09-27-2021, 07:51 AM
I got a question this morning and it provoked an academic discussion that may benefit others. It involves the meaning of the term "mysticism" and how we use it in Radix Fidem.
Mysticism is a word that indicates a means of perception, a sense of awareness. It includes a particular orientation on things in general. In the Bible, we can easily see that it's rooted in Abraham's background in Mesopotamia. You could spend your whole life trying to understand the history and culture of Mesopotamia and still only scratch the surface, since it encompasses several whole civilizations. It seems they all had certain things in common, and some that they shared with the rest of the Ancient Near East (ANE), which includes Egypt.
The ANE is our source of heart-led consciousness. Other parts of the world appear to be familiar with it, but our understanding of it in the Bible comes from the ANE. The heart isn't really the thing itself, but the heart is the one factor that connects us to the Spirit Realm. If the focus of your conscious awareness is in your head, and not in your heart, then you simply cannot connect firmly to your spirit. Of course, if your spirit is dead, you are out of luck in the first place. But if God awakens your spirit, then you simply cannot live a life of faith without moving your conscious awareness into your heart.
The wider background of the ANE on the awakening of the spirit is pretty fuzzy. We sense that there were some who had it, but never came to our kind of faith for any number of different reasons. Abraham seemed to be spiritually aware before God called him, but there's a lot we cannot know from where we are today. You can also discern that Balaam had some form of connection to the Spirit Realm, as did the Three Magi. We've lost a lot of their legacy over the centuries.
What we do know for now is that your heart is the seat of faith. Faith is like a separate faculty, higher and much more powerful than mere human intellect. Mysticism is the orientation that takes seriously what the heart has to say to our minds. By probing our convictions on different moral questions, we gain a sense of what our heart knows. If we trust that path for getting answers, and strive to make our flesh obey, then we are exercising faith. It's good if the intellect has been seasoned by Bible study, but that's not enough by itself. Faith breathes life into what the mind can learn from Scripture.
Christian Mysticism is the basic orientation that says God is a living Person who speaks to us personally. Understanding the Bible is not merely a question of intellectual analysis. We assume that it's right and just to understand what the Bible says by giving priority to the moving of the Spirit in our hearts. Your convictions are a repository in your heart of God's will for you individually; it's what the finger of God wrote on your heart before birth. The point is to expose what His finger wrote there, to get familiar with it and obey what it demands of us. It comes across as an imperative: you must do this; you must not do that. It's rooted in our identity, our sense of who we are.
To someone without a heart-led consciousness, this looks like gobbledygook. It looks like subjective wishful thinking to the intellect. Keep in mind that the fallen intellect is endlessly arrogant and boastful about its capabilities. It rejects divine revelation instinctively. This is true in any cultural background, but it is critical to the identity of what Western Civilization means. Now, anyone can observe the very real effects of genuine faith, but the intellect cannot explain it completely. Because the West is a very ugly mix of Greco-Roman rationality (with a dose of superstition Westerners pretend isn't there) and pagan Germanic superstition, it isn't purely rational. It pretends to be Aristotelian, but can't get rid of the spooky unexplained stuff that actually happens.
So, Western tradition includes something that claims to be mysticism, but isn't the same thing. It substitutes a range of intellectual capabilities that don't get much attention. Chief among them is intuition. That's normally consigned to the spooky realm, but it's not that hard to explain. Intuition is largely a talent for pattern recognition. If you are really good at it, when analyzing something, you can skip over certain logical steps and arrive at a valid answer. The brain really is supposed to do that. If you start trying to use things like intuition as a means of analyzing spooky stuff around you, it's going to look a lot like mysticism. It's not mysticism, because it's not a genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, but from the viewpoint of the intellect, it looks the same.
Thus, Western tradition, to include the wide range of superstitions from outside the ANE, has it's own brand of mysticism. The Western brand of mysticism is bogus. It leads to things like Gnosticism, the Kabbala, etc. Judaism is part of this, in that it abstracts Old Testament documents from the perspective of Western rational and intuitive analysis. Judaism is what happened when rabbis ditched the ANE mysticism of Hebrew culture and replaced it with Hellenistic reasoning. That's throwing away an awfully large body of culture going all the way back to Abraham, at the very least, and replacing it with Aristotle. Aristotle was a pagan who was acquainted with ancient Hebrew religion and rejected it. He's roasting in Hell right now, as it were.
But Aristotle is our primary source today for the assertion that we must rely on "propositional truth." This is where we get Bibliolatry (worship of the Bible as an idol) in modern evangelical Christianity. It subconsciously assumes that the intellect is not fallen, but that it can be perfected in the flesh. We still hold ourselves accountable to what the Bible says, but we don't read it through the same glasses as evangelicals do (nor Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, etc.). We strive to approach the Bible the way Abraham would, as Moses did, and Jesus, too. The boundaries offered by ANE mysticism in general, and Hebrew mysticism in particular, are sufficiently knowable to provide a reliable guide. We can trust God to speak to and through our own hearts in this way, because it's how He worked with those who wrote the Bible.
Yes, the results tend to be conflicting at times, but a critical element in our testimony is how we handle those variations. Mysticism is the approach that helps us to discern what we need to work with each other. There can be no clear and precise logical solution for all humanity for all time. It is dynamic and living, and we need decide only what we have to do to have peace with God in the here and now.
Mysticism is a word that indicates a means of perception, a sense of awareness. It includes a particular orientation on things in general. In the Bible, we can easily see that it's rooted in Abraham's background in Mesopotamia. You could spend your whole life trying to understand the history and culture of Mesopotamia and still only scratch the surface, since it encompasses several whole civilizations. It seems they all had certain things in common, and some that they shared with the rest of the Ancient Near East (ANE), which includes Egypt.
The ANE is our source of heart-led consciousness. Other parts of the world appear to be familiar with it, but our understanding of it in the Bible comes from the ANE. The heart isn't really the thing itself, but the heart is the one factor that connects us to the Spirit Realm. If the focus of your conscious awareness is in your head, and not in your heart, then you simply cannot connect firmly to your spirit. Of course, if your spirit is dead, you are out of luck in the first place. But if God awakens your spirit, then you simply cannot live a life of faith without moving your conscious awareness into your heart.
The wider background of the ANE on the awakening of the spirit is pretty fuzzy. We sense that there were some who had it, but never came to our kind of faith for any number of different reasons. Abraham seemed to be spiritually aware before God called him, but there's a lot we cannot know from where we are today. You can also discern that Balaam had some form of connection to the Spirit Realm, as did the Three Magi. We've lost a lot of their legacy over the centuries.
What we do know for now is that your heart is the seat of faith. Faith is like a separate faculty, higher and much more powerful than mere human intellect. Mysticism is the orientation that takes seriously what the heart has to say to our minds. By probing our convictions on different moral questions, we gain a sense of what our heart knows. If we trust that path for getting answers, and strive to make our flesh obey, then we are exercising faith. It's good if the intellect has been seasoned by Bible study, but that's not enough by itself. Faith breathes life into what the mind can learn from Scripture.
Christian Mysticism is the basic orientation that says God is a living Person who speaks to us personally. Understanding the Bible is not merely a question of intellectual analysis. We assume that it's right and just to understand what the Bible says by giving priority to the moving of the Spirit in our hearts. Your convictions are a repository in your heart of God's will for you individually; it's what the finger of God wrote on your heart before birth. The point is to expose what His finger wrote there, to get familiar with it and obey what it demands of us. It comes across as an imperative: you must do this; you must not do that. It's rooted in our identity, our sense of who we are.
To someone without a heart-led consciousness, this looks like gobbledygook. It looks like subjective wishful thinking to the intellect. Keep in mind that the fallen intellect is endlessly arrogant and boastful about its capabilities. It rejects divine revelation instinctively. This is true in any cultural background, but it is critical to the identity of what Western Civilization means. Now, anyone can observe the very real effects of genuine faith, but the intellect cannot explain it completely. Because the West is a very ugly mix of Greco-Roman rationality (with a dose of superstition Westerners pretend isn't there) and pagan Germanic superstition, it isn't purely rational. It pretends to be Aristotelian, but can't get rid of the spooky unexplained stuff that actually happens.
So, Western tradition includes something that claims to be mysticism, but isn't the same thing. It substitutes a range of intellectual capabilities that don't get much attention. Chief among them is intuition. That's normally consigned to the spooky realm, but it's not that hard to explain. Intuition is largely a talent for pattern recognition. If you are really good at it, when analyzing something, you can skip over certain logical steps and arrive at a valid answer. The brain really is supposed to do that. If you start trying to use things like intuition as a means of analyzing spooky stuff around you, it's going to look a lot like mysticism. It's not mysticism, because it's not a genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, but from the viewpoint of the intellect, it looks the same.
Thus, Western tradition, to include the wide range of superstitions from outside the ANE, has it's own brand of mysticism. The Western brand of mysticism is bogus. It leads to things like Gnosticism, the Kabbala, etc. Judaism is part of this, in that it abstracts Old Testament documents from the perspective of Western rational and intuitive analysis. Judaism is what happened when rabbis ditched the ANE mysticism of Hebrew culture and replaced it with Hellenistic reasoning. That's throwing away an awfully large body of culture going all the way back to Abraham, at the very least, and replacing it with Aristotle. Aristotle was a pagan who was acquainted with ancient Hebrew religion and rejected it. He's roasting in Hell right now, as it were.
But Aristotle is our primary source today for the assertion that we must rely on "propositional truth." This is where we get Bibliolatry (worship of the Bible as an idol) in modern evangelical Christianity. It subconsciously assumes that the intellect is not fallen, but that it can be perfected in the flesh. We still hold ourselves accountable to what the Bible says, but we don't read it through the same glasses as evangelicals do (nor Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, etc.). We strive to approach the Bible the way Abraham would, as Moses did, and Jesus, too. The boundaries offered by ANE mysticism in general, and Hebrew mysticism in particular, are sufficiently knowable to provide a reliable guide. We can trust God to speak to and through our own hearts in this way, because it's how He worked with those who wrote the Bible.
Yes, the results tend to be conflicting at times, but a critical element in our testimony is how we handle those variations. Mysticism is the approach that helps us to discern what we need to work with each other. There can be no clear and precise logical solution for all humanity for all time. It is dynamic and living, and we need decide only what we have to do to have peace with God in the here and now.