Emotional Devotions

The hardest thing for a Western Christian is separating emotion from Spirit.
My single strongest accusation of fraud against the modern Charismatic movement is their vociferous, almost hateful insistence that their emotional manipulation is the hand of God. No, you can’t even get them to admit God uses emotions and heals them; it is the Spirit in their minds. They get really ugly and nasty when you question it. I worked with them directly for years, so this is not some speculative commentary. Hell hath no fury like a Charismatic exposed as a fake. If you think their “move of the Spirit” isn’t carefully scripted and planned ahead of time, you have never worked on a church staff with these people. Yes, the majority of them learned their “tongues” intellectually and emotionally and it is only incidentally any kind of divine presence.
Meanwhile, I am myself a Holy Ghost Mystic, so it’s not that I poke at them as an enemy. I want them to get right and keep doing what they are trying to do. Their willingness to dump shame on the ground in favor of godly fervor is most admirable. That was easily the best thing they did for me. But their confusion of emotion for spiritual activity is typical of problems with Western epistemology. Aristotle denied the existence of the entire Spirit Realm, so there can be no Holy Spirit in his world. It’s just a name for some kind of sentiment and emotion. Since Christians insist there is a Holy Spirit, there is only one place left in their worldview for Him, and that’s in the emotions. Western epistemology not only does not yield space for a Spirit Realm, but steadfastly denies it could possibly exist. When you absorb that background, you end up with a pretty funky brand of religion.
It’s just about as dysfunctional as the mandatory memorialists. You’ve met them. They have this vast store of emotional energy devoted to something, so compelling and powerful in their souls, that they become dangerously hostile if you somehow fail to feel it. They insist their personal sense of tragedy is somehow morally universal. They would willingly kill almost anyone on this earth, and a whole bunch of anyones, to insure no one can argue with raising up some hideous monument to their lost loved ones. The more inconvenient and disruptive of ongoing human life, the better. Their personal tragedy is God’s tragedy, so don’t argue with their demands for a huge freaking memorial that uproots the most productive business center in town and blocks traffic for miles around. If you don’t feel their passion for such a thing, you have to be evil.
Only in Western thinking is it so utterly necessary to assert that the Bible is infallible. In a Hebrew culture, the intellectual background of the Bible itself, nobody would care. It’s a question that would not arise. Since ultimate truth cannot be conveyed to the human mind in the first place, there is no need to invest so much emotional devotion to the means of conveyance. Yes, we might have some practical concerns with accuracy in copies and whatnot, but a Hebrew mind does not conceive of anything on this earth having perfection. The question of textual infallibility is simply not possible, since the words themselves cannot be perfect. Instead, the Hebrew mind trusts God to bridge the gap between an imperfect human record and their desperate need to know what He demands of them. The logical necessity of objective perfection is gone, because we don’t have to prove anything to anyone. All we need is some attempt at fidelity in copying and translating.
Translating becomes a huge issue itself, because almost the entire business of translation is owned and oppressively controlled by those who insist the only proper approach is based on Western epistemology. A genuine Hebrew epistemology would yield a totally different translation, but we work with what we have. The point is, you cannot have a perfect translation by any means, so what difference does it make to demand a mental assumption of infallibility? We aren’t worshiping the book, but the God who commanded some people write a narrative of His revelation. And since we cannot possibly compare with any originals — God wisely made sure there are none — all we need is reasonable accuracy.
The question is not the Book, but the soul that comes to the Book. Does it provide sufficient frame of reference to guide a spirit awakened? Because without that spiritual birth, the whole question is pointless in the first place. I fully understand the frantic necessity of an error-free Bible if your god is subject to Aristotelian reasoning, but God did not promote Aristotle. He had His own system in place long before Aristotle came along. I tend to think God’s brand of reasoning is better.
We are accountable to the God of the Book; the Book itself can judge nothing.