I guess I’m a little naïve

I guess I’m a little naïve, but my last post was apparently a lot more controversial than I thought. Because a certain book was used in a certain class it now seems that our school has been "blacklisted." Check out Something’s Definitely Not Right with New Orleans Seminary and see for yourself. I don’t know how much the author knows about NOBTS or the Spiritual Formation classes that are offered, or about me, but as they say, “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
I guess in my original post I should have stated that in my class we discussed the problems with Foster’s theology. I did mention it in the comment in which I speculated about why we might have used Foster’s book in class. The problem is that when that comment was quoted in the “Something’s Not Right” blog, the part where I mention Foster’s bad theology is absent. So when you see this statement:

“This isn’t the place to unpack all of this because the point I am making is that under no circumstances should an evangelical Protestant Southern Baptist seminary ever turn to a teacher of counterfeit Christianity and attempt to pass it off as orthodox theology—period.”


you wouldn’t realize that right before this I said:


“First of all, I am aware of the problems with Foster's theology. But just because he doesn't hold to the same theological convictions that I do, doesn't mean that I should write off everything he has to say. I am willing to fight for orthodoxy as much as anyone else, but if I only read books written by people who I agree with then my reading list would be very short indeed.”

So to claim that our school is trying to pass off Foster’ theology as orthodox is just plain wrong.

BTW, here are examples of books that some might find 'questionable' that have either been required or suggested by a professor :

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris
Plato's Complete Works
Metaphysics - E. J. Lowe
Arguing for Atheism - Robin Le Poidevin
The Practice of the Presence of God - Brother Lawrence
Misquoting Jesus - Bart Ehrman
Summa Theologica - Thomas Aquinas

Is the SBC under the influence of new-age mysticism?

In a recent series of articles on a blog called Apprising Ministries, the author writes about the dangerous affect of contemplative spirituality/mysticism (CSM) in the SBC. You can find the series of articles here, here and here. Here's the section that caught my attention:

"And I have good reason to wonder because for a couple of years now I have been trying to alert the slumbering Slowly Becoming Catholic to the growing hiss of CSM spreading as a spiritual cancer within it under the umbrella of “spiritual formation.” Space only allows just a couple of quick examples. From my piece "SBC Embraces Emergent Church and Contemplative Spirituality" I showed you that the SBC's Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, “today considered a vital growing force in Southern Baptist missionary and ministry efforts,” featured the course “P1115 Spiritual Formation” taught by Dr. Faith Kim. Checking the syllabus we saw that one of the primary textbooks used by Dr. Kim was Celebration of Discipline by "Living Spiritual Teacher" Richard Foster

For those of you who don't know, Spiritual Formation is a required course in everyone's first two semesters of seminary. It is a proven fact that many students in seminary get so wrapped up in their coursework and ministries that their personal spiritual lives suffer. In order to help students overcome this situation, seminaries offer these types of classes in order to teach the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life, such as prayer, fasting and Bible study. It is also a great time to meet with a group of people for discipleship and personal accountibility. After going through two spiritual formation classes in my first year of seminary, I find that the accusations of CSM infecting SBC life are out of line. I guess I'm not able to judge though because I'm infected with CSM personally because we used Foster's book as our textbook in the first Spiritual Formation class that I took. Any of you other seminary students infected? Check out the rest of the blog and let me know if they have any grounds for concern over the CSM in the SBC.