The Constructive Curmudgeon

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There must be more…

More of the poetic,
the prophetic,
the noetic,
the didactic.

Not more trivia,
mania,
insomnia.

Not more celebrity.
inanity,
insanity,
profanity.

More questions,
discussions,
conclusions.

More
Not more…

Read this article by a Hindu professor who claims that yoga is intrinsically Hindu. Moreover, he is offended that Americans claim to yoke it to Christianity and deny its Hindu essence.

Do you think a Hindu professor knows what yoga is and isn’t? Why do more and more American Christians think they know better, offering “Christian yoga”? This is akin to “Christian atheism” or “Christian relativism.”

Sleep walkers are passe.
Sleep runners rule the day.

Don’t know where they are going,
What they are doing,
But they are moving.

Plugged in, jacked up, spaced out.
Proving their connections,
Never minding their defections.

Ear buds in.
Cell phones on.
Text messages out.
Never any doubt:
This is not sin.

Running to their portals.
Running with their portals.
No more mere mortals.

They are the wired wonders,
Souls torn asunder.

Sleep runners sparked by electronic speed.
Stimulation their obsessive need.
Never paying any heed
To any outworn Creed.

My good friend, theologian Dr. Alan Myatt, has co-written a major (and huge) systematic theology in Portuguese, which will be published in Brazil. It is called Systematic Theology: an historical, biblical and apologetic analysis for today’s context. For those who read this language or know someone who does, please go to the web page. It takes an integrative approach, similar to Integrative Theology by Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest.

I only wish I could read it. Perhaps Alan will translate the whole thing just for me…

[The following article was originally run in a slightly different form in Christianity Today in 2004. I am reprinting it here because of my extreme concern over the number of Christians who are attempting to mix Christianity and yoga. As I said in The New York Times in 2005, if it is really yoga and it is really Christianity, the two cannot be mixed. But sadly, churches and Christian organizations are sponsoring yoga classes.

I hate to pull rank, but sometimes it has to be done. I have been studying religion, philosophy, and theology for over thirty years. I have written five books on New Age spirituality, given hundreds of lectures and sermons on it, and participated in debates and panel discussions. I have engaged in intense spiritual warfare on this matter. To practice yoga is to open oneself to spiritual darkness. Let us instead take on the yoke of Jesus Christ (Matthew 11:28-29) and repent of all counterfeits. God is willing to forgive, restore, and empower on His terms.]

Overstressed Americans are increasingly turning to various forms of Eastern meditation—particularly yoga—in search of relaxation and spirituality. A recent Time interview with Gloria Steinem shows her matter-of-factly sitting in the lotus position. But underlying the meditative practices stemming from the religions of the East is a worldview in conflict with meditation and spirituality, despite the fact that many Christians are (unwisely) practicing yoga. Many Eastern religions teach that the source of salvation is found within, and that fundamental human problem is not sin against a holy God, but ignorance of our true condition. These worldviews advocate mediation and “higher forms of consciousness” as a way to discover a secret inner divinity.

Yoga, deeply rooted in Hinduism, essentially means to be “yoked” with the divine. Yogic postures, breathing, and chanting are designed not to bring better physical health and wellbeing (Western marketing to the contrary), but to bring union with God Brahman (a Hindu word for God). This is pantheism (all is divine), not Christianity.

Transcendental Meditation, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is a veiled form of Hindu yoga, despite its claims to be a religiously neutral method of relaxation and rejuvenation. TM initiates are given a mantra (a Hindu holy word) to repeat while sitting in yogic postures and engaging in yogic breathing in order to find God within their own being, since God (Brahman) and the self (Atman) are really one. Despite their differences, the various forms of Eastern meditation aim at a supposedly “higher” or “alerted” state of consciousness. This is because they claim that our normal consciousness obscures sacred realities. Therefore, meditation is practiced in order to suspend normal rational patterns of thought. This helps explain why so many Eastern mystics claim that divine realities are utterly beyond words, thought, and personality. In order to find “enlightenment,” one must extinguish one’s critical capacities—something the Bible never calls us to do (Romans 12:1-2). In fact, suspending our critical capacities through meditation opens the soul to deception and even to spiritual bondage.

The biblical worldview is completely at odds with the pantheistic concepts driving Eastern meditation. Rather than claiming that salvation lies within, the Scriptures affirm that we are spiritually incapacitated by our sin against a personal and holy God. Consequently, we require a supernatural rescue from beyond ourselves. Jesus taught that our inner nature makes us unclean (Mark 7:21-23). Paul amplifies this by declaring that we are “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). We cannot find either God or virtue within since “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

We are not one with an impersonal God, but are estranged from God because of our “true moral guilt” (Francis Schaeffer). No amount of chanting, breathing, visualizing, or physical contortions will melt away the sin that separates us from the Lord of the cosmos—however “peaceful” these practices may feel. Moreover, Paul warns that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). “Pleasant” experiences may be portals to peril. Even yoga teachers themselves warn that yoga may open one up to spiritual and physical maladies.

The answer to our plight is not found in some “higher level of consciousness” (really a deceptive state of mind), but in placing our faith in the unmatched achievements of Jesus Christ on our behalf. If it were possible to find enlightenment within, God would not have sent “his one and only Son” (John 3:16; see also 14:6; Acts 4:12; 1 Timothy 2:5) to die on the Cross for our sins in order to give us new life today and hope for eternity through Christ’s resurrection. We cannot raise ourselves from the dead.

But those who have followed the call of Christ to repent of their sins (Matthew 4:17) and turn to him in faith are challenged by Scripture to come before God through prayer and meditation. The biblical concept of prayer assumes that rational and meaningful communication between God and humans is possible. We offer our praise, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving to a personal God through human language. In other words, prayer is propositional—however emotional it may also be. The Lord’s prayer, for example is based on revealed truths about God and creation (Matthew 6:1-6; see also 1 Thessalonians 5:17). There is no summons to suspend rational judgment even when prayer through the Holy Spirit is “with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26). Nor should we repeat words meaninglessly to induce a trance (Matthew 6:7). Biblical meditation means pondering God’s revealed truths and reflecting on how they pertain to us. David revels in the richness of God’s law throughout Psalm 119. He encourages us to meditate on it: “I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word” (Psalm 119:15-16). Since all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:15-17), all of it is profitable for meditation in the biblical sense.

Douglas Groothuis is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of several books, including, Unmasking the New Age and Confronting the New Age.

[This is a short essay on The Second Commandment I gave to a class I taught. My view is that of The Westminster Larger Catechism; it is also shared by J.I. Packer and defended in his modern classic, Knowing God. It is unpopular, to be sure.]

4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments”–Exodus 20:4-6.

This is part of The Westminster Larger Catechism statement pertaining to this commandment:

“Question 109: What are the sins forbidden in the second commandment?

Answer: The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and anywise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself; tolerating a false religion; the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature: Whatsoever; all worshiping of it, or God in it or by it; the making of any representation of feigned deities, and all worship of them, or service belonging to them; all superstitious devices, corrupting the worship of God, adding to it, or taking from it, whether invented and taken up of ourselves, or received by tradition from others, though under the title of antiquity, custom, devotion, good intent, or any other pretense: Whatsoever; simony; sacrilege; all neglect, contempt, hindering, and opposing the worship and ordinances which God has appointed.”

This command forbids any representation of God in images. It is not meant to merely forbid the worship of images. The first commandment already did that by denying other gods. Rather, this command forbids worshiping the true God in a false way. Aaron along with the people (Ex. 32:4) and Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:28) wrongly depicted the God they claimed to serve. When God gave the Decalogue, God spoke and wrote. His appearance was irrelevant. This was also true when God spoke to Moses from the bush (Exodus 3). Therefore, Deuteronomy 4 says this:

15 You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, 16 so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, 17 or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, 18 or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below. 19 And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven. 20 But as for you, the LORD took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of his inheritance, as you now are.—Deut. 4:15-20.

In the Bible, God sometimes uses images expressed in words to describe who he is. Sometimes anthropomorphisms are used. That is not what the second commandment prohibits. What is anathema is when humans make an image of the divine. They do this for their own control, to domesticate God, so to speak. This corrupts our theological understanding, since no human-shaped image is adequate. Consider the plethora of Scriptures against idolatry. But what is the evil of an idol? Is it that merely it represents a false god, a god of fertility or war? No. The evil of an idol is that it attempts the impossible by merely mortal means: to represent God truly through a graphic image. So, The Apostle John exhorts us: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols”—I John 5:21.

Romans, chapter one explains the descent into debauchery has having its genesis in a false view (literally) of God:

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.—Romans 1:21-23

Before pagan philosophers in Athens, Paul said this:

16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. . . 29 Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead—Acts 17.

Calvin notes that the mercy seat was “so constructed as to suggest that the best way to contemplate the divine is where minds are lifted above themselves with admiration,” since the cherubim wins covered it and the veil shrouded it (Ex. 25:17-21).

These considerations, however, do not exclude all representational art. May it never be! The Tabernacle and Temple contained divinely-mandated representations of things like pomegranates and angels, but no representations of God himself. On this, see Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (InterVarsity Press)and Ryken, Art for God’s Sake (Crossway, 2006).

For more on the prohibition of images, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, chapters 11-12; J. Douma, The Ten Commandments (P&R Publishing, 1996).

The Philosophers Magazine has published my article, “Swinging in Class,” which applies jazz sensibilities to teaching philosophy. Sadly, it is not on line, but available in the 3rd Quarter, 2007 issue. So, run out and buy it. No excuses allowed.

The New York Times, which can seldom be faulted for its coverage of jazz (although it can be faulted for many other things), has a suitably long, detailed, and respectful obituary for pioneering jazz drummer, Max Roach, one of the innovators at the birth of bebop–a man who played with Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and other titans, and who never stopped exploring musical possibilities.

How many evangelical churches focus more attention on their coffee bar than on the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? What engenders greater community, the ersatz Starbucks or the Eucharist?

Having little culture of its own, evangelicalism tends to absorb the surrounding culture in ahistorical and undiscerning ways. Yes, coffee is a gift from God, and I find no reason to boycott Starbucks. But think about it.