Transcript
Subpoint D. The spirit of mysticism.
There are many forms of the spirit of antichrist in the world today for the simple reason that there are many antichrists, as John says. But one form of this spirit has escaped widespread detection by the Christian community. I am referring to a mystical movement that can be called contemplative spirituality.
Contemplative spirituality is a form of mystical religion that can flourish easily in the postmodern world in which we live. For the contemplatives, the fundamental religious reality is mystical experience. More specifically, it is mystical experience leading to a sense of union with God and with all things.
Its primary experiential vehicle is a process called centering prayer. This is a spurious designation since no communication with God occurs at all. But by calling it prayer, the mystics attempt to insulate their technique from theological criticism.
The god of the mystics in this movement may also be designated as ultimate reality (capital U, capital R) or as the ground of being (capital G, capital B). As mystics throughout the ages are said to have known, God is too great to be described by conventional theological terminology and He is therefore supremely ineffable.
He reveals Himself not verbally or through an infallible book but in the transcendent experience of mystical union with Himself. Who is Jesus therefore? Well, Jesus is one of the great masters of the inner life just as was the Buddha and other great mystics in the various religions of the world.
There is no single person by whom men must come to God. Instead, the mystical path in each religion has its own validity and can lead to an experience of union with ultimate reality. This is even true for Buddhism which does not even profess to believe in God.
According to contemplatives, it was the great religious insight of Jesus of Nazareth to recognize that our relationship to the ground of being is analogous to the relationship between a father and a son. I hope you can hear the heresy in that idea.
Let me read you the words of a man who moves in evangelical circles. He is unmistakably influenced by contemplative spirituality and he teaches contemplative or centering prayer to evangelical audiences. I am quoting from one of his better known books.
“The difference between faith as belief in something that may or may not exist and faith as trusting God is enormous. The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leave us unchanged. The second intrinsically brings change.”
I pause in the quotation for a moment to point this out. This is pretty standard stuff in many evangelical circles. This particular writer would not enjoy the paper I’m reading this morning. But I continue to quote him.
“Such is the faith described by Paul Tillich in his famous work Shaking the Foundations.” Now he quotes:
“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when year after year the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, ‘You are accepted. You are accepted. Accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now. Perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now. Perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything. Do not perform anything. Do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.’ If that happens to us, we experience grace.”
Now the writer who is quoting him goes on to apply him in the following paragraph. This writer says,
“You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you, but you are not just that. You are accepted. Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.”
What do we have here? The gospel? Far from it. Instead, our author speaks of an acceptance that already belongs to everyone and which can be believed in quite apart from any name, human or divine, and obviously quite apart from the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
In case you are wondering, the words I have read to you, which include the quotations from Tillich, are found in a popular book written by Brennan Manning and called The Ragamuffin Gospel, published by Multnomah Books, 1990.
It is characteristic of the contemplative spirituality movement that it rejects religious exclusivism. It is arrogant, the movement believes, to claim that we and we alone possess the truth. To these mystics, the belief that the historical person of Jesus is the one and only way to God is a narrow and prejudiced point of view.
That view, they say, is a relic of the rationalistic kind of religion that arose in western culture and reflected the ethos of the modern worldview. But modernity has been succeeded by postmodernism. As postmodern people, therefore, they say, we must be open to the ancient mystical insights of all the world’s great religions.
This form of mystical religion is extremely widespread and is pouring forth a gusher of literature. One of the numerous spokespersons for the movement is Elizabeth A. Johnson who serves as distinguished professor of theology at Fordham University in New York. Fordham itself is a hotbed for this system of thought.
Johnson writes this,
“But the ancient path of contemplation, which is becoming one of the great religious movements of our times, draws persons into the purifying darkness of an apophatic moment that breaks all divine images open. As a result of this existentially difficult and religiously profound not knowing, persons are moved experientially into the vision of the incomprehensible mystery of God.”
About the only thing I can agree with in Johnson’s statement is that contemplative spirituality is indeed becoming one of the great religious movements of our times. It is in fact the ultimate experiential religion in which people from all religions can participate on an equal footing.
It has no room for the exclusivism of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. It is therefore a contemporary expression of the spirit of antichrist. And if our Lord does not tarry much longer, this mystical movement could well provide the platform for the universal religion of the beast and the false prophet.
Conclusion.
There is no question in my mind that God has raised up the Grace movement and is using it widely. On the other hand, we live in a very confused world and our world is headed for even greater confusion as the end of the age approaches.
We ought therefore to feel a new sense of urgency to keep the Scriptures as our guide to navigate through the shadows and twilight that are rapidly gathering. In addition to the old forms of confusion about the gospel, we must also face the rise of new forms of error like contemplative spirituality.
I am reminded of the solemn words of Jesus as He spoke about the end of the age. His warning was grim. He said,
For false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.
Matthew 24:24.
Unless the Grace movement holds firmly to the uniqueness of the biblical gospel and to the indispensability of the name of Jesus for salvation, it cannot hope to accomplish what it ought to accomplish for God.
Indeed, if it does not do these things, it may be buried under an ocean of false theology. It may be washed away by the experience-based religion that is all too rapidly rising to prominence as our world hurtles toward divine judgment.
So, what’s my final word today? Here it is. Stay awake. It’s later than you think.
All right. I’m supposed to open it now, I think, for questions.
I should leave the platform when there is no question.
Yes.
Questioner: Um, I’m here from a very practical position. My husband and I have four boys, age ten, twelve, and two eight-year-olds. And we’ve watched this year as one of the families in our church who have raised their kids to be godly has a son who’s a junior in high school basically renounce everything he believes and spit out kind of what you’re saying, you know, in this contemplative spirituality thing.
And I believe in discipling my children at home before I send them off into youth group. We have them in public schools and to me it’s kind of like hardening off a plant. You stick it out on the porch and let the wind and the sun get it a while before you put it in the garden.
And I like to keep them up to date on what’s going on. So how much do we share with them at the age of twelve going on thirteen? And what passages specifically would you use to disciple them with?
Zane Hodges: All right. This is a being the only name and not everybody else can get to God whatever way. I think you can in a very practical way use the route that I followed during the course of this talk. That’s my way of showing to this audience that that’s a point on which the Gospel of John insists firmly.
And the best thing to do with kids obviously no matter what it is you’re trying to teach them is to give them biblical roots for this. So you want to think through how you would present it to them in a simple and persuasive way and give them the same basic passages or the ones that are more meaningful to you if you select some that I haven’t particularly quoted.
But work from the Scriptures. Always do that. And the Gospel of John is about as simple as it gets. And if you teach your children to take the statements of the Gospel of John at face value they will have learned something from that that’s invaluable. And you can make the fundamental issues of the gospel clear from the Gospel of John.
Okay. Thank you.