Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Mythos versus Logos


 Exactly 20 years ago to the month I wrote the essay included in this document. It was a response to my reading of the book Surprised By the Power of the Spirit by Jack Deere. Deere started out as a reformed evangelical but as a result of contact with John Wimber (and also I think the notorious Paul Cain) he converted to charismatic evangelicalism; so, in some ways he is representative of both sides of the  logos vs mythos dichotomy, a dichotomy I explore further in the essay referenced here.

This essay really focuses on the contemporary vulnerability for what in the jargon of today is an “encounter” expression of Christianity. Here’s a recent and very typical example I came across:

“Pray for the Encountering God for all of us. How we need so much more of the Holy Spirit and to truly encounter God to be totally transformed”

Notice the implicit valued judgement here; Viz that without these mystical encounters  Christians are unlikely to be transformed. This version of Christianity places a premium on deep intuitive and indescribable experiences of the divine. Sometimes this includes what appear to be altered states of consciousness: Viz Swoonings, trances and ecstasies. When these experiences are formalized and articulated using doctrinal formulae such as “Baptism of the Spirit” or “in the Spirit” and then used as identifying markers for a kind of elite spirituality the whole thing starts to look very like Gnosticism.

By 1997 evangelicalism, especially in its fundamentalist Reformed and Charismatic manifestations, had lost a lot of my goodwill; as various evangelical sects engaged in very human looking mutual slagging-off matches I was left wondering what really identified Christianity as authentic. Adding fuel to my fire was the rampant anti-science doctrines found amongst Christian fundamentalists in both the reformed and charismatic traditions. If these Christian fundamentalists could be so wrong about science what credit could be given to their highly affected devotional language and their loud claims to be anointed into the Truth? Such claims had become dubious. And it remains so today. As far as I’m concerned these Christian subcultures have lost the right to be taken seriously and must re-earn that right, although I don’t hold out much hope of that. In the final analysis I will probably just have to accept that beyond the Open Gospel partisan and naive expressions of Christianity are very much the natural state of human affairs.  

Reading through my essay of 20 years ago I feel that I’d be much more hard-cop if I wrote it today: The Christian community Deere represents have learnt very little about reciprocity; but then neither have the reformists.


T. V. Reeves April 2017