Dr. E, I don't wish to put words in your mouth. I asked you to define divine spark as you understood it. You used an illustration of a baloon and said that God can fill us with His Holy Spirit and inflate the baloon.
Then you make the point that some teach the baloon can inflate itself.
I understand your definition of the divine spark, then, to be "false spirituality that supposedly inflates the baloon." Without the illustration, the application would indicate that "divine spark" equals "false spirituality."
Is that a correct understanding of you?
~"...divine spark..."~
You seem to be having trouble with this concept. I'll try to be more precise than the balloon analogy (an obvious steal from Augustine's remarks that "a glass cannot fill itself.") But please read the links I offer, so we don't have to keep going in circles.
Reformed Christianity has always seen man as clay; God as Potter. Since Adam, man has been separated from God by his fallen, corrupted nature. "There is none righteous; no, not one." Romans 3:10
Enter the Gnostics, who preferred following man to God, and who thus created a philosophy which mirrored the Platonics, stipulating that man actually IS God. Thus, man's purpose in life was to rediscover this "spark of divinity" within him (which the temporal world tries to corrupt) and enlarge it to the point where man BECOMES God in a mystical fusing of the two.
From the following website:
http://www.kheper.net/topics/Gnosticism/Gnosis.html "The essential prerequisite for Gnosis, its fundamental postulate, is the recognition of "divine spark" with, ie, an individual "immortal entity" that is not of "this world," nor a part of empirical psyche. This "spark" has many names: the inner man, the best and oldest self, the deepest self, the true "I," divine spirit within, angel, the ancient being, the immortal self, daemon...in sum, it is the "authentic self," while the empirical, existential, temporal psyche is a "false I."
Scrapes of this heresy have filtered throughout time. It is the greatest heresy and the oldest, and leads to an occultic embrace of evolution.
I've linked the following interesting essay, "The Evangelical Attraction to Mysticism," which states "there are many professing evangelicals today who fail to understand the difference between religious mysticism and Biblical spirituality."
http://www.bereanbeacon.org/EvangelicalAttraction.html And ultimately I believe it results in tremendous error. Unfortunately, this error seems to be illustrated in Alamo-Girl's post # 193 -- "I believe a man is perfect while he is fully abiding in Christ and Christ in him -- regardless of whether he is in the flesh or in the spirit."