Is spiritual formation based on scripture?

This is part three of a series around the concept of spiritual formation. This series seeks to explore spiritual formation carefully and biblically—listening with empathy, asking thoughtful questions, and grounding our understanding firmly in Scripture. Here are the previous articles: PART ONE; PART TWO.  Jeff Chacon also offers a good primer HERE.

Is spiritual formation based on Scripture?

I guess it depends on what version of spiritual formation we're talking about....

In recent years the language of spiritual formation has become increasingly common in Christian books, conferences, seminaries and churches. As I’ve noted before, many believers find the idea attractive because it promises depth in an age where much of church life can feel hurried, programmatic, and spiritually thin. Every sincere Christian wants to grow, to know God more deeply, and to experience genuine transformation into the image of Christ.  Personally, I know of nobody who doesn’t, in some way, desire to grow in spiritual depth.

Because of that shared desire, an important question must be asked carefully and honestly: Is the modern spiritual formation movement grounded primarily in Scripture?

Some Practices Do Appear in Scripture

To answer that question fairly, we should first acknowledge something important. Some practices commonly associated with spiritual formation do appear in the Bible. Scripture speaks about prayer, meditation on God’s Word, solitude at times, fasting, and reflection. Jesus Himself often withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16). The Psalms speak of meditating on the law of the Lord day and night (Psalm 1:2). Fasting appears occasionally in both the Old and New Testaments.

Practices like these can certainly play a helpful role in a believer’s life. Christians throughout history have sought quiet places to pray, seasons of fasting to focus on God, and moments of reflection on Scripture. None of this is inherently problematic.

But this is where an important distinction must be made.

While these practices exist in Scripture, they are never presented as a prescribed system of disciplines that produces spiritual transformation.  To make matters more complicated, many spiritual formation teachers today have added practices like breath exercises, mantras, contemplative prayer, silence, simplicity, journaling, pilgrimage, sabbath keeping, sacred reading techniques, and hiring spiritual directors.  Many teachers insist that transformation is achieved through these things, subtly but powerfully giving them the same spiritual authority as scripture.  I have heard people say, “If you really want to grow in depth and get close to God, these are essential.”  I have also heard spiritual formation teachers say “if church leaders would embrace these things, churches would grow more.”

Of course these statements are issues of opinion, but the thing that concerns me most is this: by making them, it creates the feeling that leaders or shepherds who do not agree with spiritual formation are holding the church back, or stuck in the rut of dry doctrine.  That’s way too simplistic.  Ironically, many spiritual formation teachers are disappointed that church leaders overgeneralize or easily dismiss the spiritual formation movement, but then turn around and overgeneralize what is needed for church growth or leadership.  None of this is helpful.

Contrary to today’s spiritual formation teachers, the New Testament never outlines a program of contemplative exercises as the central pathway to becoming more like Christ.

The apostles consistently point somewhere else.

The New Testament Emphasis: The Gospel and the Spirit

When the New Testament speaks about transformation, it emphasizes the work of God rather than a set of spiritual techniques based on the experiences of Christian mystics.  If one is not careful, mastering spiritual formation techniques can lead to an intense sort of humanistic, works based legalism.

Paul writes:

“And we all… are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit,”(2 Corinthians 3:18)

Transformation, in other words, is not primarily the result of mastering certain spiritual disciplines. It is the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit through the gospel, as believers cling to Christ through the revealed Word of God.

Similarly, Romans 12:2 points to the renewal of the mind, and Colossians repeatedly centers transformation on Christ Himself, not on a system of contemplative practices:

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.”(Colossians 3:16)

The pattern in the New Testament is remarkably consistent. Spiritual growth flows from the Spirit’s work through Scripture, the gospel, obedience, fellowship, and the ordinary (sometimes it's just not that flashy) life of the church. The apostles never instruct believers to pursue mystical experiences or structured contemplative techniques as the engine of spiritual transformation.

 

Where the Modern Movement Looks for Guidance

This is where a significant concern arises in the modern spiritual formation movement.

Many of its most influential teachers encourage believers to look beyond Scripture to the writings and experiences of later Christian mystics. Rather than grounding their practices primarily in the New Testament, they often appeal to figures from the early and medieval church—particularly those associated with monasticism and contemplative mysticism.

I will address mysticism in a later article, but for now, I believe it is someone who seeks a deeper, more direct experience of God that goes beyond understanding Scripture or doctrine. They often emphasize personal, inner encounters with God—sometimes borrowing ideas or practices from broader mystical traditions—to cultivate a heightened sense of spiritual communion. In this approach, subjective experience and spiritual sensation can become as important as, or even more important than, biblical teaching itself.  The difficult part is that a lot of this, as it applies to spiritual formation practices, is borrowed from non-Christian circles.  For example, breathing exercises, while potentially helpful, have closer ties to Eastern mysticism than they do Biblical Christianity.

Writers such as Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, and Bruce Demarest frequently point readers toward historical figures like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  There are many more.  These individuals lived centuries after the apostolic era and developed practices rooted largely in monastic spirituality.

The argument often made is that the modern church has become shallow and needs to recover the “ancient” wisdom and experiences of these spiritual masters.

There is a grain of truth in that concern. Modern Christianity can sometimes lack depth. But the real question is not whether the church needs renewal—it certainly does. The real question is where we should go to find it.

We have to be really careful here, because some ideas and practices are explained in ways that seem like modern-day Gnosticism.  As one example, one of the ultimate experiences of mysticism is to stumble upon “the dark night of the soul,” as explained by St. John of the Cross, a counter-reformation monk.  He was mentored by a Carmelite nun by the name of Teresa of Avila. 

He wrote a very popular book about the subject, and the idea is there is a season when a believer feels spiritually empty—prayer seems dry, God feels distant, and the comforts of faith disappear. He believed this darkness is a form of spiritual purification, where God removes reliance on feelings and self-effort so the soul can grow into a deeper, more selfless love for Him.

Richard Foster, a modern-day advocate of spiritual formation, suggests that if you are really serious about silence and solitude, you will inevitably enter the “dark night of the soul.”  He says it like this:

“We may have a sense of dryness, aloneness, even lostness. Any overdependency on the emotional life is stripped away. . . . When solitude is seriously pursued, there is usually a flush of initial success and then an inevitable letdown—and with it a desire to abandon the pursuit altogether. Feelings leave and there is the sense that we are not getting through to God. . . . The darkness of the soul . . . put the sensory and spiritual appetites to sleep. . . . It binds the imagination and impedes it from doing any good discursive work. It makes the memory cease, the intellect become dark and unable to understand anything, and hence it caused the will also to become arid and constrained, and all the faculties empty and useless. And over all this hangs a dense and burdensome cloud which afflicts the soul and keeps it withdrawn from God.”[1]

Honestly, I’m not sure the average Christian can really make sense of this description.  I think I know what he is trying to say, but once again, is this state of mind something that is described in scripture, or is it the fruit of a 16^th century monk?  If it is the latter, why is it given such authority?  And why are we using him as a guide to show us how to achieve the “narrow way” Jesus taught in Matthew 7?  So, according to Foster, if I am really serious about the discipline of solitude, I need to expect something not described in Scripture?  This kind of expectation makes spiritual formation, according to today’s teachers, mandatory. 

In Scripture we see doubting, times of questioning, and times of persecution, but neither Jesus nor the New Testament authors ever taught the “dark night of the soul.” 

Is this something Christians today are borrowing more from Catholicism than Scripture to apply to our modern day problems?  Unfortunately, I think so.

The Danger of Stopping Too Late in History

When many spiritual formation advocates look to the past, they often stop at what is sometimes called the “classical” period of church history—the second through sixth centuries and beyond. Yet even a brief study of church history reveals that significant doctrinal and interpretive shifts began appearing very early.

The early church fathers contributed many valuable insights, but they were not infallible interpreters of Scripture. In fact, allegorical interpretations of the Bible (an approach that reads biblical passages primarily as symbolic stories whose deeper spiritual meanings point beyond the literal events to hidden truths about God, the soul, or the Christian life) became common in that period. Passages were often read symbolically or imaginatively rather than according to their plain meaning.

This interpretive approach eventually contributed to practices such as monasticism, where individuals withdrew into isolation, pursued extreme forms of self-denial, and sought mystical encounters with God. Some hermits in the Egyptian deserts deprived themselves of sleep, food, and normal human contact in hopes of achieving heightened spiritual experiences.  Where do we see that in Scripture?

The problem with using monastics as our guides is that many of their practices were based in the kind of asceticism Paul was warning Christians about.  Many of these practices have the appearance of good spiritual activity, but have no effect on our souls (Colossians 2:20-23).  My guess is that if they did, we would read about them in Scripture.

Over time, certain individuals within these movements came to be viewed as spiritual elites—people who supposedly possessed deeper insights into God than ordinary believers. Their visions, writings, and experiences were elevated as spiritual guides.

It is precisely from this stream of Christian mysticism that many modern spiritual formation practices are drawn.

 

The Question That Must Be Asked

All of this leads to a simple but crucial question:  Are these practices taught or modeled in the New Testament as the path to spiritual maturity?

When we return to Scripture itself, the answer appears to be no.

The apostles never instructed Christians to imitate desert hermits, medieval mystics, or monastic disciplines. Instead, they repeatedly pointed believers to Christ, the Gospel, the Word of God, the fellowship of the church, and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, the New Testament does not present spiritual growth as the result of mastering certain contemplative exercises. It presents it as the fruit of a living relationship with Christ, nurtured through His Word and empowered by His Spirit.

Returning to the Right Source

None of this means Christians should ignore history or reject every practice that earlier believers found helpful. Church history can be instructive, and many believers throughout the centuries have demonstrated remarkable devotion to Christ.

But history must never become our authority, Scripture is.

When we return to the New Testament, we discover something both simple and powerful: God has already given us the means of transformation.

Through the gospel.

Through the Scriptures.

Through the Spirit.

Through the life of the church.

We do not need to recover mystical techniques from the desert to become spiritually mature. We need to return again and again to Christ, who is both the source and the goal of all true spiritual formation.

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever! Amen.”(Romans 11:36)

True transformation does not come from mastering spiritual disciplines.

It comes from knowing, trusting, and following Jesus Christ.

Daren Overstreet

Daren is a Senior Leader at Anchor Point Church in Tampa, Florida.  He has been in ministry for nearly 30 years, and holds a Master’s Degree in Missional Theology

You can contact him at

daren@anchorpointtampa.org 

[1] Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 102–103.