Real and Moral

Re: ACCM
Morality = reality; it works both ways.
Reality is whatever God says it is. Sin is arguing with what God says. For me, the Bible is sufficient source for what God has to say to us all. His Holy Spirit working in my spirit is sufficient source for God’s message to me directly. All of this presumes an intellectual outlook consistent with that of the Bible.
We have a tough time with Hebrew writing in Scripture because there is virtually no other Hebrew writing from before the Hellenizing of Judaism. It requires going way back to the late Stone Age and Abraham’s time to extrapolate a bit of flavor from Ancient Mesopotamian literature. That is, we know it’s not the same, but there are some shared underlying intellectual assumptions. You could suggest a bit of Egyptian influence, but it would appear that was minimal. Besides, we aren’t really all that sure of the literature from that far back in Egyptian history. All our chronology of Egypt stands on a house of cards prior to around 500 BC. On top of that, the Hebrew people didn’t seem too worried about dating precision until rather late in the game, so that we can’t reliably date anything much before David’s reign.
If you think it matters that much, you are missing the point anyway. The Hebrew Scriptures were aimed at explaining reality-morality. It’s not so much how we got to this place, but more about what we face now that we are here. It’s not as if the twelve sons of Jacob didn’t exist and didn’t do what the narrative says, or that Abraham was just a mythical figure. He was legendary, but the outline of the narrative focuses more on his background and experiences, then his calling and battles of faith, until he arrived at the point of passing it on to Isaac. We are left guessing and estimating what sort of man he was. His character we can get, but his educational background is a mystery. Yet it is also a critical factor in shaping what eventually became Hebrew culture.
We find ourselves in the place of trying to guess what the Hebrew people took for granted was common knowledge, an issue that continues up through the New Testament. The various writers, not least that of the Letter to the Hebrews, keep referring to an oral lore we don’t have. Should we trust modern Judaism to reliably report it, given their blatant departure from the Hebrew intellectual foundations over some centuries starting before the Babylonian Exile? Most of what I propose in my teaching is only my best guess on a lot of things.
This is part of the challenge for the proposed project A Course in Christian Mysticism (ACCM). At any rate, we are left with the necessity of developing an openness to the Spirit of God leading each of us in our own individual paths to serving Him. The very nature of mysticism is not having a large body of prescribed thought. There are some pretty obvious assertions, but they cannot be implemented without the proper mystical frame of reference. We are obliged to build from a sketchy history of previous events and a body of prescribed behavior which applies directly only in a narrow context. We are supposed to extrapolate how that body of law and ritual would exemplify broader concepts hard to put into words. The most important product is not the shape it takes in your soul, but the very existence of a sense of moral imperative.
ACCM won’t attempt to answer all the questions, just eliminate impertinent ones.