Oh groan. So I've been writing about mystical verse as presented by Tozer, and he has the same idea of mysticism I've had since I first encountered it in the first years of seeking God. It's about God, it's about Jesus, no it is not about some kind of method of meditation or even faculties of the soul although I know some of the old mystics spent time on that subject. I've known there is a current movement in the church that calls itself mystical, that teaches something it calls Contemplative Prayer but the little I know about it hasn't attracted me in the slightest. It isn't the mysticism I'm talking about, that Tozer displays in his books.
Why does language get so bollixed up anyway so that we talk at cross purposes about such important things? I just took a look, a look that lasted half a minute I think, at a video of one Dallas Willard who is one of the teachers of this Contemplative Prayer movemeht and he was about to give a definition of the "will." Yes that's what I'd begun to grasp, this movement is about US, it's about the human being, it is not about God. Or God is secondary. What we are to learn is something about our own faculties and so on. This is not the mysticism of Tozer.
I heard a few minutes of John MacArthur on the subject, calling the Contemplative Prayer movement "bunk" and going on to define it as looking within for spiritual intuition, and it's all about this personal intuition as he understands it.
Well, maybe it is as this movement is practicing it. I'm not going to find out because I'm pursuing another kind of mysticism and I don't think I need to know more about that movement for this purpose. According to Tozer we should think of the Wesleys as mystics with their magnificient verses and hymns to God and the spiritual life of a Christian. Isaac Watts is a mystic to Tozer. Surely MacArthur isn't oging to dismiss Watts in the way he dismisses this current movement. But that's the problem with how language is being used in these different contexts.
I'm definitely being inspired by the book of mystical verse Tozer put together. Solidly biblical thoughts about such subjects as the incomprehensible greatness of God, about the nature of God the Trinity, about Jesus, His suffering for us, His love to us, about the Cross he endured for us, about our undeservingness, the meanness of our fallen nature and God's astonishing mercy to such ingrates, all biblical Christian themes as appreciated by different believers who thought more deeply about them than the rest of us.
If the current movement called "mysticism" that MacArthur is debunking should be so debunked and dismissed, this other mysticism should not and I've been trying to get across here how we need it. Its focus is loving God, expresseions of love to God by some who pursuied it passionately, beyond the level of most Christians in the churches. Simply because we don't invest the time in its pursuit, we've never been exhorted to deepen our experience of God as these mystics did. In fact we are sometimes exhorted NOT to pursue these things.
As Tozer analyzes the problem in the beginning of his book "The Pursuit of God" this may largely be due to a shallow understanding of Justification by Faith that keeps us stuck always in the beginning stages of salvation rather than prompted to seek the very life salvation bought for us, the whole point of it all, "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever" as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it. It's a tragedy. Sometimes God has sent true revival into a church or community and His presence alone teaches us that there is more to the Christian life than salvation, but somehow the lesson doesn't get learned.
Perhaps this current Contemplative Prayer movement could be understood as one of those reactions against this unnecessary limitation on the Christian life, a misguided reaction, a reaction that went wrong as so many of them do. The point is to know God as He shows Himself in scripture, not to "intuit" anything else or get all wrapped up in the capacities of our human spiritual faculties. Yes we have the "means of grace" and if we put enough energy into those we might become mystics too, Prayer alone touches God. If our prayers are brief and not focused on knowing God we won't become mystics, but a determination to seek God Himself and know Him better is all it takes to become a mystic like those who wrote the verse in Tozer's book.
Even the Catholic mystics sound like Protestants in this book, because they are drawn to the true God and the false practices of Catholicism simply do not draw them at all because they are false. They are seeking God Himself who is not to be found in those practices so they simply are not enticing to them. Scripture itself reveals God and that entices them.
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