Recent best-selling books assert that a number of Christian leaders have been unduly influenced by the Eastern philosophy of the New Age movement. Two of the most popular titles expressing such reservations are Constance Cumbey’s The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow and Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon’s The Seduction of Christianity.
In our May 16, 1986, issue, Robert Burrows detailed the complicated ins and outs of the New Age movement. Writing about certain practices sometimes considered New Age, Burrows addressed the concerns of Cumbey, Hunt, and other critics. “Is it possible to use guided imagery and relaxation exercises as aids to worship?” he asked. “Is it possible to use them to communicate with God or receive revelations from him? Or do those who use these techniques inevitably fall into magical manipulation and spiritual idolatry?”
Any number of writers—including John and Paula Sandford, Morton Kelsey, and Ruth Carter Stapleton—have been criticized for their apparent affinities with New Age ideas. No single treatment can deal with all these writers and the serious concerns raised about their work. Consequently, CHRISTIANITY TODAY chose to discuss the matter with two evangelical writers who have been involved in the New Age controversy. Richard Foster, the author of several books, including Celebration of Discipline, has come under fire for his recommendations concerning Christian meditation and the use of the imagination in spiritual exercises in general. David Seamands, whose books include Healing of Memories, has been criticized for using the therapy of inner healing and relying heavily on imaginative scenarios to rid counselees of trauma from past incidents.
Also participating in the discussion were two respected observers of the New Age movement: James Sire, senior editor of InterVarsity Press and author of such books as Scripture Twisting, and Eric Pement, associate editor of Cornerstone magazine.
Visualization
Common to meditation, inner healing, and other practices that give pause to some writers is visualization. “Remember,” write Hunt and McMahon, “we are not addressing the many valid uses of the imagination, such as visual images used by artists, architects, or ordinary persons in ‘seeing’ what is being described, remembering, or rehearsing in their minds.” Instead, Hunt and McMahon believe visualization is sometimes intended to “manipulate reality or evoke the appearance and help of Deity.” That kind of visualization, they say, must be avoided.
Eric Pement : Are visualization exercises biblical?
James Sire : Visualization itself is certainly biblical. The psalmists visualized all the time. Look at Psalm 77, for instance. “I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord, I will remember thy wonders of old.” Then a few verses later: “The clouds poured out water; the skies gave forth thunder; thy arrows flashed on every side.” Those are pictures. Psalm 29 and 46 are two other psalms, among many, that do the same thing. So it seems to me that there is a biblical basis for our picturing things.
David Seamands : Visualization is simply and basically human. How could you remember events, for example, without pictures? Human beings can’t stop visualizing any more than they can stop breathing or sleeping. But it’s true that visualization can be used for New Age practices. What we must do is visualize constructively and biblically.
Pement : Yet there’s an important difference between thinking or remembering, which involves mental images, and dwelling on those images for their own sake, believing that thought forms by themselves will bring things into being. Images are unavoidable—God put us in a three-dimensional world and gave us the ability to think in three dimensions. On the one hand, we can visualize to recall God’s grace and mighty deeds, and to see ourselves as God sees us. On the other hand, the New Agers have co-opted visualization because they believe the universe is a form of consciousness, and reality exists by common consent.
Would you say visualization gives us access to God? If so, is it a necessary means of access to God, or can the reality of the divine presence be acquired through other means as well?
Richard Foster : When you ask if it gives us “access to God” I assume you are asking if it can be a means of grace through which God can reach us. In that sense I would say visualization is a means of grace—but not a “necessary means.” The study of Scripture, prayer, worship—these would be examples of what could be more accurately called a “necessary means.” The Bible gives these things a high priority and universal application.
Pement : How would this square with the biblical teaching that we receive access to God through faith, because of the atoning blood of Jesus?
Sire : Richard and Eric are speaking in different categories. Eric is talking about the grounds of our access to God, which, we would all agree, is the atoning blood of Christ. Richard is talking about how we practice or appropriate that access to God, once we confess Christ. We’re mixing the justifying access, the grounds, with the sanctifying process of growth. The means of grace are not the grounds of our access to God.
Foster : Exactly! We are saved by grace through faith. There is no other way. But once we are believers we must answer the question of how we grow in Christ. Remember, Peter said, “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” and frankly, many people try to replace growth with birth. Because we have no theology of spiritual growth we get people born again and again and again.
Now, we have problems with a theology of spiritual growth because of our deep concern about works righteousness, which we should be deeply concerned about. But is there a way that Christians can grow that does not violate sola fide? Most of us have accepted Bible study, for example, as a part of the theology of growth. But I think we need to go a lot deeper into this matter of growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. We must, for example, help each other learn exactly how we are conformed to the image of Christ, as Paul says in Romans 8. And we must do that in the context of daily life. In other words, our theology must confess that we are not only saved by grace, we live by it as well.
Meditation
Some kinds of meditation are based on what Constance Cumbey calls the “old lie” of finding “the god within.” To prevent such dangers, some Christian writers have emphasized that Christian meditation should be rational or cognitive—based on objective ideas and historical events. They are concerned about forms of meditation that freely employ the imagination, which is subjective and so less easily controlled than cognition. On similar grounds, they worry about meditative techniques that employ controlled breathing (for relaxation) and visualization.
There are evangelical precedents for using visualization in meditation—consider Alexander Whyte and some of the Puritan divines.
—Richard Foster
Pement : I see a distinction between two kinds of meditation—cognitive meditation and mystical or contemplative meditation. How do you respond to this distinction?
Foster : I can understand and appreciate the concern that leads to this distinction, but its great weakness is that it is simply not biblical. It creates a false definition of meditation, because it neglects one of the most important biblical emphases about meditation, namely ethical transformation. Repentance, turning to God and changing our behavior in obedience, is central to biblical meditation.
Christian meditation is not a matter of simply gazing blissfully at your navel. Nor is it just a matter of memorizing the Gospel of John. It leads directly to obedience. We are to hear God’s voice and obey his word. Consider Psalm 119: “I will meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. I delight in your decrees; I will not neglect your word” (vv. 15–16).
Seamands : The cognitive-contemplative distinction also falsely splits the whole person. It sounds as if contemplative meditation is all feeling, and cognitive meditation is all rationality. Scripturally, it’s impossible to separate feeling and rationality. The biblical person listens to God with mind and heart. The “eyes of your heart are enlightened” (Eph. 1:18); a man “thinks in his heart” (Ps. 10).
Sire : Ed Clowney, the former president of Westminster Seminary, has written that Christian meditation differs from non-Christian meditation “not in the absence of the intuitive, but in the presence of the rational.” So even someone as impeccably conservative as Clowney can affirm both the rational and the intuitive, the mind and the heart.
Seamands : Focusing on either heart or mind to the exclusion of the other is a mistake. Church history can be divided between the two extremes, with one bringing on the other. When we lose the wholeness of our personhood under God, then we become very cognitive—salvation becomes simple mental assent to a bunch of propositions—or we go off to the extreme of uncontrolled ecstasies, visions, and so forth.
Pement : But the fear, of course, is that some of this is coming from Eastern mysticism and other non-Christian sources.
Sire : The “new” and supposedly Eastern techniques of meditation only seem new because the church has lost touch with its rich spiritual heritage. We have lost contact with the entire church before the Reformation. And now we are getting back in contact with that heritage, partly in reaction to the stress on rationality in the twentieth century and in twentieth-century Protestant thought. More important, we are re-examining the Scriptures and asking what we may have forgotten.
Agnes Sanford described a process in which you find a blemish on your body and imagine it a quarter of an inch smaller or a lighter color. To me, that smacks of psychic experimentation.
—Eric Pement
Foster : I would add that the precedents for using our imagination are not only to be found in pre-Reformation times. There are Protestant evangelical sources as well, such as the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher Alexander Whyte.
On the subject of praying and meditating, he writes of using the “truly Christian imagination” to imagine yourself hearing and watching Jesus preach, seeing a leper healed, or actually being Lazarus in his grave, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Abraham, Job, the thief on the cross, and even Judas. He says the New Testament should come to be “autobiographic of you.”
Whyte was a highly esteemed orthodox Protestant, not a New Ager. But you can see that he had plenty of room for using the imagination, which he called a “magnificent talent.” And there are many other examples, including some of the Puritan divines.
But we must remember that the imagination is not an unmixed blessing. It has been affected by the Fall, just like all our other faculties. The Devil would like to use our imagination to work his evil purposes, and we always must guard against that. The imagination, just like all our faculties, needs to be redeemed and sanctified by God for his good purposes.
Pement : My problem isn’t with meditation as it is biblically defined, but with techniques currently used by some teachers within Christian circles. These techniques include breathing exercises, using a Christian mantra, guided fantasy, and (in a few notable cases) yoga exercises. Eastern religions have traditionally promoted such disciplines. The Eastern idea is that salvific enlightenment is gained through these meditative techniques. What about this in Christian meditation?
Foster : Personally, I have very little interest in technique, but a great deal of interest in helping people come into relationship with God. Specific suggestions are helpful only to the extent that they bring us more fully into relationship so that we behold the “glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). It makes a difference where one looks. Christians look beyond themselves to a transcendent God. In Hinduism and some other Eastern religions, the meditating person looks to a “god” who is not transcendent, only immanent.
Seamands : In addition, when we Christians meditate we do not intend to submerge our identities into that of an impersonal God. “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live” (Gal. 2:20). I’m not going to be absorbed as the drop of water returns to the ocean. My personhood will never be destroyed, but will eternally fellowship with a personal God.
I was a missionary to India, and the massive umbrella of pantheistic and monistic Hinduism was a tremendous challenge. It made me an absolute fanatic on Jesus Christ. The one place that I’m not going to budge is on the Incarnation, because I see the tremendous importance of it. “Whether the Krishna existed or not,” says my Hindu friend, “that’s not important. It’s the Krishna ideal that matters, so therefore it’s the Christ ideal that matters. Whether or not Christ existed is not important.”
To that I would and did say, “No, we’re not talking about the same thing. Whether Christ exists or not is not just important. It’s absolutely paramount.”
Inner Voices
New Agers seek guidance from within. Techniques such as Silva Mind Control (a consciousness-raising technique named after its originator, Jose Silva) teach one how to obtain a certain state of relaxation, then to listen to the advice of an inner guide. The inner guide is sometimes considered a spirit and sometimes simply a manifestation of the subconscious. Protests Don Matzat (in his Inner Healing: Deliverance or Deception?), “The same technique of visualization used to allegedly encounter Jesus is used in occultism for the purpose of contacting spirit guides.”
Pement : Techniques such as Silva Mind Control teach one how to obtain a certain state of relaxation, then to listen to the advice of an inner guide. And similar things are being done in the church. I have a friend who attended a youth group meeting and ended up participating in something very much like Silva Mind Control. What do you think of such exercises?
Foster : My response would be that there are a lot of spirits out there, and they are not all good. The Bible teaches there is a spirit world, that there are angels and demons. And we need to realize that Satan and his cohorts are out to destroy us. Jesus said that he is the true Shepherd and his sheep know his voice. The sheep, you see, need to come to know the difference between the Shepherd’s voice and Satan’s voice. We’re told in 1 John, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God.” And in 1 Thessalonians, the apostle Paul says, “Do not quench the Spirit, do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil.”
Seamands : We test the spirits and these inner voices against the written Word of God and the living Christ. The Holy Spirit can never ask you or me to do anything that is un-Christlike. Chapters 14; 15, and 16 of the Gospel of John make it clear that things truly of the Spirit of God will, first, glorify God. They will not glorify the person who testifies to them. Second, things of the Spirit of God will bear the fruit of the Spirit. The gifts of the Spirit can be counterfeited, as Paul indicates. But not the fruit, because the fruit of the Spirit is simply another way of describing the character of Jesus. That’s the litmus test of any inner voice.
Sire : Practically speaking, there’s another aspect to testing the reliability of an inner voice. That is the counsel of Christians whom you trust for their spiritual wisdom and discernment, as well as the communion of saints in the larger sense—the traditional understandings of the church through history.
Pement : Then you would agree that it is a mistake to presume that the voice of the subconscious is the voice of God?
Foster : That is correct! While God can use the subconscious (just like he can use all our faculties as they are submitted to him), the subconscious in and of itself is not reliable. Satan also can influence and use the subconscious.
Inner Healing
Inner healing (or healing of memories) is the counseling device of visualizing traumatic incidents from one’s past, but adding such therapeutic touches as the image of Jesus comforting the person at the time of the trauma. This is intended to lessen the hurt of the memory, and so to “heal” it. Hunt and McMahon say inner healing is based on faulty, non-Christian psychotherapies. They fear it confuses what actually happened in the past with what is only imagined in the present. Thus, “Inner healing is simply a Christianized psychoanalysis that uses the power of suggestion to ‘solve problems’ which it has oftentimes actually created.”
Pement : Isn’t a problem with inner healing that Christians can be prone to believe that if we have a better picture, a clearer thought, then we’ll be healed? For instance, Agnes Sanford, in The Healing Light, described a process in which you find a blemish on your body, and instead of praying for it to go away, imagine that blemish a quarter of an inch smaller or a lighter color. Experiment with the different pictures that you have and see how quickly it changes, she advised. To me, that smacks of psychic experimentation.
Sire : But the idea that God responds better to a better image is not different from the notion that God is more likely to hear an eloquent prayer than a stumbling, mumbling one. The truth in both instances is this: It is not our eloquence that gets God’s attention. It is the honesty and integrity of our prayers—and whether they reflect the mind of Christ—that God responds to. As best we can, we should discern the mind of Christ and then pray with honesty and integrity, and image with honesty and integrity.
Pement : Much of the mystique or appeal of inner healing is the idea that, since the triune God is eternal and is not bound by time, Jesus has been present at all times, and therefore we can relive a past event in his presence. Are inner-healing ministries trying to engage in some kind of celestial time travel?
Seamands : No. We’re merely exposing to Christ a memory that is in our past. We don’t do any traveling in time, but if he is the transcendent Lord of time, the past is present to him so that he can heal and free us from it.
Pement : Does he really deal with the incident, or does he rather deal with our responses to the incident?
Seamands : He deals with our memory of the incident. If my perception of my personal history was that something done to me was very hurtful, then I cannot separate my perception and my feelings of that event from the actual incident.
Let’s say there’s been sexual abuse in my past. That’s an extremely harmful incident, and there’s a lot of pain connected with it, pain that I have probably repressed. I could have repressed the memory of the whole thing. And that’s the thing that causes personality problems. The memory is repressed and the feeling is repressed. But repression is like trying to bury something alive. It keeps coming back to haunt you.
So what I do is ask the counselee to go back to that incident, when he or she was a little boy or a little girl, and to think of him-or herself in the arms of Jesus, being comforted by Jesus. I’m very strong on using biblical imagery.
Foster : What David is talking about is similar to the rehearsal of God’s redemptive acts. Israel was called to remember God’s great deliverance in the Exodus. And in our worship, every time we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we recall Jesus’ death on the cross for our sin. We receive, with thanksgiving, the forgiveness and healing that resulted from Christ’s death and resurrection.
Seamands : Absolutely. The crux of the matter, for the healing of memories, is appropriating forgiveness. And that means forgiveness of the one who wronged me, and forgiveness of me for desiring revenge.
Pement : Critics of inner healing have said there is sometimes an attempt to change something unholy into something holy, something evil into something good. Do you agree?
Seamands : An act that was evil, such as sexual abuse, cannot itself be altered into something good. But we can say with Joseph, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” So, a part of the healing of the memories is always a reinterpretation of the past.
Sire : We can re-understand the past, which we have wrongly interpreted. The goal is actually to see the past as God sees it.
Seamands : Yes, which is to turn it into something that’s no longer an infirmity that cripples you. God is now going to use it as a means of you ministering to other people. It’s going to become a gift, actually. This is one of the greatest things that happens to people. I once worked with a seminary woman who had been sexually abused as a child. She was dramatically changed. She went back home to her family and was able to be a means of healing for her mother, who was abused by an uncle, and for her 85-year-old grandmother, who was abused by a great-great uncle. So she brought healing to an entire family.
But it’s not a matter of pretending the original event didn’t happen or that it wasn’t evil. The first part of counseling is convincing the hurt person that an evil thing was done to him or her. They need to stop excusing it and stop taking the blame themselves. It has to be seen for what it was before God can change their perception of it and free them from it.
Foster : David’s concern is pastoral. Those who are uncomfortable with using the imagination just want him to declare to hurting persons that they are forgiven. But there is a real difference between sitting down and reading Hodge’s Systematic Theology and being healed of a past trauma. There’s a difference between the didactic and the pastoral. People need healing at every level, not simply the intellectual.
Seamands : Certainly the healing of memories grows out of a pastoral concern for hurting people. But there are theological underpinnings, like that great hymn of Charles Wesley’s, “O for a Thousand Tongues.” One verse goes, “He breaks the power of cancelled sin, he sets the prisoner free.” The point is that it’s possible to have sin cancelled and for it still to have power over you. People can accept Christ, be on their way to heaven, and yet there’s hurt and sin in the past that has power over them. It’s got to be broken, and if it’s not broken they cannot live faithfully.
Pement : So much of dealing with troubled people has to do with helping them find reality in Christ, to face the truth about themselves and their past. Unfortunately, several counselors of inner healing have created certain events that never actually transpired. That might be emotionally satisfying at the moment, but this seems to disable the counselee’s ability to face reality honestly.
Seamands : Inner healing, properly exercised, does not create a false memory or a past event that never happened. We are helping counselees reinterpret past memories in the light of God’s providence and love. The fact is that Christ has forgiven us, and we’re merely appropriating that forgiveness. I do not create events that never actually transpired. We try to deal with persons’ pasts so they can effectively live in the present.
Pement : Some healers of memories write about a ministry to homosexuals. They say that, since homosexuals never had a good father image, they should image a good father. Jesus may be the father figure, or perhaps someone else. But the homosexual should imagine the father finally paying attention to him and playing ball with him, things his real father never did. Essentially that’s an image of events that never happened. Is this valid?
Seamands : I just don’t do that kind of thing. In the case of homosexuality, I don’t attempt to create a good father that never was, but to help the homosexual understand a good father that was and is—God the Father.
Let me give a specific example. It’s not about homosexuality, but it has to do with whether or not the past is altered. One woman I worked with was suffering with a sense of inferiority. When she was in first or second grade, her teacher asked a question, and under her breath, this little girl said, “That’s a stupid question.” She said it too loudly. The teacher heard, got very angry, and said, “If you know all the answers, then come up here and put this one on the board.” The girl was so embarrassed that when she went up she was paralyzed and could do nothing. Then the teacher said, “Look, class, here’s Marjorie, who’s so stupid she says that’s a stupid question and then she can’t answer the question. Now, one by one come up and let’s write on the board what you think of Marjorie.”
So the children did. Actually, Marjorie was very smart, but she wore horn-rimmed glasses and was not very athletic. So they all traipsed up and wrote “stupid,” “clumsy,” “ugly,” and so on. This event affected her image in a remarkable way.
So I asked her to imagine that incident, all of it happening again, but then at the end to see Jesus taking her in his arms and saying, “Marjorie, I don’t think you are stupid or ugly. You are my daughter and I love you.”
Sire : And in fact Jesus did and does love the little girl, who is now a woman. So asking her to imagine Jesus holding her is not to manufacture an illusion. That’s very different from asking Marjorie to imagine all the children coming up and writing different things on the board: “Marjorie’s beautiful” or “Marjorie’s wonderful.”
Seamands : That would be unreality to me. But Christ was there all the time.
