DOWN WITH SOLA SCRIPTURA! 

 

The following quote is from the latest Critcal Issues Commentary article Richard Foster — Celebration Of Deception Evangelical Mysticism by Bob DeWaay, pastor of  Twin City Fellowship and highlights another aspect of a growing rebellion within mainstream evangelicalism against Sola Scriptura. Within DeWaay sends a clear Biblical warning concerning this core teaching of Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism from Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster.

Foster’s musings are really rooted in classic mysticism and actually comprise a large part of the faulty foundation of the deformation of the Faith espoused in the Emerging Church aka Emergent Church, now morphing into Emergence Christianity, and now being spread throughout the visible church e.g. by Rob Bell and his friend Peter Rollins.

DeWaay is dead-on-target as he says:

In February 2008, Christianity Today ran a glowing cover story about Evangelicalism’s recent embrace of medieval Roman Catholic mysticism entitled The Future lies in the Past… The article views Foster as one who continues to guide the movement… Foster’s “journey inward” is unbiblical and dangerous. I will show [in this article] that most of the spiritual disciplines that he calls “means of grace” are no means of grace at all—but a means of putting oneself under spiritual deception.

The Journey Inward

The Bible nowhere describes an inward journey to explore the realm of the spirit. God chose to reveal the truth about spiritual reality through His ordained, Spirit-inspired, biblical writers. What is spiritual and not revealed by God is of the occult and, therefore, forbidden. We have discussed this in many articles and have produced DVD seminars on the topic. But the concept of sola scriptura is totally lost on mystics such as Richard Foster. They, like the enthusiasts that Calvin and Luther warned against, believe they can gain valid and useful knowledge of spiritual things through direct, personal inspiration. Foster describes the idea of the disciplines that are the topic of his book: “The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm.”

So Foster has conceptually repudiated sola scriptura on page one to replace it with a journey inward to explore the realm of spirits. Something must have been seriously amiss in evangelicalism already in 1978 to render this book a bestseller! It ought to have been repudiated on the spot. In a footnote to that statement Foster writes, “In one form or another all of the devotional masters have affirmed the necessity of the Disciplines” (Foster: 1). The devotional “masters,” by the way, are mostly Roman Catholics who never were committed to the principle of sola scriptura.

It is not surprising that they looked for spirituality through experimentation. But as an “inner light” Quaker, Foster never was committed to sola scriptura either. Forgetting that the Bible forbids divination, Foster explains what he is after: [W]e must be willing to go down into the recreating silences, into the inner world of contemplation. In their writings, all of the masters of meditation strive to awaken us to the fact that the universe is much larger than we know, that there are vast unexplored inner regions that are just as real as the physical world we know so well. . . . They call us to the adventure, to be pioneers in this frontier of the Spirit. (Foster: 13)

Realizing that his readers would likely take this as an endorsement of Eastern religions, he makes a disclaimer that it is not Transcendental Meditation (TM) or something of that ilk: “Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to empty the mind in order to fill it” (Foster: 15). But what Foster wishes us to fill our minds with are personal revelations from the spirit realm that we naively are to think are the voice of God. This sort of meditation is not meditating on what God has said, but uses a technique to explore the spirit world. In other words, it is divination. (Critical Issues Commentary, May/June 2009, 1)

See also:

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

ROB BELL, PETER ROLLINS AND PHYLLIS TICKLE TOGETHER ADVANCING EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY

RICHARD FOSTER’S LEGACY ENDURES: CHRISTIAN LEADERS HELP TO MAKE IT SO

GARY GILLEY REVIEWS: THE ATTENTIVE LIFE, DISCERNING GOD’S PRESENCE IN ALL THINGS BY LEIGHTON FORD

CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY OF RICHARD FOSTER ROOTED IN THE EASTERN DESERT AND THOMAS MERTON

EVANGELICAL RIP VAN WINKLES EMPLOY QUAKER MYSTIC RICHARD FOSTER FOR BEDTIME FABLES

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