Let us be perfectly clear here at Apprising Ministries; the idea of a deeper relationship with God is not wrong in and of itself. But it is the Lord Who draws us; we cannot “work” it up. And as I brought out in The Terminology Trap of “Spiritual Formation” what’s causing such a huge problem in the Body of Christ right now would be men e.g. like Donald Whitney mean well while they labor to make it appear as if there are some “safe” versions of these so-called “spiritual disciplines” originating in antibiblical monastic practices of apostate Roman Catholicism. 

My advice is: Wake Up! Practices of  corrupt quasi-Eastern Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) cannot be made safe because they didn’t originate with Protestants. We don’t get to then redefine them, and, they never were a part of what Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989) so often called “the historic orthodox Christian faith” to begin with. Know this; the repulsive rubbish of CSM is largely, and literally, taken from Counter Reformation (Hello!) figures like Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the spiritual Gestapo called the Jesuits, and the emotionally troubled nun Teresa of Avila.

Men and women, this rapid embrace of CSM within no longer protesting Protestantism is itself a judgment from God upon a sad state of affairs with the American Christian Church wherein they erected a “thing”; an idol, which they have called evangelicalism. And here we arrive at the very heart of the matter: The Emerging Church, which has now penetrated mainstream evangelicalism, must attack Sola Scriptura because if it’s ever to realize its utopian dream of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man then it must attempt to reverse the Lord’s Reformation and destroy its proper Bibliology.