ACCM: The Cerebral Point of Failure

Re: A Course in Christian Mysticism (ACCM)
One of my favorite professors back at OBU in the late 1970s was Dr. Rowena Strickland. She knew the Word better than most, even among a Baptist college faculty. She learned it all well before the fake Israel worship came into fashion among American Christians. She was no mystic by any means, though. She still suffered the failure point of making cerebral truth-seeking the end-point of her faith. It’s not a question of whether she was born of the Spirit; she was too deeply pickled in Western Christianity to break from the prison of the intellect.
Still, she understood the lie that is Modern Israel, and was already a college professor when Dispensationalism became the de facto orthodoxy among Baptists. It was no end of sorrow to her, I’m sure. Her approach in countering it was describing John’s Revelation as an attempt to cloak what the Romans would surely take as anti-government rhetoric. She compared John’s imagery with common symbols in today’s political cartoons. That might serve as a starting point, a lead-in, but it’s not suitable as the wider story.
John’s truth was not cloaked to keep it away from government surveillance. It was cloaked by its very nature. How would you describe something outside our plane of existence?
For example, I can’t make spiritually dead people understand worship. To any rational observer it seems nothing more than stirring of emotion. Frankly, way too much of Christian worship is just that. A great many “worship services” are little more than propaganda rallies. It doesn’t prevent the spiritually aware from having a meeting with God Almighty, but everyone else is just having a good time with entertainment. I can’t turn off my emotions when the Spirit of God strums the strings of my soul. However, they aren’t always moved. Some of the most powerful spiritual moments are dry-eyed observations of God’s hand splitting open time-space continuum to show my spirit something my mind can hardly recognize. It’s not emotional because my flesh has no idea what it saw.
In theory, you might recognize the psychological implications of such an experience without a spiritual awareness. The whole point is a belief in God’s power — His habit — of tweaking reality in such a way others would not recognize. Without that spiritual awareness, all you get is something hard to explain.
John’s Revelation was using ancient biblical symbolism, a long legacy of mystical logic to remind a weak soul to cling to the omnipotent Spirit of God. It was the language God Himself used to address those who served Him. It’s the realm of things Jesus referred to when He suggested Nicodemus would have to be born of the Spirit in order to understand how it works. There is no way someone confined to this realm could even want to know what’s going on with miracles and such. The truth simply is not amenable to human language.
It is frankly blasphemous to insist faith is reasonable. It is not. As one who is deeply motivated by faith in my God, I assure you it’s not at all reasonable; it belongs in the realm of mysticism. You won’t get me to argue if you dismiss it because there is no way to justify any of it without a spiritual awareness. You either have it or you don’t. You may still find my mutterings useful and/or entertaining without that, but you’ll always know you are outside of some parts of it. My starting point is not anywhere in this universe. Dr. Strickland was quite helpful in many ways, but she still missed the point.