look at next time.

Now this particular plēroō passage is something of an odd duck. It technically doesn't fulfill our conditions, because it doesn't refer to any specific Old Testament passage. Instead, it refers the entirety of the Old Testament, and in my opinion, completely explains why the New Testament interprets the Old Testament in the way it does.

That's a big statement, so bear with me until next time.


Next: [BTT043] Luke 24:44-46/ The Entire Old Testament

[BTT041] John 19:32-37 / Psalm 34:20 (arguably Exodus 12:43-46; Numbers 9:12) / Zechariah 12:7-10

Previous: [BTT042] John 19:23-24 / Psalm 22:18


John 19:32-37 / Psalm 34:20 (arguably Exodus 12:43-46; Numbers 9:12) / Zechariah 12:7-10

Fulfillment

Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with Him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you may believe. For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, “Not one of His bones shall be broken.” And again another Scripture says, “They shall look on Him whom they pierced.”

Original 1

Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
But the Lord delivers him out of them all.
He guards all his bones;
Not one of them is broken.

Original 2

And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the ordinance of the Passover: No foreigner shall eat it. But every man’s servant who is bought for money, when you have circumcised him, then he may eat it. A sojourner and a hired servant shall not eat it. In one house it shall be eaten; you shall not carry any of the flesh outside the house, nor shall you break one of its bones.

Original 3

Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘If anyone of you or your posterity is unclean because of a corpse, or is far away on a journey, he may still keep the Lord’s Passover. On the fourteenth day of the second month, at twilight, they may keep it. They shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. They shall leave none of it until morning, nor break one of its bones.

Original 4

“The Lord will save the tents of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah. In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem; the one who is feeble among them in that day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the Angel of the Lord before them. It shall be in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.

“And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn."

Comparison
The first quotation in John is relatively straightforward compared to some of the others we've looked at. Sure, the context of the original Psalm seems to be talking about righteous people in general, but whatever. It's nothing we haven't seen before.

The second quotation is also surprisingly straightforward: on the day when God gets around to destroying his enemies, the people of Jerusalem shall 'look on Me whom they pierced.' John changes that 'Me' to a 'Him', but we really should not be surprised at paraphrasing at this point.

Also – does anyone else get the feeling that God is being unusually coy in Zechariah? "Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn"? That's almost sarcastic. 'Oh, you guys are definitely going to mourn for Me as if I was your firstborn. Almost like I'm the only begotten. Eh? Eh? Wink, wink, nudge?"

What's truly amazing about the Zechariah passage is that it's the only one we've seen that was the prophecy of a singular future event, not something fulfilled multiple times throughout history. Our expectation for what prophecy is, is the absolute minority.

It's time to revise Points One and Three:


Re-Revised Point One: Prophecies usually have multiple fulfillments

Re-Revised Point Two: The context may be misleading in prophecy

Revised Point Three: Past, Present, and Future do not matter in prophecy. Prophecies solely about singular future events are the minority.

Re-Revised Point Four: The exact wording does not matter in prophecy, or we have a different version of the Old Testament than Jesus

Point Five: A passage does not have to be explicitly prophetic to be prophecy

And with this, we have come to the end of the plēroō passages. For whatever reason, there are no passages that meet our requirements outside of the Gospels. Next time, we'll review what we have learned.


Next: [BTT042] Plēroō Passage Review