A Practice of Belief or Works to Gain Righteousness

Submitted by M Tovey (United States), Aug 28, 2020 at 22:28

DNM;
There appears to be no relief of intriguing things to discuss with you; that you are able to bring up things that have been an ages old question for this journeyman in the search for whatever has been troubling the whole of humanity; that apparently cannot be answered in traditional terms of knowledge. You reference of D-Y-N from an answer to an earlier post has many implications of how mankind is still transfixed on supernatural things, but has no real clue to search out the truth of it all; and as you have inferred, no one yet has been able to provide an answer in rational human terms. Such had been my dilemma for decades until, as I had said before, found the key that now permits a greater understanding of why mankind does not seek the truth. Now we need to interject politics, since the morality of those times are now in question and politics tries to interject the modern answer.
In your implication here, the issue of right believing versus right doing has been a struggle of humanity for its entire existence, the inability to discern what will bring mankind together in a common recognition of living in harmony or in constant conflict for not being able to do the right thing. We cannot but think of how this almost immediately brings out the issue of hypocrisy; that of speaking of righteousness towards others while at the same time finding our own conduct or behavior is not above reproach.
Orthodoxy versus orthopraxy, though not necessarily in those exact terms, has been the problem for 'religious' practices for ages; from the ancient Egyptian and Sumerian practices through the realms of empires that required absolute obedience (right doing) to the sovereign to be in right standing before the throne, usually upon pain of death for not being so. Is this not the requirement we read of when the Assyrians ran amok in Mesopotamia, the Chaldeans in ancient Babylon and all the while, other lesser known monarchies were on the march. And what was the main driver: which deity were they obeying when rampaging and pillaging?
In the more modern context, such as we are contending here: whose orthodoxy (of belief) needs to be followed in order to be practicing doing the right thing; orthopraxy? Western Civilization has been the throes of that for centuries, the rest of humanity for millennia. This has gone on for so long, and yet there is no consensus that mankind is any closer now than when the original contention of whose deity is God, polytheistic or monotheistic. Even when alleging that 'Christianity' has the answer, as this believer does, it requires recognition that mankind's ability to even apprehend some comprehension of that 'orthodoxy' is misunderstood by the false orthopraxy that has been associated with the message: remember the hypocrisy? In this day and age of the apostate belief system, the original message is so clouded anymore that there is barely any way the message can come through except under extreme circumstances.
This is why your analytics have been a such a rich source of curiosity; that arguments of believing the salvation of the 'cross' (orthodoxy) and the contention of using the cross (orthopraxy) to lead the crusades to take power over Jerusalem seemed to be defeatist for those times, versus the reality today that Israel is now being set up to settle that argument over the modern belief there will be full conflicts over the contentions of the Middle East; thus your intimations of orthodoxy versus orthopraxy will be on full display, even more so now than ever.
But now the jump to the other curiosity; of the contention that Isaiah 42 somehow having a reading that a second fulfillment of that part of Isaiah could have happened when the first fulfillment was a few hundred years earlier. Your observation that they cannot have been correct leads to some reasons of misinterpretation of the Hebrew Holy Writ in Aramaic as it transitioned to the Arabic translation, which comes into view again as we observe, once more, something 'lost in translation.'
So, how does the determination of the modern political influences of D-Y-N still fit into this? Inquiring minds want to know.

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