Mysticism and how it Violates Scripture and Christian Growth

Mysticism is the attempt to directly experience God through various “spiritual” techniques. It attempts to do this apart from believing the truths of God. I can understand wanting to lay aside the attempt to understand God. It can be very frustrating. Sometimes, we yearn to just turn our mind off, find a safe refuge, and just experience the peace of God.

However, this is not the Scriptural way to find God’s peace and blessings. Instead, in many ways the Bible instructs us that finding God’s blessings has to come through the knowledge of God:

·        Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. (2 Peter 1:2-3)

It’s God’s truth that transforms:

·        Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)

However, to a large degree, the church has ignored this biblical counsel in its pursuit of mystical experience. Instead, practices found in the spiritual formation movement - silence, imagination and visualizations - which promise quick results, have achieved enormous popularity.

Richard Foster is a prime example of this movement. In the late 70s, he wrote a book —Celebration of Discipline - that is still highly popular today. While some of it is good, other parts envision a different God. For example, Foster wrote:

·        Often we assume we are in contact [with God] when we are not…Often people will pray and pray with all the faith in the world, but nothing happens. Naturally, they are not contacting the channel. We begin praying for others by first centering down and listening to the quiet thunder of the Lord of hosts. Attuning ourselves to divine breathings is spiritual work, but without it our praying is vain repetition. Listening to the Lord is the first thing…(34)

There is nothing wrong with waiting and listening for God. Regarding prayer, I do many extra-scriptural things. I journal as a form of prayer and I also like to walk as I am praying. However, I would violate Scripture if I taught that everyone needs to journal in order to have a full and blessed relationship with God. However, Foster claims that “without it [his disciplines] our praying is vain repetition.” In essence, he is writing that what Scripture teaches isn’t adequate to truly “connect” with God—that we need to add additional practices.

However, according to Paul, Scripture is sufficient to make us complete in regards to our relationship with God:

·        All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16-17)

However, Foster insinuates that we are not complete without his techniques of “centering down and listening to the quiet thunder of the Lord” and “attuning ourselves to divine breathings,” we are simply not going to have our prayers heard, let alone answered. This amounts to adding to God’s Word (Deut. 4:2). Indirectly, he is claiming that God’s Word isn’t sufficient without his practices.

Perhaps even worse, Foster claims that if “nothing happens,” it means that we have simply failed in “contacting the channel” of God despite the fact that we are trusting our Savior in faith. This means that faith alone isn’t enough to sustain contact with God. If “nothing happens,” it signifies that our faith wasn’t enough and we’ve failed to make contact. This is in contrast to the many verses that claim that God is close to those who trust in Him. For instance, Proverbs assures us that if we trust in God, we connect with Him:

·        Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

However, Foster’s teaching undermines this most basic confidence. It teaches that our God is more interested in mystical techniques than in trust and obedience. However, this contradicts God’s assertions about what He values. For example, Micah 6:8 reads:

·        He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Nowhere is there any mention of practicing certain spiritual techniques. Besides, Foster’s god is no longer close to the brokenhearted as the Bible assures us (Isa. 57:15; 66:1-2). Consequently, those who have despaired in themselves and are trusting in God alone will be disappointed by God unless they learn Foster’s disciplines. How discouraging and how contrary to Scripture to be informed that we are “missing the channel” when our prayers aren’t immediately answered! Had Abraham been nurtured on such teaching, he would have thought that he was “missing the channel” because he had not received his promised child after decades of waiting!

Instead, James 4 instructs us that we miss “the channel” when we ask with “wrong motives”:

·        You ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (James 4:2-3)

At other times, it’s sin that blocks us from God. However, Scripture never tells us that we receive not because we lack the right spiritual practices!

Foster also teaches unbiblically about the imagination:

·        Imagination opens the door to faith. If we can ‘see’ in our mind’s eye a shattered marriage whole or a sick person well, it is only a short step to believing that it will be so. (36)

There is nothing wrong with exercising our imagination, but there is a lot the matter with believing that we can move mountains with it. This thinking seems to claim that we have power that we clearly don’t have. Instead, Jesus claimed that without Him, we can do nothing at all (John 15:3-5). Foster’s teaching places our faith in our ability to imagine and not in God alone (Psalm 62). Besides, if it’s about us and the quality of our imaginations, our attention will naturally focus on ourselves, the source of our hopes. This will enslave us to self-preoccupations.

It also suggests that we can coerce God through our imagination and fails to give adequate acknowledgment to the will of God (James 4:13-16), as if God has no plan or will of His own – as if He is no more than a passive blob waiting for us to learn how to exercise our minds before He can bless us.

Although imagination can be used profitably when writing a children’s book, it has no place in regards to connecting to God. Instead, the Bible refers to imagination as an evil to which people resort in favor of the Word of God.

Similarly, Foster’s teachings portray God as unwilling or unable to heal without the right visualizations:

·        Imagine the light of Christ flowing through your hands and healing every emotional trauma and hurt feeling your child experienced that day. Fill him or her with the peace and joy of the Lord. In sleep the child is very receptive to prayer since the conscious mind, which tends to erect barriers to God’s gentle influence, is relaxed. (39)

Why worry about performing the right visualizations if God is the healer! Instead, Foster would have us place our faith in our ability to “Imagine the light of Christ flowing through your hands and healing every emotional trauma,” and not in Christ Himself. In contrast to Foster, it is so liberating to not have to worry about the quality or intensity of my prayers and visualizations and instead to look to Christ alone.

However, there are even more toxic implications to this teaching. Foster is claiming that we have the power to “Fill him or her with the peace and joy of the Lord” – that we can channel God’s healing power through our visualizations. This places us in charge of God’s grace, dispatching it in whichever way we choose.

Besides, the Bible never teaches visualizations. If anything, it teaches against them as aids to worship (Exodus 20:4-6).

Foster’s teaching also calls into question the omnipotence of God, by claiming that our conscious mind “tends to erect barriers to God’s gentle influence.” In essence, Foster is saying that our mental activity can block God’s mercy. If our conscious mind can interfere with God’s grace and plan for our lives, we cannot confidently place our trust in Him. In contrast, Isaiah identifies sin as the real impediment:

·        Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. (Isaiah 59:1-2)

This teaching also disparages the mind that God has given us. According to Foster, rather than recognizing that God gave us a mind to serve and adore Him (Mat. 22:37), the conscious mind is an impediment to “God’s influence.”

Armed with this understanding, the mystic attempts to deactivate the mind in the hope of experiencing God directly. The writer Brennan Manning (The Signature of Jesus) claims that:

·        “The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God in prayer…” “Contemplative spirituality tends to emphasize the need for a change in consciousness…we must come to see reality differently.” “Choosing a single, sacred word…repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.” “Enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard.” (Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing, 83).

However, the Bible requires us to be mentally sober and watchful to guard against deceivers (Mat. 7:15), taking all thoughts, philosophies, and false teachings captive according to the teachings of God (2 Cor. 10:4-5).

How does Foster justify his teachings? Although, he appeals to the Christian mystics and desert fathers and their spiritual “triumphs,” some of his justification is based on imagination:

·        Scripture tells us that John was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” when he received his apocalyptic vision (Rev. 1:10). Could it be that John was trained in a way of listening and seeing that we have forgotten? (14)

If he was, Scripture is silent about it. Perhaps this is the best place for Foster to exercise his discipline of silence!

The Church and its Growing Appetite for Pantheism

The West has embraced pantheism with a full-body embrace. Champion of the environment, Al Gore, stated:

• “Our religious heritage is based on a single earth goddess who is assumed to be the foundation of all life…all men have a god within. Each man has a god within because creation is God.”

For Gore, it is not enough that God created nature that radiates with His wisdom and artistry. Instead, nature is actually God. Everything is God and any distinction must be eliminated.

Why does he go to such a pantheistic extreme? Perhaps Gore expects that if we deify nature, we will also care for it better. However, if everything is deified, then the toxic waste dump is also deified along with every rape, kidnapping and beheading. To deify everything therefore is to deify nothing. It also serves to eliminate any distinction – right from wrong, just from unjust, love from hate - that has built enduring and thriving societies. After all, according to pantheism, everything is God, and God is in every action, even genocide!

Leonard Sweet, a leader in the Emergent Church, also strives to eliminate distinctions:

• For people who understand the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that the earth behaves like a living system and, indeed, that living things regulate earth’s environments, it is not craziness to suggest, as some electrical engineers have argued, that scientists who like their equipment get better results than those who don’t. …--when food, plants, animals, and machines are seen as part of us, and we of them. (Quantum Spirituality, 238)

We are our machines and our machines are us, and we are all God. In a pantheistic world, reason has no part. In fact, it is the enemy. It shows us that we are not our machines. They can be thrown onto the dump heap, and we can go on our merry way.

Reason must be eliminated. It raises embarrassing objections. Reason is eliminated in a variety of ways. We often hear the claim that reason or thinking obstructs the work and experience of God. Professed Christian psychologist, David Benner writes:

• It is a state of active receptivity that opens us up to the sacred. This is exactly how the contemporary Quaker author Douglas Steere understand prayer, describing it as “awakeness, attention, intense inward openness.” Sin, in his view, is anything that destroys this attentiveness. The greatest threat to attention is thought. (97-98)

Prayer is no longer interpersonal – a plea to our Savior. Rather, it is something we do to ourselves – a form of masturbation, a substitute for relationship. We’re in control – the captain of our own ship.

Of course, the big enemy is thought. It raises troublesome questions. While these mystical practices insist that if we are to experience God, we must get our minds out of the way, reason asks, “What is it that I am really experiencing? Can I coerce God into my desired experience through techniques and manipulations? Is God amenable to such things?”

Likewise, the Bible insists that we shouldn’t close down our critical faculties:

• Test everything. Hold on to the good. (1 Thes. 5:21)

The popular Christian mystic, Richard Foster, shares Benner’s warnings against thinking:

• Imagine the light of Christ flowing through your hands and healing every emotional trauma and hurt feeling your child experienced that day. Fill him or her with the peace and joy of the Lord. In sleep the child is very receptive to prayer since the conscious mind, which tends to erect barriers to God’s gentle influence, is relaxed. (Celebration of Discipline, 39)

Once again, the “conscious mind” is the culprit. According to Foster, God has many blessings for us, but He just can’t penetrate our mental barriers. However, Foster’s wimp-god is not the God of the Bible, who declares that there is nothing that he can’t do (Gen. 18:14) and that we cannot erect any barriers against Him. The doors He opens, no man can shut, and what He shuts, no one can open (Rev. 3:7).

Instead, the Bible is consistent in its denunciation of sin and the refusal to believe – the one thing that separates us from God.

Foster’s God is also passive, permissive, and perhaps even pantheistic. He allows us to channel him and his healing benefits through our imagination, as if He lacked any will and character of His own. According to Foster, it seems that the main barriers to spiritual growth and blessing are our minds and our failure to use Foster’s techniques.

In The Signature of Jesus, Brennan Manning echoes the same message:

• “The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God in prayer…” “Contemplative spirituality tends to emphasize the need for a change in consciousness…we must come to see reality differently.” “Choosing a single, sacred word…repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.” “Enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard.” (quoted from Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing, 83). 

Manning’s advice directly contradicts Scripture, which never advises us to “stop thinking about God.” His recommendation for using a single word (or mantra) represents Eastern contemplative practice. Instead, Scripture prescribes the very opposite:

• Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly…But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)

According to Scripture, blessedness is a matter of relationship – staying in close contact with our Savior and avoiding sin, not thinking about God.

Manning also violates the teachings of Jesus:

• And when you pray, do not keep on babbling [on a single word or phrase] like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. (Matthew 6:7) 

Evidently, Manning thinks that paganism and its manipulations and meaningless “babbling” are superior to Jesus’ teachings. He emphasizes the fact that prayer is a matter of talking to Another – our Maker and Redeemer. Fundamentally, it is not about a “change in consciousness,” but the acknowledge of our dependence upon our Savior!

Pantheists deride dualistic thinking – the separation of the thinker from the rest of reality. If instead reality is all one, the only thought that we have is what we share with everyone else. Therefore, we cannot talk about the “me-them” distinction, if we are all one. (Of course, the pantheists can’t logically maintain this stance. Whenever they say anything, they are making distinctions using dualist thought. We are also talking to another,  distinct person. Simply to say that some are enlightened and some aren’t or one thought is wrong and another is right is dualistic!)

Emergent Church pastor, speaker and writer, Doug Pagitt, puts it this way:

• We are connected to each other as well. Christians like to talk about community, yet the dualistic [us-them] assumptions surrounding our theology make it almost impossible for us to experience true community. As long as we hold on to “us” and “them” categories of seeing the world, we live behind a barricade that prevents us from joining in with God and others in real and meaningful ways. And it doesn’t really matter who we decide “them” is – the non-Christians, the sinners, the liberals, the conservatives, the Jews, the Catholics, that weird church on the other side of town. Division is division, no matter how righteous we want to make it sound. (A Christianity Worth Believing, 91-92)

Nevertheless, it is dualistic thinking that keeps my marriage going. I try to maintain a sharp distinction between my wife and my neighbor’s wife. To remove all distinctions is to remove real and committed relationships. There is an essential distinction between my children and grandchildren and other children. It’s a human reality, and any attempt to wrest away children from those who love them has always been met with tragedy. Just think of the communist experiment!

However, distinction does not obliterate our responsibilities before all humanity. It affirms it! I respect other marriages because I respect my own. I acknowledge my responsibility towards the children of others because I acknowledge my own responsibility. However, there are concentric circles of responsibility and commitment starting with the most intimate. We must honor, cherish and care for our father and mother. However, because of this essential relationship, I feel for other families.

If instead all distinctions are removed, barriers eliminated and everything leveled – parents with children, husbands with wives – we violate our God-designed selves and everything is degraded.

Even Pagitt creates “us-them” distinctions between his brand of religion and that of the Bible. There is just no escaping it. Anyone who wants to eat must distinguish between food and the one who consumes the food. Dualism is inextricably built into reality.

Emergent Church guru and writer, Brian McLaren, has also stated that dualistic thinking is what is wrong with the church (not his church, of course):

• Religious communities often take a short-cut to building a strong group identity -- by defining themselves in opposition to others. Muslims, atheists and gays are high-profile "others" which can be scapegoated to build a strong "Christian" identity. (Huffington Post Religion Blog, 2/19/03)

McLaren doesn’t seem to see that he too is scape-goating. However, his whipping boy is the Bible-believing church. However, truth always excludes, distinguishing itself against what is untrue. Likewise, justice must set itself against what is unjust. Life demands such distinctions.

Prior to this, McLaren wrote:

• Christians have been taught to see in "us vs. them" terms for centuries, and it will take time to reorient faithful people in a new direction -- "us with them," working for the common good.

Although I make a distinction between his wife and my wife - "us vs. them"- this doesn’t prevent us from working or vacationing together - "us with them." In fact, it is our mutual respect for certain barriers that makes our friendship possible.

Why can’t (or won’t) McLaren and the other Emergents and mystics acknowledge this reasonable fact, that reality is multi-faceted? Reality is not just comprised of universals and commonalities. There are necessary distinctions that must be made between ideas and even people. If this isn’t so, then let’s just open the prison doors and give every student an “A!”

This hatred of distinctions often takes the form of a hatred towards Christianity. Lynn White, Jr., Professor of History at the University of California, claims,

• “…As we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology…joined to give mankind powers which…are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt….Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature… No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

• “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects…The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated” (Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Garrett de Bell, editor, The Environmental Handbook: Prepared For The First National Environmental Teach-In (New York: Ballantine/Friends of the Earth Book, 1970, 21-25)

The West and all other societies make a sharp biblical and legal distinction between humanity and the animal world. Our laws protect humans before all else. While we can eat animals, we can’t humans. We put animals in zoos, but there is not one nation on the earth where innocent humans are kept in zoos. We marry fellow humans, not animals, at least, not yet.

While I appreciate White’s acknowledgment of the influence of the Christian faith on the sciences, his distinctions are far from accurate. While science has given us a greater ability to contaminate nature – and admittedly, Christianity has exerted a tremendous influence on the development of science – this phenomenon doesn’t reflect the teachings of the Bible.

Creation is God’s creation, and we are to admire and preserve it as such. Love also requires that we maintain it for the benefit of others. In contrast, even in the pagan societies that hold the world as sacred, where everything is sacred, nothing is really sacred. This becomes obvious when we investigate the actual practices of pagan societies.

In Whence the Noble Savage, Patrick Frank, writes:.

• “The Southwest [USA] is dotted with finds of people killed en masse…These indications of war, violent deaths, mutilations and cannibalism are form tribal societies that experienced no European or modern contact, thus contradicting the idea that peoples who were free from European influence lived relatively peaceful lives.” (Skeptic Mag. Vol 9, #1, 2001, 54-60)

• “Hawaiians drove to extinction at least 50 species of birds…By the time Europeans arrived, North America was a manipulated continent. Indians had long since altered the landscape by burning or clearing woodland for farming and fuel…Within 1500 years after occupation by Native Americans, for example, North America lost 73% of all large animal groups. About 39 genera were obliterated. Australia lost every type of vertebrate larger than humans following the appearance of the Aborigines…When the Maoris arrived in the late 13th century, the result was the rapid extinction of the moas, other flightless birds, and half of the terrestrial vertebrates.”

Frank concludes:

•   “All this emerging evidence for incessant human warfare from the earliest days, for ancient mutilation and massacre, for cannibalism, for ecological destruction, and for massive faunal extinctions sounds the death knell for the noble savage myth. Human societies have evidently and with negligent abandon despoiled the environment and engaged in pervasive warfare and murder as far back in time as we can detect.”

Why then this love-affair between the post-Christian West and Eastern pantheistic mysticism? We have rejected our Christian roots in favor of the idea of a non-distinct, mushy oneness, one that allows us to maintain our former lifestyles. Eliminating any form of distinction, any “us vs. them,” has become a moral crusade. However, such crusades merely replace the “us vs. them” with a new set of scapegoats and a deep grave for all its victims.

The Life of the Mind

Our post-modern culture has neglected the mind, apart from material matters like medicine and meteorology. I’ve been told by Washington Square Park/NYU mavens that 40 years ago all manner of political and philosophical opinion were being promoted from the Park by book tables, pamphlets, and preachers. Ideas mattered! One such atheistic observer encouraged me that I am the last Socrates of the Park.

Why the demise of ideas? Well, we’re told that they don’t matter, even worse, that they have no basis in reality. For example, multiculturalism assures us that there are no objective standards by which we can judge other cultures. Consequently, we can’t pass judgment.

This is tragic and prevents us from confronting the problems we find in other cultures. Muslim reformer and former Dutch Parliamentarian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, laments this fact. In her book, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, she points the accusing finger at multiculturalism and Western intellectuals who don’t apply this concept consistently:

• These same liberals in western politics have the strange habit of blaming themselves for the ills of the world, while seeing the rest of the world as victims. To them victims are to be pitied, and they lump together all the pitiable and suppressed people, such as Muslims, and consider them good people who should be cherished and supported so that they can overcome their disadvantages. The adherents of multiculturalism refuse to criticize people whom they see as victims…They are critical of the native white majority in Western countries but not of Islamic minorities. Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is regarded as Islamophobia and xenophobia. (xvii)

Ali argues that this unwillingness to judge according to moral universal standards is detrimental:

• Because multiculturalists will not classify cultural phenomena as “better’ or “worse” but only neutral or disparate, they actually encourage segregation and unintentionally perpetuate, for instance, the unsatisfactory position of Muslim women. State subsidies for nonstate schools allow Muslims to have their own schools…in which young girls are indoctrinated…with very conservative Islamic practices. (63

Western self-imposed moral blindness is ubiquitous and has resulted in neglect of the abused:

• But in the bigger countries, no NGO yet monitors the number of times an honor killing is committed in a [Western] member state, or the number of times a girl is circumcised, or the number of times a girl is removed form school and forced into a life of virtual slavery. (170

Meanwhile, many Islamic Study departments in Western universities are more committed to indoctrination than in the things that should characterize the university:

• Yet, in spite of having Arab and Islam faculties, most universities in Europe serve as activist centers to further the Palestinian cause, instead of research and teaching centers for Muslim students. (169)

However, having degraded the life of the mind in regards to moral questions, the West now lacks the heart and rationale to stand against intimidation:

• The present-day attitude of Western cultural relativists, who flinch from criticizing Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims, allow Western Muslims to hide from reviewing their own moral values. This attitude also betrays the tiny majority of Muslim reformers who desperately require support – and even the physical protection – of their natural allies in the West. (176)

Consequently, the pushiest prevail, undermining the West’s claim of being just. It should come as no surprise that the life of the mind is also disparaged within the church. Doctrine and the Biblical teachings of the church have been set aside, allegedly because “doctrine divides.”

Sadly, many churches have replaced the primacy of Scripture with goal of experiencing God – unmediated mysticism – claiming that the mind and our fixation upon Scripture is just an impediment. The deceased but now popular Henry Nouwen advised that we clear our minds by the simple repetition of a single word:

• “The quiet repetition of a single word can help us to descend with the mind into the heart…This way of simple prayer…opens us to God’s active presence.”

Never mind that Jesus taught against placing our faith in mindless repetitions:

• And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. (Matthew 6:7)

In The Signature of Jesus, Brennan Manning has given similar advice:

• “The first step in faith is to stop thinking about God in prayer…” “Contemplative spirituality tends to emphasize the need for a change in consciousness…we must come to see reality differently.” “Choosing a single, sacred word…repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often.” “Enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard.” (Quoted by Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing, 83)

Evidently, Manning is content to overlook the counsel of Scripture:

• Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly…But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3; Joshua 1:8)

According to Scripture, blessedness is not a matter of clearing our minds of God, but rather, of contemplating both Him and His Word!

Spiritual Disciplines guru, Richard Foster, reinforces the errant idea that the mind is necessarily a hindrance to the Christian life:

• Imagine the light of Christ flowing through your hands and healing every emotional trauma and hurt feeling your child experienced that day. Fill him or her with the peace and joy of the Lord. In sleep the child is very receptive to prayer since the conscious mind, which tends to erect barriers to God’s gentle influence, is relaxed. (Celebration of Discipline, 39)

Instead of Jesus’ admonition to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul and mind, Foster would gladly have us dispense with the conscious mind, which “erect barriers to God’s gentle influence.”

In contrast to this, the early church understood that the life of the mind – what we understand and believe – is foundational for every other aspect of the Christian life. There had been a conflict between two groups of “believers.” One group insisted that circumcision to become a Jew and to follow the Law was necessary for salvation. Meanwhile, Paul and Peter argued that this requirement would cause Gentile believers to stumble. They recounted instances of God’s miraculous workings among the Gentiles, proving that God had accepted them without circumcision.

James then confirmed their testimony with Scripture (Acts 15:15-19). Although they might have been concerned that the conflict would cause division, they had a greater concern - the truths of God and the preservation of the Gospel. The Spirit had revealed to them that salvation was purely a matter of the grace of God, and this truth trumped everything else! Consequently, to resolve the confusion they formulated this letter to be sent throughout the Christian world:

•  “The apostles and elders, your brothers, to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia: Greetings. We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said.” (Acts 15:23-24)

Among other things, this letter reflected the fact that their thought-life was important. As long as thinking was conflicted, they remained “disturbed.”

What we think determines everything else – our self-concept, attitudes and treatment of others, relationships, and even experiencing God! If I believe that He forgives and cleanses me of my sins when I confess them, I am going to feel grateful and intimate with my God. However, if I belief that I must first earn that forgiveness, then I will remain doubtful, depressed and resentful.

The life of the mind is paramount. What we believe is critical to everything we say and do. Consequently, because the Apostles had resolved this theological problem by the Holy Spirit, the church grew:

• As they [Paul, Timothy and Silas] traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey.  So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. (Acts 16:4-5)

Burying our confusion will no more “strengthen” us than a house built without a foundation. Without resolving this fundamental truth, our lives rest upon the shifting sands. Indeed, there are many truths upon which our house must find its support. This requires a steady diet of Scripture meditation – the very thing now regarded as counter-productive.