Yoga for the Glory of God

An interesting article on yoga (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25006926) has set me thinking. In it the writer reports on how people of different religious traditions are struggling with whether yoga is compatible with their beliefs. Apparently last year a yoga class was banned from a church hall in the UK, because it was said, "Yoga is a Hindu spiritual exercise". Among others the writer quotes from a so-called Christian exercise programme called PraiseMoves. So I have had a look at the PraiseMoves web site and here is my take on this.

It is true that many Hindus hold to beliefs that are contradictory to the Bible. So do many Christians. But I have never yet met a Hindu whose beliefs are in complete antipathy to the Bible. So let’s stop this simplistic nonsense of contrasting these two civilizations we call Hinduism and Christianity.

Scary Stuff!

 

The PraiseMoves web site quotes from a number of Hindus who assert that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. It quotes from “An Open Letter to Evangelicals” that appeared in the January 1991 issue of Hinduism Today in which a Swami Sivasiva Palani writes:

“A small army of yoga missionaries ...beautifully trained in the last 10 years, is about to set upon the western world. They may not call themselves Hindu, but Hindus know where yoga came from and where it goes.”

To the credulous this would sound scary indeed. That was clearly the point of the letter. It would be interesting to learn more about this army of yoga missionaries. Could it be, I wonder, an idle boast that consciously reflects the sort of triumphalistic language that Christian mission magazines and web sites often use? Here is an example of the sort of language we see in Christian literature sometimes: “We are going to conquer the nation with the gospel.” Are we then an army? Is it any wonder that nationals feel under threat here? Here is another: “Our vision is for India to become a Christian country.” Really? Do you mean like America with its racism, pornography and rampant materialism? The rhetoric of Hindu revivalists is well known in India. Why are Western Christians so naive?

The website also quotes from a Dr Alexander: “Many Westerners who practice yoga today are unaware that the physical positions assumed in yoga symbolize a spiritual act: worshiping one of the many Hindu gods”. Alexander goes on: “To a Hindu, yoga is the outward physical expression of a deep spiritual belief. You cannot separate one from the other.” Cannot or should not? Clearly the writer must mean should not as there are plenty of Muslims, Christians and atheists who do, in fact, practise yoga without holding these deep spiritual beliefs. So he is not saying, surely that it is impossible to separate the movement from the belief (is there such a thing as an ‘unspiritual belief’?). He is saying, therefore, I take it, that it is unnatural to separate them, that the one naturally goes with the other.

The meaning of symbols

But we do this sort of thing all the time. Take, for example, the custom of having bridesmaids walk down the aisle before the bride. I am led to believe the origin of this custom is to avert the evil eye from the bride. The bridesmaids are decoys. Sorry if I have spoiled your wedding preparations. Before you go and cancel that order for bridesmaid dresses let me ask you how many brides are aware of the origins of this custom? And if you were still in blissful ignorance would you not have gone ahead without any qualms, innocently enjoying a good Christian custom? So it is possible to take a custom (a form if you like) and separate it from its referent (meaning). And in so doing the symbol changes.

Likewise yoga. The idea that by doing the exercises you are buying into all the possible interpretations that any yoga teacher ever suggested is quite a stretch! This is precisely what PraiseMoves is, in fact, doing. The web site asserts that “PraiseMoves is NOT so-called ‘Christian yoga,’ which we consider an oxymoron/contradiction in terms since ‘Yoga IS Hinduism’ according to many Christians and most Hindus.” 

Apparently ‘many Christians and most Hindus’ believe that ‘yoga is Hinduism’. But we are not given the precise statistics or the research that this assertion is based on so I think we can safely cast doubt on its credibility. So going on the opinions of a few people PraiseMoves has concluded that ‘yoga is Hinduism’ which is indeed astonishing considering that no one can agree either on what yoga is or what Hinduism is. This is a big topic so let me simply assert here that Hinduism is best understood as a civilization or culture area that includes within it a plurality of mutually contradictory religious traditions (see major works by Gavin Flood, Klaus Klostermaier, Henry Pressler, C. J. Fuller and Julius Lipner).  So saying yoga is Hindu is much the same as saying pasta is Italian or, more analogously, lacrosse is Native American. 

Christian synchronized swimming?

Christian yoga is then, not an oxymoron. Rather the phrase is nonsense. It makes no more sense than Christian wrestling or Christian synchronized swimming. Not that you can’t do synchronized swimming to the glory of God. It just won’t be done in a different idiom. Sure, yoga is traditionally taught with elements of Hindu philosophy, but clearly not always. 

PraiseMoves again: “But wait a second, these postures sure look a lot like yoga poses.” Indeed, they reply, “The body can only move in a finite number of ways – not an infinite number of ways. Some of the PraiseMoves postures resemble yoga poses while others do not." It is no coincidence that the creator taught yoga for 22 years. But to try to demonstrate how distinctly Christian this exercise routine is they have created 22 PraiseMoves Alphabetics postures based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (such as Lamed, above). How convenient Hebrew is. Challenge: try Chinese!

I have nothing against meditating on Scripture while stretching. We would all do with more of both - my colleagues at WEST are well used to me getting down on the carpet during our staff prayer times. But let's not make a business out of denigrating another tradition.Would PraiseMoves please publicly repent of belittling their local Hindu gathering place? Calling it Ramalama-Ding-Dong Ashram is like talking about the Hokey-Kokey Pentecostal Church. Do they want to alienate Hindus from themselves? Perhaps they really believe there is an army of yoga missionaries out to get them. Get a life!

What Is the Mission of the Church?

Review of Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What is the Mission of the Church? MakingSense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011).

American pastors, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert have joined forces to deliver an excellent book on the task of mission. The burden of the book is to seek to define the mission of the church more tightly than it often has been lately. The word ‘mission’ is ambiguous and that has recently become more so with the addition of words and phrases like ‘missional’ and ‘missio Dei’ to our vocabulary. When the local betting shop has a mission statement (I don’t know that it does but I’d be prepared to...no, forget it) then mission can mean anything at all. And these days it usually does. So this book is a welcome contribution to the discussion.

David Bosch’s hugely influential Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission reaches its climax with a chapter in which he discusses 13 ‘elements of an emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm’. In the end, mission is all these things (quest for justice, common witness, inculturation and liberation, as well as evangelism, contextualization and theology, for instance). He cannot tie his understanding of mission down any more than that. You may think I am childish to desire something tidier but I do think it is possible and that is what DeYoung and Gilbert do so well.

They do this by the careful exegesis of a number of key biblical passages, critiquing as they do so the position of Chris Wright in The Mission of God. Wright asserts that Genesis 12:1-3 should be taken as ‘the Great Commission’ with its two imperatives to ‘go’ and ‘be a blessing’. DeYoung and Gilbert call that into question by quoting Wright himself that “‘when two imperatives occur together the second may sometimes express either the expected result or the intended purpose of carrying out the first imperative’ (ibid.: 201)” (31). So the command to Abram is to ‘go’ so that he may be a blessing.

The authors argue against an incarnational reading of Israel’s role, i.e. that the role of Israel as a kingdom of priests (Exod 19:5-6) is not to be a blessing to the nations: “The image of a royal priesthood in the Old Testament and in the New Testament suggests holiness and privilege, not incarnational presence” (35). Wright doesn’t actually use the language of incarnation but the notion is there so the point stands I think.

Luke 4:16-21, argue DeYoung and Gilbert, is not primarily about material poverty – this is demonstrated by an exegesis of Isaiah 61:1-2 and throughout Luke. Rather, they agree with Andreas Köstenberger and Peter O’Brien in their Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: ABiblical Theology of Mission, that “‘the poor to whom the good news is announced are ... “the dispossessed, the excluded” who were forced to depend upon God’” (39), a position that, interestingly, Bosch also argues (1991:104).

In a nutshell, DeYoung and Gilbert are arguing, against Wright (2010: 26), that the mission of God is not the mission of the church: “One of the biggest missteps in much of the newer mission literature is an assumption that whatever God is doing in the world, this too is our task” (41). The mission of the church, they argue, is summarized in the Great Commission passages (Matt 28:16-20; Mark 13:10; 14:9; Luke 24:44-49; Acts 1:8).

The authors survey the synoptic Great Commission passages and that of Acts and then tackle the most controversial Gospel text, that of John 20:21 and the significance of Jesus’ mission as a model for our own. They conclude, against Stott, that “the mission of Jesus is not service broadly conceived, but the proclamation of the gospel through teaching, the corroboration of the gospel through signs and wonders, and the accomplishment of the gospel in death and resurrection” (57, emphasis in the original).

The authors conclude this lengthy and well argued chapter with their definition of the mission of the church: The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples into churches, that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father (62, emphasis in the original).

After a helpful survey of the biblical narrative in four acts—creation, fall, redemption and consummation—the authors seek to handle hot issues in mission theology and practice by examining the meaning of key terms in missiological writing: the kingdom of God, social justice and shalom.

In discussing the significance of the kingdom of God they distinguish between two ways the word gospel is used in the Bible, a ‘zoom-lens’ way (they mean telephoto-lens), and a ‘wide-angle lens’ way. The former is the gospel of the cross; the latter is the gospel of the kingdom. They are one and the second necessarily includes the first.

On ‘social justice’ they distinguish between a ‘constrained’ view and an ‘unconstrained’ view of justice and opt for the former (181). In arguing for an acceptance of the concept of ‘moral proximity’, they accept that this is difficult with modern communications bring the world’s disaster areas into our living rooms (184-85). I am a bit uneasy by the authors’ uncritical acceptance of free-market capitalism: “No enlightened ruler or board or administration can possibly manage millions of people with as much knowledge as the market can” (191). I ask whether we should talk at all about the market ‘managing’ anything. The market, after all, is a network of institutions, a phenomenon of global culture that has been created by people. It is people who manage, make decisions, trade, cheat, defraud and resist all the above. No inanimate cultural phenomenon can do that. So the market is a human construction that allows the exchange of goods and services; it doesn’t manage anything.

DeYoung and Gilbert then tackle the great biblical word, shalom, looking at Jeremiah 29 and then at the cultural mandate. In the latter they draw heavily and profitably on Greg Beale’s work on the Garden of Eden as a temple (The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God). The cultural mandate cannot be the same today as it was for Adam because of the fall. Adam’s failed mandate is picked up not by us but by the second Adam, who succeeds where the first Adam failed. There is both continuity and discontinuity between the old earth and the new one. But shalom is not the mission of the church as that is the mission of the Lord Jesus to whom our mission bears witness.

For the most part I think this is a very well written book that tackles the subject in a biblically informed and carefully argued manner. The book is spoiled a bit, however, by an apparent naivety with regard to global economics and a seeming reluctance to suggest that followers of Christ should examine their lifestyle in the light of global realities. That is a minor weakness, though, and shouldn’t put people off from reading it and working out how it should affect the way we are involved in mission today. I will be using it as a set text in one of my modules. Kevin DeYoung has just followed it up with a blog post taking their argument further - http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2013/08/27/goal-missions-work-missionaries/?comments#comments.

Review of Chester on the Unreached

 

Review of Tim Chester's Unreached: Growing Churches in Working Class and Deprived Areas (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity, 2012).

This book by Tim Chester of The Crowded House in Sheffield (and now also of WEST), is an analysis of both the author’s own reading and experience and the experiences of a number of other gospel workers who are seeking to reach out to working class and deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. These workers, sharing in the Reaching the Unreached network, have been seeking to help one another in the very challenging task of church planting and nurturing in some of the most difficult estates of the UK. Chester’s book borrows heavily from the experiences of these folk and seeks to draw together significant themes and lessons to be learned.

Roy Joslin published his important book, Urban Harvest in 1982. The social character of Britain has changed hugely since then but, as Chester points out, nothing comparable has been written in the intervening years. So this book is really significant if for this reason alone. Chester seeks to lay the foundation by clarifying a Christian view of culture. Contextualization in working-class areas means that, as all cultures contain elements that are good, bad, and indifferent, so we should neither make a blanket condemnation of working-class culture nor offer a blanket affirmation. So Chester argues that gospel workers will want to affirm what is good and seek to change what is bad.

While the whole book is useful, I especially appreciated chapters 2 and 3, “The culture of working-class and deprived areas” and “Key gospel themes for working-class and deprived areas,” which are full of helpful insight and suggestions for appropriate gospel communication.

Chester recognizes the phenomenon of social lift, of people becoming Christians from deprived backgrounds and acquiring new attitudes and behaviours that lead to social mobility. “To some extent,” he says, “this reflects an aspiration by new Christians towards middle-class values, which, in turn, reflects the church culture into which they are socialized” (14). Chester is walking a tightrope here, as I think he knows, but perhaps doesn’t express. He is at pains to point out that some working-class values are good and need to be affirmed, and some middle-class values are bad and need to be changed. Considering the vast majority of the readers of this book will be middle-class he is making is a good and necessary point. But I struggle with the argument here. Chester does say that social lift reflects the aspiration to middle-class values “to some extent” (my emphasis) but doesn’t tell us to what extent it doesn’t. In a book of this size and character it is impossible to cover all the issues but I think that the social analysis of the book is at times simplistic and over-generalized. The phrases “middle-class culture” and “working-class culture” are used throughout the book in such a way that an alien might be forgiven for believing that the two cultures are the products of two completely distinct communities, like a multi-ethnic society, living side-by-side but hardly interacting, and sharing very little. It may feel like that at times but the reality is that the categories of middle-class and working-class, as Chester acknowledges (43), are not as bounded as one might think. Moreover, British society has some cohesion such that interaction between different groups is constant and inevitable.

Furthermore, the recent Great British Class Survey (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21970879) resulted in a different construction of the class system such that Britain, according to the researchers, Mike Savage from the London School of Economics and Fiona Devine from the University of Manchester, is now better described by a new model with seven classes ranging from the Elite at the top to a 'Precariat' at the bottom. Unreached was published before this so doesn’t go into the recent diffraction of the working class into a much less cohesive agglomeration than it used to be (although this is acknowledged).

Whether a two or three class system or a seven class system is best to characterize British society is not the point. They are all models of the social reality, not the reality itself. The point I am trying to make is that I am not sure that it is valid to talk in such concrete terms about middle-class values and working-class values. Since they are not distinct concrete social groups, but rather societal categories, their representatives do in fact share an awful lot—that’s what we might call British culture. While wanting to affirm, as Chester does, so much that is good and noble in the life of working-class people it is also right, I think, to acknowledge that some elements of British society, as any society, are more corrupt than others. New disciples from such backgrounds will have further to travel than others. Thankfully, much of the book covers the great needs of working class and deprived neighbourhoods and offers a feast of practical advice to those involved in gospel ministry among them. I hope a second edition would interact with the findings of the Great British Class Survey. This book should be read and prayed over by anyone seeking to reach out to those in working-class and deprived communities and should sound a challenge to a church that largely appeals to those it is like.