MYSTICISM

Discussions on Christian experience almost always provoke warnings against mysticism. And it is right that they should. For mysticism – or at least a mystical tendency – has been an unhealthy element of the church’s life through the centuries.

The term “mysticism,” however, isn’t easy to define. Generally it is associated with the quest for immediate encounters with God. Some go so far as to say that it is possible to meet God so directly that you lose all self-consciousness and become swallowed up, as it were, in his essence. That seems to have been the goal that many in the medieval church pursued when they aspired to “union with God.” The recent resurgence of contemplative spirituality encourages this same kind of experience.

Such mystic experiences, however, are not the same as the “realized communion with God” that lies at the heart of experiential Christianity. The latter knows nothing of “transcending and abolishing conscious selfhood” or “the sleep of the faculties.” It is rather a Spirit-heightened awareness of the reality of God and of communion with him, and a corresponding Spirit-enabled response of love, worship and obedience.

J.I. Packer offers the following six characteristics of valid Christian “perceptions” or “experiences” of God:

• “They presuppose and arise through biblical understanding, and they are to be identified by biblical criteria and interpreted by biblical theology. Nonetheless, they are in themselves immediate and sovereign. They are not under our control; they can neither be demanded nor predicted; they simply happen as God wills.
• “Ordinarily… these perceptions are given through the Spirit to the loving and obedient disciple in fulfillment of Christ’s promise that the Father and the Son would come to him, stay with him, and show themselves to him (Jn. 14:18, 20-23).
• “The perceptions themselves (better so called than ‘experiences,’ although each truly is what we mean by ‘an experience’) bring great joy because they communicate God’s great love.
• “They belong to the inner life, as distinct from that of the outward senses by which we know men and things.
• “They are to be distinguished from our knowledge of people and things, though it seems always to be via that knowledge, in memory if not in the moment of its being given, that perceptions of God occur.
• “Any idea that the condition of perceiving God is reduced or dissolved self-awareness should be dismissed as a confusion” (Keep In Step With The Spirit, pp. 72-3)

The confusion between false mysticism and experiential Christianity is, according to Packer, widespread, and the cause of a great deal of prejudice against the latter. The late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones noted this as well. “There are, unfortunately, even many evangelical Christians,” he said, “who deny that God has any direct dealings with men today, and who hold feeling and emotion at a discount. They frequently substitute for true emotion a flabby sentimentalism. They are afraid of the power of the Holy Spirit, and so afraid of certain excesses which are sometime found in mysticism and in certain people who claim to have unusual experiences of the Holy Spirit, that they ‘quench the Spirit’ and never have any personal knowledge of Christ. Indeed, they often go so far as to deny the possibility of such knowledge” (The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, p. 247).

The distinction between the two – valid experience of God through the Spirit and false-mysticism – might be subtle, but it is a distinction we must make. Otherwise we are doomed either to false excesses or to the absence of a true personal knowledge of God.