Stumble it!
Positivism: a delusion that imagines we can know the past or participate in the present without any interference from your own personal and social situation as knower.
Evangelical Positivism is the same thought as above; the idea that we can look into a clear glassy pool of water and not also see our own reflection…but now add to it the Holy Spirit, as if He were some great trump card that erases our experience, our biases, our predispositions, and enables us to be detached and purely spontaneous creatures.
Filed under: church Tagged: | culture, evangelical positivism, Holy Spirit, house church, positivism, spiritual formation, spontaneous, spontenaity
Hmm, could you say that again in English?
I think I understand that you are being challenged by the Holy Spirit in your thought processes in how we have always done things and that maybe, just maybe, we have always been wrong… at least on some level?
Hah! That’s funny Sherri C…the speaking in English part. I’ve just finished reading like 300 pages of text book theology in 3 days and so my vocab just became alien…sorry about that.
I think it’s a little more complicated than being challenged by the Holy Spirit, which it certainly may be that as well. It is the recognition that we are biased creatures who have an absolute inability to see anything through the pure lenses of objectivity. In other words everything that we perceive is exactly that…perception. Things are never as they are–they are as we see them to be. Culture, experience, social situation, personal information all contribute to these biases.
It is then the further recognition that instead of being upset by this, God is delighted to work in and through our bodily realities. He moves through culture, through experience, through social nuances, and even incarnates (comes in the flesh) Himself in a way that was cultural, experiential and deeply ingrained into a particular social milieu. He is overjoyed to imbue His treasure into earthen vessels, filled with “bias” and “peculiarity”.
So, finally, rather than being blind to our contribution to any given situation and rather than imagining that we are some how blank slates capable of just purely operating in the Essence of God, we must acknowledge our perspectives, biases, and experiences…then either reinforce or discard these as called for in the situation. It really is a position of awareness, ceasing to be embarrased about our inability to be unaffected by our surroundings. We don’t have to be disaffected at all…our past, our current feelings, our experiences all have a part to play in God’s work in our lives…let us acknowledge and embrace these realities.
Yes indeed. I see it particularly in race relations among evangelicals…which is why I really appreciate Paul M’s Consuming Jesus.