ii. Johann Tauler continued in next blog:

Johann Tauler (1300-1361) was also a Roman Catholic Dominican who was a disciple of Eckhart. This is why we gave the background to Eckhart. Presumably to avoid accusations of heresy Tauler moderated the language used by Eckhart; but this merely provided a cloak behind which he continued to teach many of the same essential principles as Eckhart.

An examination of his sermons shows that Tauler speaks of the three stages in the mystical life: 1) a life of spirituality and virtue, bringing us close to God's presence; 2) Spiritual poverty, when God withdraws himself from the soul, leaving it anguished and denuded; 3) the transition into a divinised life, into what he describes as 'a union of our created spirit with God's uncreated one' (Sermon on 1 Pet.3:8). That is unequivocal mystic language. Very similar to the three stages of the pseudo-Dionysius we spoke of earlier.

Many evangelicals seem to regard Tauler as a precursor to the Reformation. But I believe that this is a profound error. He was certainly not a great fan of the Roman Catholic church, but that was simply a trait which he held in common with all mystics, who eschew any kind of organisational church, which simply stands in the way of the mystic's spiritual quest of being 'oned with God'.

We find this notion of Tauler as a forerunner of the Reformation in, for example, The Puritans: Their Origins and their Successors, by Martin Lloyd Jones, in which the statement is made that:

There were certain movements of the Spirit within the body of the Roman Catholic Church even before the Protestant Reformation. A man like John Tauler in Germany was awakened by the Spirit in a new way and, I believe, filled with the Spirit. The effect it had on him was to turn him into a great preacher, a very popular preacher; and people crowded to hear his preaching.'

Elsewhere in the same book, Dr. Lloyd Jones says:

Before the Reformation there were those who were very interested in holiness and godliness and in coming to a knowledge of God. These were called mystics, and some of them were very "evangelical" mystics. There was, for instance, John Tauler in Germany who used to preach in a church where great crowds gathered, and there were many conversions. If you read his sermons you come to the conclusion that this man was almost an evengelical.'

I have read a translation of Tauler's sermons, which have been published by the Roman Catholic Paulist Press, and I am amazed that anyone could describe them as evangelical — in the true sense of the word. Here are three extracts from Tauler's sermons on the seasonal Masses:–

1) 'In this denuding of ourselves, we are reformed in the form of God, clothed with His divinity. It is the hidden darkness of which St. Dionysius (pseudo) spoke.'

2) 'Christ also said: "You shall be witnesses in Samaria." Samaria means "union with God". Surely the closest and most direct way of bearing witness is to be truly united with Him. In this way the soul takes flight away from itself and from all creatures, for in the simple unity of the Divine Godhead it sheds all multiplicity. It is now exalted above itself... In such a state a man can lose himself entirely in God... Beyond this he is led into another Heaven which is the divine Essence itself, where the human spirit loses itself so completely that no trace of the self remains... How could the mind grasp such a thing? Even the spirit of man cannot comprehend it, for so submerged is it now into the divine ground that it knows nothing, feels nothing, understands nothing but God alone in His simple, pure undisguised Unity.'

3) 'God commanded Abraham to go out of his land and leave his kin, so that He might show him all good. "All good" signifies the divine birth, which contains all good within itself.'¹⁶

Tauler is here claiming allegory in this story as symbolising a person leaving worldly things and pursuing good things so that 'the divine birth can be effected in us.' This is a Christmas sermon on the three aspects of God being born: a) the first birth is the Father begetting the Son; b) the second birth concerns maternal fruitfulness through virginal chastity and true purity; c) the third birth is effected when 'God is born within a just soul by grace and out of love'.

How could anyone be fooled by this mystical humbug? One insightful writer says on this (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Baker, 1984, pp.1070-1):

'The assumption that Tauler limited the mystical union to a conformity of divine and human wills by grace alone has made Protestant authors sympathetic to Tauler. But this interpretation... must be understood in the context of his assumption that an innate likeness to God within the human soul makes possible a union of essence or being, and also in view of his emphasis on human cooperation with divine grace in the path toward union.'

There is nothing whatsoever of the Atonement of Christ in Tauler. He does not preach an atoning Christ who has died as the substitute for the sins of His people, or who has brought reconciliation between a wrathful God and a repentant people, or who has served as the propitiation for our sins. Then we would know that he was indeed an evangelical. Instead, it is all Dominican mysticism, pietistic language without any genuine Bible theology and all wrapped up in the most extreme forms of allegorisation.

Tauler's desire was not to preach Christ crucufied but, as Chambers Encyclopedia states, 'to spread the teaching of the mystics among the unlettered devout'. That was the real basis of his preaching.

Essentially Tauler teaches that the human soul is a Divine spark which can be kindled though living the right kind of life and practising the right kind of works. This is standard Roman Catholic mystical redemption teaching.

It seems astonishing that these sermons are held up by knowledgeable people such as Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones as a kind of precursor to the Reformation! On the contrary, the Reformation was a gigantic NO! to this medieval mysticism.

At one stage in his life, Tauler had a mystical experience when he heard a voice in his head which made him fall into a trance and lose consciousness — a kind of 'slain in the spirit' experience. When he came round, he found that he was completely changed and all fired up with a new outlook on life. This is claimed by the second-blessing advocates to be evidence that Tauler received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, as can be seen in the book advocating the Charismatic 'slain in the spirit' experience Overcome by the Spirit, by the Roman Catholic Dominican priest, Francis McNutt (with a preface by the Church of England Bishop David Pytches).

It is this experience that fired up his preaching. In his book The Sacred Anointing, Tony Sargent mentions Dr. Lloyd-Jones's reference to Tauler when he writes:

'He reported the case of John Tauler, a German R.C. priest, who preached in one of the great cathedrals. God suddenly took hold of him, filled him with his Spirit, and as a result, his whole preaching was transformed.'

But that is not what had happened at all. What had really happened was that Tauler had a mystical experience when he heard a voice in his head and promptly lost all consciousness. Is that what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit?

What this mystical experience then made Tauler go out and preach fervently was not the atoning work of Christ on the cross but the importance of achieving a mystical experience of God. In one example, he preached to astounding results, as Francis McNutt reveals:

'When the sermon was over, Tauler went and offered Mass, but fully forty men stayed behind in the churchyard, lying as it were in a swoon... Then Tauler said to a man standing nearby: "Dear son, what do you think we should do with these men?" Then the man touched them but they moved very little and lay there almost as if they were dead.'

Does this remind you of the Charismatic mysticism of today? Remember, we've been told by Dr. Lloyd-Jones that "John Tauler used to preach in a church where great crowds gathered, and there were many conversions.' Were these allegedly 'converted' men convicted of sin? Not at all. They had merely been profoundly affected by Tauler preaching the teaching of the mystics. They had gone into a rapture.

Last year, I attended a Bible Rally in what would be regarded as a highly orthodox church and heard a similarly highly orthodox and well-known Reformed preacher (who, incidentally, had spent his formative years at Westminster Chapel) suddenly start waxing lyrical about how John Tauler had preached to cathedrals-full of people and brought about many conversions. But he seemed to be completely unaware that the people were converted to Catholic mysticism rather than Bible Christianity.

Recently, I read an interview in the 'Jesus Army' magazine with John Arnott, Senior Pastor in the Airport church in Toronto. He was asked by Noel Stanton: "Do you see [the Toronto Blessing] as breaking out into evangelism and mission?" Arnott replied: "Absolutely. Unbelievers are being converted just through going out under the power of the Spirit". So evangelicals believe today that conversion is a mystical experience. (Incidentally, this is very much like the ancient pagan practice of 'Incubation', whereby one goes into a special sleep in a sacred place where the gods allegedly work on you while you're out for the count!).

As an illustration of the confusion about mysticism in evangelical circles, I was sent a fax by a well-known evangelical leader recently asking to be faxed back a copy of a leaflet I had written critiquing the Slain in the Spirit experience. It was duly sent and I received a very patronising reply advising me to study Church History and then to put out an amended second edition of the leaflet taking account of what I had learned about revival. He asked me: "Have you never read what the Doctor [Lloyd-Jones] wrote about John Tauler and other mystics?" To which I replied, firstly, that I was thankful that I didn't idolise the Doctor, and secondly, that having abandoned mysticism in favour of Christianity on becoming a believer, I was in no mood to apostatise.

So much for the 14th century German mystics. Our second topic in our examination of how mysticism has influenced evangelical protestantism in history involves

2. THE RESPONSE OF THE REFORMERS TO ALL FORMS OF MYSTICISM

The Catholic mystics of the Reformation period — people such as Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits and, later, Francis de Sales, were decidedly anti-Reformation. Then there was John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila in Spain. Teresa believed herself and her nuns to be involved in a battle to overturn "the mischief and ravages those Lutherans had wrought in France".

In fact, we find that the whole issue of whether or not mysticism is a valid Christian pursuit comes into perspective at the time of the European Reformation with the vast number of individuals and groups which claimed some sort of mystical inspiriation from the Spirit. These 'spiritualists' as they were known, who were mystical charismatics, simply abounded.

It is interesting that one so often finds that mysticism and mystical notions will come in like a flood when a society or civilisation is going through big changes. As Philip Schaff puts it:

'Protestantism had reached a very critical juncture. Reformation or revolution, the written Word or illusive inspirations, order or confusion. That was the question.'

There was the Roman Catholic Church with all its corruption. The Reformers appear on the scene. But there was competition. Two groups vied to be the one which would 'restore' the Visible Church. Both claimed that their desire was to restore it to its rightful condition. One group rested on Biblical authority, the other on mystical promptings of the Spirit through direct revelations.

All the while that the genuine Reformers were at work on this process of restoration, they were regularly plagued by various sects and characters who claimed they had received 'words from the Lord' about this, that and the other matter. Martin Luther called them schwarmer, (swarm is derivative), fanatics, enthusiasts. This continued right through into the Puritan period in the seventeenth century and beyond.

The essence of 'enthusiasm is the subjective Inner Light versus the objective external Word of God. This was one of the principal controversies at the time of the Reformation. And this is epitomized in Luther's dealings with the revolutionary Thomas Muntzer, who was instrumental in the Peasant's War in 1525. He believed that justification by faith alone was an invented doctrine, and he was violently opposed to the notion of sola Scriptura, saying, like any good enthusiast, that 'they poison the Holy Spirit with the Holy Scripture'.

In his very interesting book The Third Reformation, which examines Luther's relationship to mystics and charismatics, Carter Lindberg of the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, says:

'The key to Muntzer's theology is a mystical spiritualism... mystical theology of an experiential self-disclosure of God to the person.'

Luther's response to Muntzer was to declare that he would not listen to him "even if he had swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all!" Lindberg writes that it was significant for Luther that Johann Tauler was of catastrophic importance for Muntzer. Apparently Muntzer carried around with him Tauler's sermons, bound in a double volume.

Another of the confrontations between the Word and mystical inspirations involved three men who were friends of Muntzer, known as the Zwickau prophets. They claimed to be prophets from God and to have had intimate conversations with Him. They had no need of the Bible but relied on the promptings of the Spirit. Melancthon was utterly taken in by them. But Luther said:

'Those who are expert in spiritual things have gone through the valley of the shadow. When these men talk of sweetness and being transported to the third heaven, do not believe them. Divine Majesty does not speak directly to men. God is a consuming fire, and the dreams and visions of the saints are terrible.'

It is ironic that Luther in his younger days had an attraction to Tauler. But it seems that he liked to adapt Tauler's concept of God's grace being necessary to religious mystical experience to his own developing idea of Justification. Luther certainly rejected the teaching of the mystics (including Tauler) on union with the Divine. And so did Calvin. In a footnote to Calvin's use of the term unio mystica, 'mystical union' (an unfortunate adoption of a term used in Mystical Theology), in the Battles edition of the Institutes, it says:

'Niesel notes that Calvin nowhere teaches the absorption of the pious mystic into the sphere of the Divine Being.'

We find numerous references to the rejection of mystical notions in the Lutheran confessions. In Article 13 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession:

'It is good to extol the ministry of the Word with every possible kind of praise in opposition to the fanatics who dream that the Holy Spirit does not come through the Word but because of their own preparations. They sit in a dark corner doing and saying nothing, but only waiting for illumination.'

In his Smalcald Articles, Luther even reckoned that the Pope was an enthusiast:

'We must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one His Spirit or grace except through or with the external Word which comes before. Thus we shall be protected from the enthusiasts... The papacy, too, is nothing but enthusiasm, for the pope boasts that all the laws are in the shrine of his heart, and he claims that whatever he decides and commands in his churches is spirit and law, even when it is above and contrary to the Scriptures and the spoken Word. All this is the old devil and old serpent who made enthusiasts of Adam and Eve.'

 We say again that the Reformation was a gigantic NO! to Catholic mysticism. But that did not stop it working vigorously, as we know.

 Thirdly, any consideration of how mysticism has influenced Protestantism in history must take into account:

3. THE PIETIST MOVEMENT

This was a seventeenth Century movement among German Lutheranism, which arose as a reaction against the prevalence of dogmatic theology in conjunction with spiritual deadness.

Pietism was the reaction of the spirit against the letter. It laid stress on the subjective rather than the objective aspect of faith. However, not all the Pietists are to be condemned. Many were well-meaning devout men. Philip Spener (1635-1705), for example, was clearly a godly man who had the best of intentions. However, as so often happens with reactive movements which are knee-jerking against some other extreme (or often what they imagine to be some other extreme), those who take up the baton from the founders pervert even the good morsels into a wholly extremist venture.

For example, Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714) started out as a Pietist, a disciple of Spener, but ended up as a fanatical mystic. And this often happened. Johann Arndt (1555-1621) is generally regarded as the Father of European Pietism. His work, Four Books on True Christianity took up many of the themes of the medieval mystics, and was very influential on German Pietism. Yet it is significant that the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says of Arndt:

'In contrast to the prevalent forensic view of the Atonement, he dwelt on the work of Christ in the heart of man.'

In many ways, this exemplifies the central thrust of Pietism. We will be looking further at the way that mysticism does away with the forensic nature of the atonement; but we see here the essential contrast between the mystico-pietistic view of salvation and sanctification and the biblical evangelical understanding.

It is interesting to note that, according to Robert Clouse, Arndt "helped prepare the way for the Enlightenment and for Pietism". This is because a religion of the heart meant relativism, subjective experience, by which a person is no longer dependent on external authority. That would mean freedom from the authority of the Church and from the authority of Scripture. The development of hyper-individualism. Remember that mysticism not only involves seeking union with the Divine, it also involves making one's subjective experience the sole arbiter of religious truth.

It is highly significant that one of the principal reforms demanded by the German Pietists, according to Routledge's Encyclopaedia of Religions, was 'that the theological schools should be reformed by the abolition of all systematic theology, and that morals and not doctrine should form the staple of all preaching'. And what would you suspect to be the result of that reform? In their eagerness to eschew systematic theology, the mystics and pietists embraced a systematised devotionalism. Systematic theology devoid of heart religion is bad enough. But a heart religion which is devoid of systematic theology is a scourge.

Which is it easier to do? To melt a scholastic heart or to bring a mystic down to earth?

Pietism has been described as 'the last fruit of the heart religion which originated in the Franciscan Movement'. And it is surely no coincidence that many Protestant critics of the time saw in the Pietist movement a retrograde tendency to Catholicism. It is interesting to read the largely sympathetic treatment of Protestant Pietism in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol.11, p.355):

'The Pietist emphasis upon a quality of life rather than orthodoxy of beliefs tended to produce a softening of religious divisions. Contact with like-minded Roman Catholics developed late in the 18th Century.'

A Softening of religious divisions. Well that is admirable if there has been some unbiblical division of which the Lord would not approve. But it is tragic if this softening happens without any discernment. It is interesting to trace the influence of the Pietist movement on later developments in Protestantism: One of the more pronounced aspects of Pietism was 'An insistence upon a conscious crisis as necessary in the process of salvation'. Here we have the roots of a number of later developments in the Christian scene: e.g., the crass sort of Revivalism which appears to have developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Ultimately it prefigured the second-blessing theology which came to dominate Holiness Movements, Pentecostalism and, later, neo-evangelicalism.

Next in our consideration of how mysticism has influenced Protestantism in history, we examine

4. THE MYSTICAL LEGACY OF JOHN WESLEY

It is an interesting fact that Wesley's childhood was steeped in the Mystics. His parents were great fans of the mystical writers and Charles and John grew up in a home surrounded by their works.

Initially John was wholly accepting their teachings, and they made and left a deep impression on him during the formative years of his life. Eventually, he became involved in a protracted internal struggle with mysticism which never really abated. John Wesley wrote to his brother Samuel on 23rd Nov.1736: 'I think the rock on which I had the nearest made shipwreck of the faith was the writings of the Mystics'. And in this connection he specifically names Johann Tauler and the Spanish Quietist, Miguel de Molinos.

In his Preface to the Collection of Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1739, John Wesley writes:

'Some verses, it may be observed, in the following Collection, were wrote upon the scheme of the Mystic Divines. And these, it is owned, we had once in great veneration, as the best explainers of the Gospel of Christ. But we are now convinced that we therein greatly erred, not knowing the Scriptures neither the power of God. And because this is an error which many serious minds are sooner or later exposed to, and which indeed most easily besets those who seek the Lord Jesus in sincerity, we believe ourselves indispensibly obliged, in the presence of God, and angels, and men, to declare wherein we apprehend those writers not to teach "the truth as it is in Jesus"'. And he then lays out the argument under four headings: They lay another foundation; their manner of building on it is the opposite of that prescribed by Christ (He commands us to build up one another. They advise: 'To the desert! To the desert! and God will build you up'); their superstructure has no correspondence with that laid down by the Apostle Paul; they teach another Gospel.

Again, in his diary on 5th June 1742, Wesley writes:

'I just made an end of Madam Guyon's "Short Method of Prayer". Ah, my brethren!... O that ye knew how much God is wider than man! Then you would drop the Quietists and Mystics together, and at all hazards keep to the plain, practical, written word of God'.

How many evangelicals today read Madame Guyon? Or, rather, how many will actually admit it? Well, listen even to John Wesley! He hopes you'll drop the quietists and mystics and keep to the plain, practical written word of God.

In Wesley's journal dated 5th February 1764 is written: 'I began reading Mr Hartley's ingenious Defence of the Mystic Writers. But it does not satisfy me. I must still object: 1) To their sentiments (most of them hold to justification by works); 2) To their spirit; 3) To their whole phraseology, which is both unscriptural and affectedly mysterious.'

However, in spite of all this insight and rejection of mystical teaching, Wesley was a complex character who never really shook off the foundations of the mystical teaching he had imbibed. As J. Brazier Green says in John Wesley & John Law (Epworth Press, 1945, p.179):

'Although Wesley uttered substantial indictments of the Mystics in 1739, 1756 and 1764, he was also publishing and commending their writings in his Christian Library (1749-55) and until the last years of his life'.

And it was the Mystic's doctrine of 'perfection' which laid the ground for Wesley's own teaching in this area. In an article on 'Perfectibilists' in Blunt's Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Thought (Rivington's, 1874), the writer states:

'Many mystical divines have believed that a life of profound devotional contemplation leads on to such an union with God that all which is base and sinful in the Christian's soul becomes annihilated, and there ensues a superhuman degree of participation in the Divine perfection. Such a doctrine was held by the great mystic whose works pass under the name of Dionysius, and from him was handed down to the Quietist Hesychasts, the strict Franciscans, the Molinists, the Jansenists, and the German Mystics [Dominicans such as Eckhart and Tauler], from whom it passed on to the English Methodists, among whom it has always been a special tenet that sanctification may, and ought to, go on to perfection.'

Doesn't this show how dangerous it can be to be undiscerning in what one reads for spiritual nourishment? Naive believers imagine they can pick out the "good bits" and reject the "bad bits". But why involve yourself in such play when the result could be shipwreck, and when there are many genuinely devotional works to read, among the Puritans for example?

This is why Wesley was so confused through his entire Christian life. He rightly rejected certain aspects of mystical teaching, but never shook off others. One of his biographers, Robert G. Tuttle Jr. (John Wesley: His Life and Theology, Zondervan, 1978, p.341), says that for Wesley,

'the mystical disregard for the historical significance of the Incarnation became the greatest area of incompatibility — although Wesley continued to agree with the mystics that perfection was God's purpose for all men and that it involved total communion with God.'

In spite of his wise insights into certain Christian truths, the legacy of John Wesley's teaching on sanctification lived on to become a founding principle in Finneyite Revivalism, the Holiness Movement and Early Pentecostalism. As the first half of the 19th century progressed, the old-fashioned idea of revival had gradually turned into revivalism, in which man-centred emotional experience in conversion became the vogue. (See 'Revivals & Revivalism' by Iain Murray, Banner of Truth).

Revivalistic camp meetings reflecting this emphasis became widespread. And as one researcher of this period has put it:

'Those who attended such camp meetings...generally expected their religious experiences to be as vivid as the frontier life around them. Accustomed to braining bears and battling Indians, they received their religion with great colour and excitement'.

Often, these meetings would involve phenomena such as hysteria, falling, jerking, so-called 'Holy Laughter', barking like dogs, etc. This is mysticism at its crudest, with people seeking a direct experience of what they believe to be the Divine, and making their own subjective experience the yardstick by which religious truth and efficacy would be measured. Enthusiasm is just a very crude form of mysticism.

What we discover during this period is that in place of the biblical conversion process of seeking to be declared acceptable to God through faith in a righteousness which is not our own, the emphasis began to fall on finding God through a powerful emotional experience. This is mystical revivalism.

By the mid-nineteenth century there had been a huge resurgence of interest in Wesley's sanctification teaching. Wesley had referred to this experience as (and I quote) 'a still higher salvation...immensely greater that that wrought when he was justified'. He and his followers urged people to seek this second blessing experience, and as this experience infected other Protestant groups, the body which resulted came to be known as the 'Holiness Movement'.

John Wesley, who failed to discourage weird, gratuitous phenomena in his evangelistic meetings, unwittingly fathered the wayward Holy Spirit Movements of the nineteenth and 20th centuries. As even the Roman Catholic writer, Killian McDonnell rightly observed in an article in the Roman Catholic charismatic journal New Covenant (May 1st 1972):

'John Wesley was father to much of the 19th century American religious fervour; and one of his children was the Holiness Movement which gave rise to the Pentecostalism of the 20th century'.

People such as A.B. Simpson, R.A. Torrey (first principal of the Moody Bible Institute in

 

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