It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1, NASB)

Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism Was Never Part Of Christ’s Doctrine 

In that verse from Luke 11 our Lord Christ Jesus of Nazareth was asked a straightforward question: Teach us to pray as John the Baptist once taught his own disciples. We are on safe ground to understand that something concerning the way these disciples had seen the Master pray moved them to want to be able to pray in such fashion. And since both John the Baptist and Jesus in His humanity were practicing Jews we know from history they would not have been involved with meditation, which is the type of “prayer” neo-Gnostics like Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic “Roshi” Richard Foster are talking about when they yammer on about “silence and solitude.”

Men and women, don’t let these practioners of this Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) masquerading as supposed Spiritual Formation e.g. taught by Foster’s friend Dallas Willard fool you. The burden of proof is on them to show you from any reliable historic sources that their form of “Christian” transcendental meditation aka Contemplative/Centering Prayer (CCP) was ever practiced by Jews at the time of Christ. And they can’t produce such sources because they don’t exsist. As a matter of fact in his book The Sacred Way Emergent Church theologian Tony Jones, who practices CSM as does his own pastor Doug Pagitt, tells you where CCP came from:

Like the Jesus Prayer, Centering Prayer grew out of the reflections and writings of the Desert Fathers. John Cassian (c.360-c.430) came from the West and made a pilgrimage to the desert to learn the ways of contemplative prayer … Cassian was deeply influenced by his time in the desert, and he wrote his book The Conferences about his conversations with the Desert Fathers to acquaint Western Christians with their teachings. (70, emphasis mine)

So we have confirmation here that CCP “grew out of the reflections and writings” of apostate Desert hermits who were already in violation of Christ’s command to His Church — Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). Anybody recall Jesus of Nazareth separating Himself from the world to live selfishly in caves occasionally emerging to have “interspiritual” dialogues with practitioners of pagan religions as to how they “experience” God? And many of you familiar with Apprising Ministries will have heard me using the term semi-pelagian recently. With good reason; consider the following from “The Semi-Pelagian Theology of John Cassian,” whom Jones cited above: 

John Cassian was a contemporary of St. Augustine in Gaul (modern France). A Semi-Pelagian monk and founder of many monasteries, he wrote The Institutes and Conferences and slightly modified Pelagius’s teachings. “The Semi-Pelagian doctrine taught by John Cassian (d. 440) admits that divine grace (assistance) is necessary to enable a sinner to return unto God and live, yet holds that, from the nature of the human will, man may first spontaneously, of himself, desire and attempt to choose and obey God. They deny the necessity of prevenient but admit the necessity of cooperative grace and conceive regeneration as the product of this cooperative grace.” A.A. Hodge
(Online source)

Sounds just like the belief of the average Christian today, does it not? As it regards our subject of prayer below I will first give you the answer Jesus gave to His disciples when they asked Him, “Teach us to pray.” This will be followed by Swami Foster so you can see for yourself his neo-Gnostic answer to that question is so far out there we aren’t even able to get a radar fix on it. 

Yet this is the foolish, existential, highly subjective, and focused on the self CSM—which originally flowered in the antibiblical monastic traditions of apostate Roman Catholicism—to which evangelicalism is now running. And if you think I’m overstating this then why not go into the silence and contemplate Tony Campolo To Enlighten Southern Baptists In Virginia; see for yourself just what’s going on right now within entire state conventions of the pretending “Protestant” Southern Baptist Convention.

Lord, teach us to pray just as John also taught his disciples…

God the Son, Christ Jesus of Nazareth: 

And He said to them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. ‘Give us each day our daily bread. ‘And forgive us our sins, For we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.'” (Luke 11:2-4)

Guru wannabe Richard Foster:

Contemplative Prayer immerses us into the silence of God. How desperately we in the modern world need this wordless baptism! … Contemplative Prayer is the one discipline that can free us from our addiction to words. Progress in intimacy with God means progress toward silence… It is recreating silence to which we are called in Contemplative Prayer…

At the outset I need to give a word of warning,… Contemplative Prayer is not for the novice. I do not say this about any other form of prayer… Contemplative prayer is for those who have exercised their spiritual muscles a bit and know something about the landscape of the spirit. In fact, those who work in the area of spiritual direction always look for signs of a maturing faith before encouraging individuals into Contemplative Prayer…

I also want to give a word of precaution. In the silent contemplation of God we are entering deeply into the spiritual realm, and there is such a thing as a supernatural guidance. While the Bible does not give us a lot of information on that, there are various orders of spiritual beings, and some of them are definitely not in cooperation with God and his way! … But for now I want to encourage you to learn and practice prayers of protection. (Prayer: Finding The Heart’s True Home, 155,156,157)

See also:

“CELEBRATION OF DISCIPLINE” BY RICHARD FOSTER AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGICAL ERROR

DELUSIONS OF DALLAS WILLARD

SPIRITUAL FORMATION IS PIETISM REIMAGINED

TONY CAMPOLO WITH “MYSTICAL ENCOUNTERS FOR CHRISTIANS”

CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY/MYSTICISM (CSM) OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION IS RECKLESS FAITH