“Christianity
Today” Endorses
Foster’s Celebration of
Disciple
Renovare is the
movement of Spiritual Formation,
headed by Richard J. Foster, a
Quaker. Foster edited the
Renovare Spiritual Formation
Bible. Twenty-five years ago
Foster wrote Celebration of
Discipline, “hailed by
many as the best modern book on
Christian spirituality and
described by Christianity Today
as one of the best ten books of
the twentieth century.
Foster
Advocates Reviving Roman Catholic
Disciplines
This book of
Foster’s advocates the Roman
Catholic disciplines from
Confession to the Spiritual
Directorship, Foster, and his
book, Celebration of Discipline,
perhaps more than any other
single effort, started the
massive avalanche of
Protestantism’s enthusiastic
slide into Roman Catholic
disciplines-especially Spiritual
Formation and Spiritual
Directors.
To understand the
global movement of Spiritual
Formation, which now is in
virtually every Protestant
denomination, including the
Adventist Structure, we must go
to the source-to Renovare, the
organization that has been
pushing Spiritual Formation for
25 years, and its founder,
Richard J. Foster.
“Celebration
of Discipline explores the
‘classic Disciplines,’
or central spiritual practices,
of the Christian faith.” So
reads the flyleaf of the Celebration
of Discipline. (New York:
Harpers San Francisco, 1978,
1988, 1998).
Foster
Advocates Jesuit Spiritual
Directors
In this book, the
Quaker, Foster, reintroduces
modern Christianity to medieval
Roman Catholic Christianity and
Jesuit Spiritual Exercises.
Foster writes in his section on
“The Spiritual
Director,” “In
the Middle Ages not even the
greatest saints attempted the
depths of the inward journey
without the help of a spiritual
director. Today the concept is
hardly understood… That is a
tragedy…”
Richard J. Foster, Celebration of
Discipline, 185.
Foster upholds the
Roman Catholic Desert Fathers,
the Cistercian lay brothers in
twelfth century England, the
seventeenth-century Benedictine
mystic, Dom Augustine Baker. For
pages he develops his advocacy of
Spiritual Directors. Foster
quotes Virgil Vogt of Reba Place
Fellowship [who] says, ‘If
you cannot listen to your
brother, you cannot listen to the
Holy Spirit.” (Celebration
of Discipline, p. 187). Foster
quotes the mystic Trappist Monk
Thomas Merton, as well as the
psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was
taught his deepest insights by
the evil spirit named Philemon.
Foster
Introduces Loyola
Foster introduces
the reader to Ignatius of Loyola,
the founder of the Jesuits, on
page 29 of his book. On page 41
Foster describes the same kind of
scenario, based on the Spiritual
Exercises, that Pastor
William Loveless used in the
early 1990s, when he led the
pastors of the Structure
conference in the Jesuit
Spiritual Exercises.
On page 64 Foster
recommends the Rosary or a prayer
wheel. On page 102, Foster
favorably tells a story about St.
Dominic visiting St. Francis,
when neither one of them spoke a
single word to the other. Then
Foster goes on to introduce the
reader to St. John of the Cross.
On page 51 foster
speaks highly of the second
Council or Orleans in the sixth
century when regular fasting was
made obligatory
Foster
Advocates the Concept of the
Confessional
On page 148 Foster
speaks of the
‘advantages” of the
Confessional, or Sacrament of
penance, listing three
advantages: 1) that the
Confessional is “Reality
Therapy of the best sort;”
2) that the person receives the
word of forgiveness in the
absolution [note: the priest
saying, “I absolve
thee”] 3) the
“third” advantage of
the institutionalized
Confessional, [is] namely,
penance.
Foster
Advocates the Confession With
Journaling and the Examen
Then Foster
proceeds to spend nine and a half
pages describing how confession
should work with journaling, and
how confession is to be given,
quoting St. Alphonsus Liguori,
who gives three things necessary
for confession, one of which is
the examination of conscience,
which Ignatius Loyola called the
examen. Liguori is the Roman
Catholic founder of
Redemptorists, and a Roman
Catholic moral theologian.
Liguori
Advocated Elimination of
Scriptures in the Vulgar Tongue
Liguori, one of
Rome’s highest authorities
on Canon Law, is the Roman
Catholic author considered more
authoritative and probably more
often quoted than any other, who
is often quoted in justification
of the behavior of the Jesuits.
Liguori wrote:
“The
Scriptures and books of
Controversy may not be permitted
in the vulgar tongue, as also
they cannot be read without
permission.” (Quoted in
Loraine Boettner, Roman
Catholicism. Philadelphia:
Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing Co., 1962, p. 98.)
One of
Liguori’s books is the
Glories of Mary, where Mary set
forth as a “mediatress of
peace.” Liguori wrote:
“He fails and is Lost who
has not recourse to Mary.”
(The glories of Mary, p. 94).
“The Holy Church commands a
WORSHIP peculiar to MARY.”
(Glories of Mary, 130).
Renovare
Spiritual Formation Bible
Approaches “The Bible
Through the Lens of Christian
Spiritual Formation
Therefore, Foster
quotes one of Rome’s
greatest Canon Law authorities on
the elements of confession, a man
who wrote that the Scriptures
must not be translated into the
vulgar, or common tongue, and
that the Scriptures cannot be
read without permission. And here
is Foster today, coming out with
a Renovare Spiritual Formation
Bible, a Bible written for
the purpose of “approaching
the Bible through the lens of
Christian spiritual
formation.” –Renovare
Spiritual Formation Bible, p. xv.
Forster
Wants Confession Recovered by the
Church
Confession is one
of the disciplines that the
Christian world needs to recover,
says Foster: “May God give
grace to the Church once again to
recover the Discipline of
confession.” –Foster,
Celebration of Discipline, 157.
Foster
Advocates Spiritual Directorship
Another discipline
for the church is
“Guidance,” or
Spiritual Directorship. Clearly
Foster, though a professed
Quaker, is steeped in Roman
Catholicism, and is one of the
foremost advocates of Rome,
leading all of Protestantism into
the most advanced discipline of
the Roman Catholic Church,
especially Jesuit Spiritual
Formation.
All
Organized Protestantism is
Following Spiritual Formation
Enthusiastically
And all
of organized Protestantism is
welcoming it and following it
enthusiastically, including
the Adventist Structure,
which implemented Spiritual
Formation globally in September,
2001, for the training of all of
its ministry in all 13 regions of
the world field.
The Renovare
With-God Life Conference Ministry
Team includes Michael J. Sheeran,
S.J., a Jesuit, along with
Protestants from Southern Baptist
and Nondenominational to
Presbyterians, Episcopalians,
Quakers, Salvation Army,
Christian Reformed, Methodist,
various Roman Catholic speakers,
Christian Missionary Alliance,
Vineyard Christian Fellowship,
and much, much more.
Vatican II
and Renewal
Renewal
and Vatican II
Vatican II
attempted ‘to present its
age old doctrines and moral
outlook in a new way that would
be intelligible to the minds of
modern men and women.” The
Jesuits, 477. The very first
Apostolic Constitution in Volume
II of the Vatican II documents,
Post-conciliar Documents, called
for “continuous need of
conversion and renewal, a
renewal which must be
implemented not only interiorly
and individually but also
externally and socially.”
–Vatican II Documents,
Volume II, More Post-Conciliar
documents, Gen. Ed. Austin
Flannery, O.P., “Apostolic
constitution of Penance, Paul VI,
Paenitemini, 17 February, 1966,
p. 1.
Decree on
the Up-to-date Renewal of
Religious Life
An entire section
in the Documents of Vatican II is
devoted to the Decree on the
Up-to-date Renewal of Religious
Life, Vatican II, Perfectae
Caritatis, 28 October 1965, pp.
611-655.
Today All
Mainline Protestant Churches,
Including the Structure, Have
Implemented Spiritual Formation
The Jesuits took
the turning to the world and ran
with it with their movement of
“Renewal.” Today,
Renewal and Renovare have
swallowed up all the mainline
churches-Presbyterian, Methodist,
Episcopalian, Seventh-day
Adventist, --all have implemented
Jesuit Spiritual Formation. The
Renovare Spiritual Formation
Bible is designed to entrench the
reading of Scripture into the
mould of the Jesuit Spiritual
Exercises and Roman Catholic
thinking. It
blends “Renewal” [the
English term], or Renovare [the
Latin term meaning
“Renewal”], with Jesuit
Spiritual Formation, which is
calculated to train the mind and
conscience to submission to an
earthly hierarchy as a cadaver is
moved. It is called “cadaver
obedience.”
Turning
Light Into Darkness
Thus we are
looking at what Winston Churchill
in another setting, called, the
danger that the human race will
“sink into the abyss of a
new dark age made more, sinister,
and perhaps more protracted by
the lights of perverted”
reading of the Scripture.
Churchill here used the word
“science’ referring to
Nazi science in his speech in the
House of Commons, 18 June, 1940.
We here take his statement and
apply it to what the Jesuits are
now doing with the reading of
Scriptur
The Jesuits would
twist and channel the power of
Scripture into Jesuitical
Spiritual Formation.
Part II
From
Protestant, Biblical Spirituality
to Ignatian Spirituality:
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