Cultish: Is Contemplative Prayer New Age? w/ Marcia Montenegro

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00:03

All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, entering the kingdom of the cults. My name's Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here.

00:10

I am joined by my trusted good friend and super sleuth, Andrew the Super Sleuth of the show, coming from your super secret headquarters, not in Harriman, Utah anymore, but your brand new super secret headquarters.

00:21

It's good to see you, man. How you doing? I'm doing well, man. And you were just here chilling with me for a little bit and have some exciting stuff going on in your life, huh,

00:29

Jerry? Yes, yes. I hate to break it, for anyone who had hopes for the marriage, the marriage area is officially closed.

00:35

I got engaged over the weekend, and it was super exciting, so got to -

00:40

Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It was a great time. I took my girlfriend up there, and we hiked up this mountain, and it was a pretty cool kind of circumstance.

00:48

It's called Donut Falls. It's a little bit of a hiking travene, and I didn't know if we were going to make it to the top, because Andrew had his kids with him, and normally they have a hard time sometimes hiking.

00:59

Your wife, Casey, how many months pregnant is she? She is 22 weeks pregnant. 22 weeks pregnant.

01:04

Uh -huh. And so at any time, I was kind of like, I want to get to this specific location, because it's a nice little cave with a waterfall.

01:11

But at any time, I was like, all right, I've got two or three contingency plans in case we can't make it. But somehow, miraculously, we made it up to the top.

01:19

Wow. I popped the question, and she said yes, so now we got a whole lot of fun planning to do the next couple months. Oh, wonderful.

01:26

Oh, great. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming back on. We are here with Marsha Montenegro. She has been with us a couple of times.

01:33

We've talked about the Enneagram. We've talked about witchcraft. We've talked about a broad variety of topics.

01:40

You have a website, Christian Answers for the New Age, and you are one of our favorite guests and a lot of our fans really like and appreciate you.

01:48

And as always, we have to play our complimentary audio clip to bring you into what we're going to talk about today.

01:55

Here we go. Release the kraken. Yes. Yes.

02:02

Marsha, you are our favorite kraken because you deal with a lot of different topics. So thanks for coming on today.

02:10

Well, thank you for having me. I look forward to this, and I'm so grateful that you are interested in addressing this topic, which

02:19

I think is an under -addressed area in the church. Yeah, I appreciate that.

02:25

In fact, I reached out to you and I asked you, what topic do you want to talk about if you come back on?

02:31

And you talk about a broad variety of topics, but you talked about contemplative prayer and contemplative spirituality.

02:38

What makes that an important topic for you, given the material that you discuss with your ministry and also on your website?

02:46

Yes. Yeah. The reason it's connected to my ministry is because there are some overlapping areas.

02:55

One of the reasons these practices are in the church now, in the evangelical church, goes back to some

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Trappist monks who started the modern, what they called the centering prayer movement, although later one of the main founders was using the word contemplative prayer.

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And they used some Eastern meditation practices and influences to formulate this whole idea.

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And so they started, they wrote books and they formed this contemplative or centering prayer movement.

03:34

And they admit the Eastern influence also, when I was first writing my article on this,

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I discovered that, you know, I can go into this later, but for example,

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Thomas Keating brought a Buddhist into the Abbey to talk to the monks about meditation.

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And he really thinks or thought, because he's now has died, but he really thought that the

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Eastern or the Buddhists and the Hindus who did meditation had some kind of secret, you know, great way to do meditation that Christians could learn from.

04:14

So he felt Christians could learn meditation, or at least some of it, from practitioners of Eastern religions.

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So that is one area of overlap. Another area has to do with the

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New Age, where the New Age has this very mystical view of things in the

04:33

Bible. And they will often interpret things in the Bible in a way that, of course, is not correct, because they're

04:42

New Agers. So they're looking at it in a different lens. But they give these mystical interpretations that have kind of carried through in some of these practices that involve this, this needing to be still and this needing to kind of disconnect from your mind, and everything around you in order to, quote, unquote, commune with God.

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And they'll, the contemplative people will even say to unite with God. So that's the goal.

05:17

So you have, of course, different people who are teaching these things.

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And of course, there will be variations in some of their ideas and the way they teach it.

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But it really does go back to some core ideas that came from this movement that goes back further to people like Thomas Merton, who

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I guess, when we get into all this, I'll talk about him a little bit. And even back to a book called

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The Cloud of Unknowing, which was like a 14th century manual by an anonymous, they think a monk, writing about techniques for purgation, you go through the purgation, the dark night of the soul, and then you go, you go in this ladder to unity with God.

06:07

And so, have you ever heard of The Cloud of Unknowing? Doesn't sound familiar.

06:13

No, I'll have to get it. Okay. The Cloud of Unknowing is unknown to you. Okay. Yeah. I'm trying to make a little joke.

06:22

I'm not a natural comedian. So yeah,

06:28

I actually slogged through The Cloud of Unknowing. It took me two years to get through it.

06:34

It's very hard. It's very hard to read. I mean, it was written in the 14th century. So yeah,

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I read it in modern English, but there were all these footnotes explaining some of the turn of phrases and the use of certain words that you really wouldn't understand as a modern reader.

06:50

Right. So it was hopeful, but I'm telling you, wow, what a book, when I finished that, I was like, whew.

06:56

Gotcha. It was like a weight was taken off of me. Yeah. I appreciate that. So just so I could understand, and maybe just I want to make sure in case our audience is wondering as far as context, you're kind of referring to the sort of the historical origins of where contemplative prayer came from.

07:12

Yes. In the same way how right now in the modern day, how you have Eastern spirituality and occultism just exploding here in the

07:20

West. We've covered that with multiple episodes. We've done both with you and with other guests we've had on the program.

07:27

You basically essentially had the same thing happening back in the 15th century, where you sort of had the mysticism of that time, sort of trying to be syncretistic with Christianity, trying to take a more mystical idea of prayer.

07:43

Is that kind of my understanding then? I think there may be different views. I am not an expert on the medieval mysticism.

07:57

I know some things about it and I've had to read about it. I'm not an expert on it, but my understanding is that, because I'm not a historian, but my understanding is that there were these mystical practices for various reasons that were being practiced a lot in monasteries by monks and by some nuns, you know, like Teresa of Avila, and starting around the 12th and 13th centuries, maybe even a little before that, there were people like Hildegard of Bingen, who is referred to actually by New Agers.

08:28

And that's where I first heard of her. She's very popular in some quarters of the New Age, because some of these people had these mystical views.

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There's another person who's very well -known named Meister Eckhart, who's often referred to by New Agers.

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In fact, he's a big popular guy in the New Age, but he was technically Roman Catholic, but I think his views were not very orthodox.

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And the way he expressed himself, it sounds like everything is connected, we're all connected to God, the eye that sees

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God is the eye that sees me, and that kind of thing. Now, what he actually meant by that, I don't know, because I haven't studied him in depth.

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But the kinds of things he said are very harmonious with a lot of New Age ideas, and New Age and mysticism often overlap, even though one is in the context of maybe a

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Christian or Roman Catholic theology, and the other is not. There are these connections that people make, whether they should make them or not.

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And so you've got kind of a New Age connection that way, and this medieval mysticism, which

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I think was fairly, I guess it was pretty prevalent, I don't know how prevalent it was, but it was prevalent enough to still be influencing a lot of people today.

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And a lot of things were written on them, like Teresa of Avila supposedly would go into these ecstatic trances, and the other nuns had to come hold her down, because otherwise she'd float in the air.

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And these are actual accounts, now are they true or not? I don't know how many people witnessed this, but these are things that supposedly happened to her.

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And so this kind of theology normally kind of stays within the confines of certain areas of the

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Roman Catholic Church, you know. I mean most people would look at that as that's a Roman Catholic thing, but now these mystics have migrated into the

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Evangelical Church because of the contemplative prayer movement, and through various avenues that I can discuss, it has come into the

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Church. Right, so just real quickly, so then to understand then is that what was once syncretistic during the 12th through the 15th century that you're referring to, of both this sort of mysticism along with Christianity that's very antiquitous,

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Walter Martin referred to spiritism, mysticism as the cult of antiquity. So in the same way that happened back then, now we're sort of seeing that now repackaged in the modern era, there's nothing new under the sun, but we're now looking at a modernized version.

11:23

Andrew, what were you going to say? Yeah, you said a few little buzzwords earlier, you said

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Trappist monks, right? So what is a Trappist monk for our listeners, and what branch of Christendom do they come from?

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Were they Roman Catholics as well? Yes, Trappist monks is one of the orders in Roman Catholicism.

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I've read a little bit about it, and right now I can't remember anything I read about it, because I guess it wasn't that essential.

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I can't remember, but I think maybe they are very much devoted to the idea of contemplation.

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I could be wrong on that, because each order kind of has its own little theme, maybe, or whatever the founder of that order, like the

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Franciscan order was started by St. Francis, and that's what Richard Rohr is a part of, and they have their own traditions.

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They have the Trappist monks, and then you have other orders of monks, which I know very, very little about.

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I just know these are Trappist monks because these three men, Thomas Keating, William Menninger, and Basil Pennington, are the three who started this contemplative or centering prayer movement, and their influence has been very strong, even though they're within the

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Roman Catholic Church, and normally most evangelicals would never hear of these people, but their teachings got out via people like Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, and also we have another element now.

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Richard Rohr apparently was very close with Thomas Keating and admired him, and often refers to Thomas Keating, and actually says that he influenced him, and I think

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Richard Rohr is very big on contemplation. This is another avenue that this is coming into the church from before, because that's why his center is called the

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Center for Action and Contemplation. He believes in action, but he believes the contemplative element is essential because he says that it's the way we unlearn, and we need to unlearn, and so unlearning is done through contemplative practices.

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That's one of his big themes, and he will often mention Thomas Keating in conjunction with this idea, so how much of an influence

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Keating was, I don't know, but he's acknowledged him as an influence. Thomas Keating died around,

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I think he died around 2018, I meant to check before I came on, but it wasn't that long ago.

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I actually heard him in person in 2005. I heard him speak in a church in this area, and then

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I spoke with him afterwards privately. Thomas Keating was one of the three men, but he seems to have been the most influential of the three, because he had a very commanding way about him.

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He did a lot of speaking, he has that kind of persona, whereas William Menninger stayed back in the background a little more.

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I don't think he wrote any books. Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington both wrote books, and I've read books by both of them.

14:34

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14:44

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14:53

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15:01

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15:08

So just to understand then, when I hear Richard Rohr, we've brought up that name before on our podcast, in fact, the one we did with you initially on the

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Enneagram, and he was one of the prominent people for really normalizing and bringing the

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Enneagram and its ideas into evangelicalism. So we've had episodes where we've talked about the theology and just the spiritual dangers regarding the

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Enneagram. Does the theology and kind of what you see of the people who are evangelical who are interested in the

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Enneagram and their types and all that really phenomena—I think that's an appropriate term—do you see the same thing with contemplative prayer?

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Are they hand -in -hand, or what does that look like? They do converge, and this is something

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I noticed a few years ago, and then I started looking into it more, and I started doing several

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Facebook posts showing the connections as I came across them, and honestly, there's so many, it's like this incredibly vast spiderweb.

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I mean, it's just the connections are just incredible. It's like it boggles the mind, and I think

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I even named one of my posts the spiderweb or something, because the connections just go everywhere.

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And what I found is that maybe not so much people like the layperson doing the Enneagram as necessarily into the contemplative stuff, but the writers and teachers of the

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Enneagram, a lot of them are spiritual directors. Now, here's another term that comes from, as far as I know, medieval monasticism.

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The spiritual director was somebody who was going to guide you in hearing

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God or hearing the Holy Spirit. That's why they're your spiritual director, to help you recognize when you're getting this guidance.

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Now, that is my understanding of the term, as is explained today. Like I say,

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I don't know the historical origins of spiritual directors, but I know that's where the term came from, and it's been used consistently in the

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Roman Catholic Church. But until when I became a Christian, nobody in the Evangelical Church had a spiritual director.

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Now there's tons of them. There's tons of spiritual directors in the Evangelical Church, and they're training other people to be spiritual directors.

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And a lot of these spiritual directors either know the Enneagram and promote it, or they teach it.

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And a lot of the Enneagram teachers are also spiritual directors. I mean, it's like this crossover. And of course, it's not always true, but I'm finding it to be a consistent theme.

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So you've got, and then you throw Richard Rohr in the mix, who's kind of a Johnny come lightly to the whole, you know, mystical thing.

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But he's into, he always talks about the mystics and how the mystics got it, but the

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Western Church didn't get it, but the mystics got it. And so he's very big on the mystics.

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And so his promotion of that because of the Enneagram connection to Richard Rohr makes people more open to Rohr, or at least know about him.

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And so his influence in that area comes also because of the

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Enneagram. So the Enneagram seems to have heightened the interest in and maybe acceptance of contemplative spirituality, which actually preceded the

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Enneagram. Okay. The contemplative stuff came about first before the

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Enneagram came into the church, but the Enneagram seems to be, you know, kind of giving it more, more of an audience.

18:45

Man, it reminds me of, yeah, it makes perfect sense. It reminds me of when I was going to my

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Bible college. And I remember we had a class called Spiritual Formation in the 21st Century. And I think the book that we were supposed to read was

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Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. And what you're saying is just ringing all of these bells is making me remember this class.

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And what I find really dangerous and see if you can go into this a little bit further, Marsha, is that when we have people telling us that we have to do or can do

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X, Y, Z in order to grow in a closer relationship or knowledge of God, or maybe they would use like your innate divine or the divine presence.

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That's where we can get a lot of issues, right? Because what we have is God's word to grow in sanctification with our

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Savior is reading his word, prayer through the word, right? Not trying to make

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God's will bend to our will, but trying to align our will with God's will through his revealed will and his word.

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What are some dangers and what are also the language that contemplated prayer people, what is the language that they use that so we can be aware of when we're getting into a situation where they say things that are very similar, but it's also disguised, right?

20:02

Yes, exactly. And this is one of the big problems is the language. People either not knowing what it means or assuming it means something that it really doesn't or not understanding the full meaning.

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Spiritual director would be one of the terms that we're seeing more now that a lot of people may be like, well, what is that?

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And then they may explain it in a somewhat innocuous way, you know, when actually,

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I mean, I don't think that we need spiritual directors. It's one thing to have spiritual advisors, you know, go to a pastor, go to a mature

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Christian for advice. That's not what we're talking about here with spiritual director. This is a much more intimate and spiritual kind of connection.

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Then you have the spiritual formation, which is one of the terms that brought this into the church because everybody defined it as discipleship.

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But it's not in most cases, it's not really discipleship. They just say it's discipleship and maybe they really believe it's discipleship, of course.

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And I always say, well, why don't you just use the word discipleship? Right. Let's just use that word.

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We know what that is. And because it involves these practices that they claim are biblical and they will cite verses.

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Now, I want to say something here before I forget it. I have examined every single passage of scripture that I have read in any book or writing that promotes contemplative practices, and not a single one of them has been used correctly.

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I have yet to find one that is used in context and used correctly.

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They're all used incorrectly, all of them. And this is amazing to me because they quote scripture or they refer, they may just list some scriptures, you know.

21:52

Well, when you go and look at them, they're not supporting what they what they say they support. So this is a big problem is a misuse of scripture.

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So you've got spiritual formation that is supposed to be discipleship. It is actually disguised contemplative practices.

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Another one is Lectio Divina. Now, Lectio Divina is another medieval monastic practice.

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Now, what a lot of people have told me, including, I think maybe a few Catholics, is well,

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Lectio Divina is not, you know, a mystical thing. It was this reading scripture. And I said, you know, whatever it was in the 13th, 14th or 15th or 16th centuries,

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I don't know what it was then. But what I'm dealing with is what I am seeing it, how

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I'm seeing it now and how it's taught now. Gotcha. Oh, I appreciate that. I address how it's being used now.

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And I have read lots of articles, watched lots of videos on Lectio Divina.

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I've done several Facebook posts on it. I address it briefly in my article on contemplative prayer on my

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Web site. And every time it's the same thing. It's a mystical reading of the

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Bible. OK, it's reading the Bible for a private meeting and they have a technique you go through.

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And I actually watched a video recently of Thomas Keating talking about this. Good. OK, well, let me ask you this,

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Scott, I think it'd be good also as well to define terms, because a lot of our listeners, for example, they'll be they're they're listening and hearing about, you know, the 12th or the 15th century and hearing about monks doing chanting and such.

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But a lot of ways this is now infiltrating the church and modern day evangelicalism.

23:38

So that's actually a lot closer. This issue is probably a lot more close proximity than people realize.

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So maybe you could explain just to find terms like what is contemplative prayer look like?

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Give a couple examples of what that process is. OK. And then why? And again, you are a former

23:55

New Ager. You're giving your ministry is called Christian Answers for the New Age. What is it about this type of contemplative prayer that is usually a spiritually dangerous and also similar or emulating in some sense the

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New Age, but cloaking itself in Christian terminology? Expand that if you could. OK, yes.

24:15

And this is a really kind of complex area. This whole topic is very complex, because as you see already from the short time

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I've been talking, I have brought in all kinds of elements from all over the place. And that's the way it is.

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And that's one reason it's hard to discuss with people because there's so much to it.

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And, you know, when you start throwing all this stuff out, people either get confused or they think you're you know, you're crazy or something.

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So it's very, very hard to kind of smooth it all out and make it sound, you know, here it is.

24:46

One, two, three. It's hard to do that. But basically, contemplative prayer is based on the idea that there that prayer, that the highest form or the most intimate kind of prayer is without words.

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And is involving needing to be still, this is very important, and they misuse

25:12

Psalm 46, 10, which in the King James says, Be still and know that I am God.

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The NAS says, Cease striving. And I've, of course, looked into this a long time ago, and I have an article on it on my website.

25:27

It doesn't mean to be physically still. God isn't saying be still.

25:32

And he's certainly not saying be still so you can pray. He is telling people he's rebuking people who are striving against him.

25:41

And he's rebuking Israel for not trusting him. It's a the Psalm 46 is pretty short.

25:47

I think it's it's, you know, 12 verses or something. But if you read it and see the context, you see has nothing to do with prayer and has nothing to do with being physically still.

25:58

So that's taken, though, very literally. And you have to be still and you have to.

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Usually they tell you, you know, you just be still, maybe close your eyes. You have to kind of put other thoughts aside.

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This is very much like Eastern meditation and. Emptying your mind. Huh? Emptying your mind.

26:19

They don't say that. And actually, even in Eastern teachings, they don't usually say that.

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Now, the Zen Buddhists will talk about the beginner's mind. So people should know I did do Zen Buddhist and Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist meditation.

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So when I talk about Eastern meditation, that's another area I address in my ministry. And a lot of that is my background, but also a lot of reading and research

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I've done in my in my ministry. So just so people know, I have that background, too.

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It's not just a general new age background, but I have this thing. So a lot of this they will actually sometimes teach, for example,

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Keating and Pennington in their books will talk about, you know, you you don't let thoughts intrude and they give a technique you do for that, which is the technique

27:06

I actually learned when I was doing Buddhist meditation. It's the same technique and they teach the exact same thing.

27:13

Now, the idea here and Thomas Keating said, if you think of God when you're praying, you should not think of God.

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Now, just think about that. Take a moment. Yeah, I'm trying to.

27:30

I mean, I can see your face. God, what'd you say?

27:36

Right. OK, so when you're going to pray to God, don't think about God, because that gets in the way.

27:41

That's a barrier. It's a thought. And this is Eastern. This is Buddhist meditation, especially because your thought is coming from the material mind and the material world is not real.

27:54

And so you can't get a spiritual insight or spiritual growth or understanding if you're using the material because the material is a barrier.

28:05

So you have to put thoughts. So the mind has to kind of go into neutral so that the thoughts aren't there because they're going to get in the way.

28:12

So Thomas Keating says this gets in the way. This gets between you and God. So you see what he's doing.

28:19

He's taken the Buddhist concept and he's implementing it in what appears to be a

28:25

Christian or he's using Christian language. But it's a Buddhist concept. It's not a biblical concept, of course.

28:33

And so and they also say that the wordless prayer is superior. You know, they don't say don't do verbal prayer, but that basically they're saying you go beyond verbal prayer and that you have a deeper connection with God through wordless.

28:52

You know, you go into this. They don't say go into a state, but this is what it is. And then you're kind of in this other level that's higher and closer to God.

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Now, this is this really parallels New Age, because in New Age, there's always this idea of going higher.

29:07

You know, you go higher than basically the material realm because the spiritual realm is higher in there.

29:14

And that means for New Ager, it's better. So you're going higher and they're kind of saying the same thing, although they may use the word deeper instead of higher.

29:24

OK, it's based on the same concept that there's something you have to do to really have a more intimate connection with God.

29:32

And thoughts and words are on one level, but you can go beyond that level. And contemplative practices are one way to do it.

29:41

So actually are the way to do it. Yeah, I have a question for you. So people who follow this contemplative prayer, let's say like the

29:49

Trappist monks, for example, that you named earlier, what's part of their theology? So if you did not think about God in order to get to this moment, because that's a thought from the material brain coming in, how does that bleed out into their theology?

30:03

So would they also say that a Hindu who does this form of contemplative prayer is actually speaking with the same

30:09

God? Are they universalists? Does it lead to universalism? You know, the implication from what

30:17

I've read, in my opinion, at least as far as Thomas Keating goes, is that he was possibly a perennialist like Richard Rohr.

30:25

Hmm. And because from what I, when I remember reading that book by him, the impression

30:32

I got is that he was saying, yes, they are, they are communing with the same God.

30:38

And that would be, of course, what Richard Rohr would say, because a perennialist, and I'm not saying

30:43

Thomas Keating is a perennialist. And as far as I know, he never said he was, but everything

30:48

I've read and heard from him would indicate that to be a strong possibility. So a perennialist would say everybody connects to God in all religions in their own way.

31:03

And so we can learn from other religions, a Christian can learn from a Hindu or a Buddhist how to connect or pray to God because it's all the same

31:12

God anyway. Now, Richard Rohr definitely would say that. And I think he has said that. Thomas Keating seemed to say that.

31:19

I don't know if he was as he wasn't as overt as Richard Rohr.

31:26

But he seemed to say what's also interesting here is a little secondary note that I think

31:32

I find interesting. Richard Rohr mentored Chris Horwitz, who wrote

31:37

The Sacred Enneagram. And Chris Horwitz and his wife have a very close relationship with Richard Rohr.

31:43

I think his wife was on the board of the Center for Action and Contemplation for a while. Richard Rohr was on the board of their organization called

31:51

Gravity. There's a very close relationship there. And I have listened to Chris Horwitz's wife,

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Filena, speak at Biola and speak at a Methodist church,

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I think. She said Thomas Keating was her spiritual mentor, which

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I find very interesting. And she also did a post, not a Facebook post,

32:13

I think it was an Instagram or a tweet on it's a goddess,

32:19

Kuan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, who's very popular in the new age. And she did a little tweet or something that said,

32:27

Kuan Yin hears the cries of the people suffering around the world. And I thought,

32:34

OK, now that's not something most Christians would post. I'm like, this is extremely interesting to me.

32:40

Either I think somebody sent it to me, because I'm not on Instagram or Twitter anymore.

32:48

I think somebody must have. I don't know how I saw it. But anyway, I saw it. And so I did a whole post on it.

32:54

And because of her comments about Thomas Keating and because of her close relationship with Rohr, I began to wonder if she's a perennialist, because certainly if she thinks

33:04

Kuan Yin hears the cries of the suffering people around the world, that would indicate a perennial view.

33:12

I mean, we're really going out of the box of Christianity here. It's not Christianity anymore.

33:20

Perennialism, for anyone who's new to understanding terms, can you define that for us? This is a view, a worldview, and I am not an expert on this.

33:30

I've gotten a lot of this information. I'd like to mention Dr. Ron Huggins, who is a scholar, has taught at three seminaries.

33:37

He helped us with some research on our Enneagram book quite a bit, the historical stuff, because he's got a lot of knowledge of that time period back then.

33:49

And he helped guide me and even pointed me to a book that I read parts of to help me understand this.

33:55

The perennial view was really almost kind of a movement started by these people, not in the

34:01

United States, but elsewhere. I can't remember their names now. One of them, the last name was Shurn or something like that.

34:08

And then there was a Hindu guy who was a very big guy in this movement, around, I think, in mostly 1800s.

34:14

And it was this view that all religions are rooted in the same core reality, the same divine truth, and the same

34:23

God. They all come from that, and they all basically connect to that one core truth, which is also like God.

34:33

God is like the divine reality, and God pervades creation. So it's panentheism.

34:41

It's not pantheism. They don't say God is creation, like the rock is God and the river is

34:47

God. They say God is in creation and creation is in God. And so everything is divine.

34:54

Now, this is Richard Moore's view. So if you are a perennialist, you are, by definition, a panentheist.

35:00

They go together. If you have one, if you have perennialism, you have panentheist. Let me just quickly say not all people who are panentheists are perennialists.

35:09

That's not true. But if you're a perennialist, you're a panentheist. So everything is divine and connected, and we were never separated from God, because as part of creation, creation was always part of God.

35:22

So we've always been part of God. We've never been separated from God. But we don't know.

35:28

Most people don't know that. So they're looking for this connection. They're looking for God, and they find that through different religions.

35:36

But the perennialists believe that the way people find it through the various religions is kind of a superficial thing.

35:45

And they think that's OK. It's like, that's OK if that gives you what you need spiritually, then that's fine.

35:51

But if you really want to go deeper and go to the real core reality of everything, then you go on this inner journey where you open up to go beyond the confines of your religion, and you go on this inner journey path.

36:11

And if everyone does that, which is through mysticism, you go do it through mysticism, that's what unites all the religions.

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37:06

Back to the show. And what you're seeing then, real quickly then, is I think about Peter Jones' book,

37:11

One or Two, Seeing a World of Difference. We were talking about that prior to the podcast. You have two conflicting worldviews.

37:17

You have one -ism, which is the combined all -is -self. There's no distinction between creator and creation.

37:23

Then you have two -ism, where there's the distinction between the triune creator and his creation. It seems to me like this idea of contemplative prayer, it's trying to have it both ways.

37:34

It's trying to say, yes, there's a way to communicate with God, but they're also trying to say, no, this is a way to sort of connect with the divine or kind of go deeper than yourself to connect with the divine.

37:47

So it seems like they're trying to have it both ways. Is that kind of a correct assessment? I think so.

37:53

Now, they would not say, and a perennialist would not say, you know, they're not monists.

37:58

They don't believe there's no distinction between God and creation, but it's this panentheism, this kind of weird middle of the ground between pantheism and the distinction of God and creation.

38:10

It's a very weird area, but there's a lot of people there, and more and more, unfortunately.

38:18

Yeah, it is kind of like that. It is kind of like they're going along with the traditional thing, the

38:25

Bible and what Christianity supposedly is, but then they have this other element that's introduced that has all to do with experience.

38:34

So this is the way you experience the presence of God. This is the way you experience intimacy.

38:39

It's very experience -based. Right, with a lot of repetitions? Repetitions?

38:46

Yeah, with a contemplative prayer, they're kind of like mantras they'll say, and there's part of being silent, but is that an aspect of it too?

38:54

With some of the teachings, yes. What they teach is, for example,

39:01

Thomas Keating does teach that, or did teach that, where you have a phrase or something that you repeat, and then when you're trying to get into this state where you're not thinking, if you get distracted, then you can repeat that phrase to kind of get you back focused.

39:17

But where I see the repetition used more is in the Lectio Divina techniques, which involve reading a passage, a short passage of Scripture, and you read it over and over slowly until a word or phrase jumps out at you.

39:34

And this word or phrase is jumping out at you because there's some kind of meaning there that God has for you.

39:40

And then that becomes your little, they don't use the word mantra, but that kind of becomes your little mantra.

39:47

Then you're supposed to think about that word or phrase, and that kind of becomes the thing in your mind that you can repeat in your mind.

39:54

And you're supposed to contemplate that, because that's the message for you. So it's very subjective.

40:01

It's private meaning of Scripture. It's not reading Scripture for the context.

40:06

It's not comparing Scripture to Scripture. It's not doing a historical grammatical evaluation, which is the normal evangelical approach to Scripture.

40:16

And of course, to me, the most rational and reasonable one. And then they won't say, oh, don't do

40:22

Bible study or don't read the context. They think that's fine. But then you do this other little

40:27

Lectio Divina thing for the experience of really getting closer to God. See, it's this other little extra, or maybe not extra, because they think it's really important.

40:38

I have a question real quickly. So I think, Andrew, if you have any thoughts, you can also jump in as well, too, anytime. But I'm thinking just of examples of two books that come to mind of just books that are on prayer that are very popular with evangelicalism.

40:51

And you can let me know, Marcia, if there's any direct correlation that you'd recognize that would be similar to Contemplative Prayer.

40:58

The first would be a book that came out in the early, early 2000s called The Prayer of Jabez. This was, yeah, this was something that, yeah, this book, when it came out, it exploded.

41:11

I mean, there are Prayer of Jabez journals. There are Prayer of Jabez books. There's one for kids.

41:18

There's literally a whole section of a Christian bookstore dedicated to Prayer of Jabez. And I'll let you explain that, give me your thoughts on that.

41:26

But also, there was the book Jesus Calling by Sarah Young.

41:32

That book is just made a gajillion copies. And it feels like every other time I go, every six months, there's a new version of that in the

41:39

Costco section in spirituality, right? But in that, but in Jesus Calling, what

41:46

I noticed, the reason why I bring that up is because I'm thinking of when you read the different areas of Jesus Calling, it's talking about Jesus in the first person, like he's talking to you, but it always goes back to experiencing the peace of his presence.

42:04

And I remember in 2014, I was reading these sections, I was in like this group text thread and someone said devotional,

42:12

I'm like, this is, it's almost like they're trying to get you into sort of the peace of his presence of this sort of pseudo -mystical experience.

42:22

Are there any correlations in those two that correlate to contemplate a prayer? What are your thoughts on that,

42:27

Marcia? I don't think, well, with Prayer of Jabez, I don't think, as far as I know, has no connection to the contemplative prayer thing.

42:36

I think this was a, this is my own viewpoint. I think this was a gimmick that he thought,

42:41

I can't remember the author, who was the author? Bruce Wilkinson. Oh, that's right. I don't mean to insult the man, but I really, my impression of it is that it was like a gimmicky thing that,

42:52

I don't know, he thought of or something. And so you go to this prayer of Jabez, which of course is not the prayer that Jesus gave the disciples and not that there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but it's just this prayer that's recorded in the book, and it's not necessarily something we're supposed to pray.

43:10

But yeah, it kind of became this gimmicky thing. There were several things in the book I strongly disagreed with, but one of the things was he said, if you say this prayer for 40 days, you know, he said, you need to say this, like, for 40 days, and then it's going to change you.

43:25

Well, right away, I mean, that's a gimmick. That's a technique. That's not biblical. It's almost like a self -help thing.

43:31

So I see that almost as a self -help kind of thing, more than a contemplative thing.

43:37

I didn't see anything there really particularly deep. I didn't think the book had any depth to it at all, frankly.

43:44

I thought it was very superficial, and it wasn't about a deep, intimate connection with God. It was about a technique that would make things work for you.

43:52

So that was more like a self -help book. Now, the Jesus Calling I'm very familiar with. I have written two articles on that, and including the first after the first edition was out, and then when the 10th anniversary edition came out, which they changed, they took out some things that she had written in the preface of the first book where she said how she came about doing it, which was reading a book,

44:16

God Calling, which is not even a Christian book. I mean, it's in Christian bookstores, but it's not

44:21

Christian. That's a whole other topic. That was the book that influenced her, and she called that book a treasure, and that was from a movement, the

44:29

Oxford Movement was one of the names of it, where they were taught to sit down with a pencil and a paper and then sit there and listen for God to speak and write the words down.

44:40

And so that movement, which was God Calling was a product of that movement, influenced

44:47

Sarah Young to write Jesus Calling. All that was taken out of the 10th anniversary edition.

44:53

And so my critique of that is that what she has Jesus saying, first of all, she claims

45:00

Jesus said these things, does not match the character of Jesus in the

45:05

Bible. And so I said, never put aside the issue of whether you can hear

45:11

Jesus, because when you get into that, that's just like a whole other rabbit trail you go down. Can you hear

45:17

Jesus talking or can Jesus talk to you? I just don't even want to get into that discussion. But what

45:22

I say is, whether you think Jesus can talk to you or not, or whether he talked to Sarah Young or not, let's look at what this

45:28

Jesus says. If it does not match the Jesus of the Bible, it is not Jesus, and therefore it needs to be rejected.

45:35

And that was my approach, and my claim was that this Jesus did not match the

45:42

Jesus of the Bible, and there were many, many ways I could show that. Now, how is this connected to the contemplative prayer?

45:49

I don't think it's directly connected, but I think it has helped pave the way for the contemplative prayer stuff, because there's a similarity there in that they're both very subjective, and they're both experience oriented.

46:07

And so those two things of the Jesus Calling book, which makes you, if you're reading it and you think this is

46:13

Jesus, or it could be Jesus, or it has some kind of what you think is a good spiritual effect on you, or an emotional effect, then you're more open to having more experiences.

46:24

And the contemplative prayer stuff will offer that. It's kind of mind -blowing, like when we read in the scriptures, we see

46:33

Jesus, like you mentioned the Lord's Prayer, when he says, pray then like this, he mentions nothing of these contemplative prayer techniques, you know?

46:43

Well, no, there's no technique, really, there's no techniques in the Bible. No, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, there's no techniques of contemplative prayer or anything like that.

46:51

He says, pray then like this. You'd think the number one person that would help you be able to pray to get more close to God would be

46:58

God himself in the flesh, right? Yeah, one would think that. Yeah, one would think.

47:03

Could you give us like a quick juxtaposition between the Lord's Prayer and contemplative prayer?

47:10

Like, what's the difference between the two? Well, first of all, the Lord's Prayer and all prayers in the Bible, as I point out, are verbal.

47:18

And it's important what I mean by verbal. I don't mean that it can't be quiet prayer, because I've said that and people have said, well, there's nothing wrong with saying a silent prayer.

47:27

And I said, no, I'm not talking about silent, I'm talking about verbal. Yeah, you can say a verbal prayer silently, you know, but verbal just means you're using words, whether you're speaking them or thinking them.

47:38

All the prayers are verbal in the Bible. And of course, I think in the

47:44

Bible, they're all spoken, or at least we think they're spoken out loud. So contemplative prayer is not verbally oriented.

47:53

So there's one big, huge difference right there. Another one is that the

47:58

Lord's Prayer, as we call it, that Jesus taught his disciples has a clear, certain kind of a pattern to it.

48:06

It's not a technique, it's a pattern. You acknowledge God, you praise God, you thank God, you petition

48:11

God, you ask God for forgiveness, you ask for protection. It's, you know,

48:17

I think some people have parsed that out and they have little acronyms for it, which I can't remember now. But I mean,

48:23

I think that that's true. I think you can look at the prayer and see that Jesus was giving them all the essentials of what prayer is.

48:32

And we even see that in Jesus's prayers, like for the disciples, the high priestly prayer, the prayer when, you know, he's asking

48:40

God to raise, he prays before he raises Lazarus from the dead.

48:45

So, you know, what we see, what I always say is if we want to know about prayer, the model and pattern for prayer is in Scripture.

48:56

And for Christians, especially, not that there isn't, there are great Old Testament prayers to look to, but the prayers really relevant to Christians are in the

49:06

New Testament and especially with Jesus. And so, you know, and then there are some prayers, of course, in the

49:14

New Testament letters and in Acts. In fact, prayer is a big theme in the book of Acts.

49:22

So we can learn, we can look at that to see the model for prayer and the contemplative prayer.

49:29

If you put that here and look at what they're teaching, there isn't any model for it in Scripture at all.

49:36

I mean, there's just no model for it because where they say there's a model for it, like the be still,

49:42

Psalm 4610, that's a misuse. And then they'll take other, they'll take other passages that talk about being silent, especially in the

49:52

Psalms. I think there's some that say, I will be silent before the Lord or I wait before the Lord and they will use that to endorse, you know, this being quiet and still in order to hear

50:04

God or be close to God. But the thing is, is if you look at the context of that and what that language is, that has to do with being in awe of God or it has to do with trusting

50:17

God. So there's a passage in the beginning of Revelation 8 where it says that there is,

50:23

I think it's they're going to open the seventh seal, I think. And it says there was silence in heaven for half an hour.

50:31

And they often point to that. Well, that's because that is a very big dramatic interval between the previous seals, which unleashed these incredible torments on the ungodly on earth to the seventh seal, which was the big powerhouse seal.

50:51

And it's kind of like, wow, watch out, the wrath of God is about to be let loose.

50:57

It's this awe of the majesty of God and his wrath on wickedness.

51:03

That's what the silence is about. It's in reverence of God. It's not about being quiet so that you can somehow hear

51:11

God's voice. Now, see what I mean by the misuse of Scripture? I think this is the thing that bothers me the most.

51:20

From these teachers, it bothers me the most. I am reading a book by one of the head honchos of the contemplative prayer movement, incredibly influential woman,

51:33

Ruth Haley Barton, who got her started, well, she was at Willow Creek and, you know, the big mega church.

51:46

And she went to a place called Shalem Institute in Washington, D .C.,

51:52

actually the area where I live, and Shalem Institute is at best what

51:58

I would call an interfaith organization. I think it may be possibly perennial.

52:04

I don't know. I can't really figure that out. You know who her mentor was?

52:10

Her mentor was a Buddhist nun. A Buddhist nun?

52:17

Yes. What does that mean? Well, they're, you know, they're Buddhist monks. And then some orders, and I don't think this was true.

52:26

I don't think this has not always been true in Buddhism. This is a more modern, more recent thing where they allow women to be not

52:34

Buddhist nuns. Just like you have Buddhist monks, they're Buddhist nuns. This has nothing to do with Roman Catholic nuns.

52:40

These are Buddhist nuns. So they're wearing orange nun outfits? No, I don't. I don't know.

52:46

No, I don't. Well, there are, you know, the orange thing is really Hindu. Oh, okay. Usually.

52:51

I think there are some Buddhist monks who wear red, but they might be, or I mean, they're different.

52:57

They wear different colors according to the lineage they're a part of. So anyway, her mentor was a

53:04

Buddhist. And she wrote a great, when this woman died a couple of years ago,

53:11

I think she wrote this tribute to her. I did a Facebook post on it. I am reading this book.

53:16

And so far, every scripture reference she's used has been mishandled. Now, I have looked into her before.

53:25

This isn't my first encounter with her. I just decided since I've posted on her and listened to her and read things online from her,

53:34

I thought I needed to read this book because Sacred Rhythms is one of her most influential books. And so it's been very hard to read this.

53:43

Sometimes I have to put it down for three or four days because I can't stand reading it. And I'm just going to be very frank here.

53:50

And so, you know, I just have to put it aside. And now

53:55

I'm finally getting kind of towards the, I think I'm about two thirds the way through. I have tons of notes. I don't know how

54:01

I'm going to write an article on here. There's so much wrong with this. I think what I'm going to have to do is pick the worst things because I can't possibly write about all of it.

54:10

Right. And I think one of the things people, I appreciate you really unraveling a lot of this for us,

54:15

Marsha. I know it's kind of, I hope I'm not confusing you. No, it's, no, this is, no, this is very, I think it's been very, no, it's been very informative.

54:24

And it's one of those things, at least from our experience, is that when you, you are looking at, when you're looking at definitive cultism, when you're looking way out there and you're looking at like fundamentalist

54:34

Mormonism, like Warren Jeffs or something, something in the realm of Scientology or something that's a definitive cult, everyone's on the same page.

54:43

I think once you start getting right on that line of definitive orthodoxy, that's where the, that's where there is a fine line of anyone who goes too far in second

54:54

John, but that lines and times becomes incredibly murky at some point.

55:00

And I feel like a lot of times when you jump back into, there's a barrier between orthodoxy and cultism where there's just a lot of, yeah, sometimes it's very nuanced in many ways.

55:09

I think that's just something, as we're looking, something like contemplative prayer, because there's a lot of people who honestly, who listen to our show, who probably are evangelical, who are doing these sorts of things in the same way, probably how they're feeling about the

55:20

Enneagram. Well, it's just a personality test. What's the big deal? They're looking at something like this saying, well, it's just the big deal.

55:26

This is just a different method of how I am trying to get close to God.

55:32

Well, let's, let's do this. Cause we've already got, we've gone for a little over an hour and as always, you're a favorite Kraken and that's why we always let you lose.

55:41

What we're going to do is I think maybe we can give some practical examples because you mentioned a couple of verses that they typically will get proof texted when it comes to that.

55:51

But also maybe we'll even look at some examples. There's a lot of apps, even websites that give directions on contemplative prayer.

55:58

Maybe we can look at a couple examples of those so people can kind of have an idea. And then we can, we can work together and then respond to those.

56:05

And so people will get a general idea of what is actually problematic with this type of spirituality.

56:12

So let's go ahead. We'll go ahead and jump into that in part two. So if you all enjoyed this episode, definitely let us know what you thought.

56:19

Leave us a review on iTunes. And as always a program like this cannot continue without your support. So if you feel led to support cultish, you can go to the cultish show .com

56:27

and you can go to the donate tab. There's a one -time or monthly donation that you can participate in. All that being said, we'll talk to you part two in cultish where we enter into the kingdom of the cults.