Spiritual Formation—Shhh! … Whee!
A false and dangerous mysticism is rapidly infecting evangelical churches today. We previously mentioned the scripture abuse inflicted by Lectio Divina by which the Bible is used as a prop to muzzle the mind. What follows is silence (shhh!) and then the launch of one’s imagination (whee!).
We will briefly examine how spiritual formation uses both approaches.
Silence—Shhh!
In his article, “Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation and the Restoration of the Soul,” Dallas Willard argued: “Indeed, solitude and silence are powerful means to grace.”
Silence is a means to grace? The Bible says faith is the means to grace (Romans 5:2; Ephesians 2:8). Not one word is said about silence being a means to grace.
In his book, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Richard Foster writes, “Progress in intimacy with God means progress toward silence.” 1
Really? It’s not found in progress in the Word and the building up of one’s holy faith?
The silence that Richard Foster and others in his movement so exuberantly extol is not at all the silence Scripture commends. What few verses these men cite to support their delinquency are abused with faulty exegesis.
For example, the human soul waiting on God in silence (Psalm 62:1) does not mean, as Richard Foster says, silencing all thoughts. It simply means, as the rest of the verse makes clear, that David is trusting God to rescue him and will not entertain contrary thoughts.
The Hebrew word in this verse translated as “silence” is dumiyah. This word hardly secures the meaning Foster reports, the cessation of all thoughts. For the same word is also used to convey the ideas of expecting, reflecting, and observing. Scholars acknowledge that this word has an uncertain root derivation, thus making it precarious to extract meaning from etymology.
While the etymology of this word can mean silence, the rest of the psalm indicates that this is not the silence Foster promotes, wherein the mind becomes passive and empty.
In this same verse where dumiyah appears, cognitive thoughts immediately follow and continue through the remainder of the chapter. There is no indication whatsoever of a mystical excursion taking place.
Instead, the prevailing thought is that of trust and expectation, of a willingness to be subdued before God only, as the ending of this Hebrew word strongly suggests by using the name of God, yah.
The Hebrew word (rapah) for “be still,” used in Psalm 46:10 (“Be still, and know that I am God”), is used 46 times in Scripture, and it never means a call to embrace the silence of mysticism but instead means to trust God, to be patient, to wait.
When the Psalmist wrote, “Be still, and know that I am God,” the stillness urged wasn’t at all like that recommended by Foster.
Instead of emptying the mind and trusting solitude to yield its benefits, the psalmist focused his mind on God (Psalms 46:1, 5, 7, 11), on the circumstances the psalmist was facing (Psalms 46:2, 3), and on what the end of history portends (Psalms 46:4-6, 8-10). There’s nothing mystical about this.
All these attempts to justify from Scripture the kind of mysticism Foster and Willard promote fail, once superficial similarity is exposed by sound biblical exegesis.
To suspend thinking, or to open oneself to the serendipity of silence, is completely contrary to Scripture!
The Imagination—Whee!
Once a mystical solitude gains governance, the imagination that should never be trusted in the first place now leads the way to God. Such nonsense!
In his book, Celebration of Discipline, Foster writes:
The inner world of the meditation is most easily entered through the door of the imagination. We fail to appreciate its tremendous power. The imagination is stronger than the conceptual thought and stronger than the will.2
Foster’s emphasis drifts from rightly dividing the Word and studying to show oneself approved unto God and steers instead toward the exercise of one’s imagination, which he calls a “holy moment with God” and “floating in the depths of God.”
Proponents of the spiritual formation movement credential man’s imagination more than God’s revelation. Totally disagreeing with that, A.W. Tozer made the assertion that “Faith in God is a function of knowledge, not of human imagination.”3
Richard Foster said something quite different when he wrote, “Imagination often opens the door to faith.”4
Instead of saying what Scripture says, that faith comes from the Word (Romans 10:17), Foster changes the locus of faith’s origin by saying faith comes from the imagination.
The theological shift here has enormous importance!
Divine revelation is minimized; man’s imagination is maximized.
Unlike Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, older theologians warned against a reliance on the imagination. John Calvin declared, “The imagination of man is a dreadful dungeon.”5
John Owen, the most outstanding theologian the Puritans ever produced, said a “continual watch is to be kept in and on the soul against the incursions of vain thoughts and imaginations.”6
It was Owen who also said, “This imagination of ours is become the seat of vanity, and thereupon of vexation to us, because it apprehends a greater happiness in outward good things than there is.”7
Pascal referred to the imagination as “that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity.”8
Joseph Butler, theologian and philosopher from eighteenth-century England, referred to the imagination as “that forward, ever intruding and delusive faculty.”9
A.W. Tozer observed: “Divine revelation assures us that certain things are true which imagination will simply not grasp. We believe them but we cannot see them in the mind’s eye.”10
Tozer cautioned, “The imagination, since it is the faculty of the natural mind, must necessarily suffer both from its intrinsic limitations and from an inherent bent toward evil .... ”11
None of these views argues for exclusion of the imagination. The more limited point is that it is important that Scripture govern that which governs us, the imagination.
Inverting this order, as Foster and Willard are prone to do by investing trust in the imagination, is a horrible mistake.
Foster’s failure to assess accurately the biblical view of the imagination is simply stunning. Instead, reveling in the power of the imagination before throwing all caution to the wind, Foster invites his readers to follow him into the silence (not into the Word) and onward to an adventure that only a high-powered imagination can bring you.
Dallas Willard’s assertion that the gospel and the Spirit are dependent upon these post-New Testament disciplines reeks with heresy.12 Paul spoke of the gospel being the power of God unto salvation. But Willard thinks this power is insufficient on its own; the spiritual disciplines are needed.
Dallas Willard further clarifies his perspective by saying, “The aim of disciplines in the spiritual—, specifically, in the following of—the transformation of the total state of the soul.”13
According to Mr. Willard, all that the New Testament taught about the transformation of our souls isn’t enough; these “spiritual disciplines are needed.
In contrast to this claim about Scripture not being enough, the Old Testament taught and the New Testament confirmed that the most wonderful and dramatic change in our life became ours when we became a new creation.
But that’s not what Dallas Willard thinks. He contends that “the invasion of the personality by life from above does not by itself form the personality in the likeness of Christ.”14 No, but it forms our spirit totally in the likeness of Christ!
Rather than work from that premise, Willard wanders off to a different one to say of God’s gift, the new-nature, “it does not alone bring one to the point … where sin shall not have dominion over you ” (Rom 6:114).15
Well, that’s certainly not what Scripture said! God declared, “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit … I will put My spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statues and do them” (Ezekiel 36:26, 27). And, indeed, God did precisely that when he gave us a new nature—his nature, so that our spirit is his (I Corinthians 6:17) and our life is his (Colossians 3:4).
The perfect provision has already been made, but that life is still dominated by sin? According to Dallas Willard it is.
Is there nothing too sacred for Dallas to smudge, stain, slander, and smear? This man will stomp all over the cardinal truths of Scripture.
First he asserts, then he inserts. Like a slimy serpent, he weaves his own ideas into Scripture.
Willard claims—audaciously, brazenly—that what will bring victory is not the new nature but these “spiritual disciplines” he champions.
Now if that’s not the clearest example of adulterating the Word of God I don’t know what is! In language that couldn’t be plainer, Willard shows his hand, declaring outright that these “spiritual disciplines,” absent from Scripture in the way he presents them, are essential for a believer’s transformation.
You should know that there are many theological disputes that are well within the boundaries of orthodoxy. However, the spiritual formation controversy isn’t one of them. What we’re dealing with here is not polemics (where more granular aspects of Christian thought are examined and exposed), but apologetics (where sources and ideas from other religions and philosophies are examined and exposed).
The spiritual formation controversy is not a debate taking place in the gray area of opinion. It is black and white bad, and should be vigorously opposed.
Notes:
1. Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, (San Francisco, HarperOne, 1992), p.155.
2. Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980), p.22
3. A.W. Tozer, Jesus, The Author of Our Faith, (Camp Hill, PA., WingSpread Publishers, 2007), p.11.
4. Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, p.34.
5. John Calvin, Sermons on Deuteronomy (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), sermon on Deut.29:19, 1035.
6. The Works of John Owen, 7:385-86.
7. Ibid., 7: 276.
8. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, (New York, Washington Square Press, 1965), p.27.
9. Alexander Whyte, Lord, Teach Us to Pray, (Grand Rapids, Baker book House, 1976), p.243.
10. Warren W. Wiersbe, Developing a Christian Imagination, (Victor Books, Wheaton, Illinois 1995), pp.69, 70.
11. Ibid., pp.213, 214.
12. Dallas Willard, “Spiritual Disciplines, Spiritual Formation an the Restoration of the Soul.” Journal of Psychology and Theology, Spring 1998, Vol. 26, #1, p. 255.
13. Ibid., pp.101-109.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
