The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

Betwixt Text and Nature, God and Evolution 163
Spirituality never stands detached from, and is in this sense also
conditioned by, the culture or society in which it is expressed.
In both these interpretative contexts, an intensely-experienced
personal conviction, interpreted as a revelation of God’s true
intent, lies at the heart of at least the leadership of the Creation
Museum, but certainly also of most of its patrons and supporters.
This is an orientation that for its adherents lies outside the terrain
of contestation from either normal science or human reasoning; it
is a hermeneutical world that is inward-looking, 62 and critical only
in the sense that such intellectual work would feed the premises of
the already accepted (world)views. This may well be described,
from a social-scientific perspective, as a mythological worldview
of sorts; 63 from the side of natural science, as a mystifying take on
reality; and from the discipline of Spirituality, as approaching in
many respects the mode of the mystic.
62
C. J. S. Lombaard, “South African Perspectives on the Communication of the
Bible in Church and Society” (Ph.D. diss., North-West University,
Potchefstroom Campus, 2004), 5–8.
63
Cf. P. van Dyk, “Mythical Linkage and Mythical Frameworks,” Old Testament
Essays 18, no. 3 (2005): 863–78.