A brick may be used in a pagan temple, but then reverently placed in a Christian church. A cave may be used as a stable, but then turned into the birthplace of God. No metaphysical system is safe from plundering by Christianity, because Christianity is afraid of no good idea, object, or word.
The system in which a great work of art is trapped may be corrupt, but we can reinterpret that work and so redeem it for Christ.
Is this process dangerous? Of course, because there is always the danger of being corrupted by the object of redemption before it can be reimagined. What is more dangerous is the cowardice that would leave any good, true, and beautiful thing to the Evil One. We must reclaim everything for King Jesus.
All religions that have lasted for a very long time will contain valuable insights and great ideas. These wise ideas will be deeply embedded in demonic wickedness and vice, but a Christian that engages their culture must work to redeem what is good and not leave it to empower and attract others to evil.
A culture that takes a beautiful mountain and names it for their pagan god does not thereby force us to blow up the mountain. We need to reinterpret the mountain for the people in a way that enfolds their history and insights into the broader story of Christendom.
Christ’s Kingdom makes no colonies, it redeems nations. The nationals of every land reimagine their God given insights to make them part of the Christian story.
We must acknowledge that many good things come to mankind through the common image and grace of God in each human being. Christians of all stripes would never want to hide the truth that some great idea or good thing came from another faith. That is the false path of those Muslims who take Christian churches, turn them into mosques, and then bury the earlier Christian history as if it did not exist.
Better is the acknowledgment of what a thing was and then a joyful description of what it now is.
For example, in the United States of America the art of some city landscapes was often built on materialist or secular assumptions and ignored the needs of human beings. It needs imaginative redemption and artistic reconceptualization.
Such an appropriation of the best of the cityscape cannot be syncretistic, but must condemn the greed and the materialism that sent money makers soaring over cathedral domes. This can be done, however, without tearing down a single beautiful building or covering up their sordid histories. Just as the Narnia stories redeemed the image of Bacchus for generations of children, so better Christian story tellers can redeem the best of the skyscrapers in our cities.
As the King’s College develops in the bosom of the Empire State Building it will perform this deeply Christian task.
As this dangerous work is done, we must listen to the prophets who will warn us of the danger of adopting the evil systems along with the singular ideas and works that we intend to redeem. One such faithful prophet is Al Mohler. The traditional Church must admire his courage in restoring a lost seminary and in reclaiming much that the world was appropriating from us.
Recently, Mohler wrote a courageous post condemning the importation of Yoga into the church. If a blog post was to be judged by its enemies, then Mohler is on the side of the angels. Some people who care nothing for the Bible, doctrine, or even Christian tradition have been livid. They are angry because they measure the worth of an idea only by whether it immediately helps them.
Yoga has done them some good, so it must be all good. This is fallacious, however. A system may be deeply evil, but still make trains run on time or improve education for serfs. Many of Mohler’s critics are wrong, and he is right to warn us: historic Yoga, as practiced for centuries, cannot be brought in totality into a Christian life.
But this does not mean that many insights of Yoga and all that is good in it, and there is some good, cannot be appropriated by the Church.
Mohler lacks imagination in this regard. The man who imagined that Southern could be returned to traditional Christianity should find faithful men and women who can appropriate what is good, true, and beautiful in Yoga and turn it to Christ. It was Christ who gave men of old the insight to do good through Yoga and devils that corrupted that insight into a false religion.
Can Southern purge the evil and bring out the good in Yoga? It is exactly what Christians did with the very notion of the academy when we created the modern university out of what was best of the philosophical academies.
This is normal Christian behavior, as a thought experiment would show.
If Mohler took over a town built by the Bolsheviks, he would not tear down the school buildings just because Stalin built them. He would not dishonor the blood of the enslaved who built those works with their blood by failing to keep them, redeem them, and turn them to their true purpose.
Mohler would never ignore the good done in those buildings, even while utterly damning the system that built them. The schools were not the problem, communism was. He would take those schools and turn them to good works.
In the same way, Christians can and should take the insights of Yoga and turn them to good.
Mohler’s essential argument against Yoga seems to come to three main points: Yoga involves internal meditation, Yoga conflates the spiritual and the physical, and Yoga necessarily implies a non-Christian view of sexuality.
No Christian can oppose meditation per se. We are taught to meditate on the name of Jesus, the Word of God, and His precious inerrant Words in Sacred Scriptures. It is true that no Christian could meditate on meaningless phrases or the names of pagan gods, but meditation itself is not the problem.
It is not hard to find a long Christian tradition of helpful spiritual formation through meditation.
Second, Mohler is no gnostic. He knows that bowing the knee in an attitude of prayer puts the physical symbolically in line with the spiritual in our culture.
Every culture develops physical acts that bring the outer into conformity with the inner reality. Kneeling may be a sign of adoration to Zeus in one place and time, but the problem is not the kneeling, rather with the demon to which men are kneeling. So the positions of Yoga, which are just physical positions after all, need reinterpretation by men and women steeped in the culture that created them, but also deeply Christian.
We need no superficial work, but a reimagining that is true to the original insights of the creators of Yoga while also true to Sacred Scriptures. This work has not been done, so Mohler is right to express prophetic concern about members of the Church who lightly sprinkle the Yoga imagination, but do not baptize it.
To give just one example, if Yoga implies a sub-Christian view of sexuality, then it is bad for a person and ultimately for a culture. Yet Yoga has also helped men and women with sexual dysfunction as well. Can Christians find a way to reinforce the good insight of the basic wholesomeness of sexuality without allowing base and depraved ideas to infect it?
Surely we can.
The genius that could work to reclaim the Baptist convention can also reclaim what is good, true, and beautiful about Yoga. Justin Martyr was right when with confidence he could claim anything worthwhile for Jesus, because those good things came from Jesus at the start. No logos without the Logos.
Most of the online opponents of Mohler would throw holy water on Yoga and bring it into the Church. This light and careless attitude is destructive to the Faith. It is bound to lead to syncretism and the destruction of the Church. That is the path of the Episcopal Church in the United States and it is best labeled “Ichabod.”
But shunning Yoga is not the best idea for Christian academics. Instead, with pastoral oversight, we must find what the Logos initially said to the wise, which demons turned to folly in the unregenerate sages.
As for me and my house, against all attacks, we will serve the Lord God. If an idol must be destroyed, we will get an axe, but we will also save what can be saved and appropriate what can be redeemed.
This house is afraid of nothing that is good, true, and beautiful. It is easy to imagine Yoga dying, because Christianity has enfolded all that is good in Yoga within the embrace of its true home. May some Indian genius do this very task.
October 11th, 2010 | 4:44 pm | #1
John Mark,
If the history of Yoga can be found in the Vedas, Uphanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and Stone Age Shamanism, and shares characteristics with not only Hinduism, but also Buddhism,then wouldn’t an argument to condemn the practice be deemed legitimate by Mohler?
October 11th, 2010 | 5:43 pm | #2
Only if the worldviews mentioned have nothing of value to be found in them, a dubious notion.
As a Christian I reject all other religions as a whole, but hope some fellow believer finds the good in them and redeems it.
I am not (at all) competent to do this here, but have tried to follow the Christian tradition of doing this with Plato.
JMNR
October 11th, 2010 | 6:28 pm | #3
John Mark,
The Vedas are a collection of hymns that praise a divine power, the Uphanishads describe the inner vision of reality resulting from devotion to Brahman, and the Bhagavad-Gita spells out three facets that should be brought together in our lifestyle:
1) Bhakti – loving devotion
2) Jnana – contemplation or knowledge
3) Karma – selfless actions
If yoga is simply meditation and the practice of physical postures, and all things are to be seen in relationship to being created by God and therefore under His sovereign Lordship, then I don’t think I would have an objection as long as that meditation is focused on the God of the Bible, and the physical postures are intended to maintain the health of this temple called my body.
However, as Mohler points out in his article, ‘The Subtle Body – Should Christians Practice Yoga’ (a word play on Syman’s book), yoga is a “a spiritual discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine”.
This ‘divine’ is not the Judeo-Christian God of Scripture. As Mohler continues, “But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose”.
If the teaching of yoga is the attempt to “escape the consciousness of this world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness”, then isn’t that a means to an ungodly end?
I found your article thoughtful. A few questions arise however. If the Church is to ‘save what can be saved and appropriate what can be redeemed’, how should the Christian who has a Hindu or Buddhist friend respond to the charge that we are co-opting what is not rightfully ours, since the practice of yoga originated with these Hindu documents? How does the Church go about it’s business of equipping the saints in a Biblical manner, teaching sound doctrine, reproof of error, correction in righteousness, while yet at the same time avoiding the spiritual dimension of yoga to this ‘unknown God’?
October 11th, 2010 | 6:52 pm | #4
Good ideas belong to nobody . . . they are the common gift of God to humankind. Christianity takes all the good people have dimly seen and places it in the right setting. A jewel can be the eye of an idol or a lovely stone . . . we just need the right setting.
As I pointed out Mohler is mostly right: shallow appropriation of bad ideas is dangerous and wicked.
We need a deep and thoughtful (and I would argue Indian) examination of the great texts and practices of the major Indian faiths in order to do this well and with cultural sensitivity.
The West has been at work on the Greeks for centuries and still gets some of it wrong (syncretism or Tertullian rejection). We should go slow here, but not be afraid.
So bottom line:
1. most Christian uses of Yoga are sloppy and should be offensive to both Christians and people serious about Yoga. Mohler is right to warn us.
Most of his critics are shallow and their views indefensible. They are the equivalent of putting a Christian bumper sticker on the Parthenon and declaring it “ours.”
2. Mohler lacks imagination (rare for him I think) when he declares that Yoga does not contain practices that will still be recognizably traceable to Yoga, but made pure by the Church.
Has this been done yet? Not so far as I know. Can it be done? Almost surely.
October 11th, 2010 | 6:58 pm | #5
Put another way:
The Vedas, Uphanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Stone Age Shamanism, Hinduism, and also Buddhism are false (from the Christian point of view) as wholes. They deny the truth of the Gospel.
Most of us don’t have the time to mine the gold from the dross . . . but many children of those culture have good reason to do so. They have been blessed by the gold as well as suffering (dreadfully) from the dross. We should burn the dross (idols for destruction!) and save the gold!
This is a work that must be done over centuries and with care. Pastoral oversight will be needed, but the mindless Tertullian position (not I hope Mohler’s) that Jerusalem has nothing to do with India is in some ways as dangerous as syncretism long term.
I celebrate the common ground we have with all of them, the beauty they have produced, and the positive cultural impact.
That is the common property of all mankind, came from God, and points to Jesus.
October 11th, 2010 | 7:56 pm | #6
John Mark,
So can you state the redeeming aspects of yoga? What is the gold of yoga that needs to be mined from the dross?
I’m looking for examples here, which I don’t think you addressed in your article.
You critique Mohler for not doing it, yet you also say you don’t have time to do it either?
October 11th, 2010 | 8:33 pm | #7
I know Christians who do the yoga thing. They love Christ, but use these exercises to help their physic.
It’s good to talk about the spiritual aspect of those who yoga in the false religion way.
For me, it’s a waste of time.
Yet, like the Martial Arts, yoga serves a purpose for some of the Lord’s children.
Al Mohler is here to challenge and keep us honest. I like that.
PS I remember watching Paul McCartney on a TV special, where he played 7 or 8 different instruments, and at the same time, there was a sound man there who was recording each tune. Paul shared about his time as a Beatle, and at the end of the program, all the instruments he played were played in unison, and Paul sang some words to this new tune he just made up.
I shared this with our worship band the next morning in church, and said, “Paul McCartney, even though he is not a Christian, brought glory to God with this incredible giftedness. It really does bring glory to God when humans perform in a way that is exception, even when they are dead in their sins.
I also prayed for Paul, and asked the Lord to open his heart.
October 11th, 2010 | 8:35 pm | #8
PS2 That was an exceptional post John Mark. Thanks. I’m edified.
October 11th, 2010 | 9:17 pm | #9
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Michael Patton, Randy Edwards. Randy Edwards said: @eventhieves FYI A very good rejoinder to Mohler's critique http://tinyurl.com/2abpzgn [...]
October 11th, 2010 | 9:33 pm | #10
Hhhhhmmmm…
Another way of saying some things already observed, esp. by Mr. Drake:
1. As you observe, Dr. Reynolds, Christianity already has a tradition of meditation. However, I don’t simply mean meditation on the Bible. The Desert Fathers quickly gained knowledge of the skills of physico-psychological self-control. Sit, control one’s breathing, gradually learn to empty the “self” of “self-consciousness,”….and certain psychological states will ensue. What I don’t understand is what you think Yoga adds to either the Christian meditative-ascetic tradition or a generic meditative technique.
2. I question whether it is proper to say that Yoga has insights. It is a technique, based on certain assumptions about the nature of spiritual reality. If there are medically or psychologically useful techniques (like say, the technique of neurosurgery), then let’s detach them from their spirituality (assuming we can), and make use of them.
3. I really doubt that it has anything to say about the “good, the true, and the beautiful,” as that might be understood from the standpoint of your Christian Platonism. Its premises are too fundamentally different. Specifically, Yoga does not hold to “the good” or “the true” as transcendental qualities derivative of the absolutely transcendental; rather, it assumes the goal of moksha, liberation from the wheel of life in which these qualities are manifestations. Yoga, really Hatha Yoga, is but the beginning point of Jnana Yoga, the path of wisdom, the transcendental annulment of particulars in the universal vision of the All, total cosmic reality (=”Brahman”).
3. Finally, I disagree with one of your rhetorical premises–we’ve successfully Christianized Plato, so we can Christianize Yoga. But obviously, we won’t be resolving that question here.
Finally, I agree with Mr. Drake: how should we go about this?
October 11th, 2010 | 10:09 pm | #11
A lot of this is probably rooted in cultural discomfort. If Mohler were from another part of the world, he’d probably have as much discomfort towards NASCAR, football, and obesity. He’d probably write a “courageous post” condemning these.
But if he wants to do something truly courageous, I’d suggest examining the questionable militarism of conservative Christians in the south.
October 11th, 2010 | 10:45 pm | #12
It’s helpful to remember that the “meditation” achieved through yoga exercises is the exact opposite of the meditation that is done when Christians pray to God. The former is the annihilation of thought, while the latter is the refocusing of thought.
I think Al Mohler does see the redeemable aspect of yoga, which is the physical benefit of exercise. I personally have often prayed and dwelled on God’s word while doing stretches before a workout, but I would never call it yoga.
But like Mohler, I am very skeptical of what Christians are actually doing when they get into this stuff. Sure, you can pray to God during any activity, but does that make it ok to attribute a special spiritual significance to the yoga positions? That’s where syncretism comes in.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:05 am | #13
I’m one of those reformed Baptists (as opposed to Reformed Baptists) who wanted to throw something at my laptop when I heard about Mohler’s position.
Then I actually listened to his Thinking in Public podcast, and found most of his arguments compelling, namely – Yoga as it’s defined by its practitioners is a fundamentally spiritual discipline, with physical elements to it. The spiritual aspects of it are profoundly anti-gospel. The physical elements devoid of their spiritual roots are not yoga, and shouldn’t be called such.
And I certainly agree that ideas such as physical fitness, meditation, communion with God are certainly ones that are Biblical.
But isn’t the question – which comes first?
This sentence:
“In the same way, Christians can and should take the insights of Yoga and turn them to good.”
seems to be the same argument as the one offered by Christians insisting that Sex and the City was a great movie for Christians to see.
Doesn’t the Christian world view actually begin and end with God’s view of things, rather than simply translating man’s view?
Does God have anything to say about transcendence, intimacy with Him, and the means to attain it? (Not to mention secondary issues like the significance of the physical body, sexuality, etc.)
Why not just go there first?
For the record, I am more and more frustrated with Dr. Mohler at his continual focus on the problem, whether it’s yoga, or gay marriage, rather than the solution</i. to the problem, which is the gospel. Methinks that many Christians who find themselves drawn to things like yoga are simply not being well taught enough about the far richer transcendence to be found in genuine fellowship with the real and only God of the Bible.
October 12th, 2010 | 3:38 am | #14
There are many good comments here and there may be more. I am teaching a lot this week so if I am slow to reply it is not due to a lack of interest.
My premise is that any long term human activity that has helped many will have something worthwhile we can learn from it. I need not identify the particulars and it is possible that in any give case I would be wrong, but that is my inclination.
Given common grace does it really seem probable that a human activity that has helped many would not contain something worth learning?
I am certainly not afraid to look!
I fear some have missed my point when they wonder if I don’t know the Bible has much to say about these practices.
I know this and we should heed the Bible and its warnings. However, for those born in lands from which Yoga came there is good reason to find what is redemptive in the culture from which they came. What could be redeemed? What must be destroyed as an idol? These will be hard calls, but they must be made.
As for Plato: nobody could in one sense make Plato a Christian. He was no Christian and his work will never be Christian. However, traditional Christians have found ideas in his work . . . or at least vocabulary that helped them. For example, heavily influenced by Platonism Jewish sages produced the main Bible translation used in NT times.
There is nothing to fear here anymore than the we need fear the fact that Solomon apparently adopted proverbs from “outside” sources (such as pagan Egypt).
Christians of course should not chant or pray to pagan gods. They should not mediate on being “nothing.” However, adapting techniques used in Yoga may be possible . . . though not in the facile way most are now doing . . . if at all.
This will not be Yoga qua Yoga, but it will be a Christian set of practices derived from Yoga. Why not think after centuries that sages in another religion would have a thing or two to teach us about mediation?
Maybe not, but it would be shame to ignore the possibility.
October 12th, 2010 | 3:44 am | #15
Am I the only one who found the stereotyping of Southern folk ways offensive in one of the comments?
Come now . . . NASCAR is sport and not a false religion. A man may corrupt NASCAR or cricket, but this is not the same as a thing that is (from a Christian point of view) wrong no matter how practiced. The fact that there are goods to a complex, but bad view does not mean that the complex view is good.
Stalin built many nifty houses and a few grand projects. We don’t have to tear them down to say that Stalin was a monster. We also don’t have to think Ike perfect (or anything like) to say that comparing Ike to Stalin would be ludicrous.
Comparing NASCAR to Yoga is equally unserious.
October 12th, 2010 | 3:49 am | #16
By “no matter how practiced” in my last comment, I meant that Yoga as practiced historically is (as Mohler) points out a different religion and based on religious assumptions hostile to Christianity.
That you could adapt insights from it or derive lessons is different than adopting Yoga whole.
NASCAR, so far as I can tell (though I am no fan), can be adopted as a sport by believers without having its essential elements changed.
Yes?
October 12th, 2010 | 9:21 am | #17
This morning’s reading in Kierkegaard:
“Imagine a fortress, absolutely impregnable, supplied with provisions for an eternity. A new commandant comes. He gets the idea that the right thing to do is to build bridges over the ditches–in order to be able to attack the besiegers. Charming! He transformed the fortress into a village, and the enemy captured it, naturally. So it is with Christianity. We changed the method–and the world conquered, naturally.”
(From the Journals, one can find a version of this at http://goo.gl/YpgJ )
I realize that K’s radical dialectics doesn’t always make for good pastoral advice.
Nevertheless.
October 12th, 2010 | 9:45 am | #18
Perhaps a good start on this question might be to read a couple of books.
The first would be Thomas Merton’s “The Inner Experience”, and his comments on some of the benefits of using Eastern methods. Some of which have been practiced by Christian contemplatives for centuries.
The second would be the book “Christian Yoga” by Dechanet,. It’s a good book and has been around for a long time. He also wrote a second “Yoga & God’.
All have great insights in this area.
October 12th, 2010 | 10:10 am | #19
“It was Christ who gave men of old the insight to do good through yoga”? Can anyone show me chapter and verse on this one please
October 12th, 2010 | 11:00 am | #20
James 1:17 –
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
This verse refers to the Father, but since everything good we experience is mediated through Christ, it seems appropriate to attribute it to Christ as the Giver. Common grace at work.
If works of charity are good, then the impulse could only come from God, not from the evil one. But of course if it came through a corrupt source such as yoga, it would have been a corrupted impulse. Yet the basic impulse would still have been a good one.
October 12th, 2010 | 11:08 am | #21
Pentamon:
Yes, but what exactly is the “good impulse” that Yoga comes from or is directly at?
That is the whole of the question.
Is the form of self-control or self-transcendence cultivated through Yoga consistent with the “fruits of the Spirit,” which have come into the world through Jesus Christ?
Is it the same SORT of thing? I suspect not.
October 12th, 2010 | 11:51 am | #22
Moderation is an important virtue in our age and the practical wisdom needed to carry out virtue is almost as needed. Yoga seems to help some people I know achieve this.
These are two goods I see in it. Of course using bad means to achieve good ends (or in this case mixed means) is no good, but can we find a way to redeem the good and renew the bad?
Everything that is not inherently base for King Jesus!
October 12th, 2010 | 11:53 am | #23
By all means read Merton, I have gotten great pleasure and instruction from this, but my friends who should know say his view of the East is sometimes naive or shallow.
I take both Merton on the East and my friends cautions . . . cautiously.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:03 pm | #24
The comment about NASCAR, football, and obesity draws attention to the propensity of some people to be disproportionately critical of the things that they find culturally foreign. Manifestations of this propensity are not particularly “courageous.” They are especially not courageous when one’s fan base indulges the same propensity.
Mohler seems to have made it his industry to win points among Southern fundamentalists. This is why I suggested that real courage would be to write a post condemning the peculiar sins of that same constituency (and here I don’t mean the “sin” of being insufficiently conservative, fundamentalist, or nationalistic). It’s not as if sins characteristic of Southern fundamentalism would be hard to find–so long as Mohler can overcome that tendency to be less critical of one’s own culture.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:47 pm | #25
But C. Ehrlich:
Your examples are stereotyped and in some cases are not even evils. Your dig about “obesity” seems mean spirited in this context.
Finally, your assumption that anyone enjoys the flood of hate mail and stereotyping they get when they warn about a popular practice seems wrong headed.
Mohler is a person and you seem to assume the most uncharitable take on his intentions. This is not Christian. I have seen Southern and the notion that it is a fundamentalist bastion in the sense you mean is false.
I am not a Baptist or Reformed, but they seemed engaged in considering a multitude of ideas and were cordial to me as a theological guest. Mohler is a very bright man who could have gone into elite academic culture but instead sided with a group that is not very fashionable.
That seems courageous to me.
October 12th, 2010 | 12:51 pm | #26
I should add that the idea that Yoga is not popular in the South or in the church communities Mohler serves is an example of stereotyping that misses facts on the ground… One reason he wrote about it is because it is increasingly popular.
Mohler gets his views of the present Christian South by living there!
October 12th, 2010 | 7:12 pm | #27
As long as it’s not Yoga offered to idols, I’m fine with it.
JMR is correct that Yoga is not popular in the South, but line dancing is, which depends on Pythagorean geometry, which is deeply connected to a cosmology that is theologically and philosophically antithetical to Christian theism. Thus, if you line dance, you’re double-dipping with diablo.
October 12th, 2010 | 11:43 pm | #28
Ah, but those zany line-dancers have no pretense of tapping into the mysteries of the universe through their Pythagorean mating ritual. That’s what the square root of -1 is for.
October 13th, 2010 | 12:21 am | #29
J.M. Reynolds, I’d encourage you to re-read exactly what I have written in my last two posts. I am not supposing that NASCAR, football, or obesity are evil. My mention of “obesity” was not personal or mean-spirited–and it was certainly not intended to be. I can assure you that I was not commenting on Mr. Mohler’s size; it is simply a fact that obesity is epidemic in the South. Moreover, as compared to yoga, it is uncontroversial that NASCAR, football and obesity are more ubiquitous in the South, or are more typical of Southern culture. Finally, your claim about my “assumption” about someone enjoying hate mail, etc. is totally groundless and absurd.
Please Mr. Reynolds: either slow down when you read, or read twice.
October 13th, 2010 | 1:44 am | #30
Frank nails it. Yoga as practiced by many in the United States is really no more than a bunch of exercises. They do the exercises with no spiritual content in my kids’ school. My wife went to some yoga classes that met at the local Unitarian Universalist anti-church, and I didn’t get the sense that they were teaching any spiritual content or anti-content. It was simply a bunch of exercises, like in a workout video or a calisthenics class at a gym. She wouldn’t have gone back if there had been any sense of religious content tied to it.
Given that, it isn’t really any different from line-dancing with its Pythagorean origins. (I do like Pythagoras’ picture of numbers as the foundation of all reality, though. It’s Plato’s Forms but in a much less plausible and thus much cooler presentation.)
October 13th, 2010 | 9:19 am | #31
JMR. Some of my friends, who are from the far east, think Merton is very insightful in the ways of the far east culture.
October 13th, 2010 | 10:58 am | #32
Christians made a pagan holiday into Christmas.
October 13th, 2010 | 9:30 pm | #33
EM,
Check out Touchstone Magazine. It keeps killing the urban legend that Christmas was pagan.
October 14th, 2010 | 12:02 am | #34
If yoga wasn’t a sin before Mohler’s “courageous post,” perhaps it is one now.
October 14th, 2010 | 10:47 am | #35
[...] comes as a response to some warning words from Al Mohler about the dangers of Yoga. An excerpt of Reynolds’s remarks, which appear on a First Things blog: A culture that takes a beautiful mountain and names it for [...]
October 14th, 2010 | 11:01 am | #36
Mr. Ehrlich
Touché.
I suspect you are being satirical, but in fact this would be the best reason for avoiding yoga: not, can I do it in faith, but can my weak brother, a sister whose conscience is not fully formed, do it in faith?
October 14th, 2010 | 11:18 am | #37
“..shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened”
That depends. Thw weak brothers need to grow strong. And the strong need to be sensative, and yet they both need to go to the Scriptures together and study these things.
I know a missionary in Nepal who is reaching Hindus for Christ. He doesn’t seem to mind some of their cultural expressions so much, as some other Christians do.
The Bible is where we need to go to understand these things. Otherwise we will argue on opposite sides from our subjectiveness and deep desires and own thinking.
October 24th, 2010 | 4:29 am | #38
I don’t see this.
If I wrote a post saying: “The benefits of group singing for the agnostic or atheist.” and gave reasons why singing hymns not so much for praising God, but because gathering together in groups every Sunday and singing was beneficial to people’s mental health, what would you think?
I think adopting a spiritual practice and stripping it of its meaning just to gain secular benefits is dishonest to it. Ironically, the people who think Yoga is a sin are being more truthful to it, because they believe you cannot separate the routine from the doctrine.
October 24th, 2010 | 10:34 pm | #39
“what would you think?”
That’s a typical church in America.
I think you can separate it. I know people who do it.
Basically the same as the Martial Arts.
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