Realising late in the day that I needed some holiday reading to supplement an Agatha Christrie novel, I hurriedly ordered the book that had been on my Amazon wish-list the longest, Prof. Stephen R. L. Clark’s From Athens to Jerusalem. To my surprise it went on the list as far back as July 2012, when I heard him speak at an Intelligent Design conference in Cambridge, hosted by the Philosophy of Religion branch of the Tyndale Fellowship. Time flies when you’re geriatric, doesn’t it?
As I commented when the excellent video of his talk went online, I probably enjoyed it over all the other contributions at the conference, even those by leading ID lights like Stephen Meyer. Overall, his theme was that true rationality must include the acknowledgement of the supra-rational (ie spiritual), and he demonstrated in great style the inadequacy of materialistic naturalism. The video is well-worth a view.
The book is an augmented version of the Gifford lectures Clark gave thirty years earlier on the same themes, so I looked forward to a stimulating philosophical refresher, very relevant with the demise of New Atheism, once I’d found out who murdered the girl-guide in the boathouse. This the book delivers, but in the longer format I found a few things to disagree with, which is of course fine where philosophers are involved. The issue I want to comment on here is in his fifth chapter, Enlightenment and the Holy Spirit.
His aim here is to pursue the idea that not all truth, and not the most important truth, can be expressed in language, and the chapter is mainly an exploration of mysticism. He glances at the “nature mysticism” of William Wordsworth, but concentrates more on the mystic traditions within religions, especially Christianity and Buddhism.Their techniques for stilling “the internal chatter” of our chaotic minds are dealt with with some nuance, but he regards them all as united in seeking , and often apprehending, the “One Original,” ie (speaking, as Clark is, as a Christian) “God as he actually is.”
Perhaps most interesting for Evangelicals is that he has obviously encountered, and sympathised with, the Charismatic movement, and specifically he discusses glossolalia, and the whole experiential content of Pentecostalism, as a socially denigrated but legitimate means to the mystical end of experiencing God. Glossolalia, being meaningless, enables the rational mind to empty itself in an analogous way to the mantra, or the Zen contemplation of impossibilities such as the sound of one hand clapping.
Now, this specific focus on tongues enables one to home in on a contradiction, because Charismatics practise tongues in supposed obedience to Scripture, and Scripture’s teaching on tongues is radically different from advocating a technique for quietening the mind to encounter the “One Original.”
At Pentecost, the Jerusalem church, newly endowed with the Holy Spirit, was given not only boldness to declare the Gospel of salvation (exemplified by Peter’s sermon), but to proclaim God’s praises not in gobbledegook, but in the languages known by the Diaspora Jews assembled in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost.
Apart from possible allusions to the regathering of Israel from the nations, and the reversal of the wider division of the nations at Babel (the latter much relied on in sermons on Whit Sunday), Paul later argues in 1 Corinthians that these foreign-language utterances are a sign not for believers, but for unbelievers. This accords with the Pentecost events, for a proportion of the hearers, failing to understand the utterances were rational praises of God, regarded the disciples as drunk, just as Paul warns (1 Corinthians 14:23) that unbelievers hearing untranslated tongues in church will think Christians are mad.
In church, Paul says, prophecy is to be preferred as it is comprehensible, and reveals the secrets of the heart to produce saving faith – and that too is exactly what we see in Acts 2, as it is Peter’s sermon, not tongues, that saves 3,000 souls.
Yet throughout Paul’s teaching on the subject, he assumes that the gift of tongues is a gift of speaking human languages intelligible to those who know them, or who have a spiritual gift of interpretation. And although the speaker does not understand the language he speaks, he is not babbling in order to free his mind for mystical experience. Rather the content is, if only he knew it, prayer (1 Corinthians 14:14-15) or thanksgiving (v17), and possibly Paul also includes revelation, knowledge, prophecy or instruction (v6). Note that the “tongues of men or angels” in 13:1 is likely hyperbole, for no angel in the Bible ever speaks an incomprehensible language – and if they did, it would still be a language, not glossolalia. If, then, tongues edifies the private speaker, it is not because he encounters God-as-he-is, but because his prayer is answered, or his thanksgiving overflows supra-rationally.
The sub-apostolic church, which no longer practised tongues aside from the hyper-charismatic Montanists, recognised that tongues were genuine languages, ie interpersonal communication of rational concepts. They often taught, probably wrongly, that tongues enabled the first apostles to preach the gospel in new lands without undergoing language training.
Certainly this was the assumption of the early Pentecostals, who (a) believed they were reviving a gift lost since apostolic times (ie, they were Cessationists!) and (b) sent out missionaries with “the gift” believing they would be able to communicate the gospel to foreigners. It is seldom mentioned in conservative circles that even C.T. Studd, founding the China Inland Mission with the “Cambridge Seven,” believed this.
It was only the disillusion of discovering that, having travelled across the world and suffered all kinds of hardships, nobody understood a word the missionaries said, that caused the Pentecostal leaders back home to redefine tongues as a private prayer language, and to pass that unbiblical idea on to the whole Charismatic movement today. Usually the teaching is vague enough to hint that the language is real (apocryphal tales of people hearing a message in their native Swahili in Biggleswade), but enough of the “Shish Kebab” style of tongues as a taught mental technique predominates for Stephen Clark, as a professional philosopher of religion, to perceive it as a mind-emptying equivalent to Transcendental Meditation, that is taught in the Bible and ministered by the Holy Spirit. But as I have shown, the Bible does not teach it as that at all.
In fact, if we step back from the experiences of the Toronto Blessing folk and the mediaeval Catholic mystics, and look at what Scripture says, the whole mysticism thing that Clark welcomes falls to the ground. It is not that the Bible relativises the mystical quest and balances it with rational doctrine (as a superficial reading of 1 Corinthians might suggest), but that there is really nothing in either the Hebrew tanakh or the New Testament (nor, as far as I am aware, the OT apocrypha) that even hints that God may be known in that way. No techniques to that end are taught, and it is not even set out as a religious goal, in this life.
That’s not to say that experiences of divine power beyond the rational are excluded from Scripture. But they come unbidden, by God’s grace, and invariably their aim is to deliver propositional content. In fact, most such encounters are not religious in the sense of bringing the recipient into direct knowledge of God, but are given to prophets in order to minister God’s propositional words of warning or promise to his whole people. Even if we think of Paul’s famous vision of heaven in 2 Corinthians 12, it was firstly a one-off gift of grace, and secondly involved a communication in words, not mystical experience, that he was not permitted to speak.
The deepest worship of God, notably in the Psalms, comes not from emptying the mind, but by filling it with the things revealed about Yahweh, which then increasingly become the content of the heart. In particular, following the admonition of Moses, the Hebrews meditated on the torah of God in order to know him. Psalm 119 exemplifies this. By studying the torah, and particularly the commands of God mentioned in every one of its 176 verses, the writer expects not only to be delighted and blessed, but to know God (eg Psalm 119:2) and to become like him.
Other psalms meditate on the historical benefits of God’s covenant, or on his attributes, or on his role as Creator (eg Psalm 104). Sin is confessed as the reason for estrangement from God, rather than having too busy a mind. And of course a massive part of Israelite biblical religion was the system of festivals and sacrifices that God had established, all of which were corporate, prescribed, and incredibly busy.
Mystics must also be very disappointed with the teaching of Jesus who, when asked to teach prayer, said nothing whatsoever about stilling one’s heart to discern the One, but instead taught us how to ask for stuff – just as Paul does in Philippians 4:6, where the cure for anxieties is not Buddhist detachment or the hours of glossolalia advocated by some Charismatics, but this:
In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
In fact, the very heart of Christianity is that that whereas God was dimly glimpsed through the Law spoken through the prophets, he may now be known fully through the Son (Hebrews 1:1-4). In my context, the significance of this is that God became more accessible not by his worshippers reaching a higher state of consciousness, but by God becoming comprehensible as a man. Doubtless many readers will have experienced some faint reflection of Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road beyond the merely propositional – I certainly agree with Clark on that. But Jesus is still a man like us, and any supernatural experience of him is merely a supplement to the spiritual union we have with him through faith, baptism, the breaking of bread and the word. Most of our knowledge of God will still come from meditating on the life and teaching of God incarnate, for we are told we will not see him face to face this side of the second coming.
If all this is true, then either the teaching of the Bible, written by many prophets in the Spirit over two thousand years, is severely deficient in the mysticism department; or else whatever is encountered by the techniques of Buddhists, Kundalini Hindus, Nature Mystics, New Agers, Acid Heads, and Charismatic tongues-speakers is not the “One Original.” However, it may well be, as Stephen Clark’s optimistic ecumenism suggests, the same entity in different guises. Clark himself makes reference both to the dark corners of the human soul, and to spiritual beings not necessarily seeking our good.
But if it were our Creator and Saviour, the triune God Yahweh, I think his word might have told us so, and instructed us in these techniques. Don’t you?
