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AR 25:26 - The surprising pathways of Protestant mysticism
In this issue:
ORIGINS - "some of the finest Christian minds from across a multitude of disciplines" on Intelligent Design
PROTESTANT MYSTICISM - a brief history "from medieval Rhineland to contemporary China"
Apologia Report 25:26 (1,483)
July 1, 2020
ORIGINS
Story of the Cosmos, How the Heavens Declare the Glory of God, Paul M. Gould and Daniel Ray, eds. [1] -- Neil English ("Ph.D in biochemistry") raves with this review, beginning with bio detail on Daniel Ray, "a former schoolteacher and amateur astronomer, and Paul M. Gould, a philosopher and apologist. Ray and Gould have assembled a stellar line-up of some of the finest Christian minds from across a multitude of disciplines - the sciences, the arts, philosophy, and theology - who are united in their conviction that the universe displays the unmistakable hallmarks of order, design, and foresight, from the microscopic realm of the sub-atomic to the macroscopic world of stars and galaxies.
"The origin of life is as mysterious as ever; the more we probe into it, the more complex it becomes. So, too, is the nature of human consciousness. The book draws upon an exceptionally rich repository of intellectual thought, from Aristotle, Plato, and St. Augustine in the ancient world, to C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, John Lennox, and others in the modern era, who have all formulated the same answer to an age-old question: Why is the cosmos intelligible, rational, and ordered? ...
"Three chapters in Part I of the book, written respectively by distinguished scientists Guy Consolmagno, Guillermo Gonzalez, and David Bradstreet, explore another, related question: What was God's purpose in creating a cosmos that is intelligible to humankind? ...
"What happens when scientists do not pursue the evidence wherever it leads? That fascinating question is answered by astrophysicist Sarah Salviander, who describes in considerable detail the consequences of abandoning Judeo-Christian ways of thinking. Salviander showcases the disputes that arose between the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington and his brilliant Indian graduate student, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Chandra). Although Eddington admired Chandra's theoretical achievements, he refused to accept where Chandra's conclusions concerning the fate of massive stars (neutron stars and black holes in particular) would lead him. ...
"The distinguished nuclear physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer fell victim to the same kind of cognitive dissonance....
"The same resistance to accepting wholly rational and reasonable conclusions about the nature of reality is explored by Christian apologist William Lane Craig, who discusses the mindset of atheist cosmologists like Lawrence Krauss....
"Physicists Luke Barnes and Allen Hainline, who take a decidedly neutral stance on Christian theism in the book, similarly debunk ill-thought-through statements made by Darwin-thumping atheists such as Richard Dawkins...." Last, "how should the atheist or agnostic best respond to it? That question is explored in a thought-provoking essay by Paul M. Gould, who <www.twotasksinstitute.org> sets out a robust argument for theism based on the reasonable premise that naturalism cannot account for the flourishing of human life." Salvo, #52 - 2020, <www.bit.ly/37HrjI3>
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PROTESTANT MYSTICISM
"The Diffusion of Christian Mysticism: From the Medieval Rhineland to Contemporary China" by Glen G. Scorgie (professor of theology at Bethel Seminary of Bethel University, MN) -- "It was 1938, between the two great World Wars. China was in upheaval, and the Middle Kingdom's first experiment with Western-style democracy was in tatters. ...
"Against this volatile backdrop, a new, growing, fiercely independent and theologically conservative network of Protestant churches known as the Little Flock decided to prepare and publish the first-ever Chinese translation of the autobiography of the seventeenth century French mystic Madame Guyon. ...
"Observing this is rather like wandering through some farmer's pasture and discovering an asteroid. How on earth did this get here? By what sequence of events, what chain of relationships and baton relays did Madame Guyon and her Quietist mysticism show up in China, and to such a surprisingly warm welcome from earnest Chinese Protestants? ...
"How do things catch on? Scholars of Christian spirituality should begin searching for answers to this question, which is so critical to the future of Christian spirituality itself. ...
"As a small contribution to this recommended genre of inquiry, this essay explores (admittedly, from a very high-altitude vantage point) the journey of Christian mysticism from the medieval Rhineland to parts of modern-day China via rather unexpected carriers - populist Protestant preachers, Holiness evangelists, and missionaries shaped by the Keswick Movement. ...
"In order to trace any historical pathway of Christian mysticism, we must first penetrate 'the cloud of unknowing' that too often surrounds the term itself. ...
"I think it is best (and in our circles, probably safest) to align with Bernard McGinn's generously inclusive depiction of mysticism as direct and immediate apprehension of the divine presence. The consciousness of which he speaks goes beyond, or moves deeper than, the more familiar and more objective experiences of sensing, knowing and loving. Karl Rahner has helpfully tagged at least a couple of important additional features of the mystical experience....
"The function of mystical theology is to provide seekers with an interpretive orientation to such a quest, and to guide them into proven pathways toward its realization. ...
"A strain of the mystical has been present in the Christian tradition from the very beginning. Its earliest phase was catalyzed most influentially in the writings of the enigmatic fifth to sixth-century Christian scholar Pseudo-Dionysius. ...
"By the time we come to the so-called Rhineland mystics of the Middle Ages, Christian mysticism already has a millennium or so of development under its belt. While the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius was never as pronounced in the Western church as in its Eastern counterpart, it was certainly still evident in the writings of Meister Eckhart in particular, and to a considerably lesser extent, in the works of his two most gifted disciples: Henry Suso and Johannes Tauler. ...
"Protestantism has not been viewed as particularly fertile soil for mystical sensibilities. And frankly, for good reason. ...
"Like a game of whack-a-mole, mysticism keeps popping up within the Protestant tradition, despite the best efforts of its critics to disparage and suppress it.
"Most scholars will concede that there is at least a modest mystical dimension to the lived experience of most believers. But how significant a component of their faith practice this piece comprises, and how intentionally and diligently they value it and cultivate it, varies according to the religions themselves, and amongst the adherents of each. ...
"[I]t is relatively rare to identify contemporary Protestants with much legitimate claim to the title of full-on mystic. It is more promising to look through the past, and scan the present, for those with some recognizably mystical aspect to their Christian experience. ...
"Martin Luther was no fan of Pseudo-Dionysius. He made this point abundantly clear [and wrote] Dionysius is very pernicious.... I myself do not want any believer to give the least weight to these books. So far indeed from learning about Christ in them, you will be led to lose what you know. ...
"And yet, at some point early on, Luther discovered a fourteenth-century devotional work of contemplative and mystical insights by an anonymous Frankfurter associated with the Teutonic Knights. ... Luther found it personally soul-nourishing, and gave it its enduring (and rather nationalistic) name - that is, the Theologia Germanica. ...
"The Theologia Germanica set Protestant mysticism on a decidedly Christocentric path from which it would rarely ever deviate thereafter.
"The Theologia Germanica already anticipates a number of the tendencies that will characterize subsequent Protestant appropriations of mysticism. It is pervaded by calls to self-renunciation, on the grounds that self-will is the root of all evil. It even affirms a kind of replacement theology whereby the self is to be completely switched out and replaced by the interior-dwelling Christ. ...
"The English-speaking world has long had its own indigenous Christian mystics. One has only to think of Julian of Norwich or Richard Rolle, for example, to realize that this was so. It is a curious thing that the Protestant movement in the English-speaking world rarely tapped into such indigenous mystical resources. Instead, it turned more frequently to mystical figures and resources from the Continent. ...
"Another formative work for later Puritan spirituality was The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677), written by Henry Scougal, a young philosopher and theologian of Calvinist persuasion in Aberdeen, Scotland in the late 1600s. Scougal's tenure as a professor was just four years, for his brilliant life was also tragically brief. He died just a few days before his twenty-eighth birthday. ...
"Historian Bruce Hindmarsh has noted that Scougal's work would be cited regularly and repeatedly by writers representing the subsequent evangelical movement within English-speaking Protestantism. It became a favorite of John Newton, was commended by Susanna Wesley to her sons John and Charles, and passed along by Charles to George Whitefield, who wrote of it: 'I never knew what true religion was till God sent me that excellent treatise by the hands of my never to be forgotten friend.' ...
"Wesley and others in that Oxford University Holy Club had engaged with the mystics, and had been personally encouraged in this direction by their spiritual mentor, the latitudinarian Anglican William Law. ... [M]uch (perhaps too much) has been made of Wesley's apparent disparagement of mysticism: 'I think the rock on which I had the nearest made shipwreck of the faith was the writings of the Mystics.' [Yet,] Wesley willingly published numerous abridged versions of mystical writings for the edification of his followers. ...
"Wesley oversaw the publication and distribution of some of Guyon's writings as well. ...
"Wesley believed the mystics were right to highlight the divine reality beyond our sensory world. However, in light of the Incarnation, mysticism needed to be more open to God's continuing presence in our everyday world. The error of the mystics was instead to turn all into spirit. ...
"Wesley articulated the general contours of 18th century English-speaking Protestantism's qualified appropriation of the Christian mystical tradition. ...
"But this status quo is about to change as Protestants began to discover and enthusiastically embrace the writings of Madame Guyon. ...
"Guyon embodied a post-Reformation mysticism - a 'new mysticism' - that sought (as did also the Salesians, among others) to carry the reality of religious experience beyond the cloister. ...
"Protestants' attraction to Guyon was prompted in part by their perception of special affinity with her through their shared experience of Roman Catholic hostility. ...
"Guyon's full name was Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe Guyon, but she was widely identified by Protestants simply as Madame Guyon. ...
"Quakers ... were surely the most enthusiastic first-responders in the English-speaking world to the Quietist writings that made their way across the English Channel....
"The Holiness Movement took shape in the nineteenth-century as Methodist and Wesleyan themes spilled out beyond their original denominational confines to affect a much broader, ecumenical span of Protestants."
The most influential writer of the Holiness Movement was American Phoebe Palmer and her formulation of a "radical self-surrender owed something to the Quietist writings that Palmer had previously absorbed."
Scorgie notes "a particular chip in the larger Holiness mosaic, named after the English town of Keswick in the Lakes District of north-east England, where week-long meetings, attended by thousands, have been held on an annual basis since 1875. ...
"Keswick promoted (and continues to promote) a pathway to victory over sin in the believer's life (that is, an ascetic pathway to sanctification and missional power) through a radical negating of the sinful self. The goal of the believer is to participate in a breathtakingly comprehensive denial and renunciation of the ego, and everything associated with it, in order to make room for Christ to indwell believers and to live out his life through their consecrated and now essentially enucleated selves. For this reason, the Keswick message has been described as a 'replacement' theology or a commendation of the 'exchanged' life.
"Keswick was originally established as a response to the itinerant ministries in England of Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, a married couple of Quaker-born American Holiness leaders. ...
"The nineteenth century was the great century of Protestant missionary endeavor. ...
"Ironically, the most significant and enduring gains for the Christian faith occurred in the wake of the fateful Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, and China's humiliating capitulation to European demands for access to China's interior and the sale of opium throughout the land. ...
"The Protestant missionaries who flooded into China (by 1905 there were almost 3,500 of them) during this subsequent window of opportunity - that is, between the 1860s and the Communist Revolution in 1949 - brought with them orientations to Christian spirituality that echoed their own formative experiences in North America and Europe. A significant number of them were products of either Methodism, the nineteenth century Holiness Movement generally, or the Keswick Movement in particular. ...
"The contours of classic Christian mysticism morphed considerably during its Protestant journey to the shores of nineteenth-century China. The version of it that was conveyed to China by Protestant missionaries, having been filtered through a grid of distinctly Protestant values and priorities, was distinctive in its own right. Almost all of these missionaries testified to an intentional dependence upon the Holy Spirit for guidance and empowerment in their endeavors, while at least some of them gave priority to cultivating an experiential awareness of the presence of God. What we are interested in here, now, is how such mystical themes were appropriated by Chinese Protestant Christians themselves in the years leading up to the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
"Our investigation will necessarily be limited here to a single, hopefully well-placed biopsy - the mystical spirituality of Nee Tuosheng (1903–1972), or Watchman Nee, as he was known to English-speakers. ...
"If Wesley embraced a mysticism of service, Nee cultivated a mysticism of suffering. ...
"[I]t is very possible, even likely, that he drew solace and strength from a similar Quietist consciousness as he languished in a Shanghai prison. We do know that he found in the spiritual resources he had inherited from Margaret Barber and others a remarkable resilience." Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 20:1 - 2020, pp1-21, <www.bit.ly/2ANOR1J>
We've been told by former adherents that the Local Church/Living Stream movement of Nee disciple Witness Lee (1905–1997) is also much enamored of Madame Guyon's writings - see, for example, "The Discovery of God's Truth in the Nineteenth Century" here <www.bit.ly/3gau5sb> - NOTE: "buyer beware" regarding the source, <www.bit.ly/2NK38Q0> Living Stream.
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Story of the Cosmos: How the Heavens Declare the Glory of God, Paul M. Gould and Daniel Ray, eds. (Harvest House, 2019, paperback, 272 pages) <www.amzn.to/2UWIkZu>
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