But what is really being accepted? What are the presupposition that enable the mystical advancement of spirituality without a corresponding advancement in the knowledge of God?

...The premise beneath all these spiritualities is that sin has not intruded upon the relation between the sacred and human nature, that human nature offers instant access - indeed, we assume unblemished access- to God, that human nature itself mediates the divine. Gone are the days when people understood than an avalanche has fallen between God and human beings, that human nature retains its shape as made in the image of God but has lost its relationship to God and stands in pained alienation from God...how can we be so knowledgeable about evil in the world and so innocent about sin in ourselves?..The reason of course, is that we have lost the moral world in which sin is alone understood...The consequence is that we have come to believe that the self retains its access to the sacred, and access not ruptured by sin.

...The reality...is that God stands over against us. To know him is not the same thing as knowing ourselves. This is the fatal principle of all paganism, that the divine and human are part and parcel of each other, that there is no absolute barrier between God and the creature, that the sacred is found in the self. ...[but] Grace is known only as God acts to make himself known through his Word and Spirit. It is only as the self-revealing God speaks again his ancient Word into the contemporary world that it is heard, only as the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit enters the recesses of a hearer's being that God's address as address is heard. Yet this hearing does not happen ... disconnected from the redemptive acts of Israel's history but, rather, it happens through and in connection with the acts within this narrative.

The route to knowing God is not within but through special revelation:

Revelation, then, is public, not private. It is public in the sense that God's primary locus of communication is not within the self nor are his intentions accessed by intuition. He has spoken, and he continues to speak, through the words of Scripture which constitute the Word of God... since God brooks no rivals, he respects no self constructed sacred spaces. These are spaces in which the sinner declares his or her own sovereignty and, in projecting human want and need into eternity, is, in that very act, seeking to control eternity, to have it on his or her own terms. Eros spirituality, however, dies in the presence of God's Word because biblical truth destroys the sinner's sovereignty which is at the heart of this kind of spirituality.

Because God is independent and self-existent, knowledge of Him, which is necessary to know Him, does not begin in the heart of man but rather proceeds directly from the the Father through His Word.

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