In the September 2008 Christianity Today magazine there’s a feature interview with Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster. In the Apprising Ministries article Contemplative/Centering Prayer As “Christian” Meditation we look further at the so-called “spiritual disciplines” of the spurious Spiritual Formation aka Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism, which he teaches along with his spiritual twin Dallas Willard.

Foster refer to these practices as “The Inward Disciplines” in his classic book on the subject Celebration of Discipline (12). In fact with “Silence and Solitude,” “The Jesus Prayer,” and “Centering/Contemplative Prayer,” we are now involved with what even Foster himself calls “The Discipline of Meditation” (15). And in that CT issue we will also find an ad for Spring Arbor University with it’s Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Leadership course “designed with [Richard Foster’s] direct input, which tells us: “Deep within you there is a place. It’s vast and expansive. It’s also hard to find” (Online source).

This is the mistaken and semi-pelagian (at best) idea of a spark of the divine within mankind, which is also referred to as your alleged “true self.” I refute this Biblically in The Real Truth About Your Evil “True Self” so here I’ll simply remind you that Richard Foster was very influenced by a Roman Catholic monk named Thomas Merton whom you can find out more about in Who Is Thomas Merton? But below is what Merton’s mysticism “revealed” to him as he teaches us that there is a spark of God in everyone:

Again, that expression, le point vierge, (I cannot translate it) comes in here. At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.

It is so to speak His name written is us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billion points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely….I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere (Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander,158, emphasis mine). 

Here’s the most important point to understand with all this talk now in the evangelical community today about this alleged “inward journey” of silence and solitude, which is how so-called “Christian” mystics like Teresa of Avila refered to “The Discipline of Meditation”. The practice of this type of “Christian” meditation is virtually identical to that practiced in Eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism and the transcendental meditation of Hinduism. And if you really want to know where the foolish inward journey of corrupt Contemplative/Centering Prayer will eventually take you make the time to read Thomas Merton and the Buddhas where you’ll see Merton’s own idolatrous account from his own diary concerning his reverent awe when standing in front of the huge Buddha statues on Polonnaruwa.

This garbage has absolutely no place in the Church of Jesus Christ and Christianity Today should be ashamed of itself for promoting Roshi wannabe Richard Foster.