Acting from what you know

You have to recognize when you come into understanding that overwhelms your even most passionately held belief or opinion. One of these is the recognition that the visible Christian church can indeed be categorized as physically, emotionally, or intellectually oriented (the three great branches: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant respectively).

This applies to me in my passionate - genuinely passionate - hatred of Roman Catholicism as being a church of false doctrine and literally of the devil. Where I have to be honest is in this: I also hold all Protestant churches (and denominations) in varying degrees of contempt as well. So...

So, the fact is I am riding above both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (and Eastern Orthodoxy as well).

So now I have to figure out the correct view and attitude towards things like church history where people who basically hold my doctrinal views were tortured and burned alive by Roman Catholics.

(There's not a small caveat necessary here which is: on the mark biblical doctrine exists; but really only the intellectually oriented types will find it or even value it. Yet, with that in mind it probably also follows that there are genuinely true biblical things in the other two types (the physical and emotional - Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic) that one has to recognize. And there is false doctrine in all as well. But ultimately you need the physical, emotional, and intellectual developed in you in a balanced way, and that will include by default the on-the-mark intellectual understanding of pure, biblical doctrine, which exists to be seen and accepted.)

But as a Man #4 Christian you really aren't allowed to get 'angry' at any of the lower three levels. You understand them. That means I can't take sides 'righteously' when reading the history of people being burned at the stake and tortured and all that. I have to have a higher understanding of it. Which is possible, when you are truly at the Man #4 and higher level.

So, yeah the Papists are corrupt in several ways, yet they do have the cathedrals and music. And some of the Protestants actually have the pure doctrine, which is big, but they are generally shallow other than that. The Eastern Orthodox are sensually oriented, yet they do also have more practical teachings regarding real development of level of being (judging by the fact that Philokalia type writings are so close to Man #4 knowledge, if not quite there).

Pure doctrine is obviously very important, yet regeneration occurs prior to getting that, so... It's not everything. (You find it eventually once truly regenerated.)

I've known all this, but since I 'went down' to the mainstream church level and I naturally was in alliance with the intellectually-oriented Protestants who had the pure doctrine I could indulge all those fighting emotions and attitudes; but what I have to face is, as I said: I have just as much contempt for the Protestant level as the others, regarding the visible church in general. And contempt is not too harsh a word.

Once I re-situate myself where I'm suppoed to be (where my development and understanding put me at) then that contempt has to disappear and understanding take its place. That doesn't mean you 'agree' in some soft, compromising, ecumenical way with churches and denominations and branches of the faith that hold to false doctrine, but it means you are above those levels in a real way because you understand everything involved at those levels. You see the wheat and chaff in each.

You can't get there completely until you're able to see and accept pure biblical doctrine though (that intellectual level development that is usually the last to be acquired completely). You can't just pronounce yourself above it all. You have to have real understanding of it all.

So this post is about acting from what you know. (Actually I suspect you're not even a real Christian until you do enter the Man #4 level of it. Though that can be disputed, by me even. Maybe it's just a matter of different orders, and the Bible certainly talks of differences in level of being among Christians, for instance as Paul the apostle writes in different places in 1 and 2 Corinthians, and else where.)

It sounds arrogant, but so what. I'm not saying I'm better. I'm admitting common faults, afterall. But I'm saying I know more. I know better than the people who are naturally at one of the three levels of the visible church below. So I have to act from what I know. And correlating the three main branches of Christianity with Man #1, 2, and 3 is understanding that overrides everything. If you're Man #4. You have to stop playing games. Stop playing around at a level you don't belong. Throw off the allegiances and baggage, and act from what you know.