BIOLA UNIVERSITY: GOING, GOING, GONE AS PRESIDENT TAKES SABBATICAL AT CATHOLIC CONTEMPLATIVE MONASTERY

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

For many years, Lighthouse Trails has written about the slide that
Biola University in Southern California has taken into contemplative
spirituality. Our first indication that the school was heading that way
was in February of 2006 when we learned that Biola was actively participating in a publication called Conversations Journal,
a magazine whose primary purpose is to bring contemplative
spirituality to the church, and editorial involvement includes names
such as Richard Foster, Basil Pennington (a Catholic mystic), Tilden
Edwards (co-founder of the panentheistic Shalem Institute), and others
of the contemplative viewpoint. Since then, we have watched as Biola
has gotten whole-heartedly on the contemplative band wagon with its
own Institute for Spiritual Formation through Biola’s Talbot School of Theology.
Fast forward nearly twelve years to the
fall of 2017 when the longstanding president of Biola, Dr. Barry
Corey, took a month-long sabbatical leave starting with a week at the Glastonbury Abbey in Massachusetts
(a Benedictine monastery) then wrote about his time of contemplative
silence at the Abbey for the students of Biola in an article titled “The Abbey Makes Space for the Soul” in the school’s student-run newspaper Chimes.
Of course, it makes sense to us that the
president of a strongly contemplative university would spend time in
silence at a Catholic mystical retreat center. We have been explaining
for many years now that contemplative prayer came to the evangelical
church from the Catholic monasteries (e.g. Thomas Merton at
the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky). So naturally, a contemplative
proponent such as Corey would be drawn to a Catholic contemplative
retreat center. It’s like going back to the roots of what has become
the foundation of Biola’s “faith.” And with the president himself
boasting of his time at the Glastonbury Abbey, no doubt, many students
will wish to follow suit. Most of them probably won’t have the money
to take a week off and fly across the country to Massachusetts
(college students are generally strapped for funds – Biola’s yearly
tuition runs over $40,000 a year). But with President Corey’s glowing
report of his time at Glastonbury, students can at least order a few
books from Glastonbury’s online bookstore.
Here are some titles Biola students might purchase from the Glastonbury bookstore: Becoming the Presence of God (Contemplative Ministry for Everyone) by Michael Ford, Finding Our Sacred Center by Henri Nouwen, Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation by Richard Rohr, Christ in All Things: Exploring Spirituality with Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self
by Rohr, and a multitude of other similar books. The majority of the
books in Glastonbury’s bookstore radiates with the contemplative message
that God is in everyone. For those who are new to
understanding contemplative spirituality, THAT is the foundation of
contemplative prayer (i.e., Spiritual Formation)
– God in everyone, which of course, if was true, then Christ died for
us in vain as man would not need a Savior separate from himself. This
is why we have given our lives up to warn the church about the
infiltration of this panentheistic spirituality that now affects over
90% of the Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. If
contemplative spirituality (as promoted at Biola) is legitimate, then
the Gospel is not needed, and those of us who believe in it are the
worst of fools.

Some reading this may be thinking, well,
just because Dr. Corey visited a contemplative monastery doesn’t mean
that Biola itself is promoting or teaching contemplative prayer. On
that matter, we could give one example after the next (see links to
some of our former research below). But let’s look at just a few
recent things from Biola’s website:

First, in Biola’s Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care,
in the Fall 2017 issue is an abstract from an article titled
“Evangelical Spiritual Disciplines: Practices for Knowing God” written
by Dr. Tom Schwanda (Associate Professor of Christian Formation &
Spirituality at Wheaton College). It reads:

Evangelicals are not known for their awareness of or appreciation for their own history. . . . “evangelicals . . . have never been introduced to the richness of their own spirituality. Many evangelicals, and more broadly Protestants, were unaware of spiritual disciplines until Richard Foster’s groundbreaking publication Celebration of Discipline first released in 1978. While Foster wrote as an evangelical he was recovering the classic spiritual disciplines
that have been shaped by 2,000 years of the Christian church. As
important as this was there is also both historical and practical value
for evangelicals to recognize the rich spiritual treasures within their stream of Christian spirituality. This article seeks to redress this weakness in one limited way by examining the origin of evangelical spiritual disciplines and their development over the past three centuries. (source; emphasis added)

What Dr. Schwanda means is that
evangelicals have been missing out on “classic spiritual disciplines”
(primarily contemplative prayer), that is until Richard Foster brought
them to us. He’s also saying that Christians don’t have to look for
these disciplines from other religions or belief systems because we
already have a heritage of Christian mysticism in our own backyard
(i.e., a long line of Catholic mystics). Ray Yungen tried to explain
this in his book, A Time of Departing. Read the section below, which should provide some insight:

In [Thomas] Merton’s efforts to become a
mystic, he found guidance from a Hindu swami, whom Merton referred to
as Dr. Bramachari. Bramachari played a pivotal role in Merton’s future
spiritual outlook. [Henri] Nouwen divulged this when he said:
“Thus he [Merton] was more impressed when
this Hindu monk pointed him to the Christian mystical tradition. . . .
It seems providential indeed that this Hindu monk relativized [sic]
Merton’s youthful curiosity for the East and made him sensitive to the
richness of Western mysticism.”
Why would a Hindu monk advocate the
Christian mystical tradition? The answer is simple: they are one in
the same. Even though the repetitive words used may differ (e.g.
Christian words: Abba, Father, etc. rather than Hindu words), the end
result is the same. And the Hindu monk knew this to be true.
Bramachari understood that Merton didn’t need to switch to Hinduism to
get the same enlightenment that he himself experienced through the
Hindu mystical tradition. In essence, Bramachari backed up what I am
trying to get across in A Time of Departing, that all the world’s
mystical traditions basically come from the same source and teach the
same precepts . . . and that source is not the God of the Old and New
Testaments. The biblical God is not interspiritual!
Evangelical Christianity is now being
invited, perhaps even catapulted, into seeing God with these new eyes
of contemplative prayer. And so the question must be asked, is Thomas
Merton’s silence, Henri Nouwen’s space, and Richard Foster’s
contemplative prayer the way in which we can know and be close to God?
Or is this actually a spiritual belief system that is contrary to the
true message that the Bible so absolutely defines—that there is only
one way to God and that is through His only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ, whose sacrifice on the Cross obtained our full salvation? ( A Time of Departing, 2nd ed., p. 199)

Second, to show that Biola is promoting contemplative spirituality, if you examine the editorial staff for the Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care,
you will see numerous contemplative and/or emergent names (Ruth Haley
Barton, Klaus Issler, Kyle Strobel, Larry Crabb, Bruce Demarest to name
a few); there is no way that the Journal is not going to be promoting contemplative spirituality.
One more example, in Biola’s class SEED570
Introduction to Spiritual Formation, one of the textbooks being used
is Adele Ahlberg Calhoun’s book, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. In a Lighthouse Trails review of this book, we quote Calhoun from her book where she states:

I would be remiss not to mention the spiritual tutors that I know only through books: Dorothy Bass, Eugene Peterson, Gerald May, M. Basil Pennington, Dallas Willard, Phyllis Tickle, Fredrick Buechner, Richard Foster, Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Jonathan Edwards [not a contemplative], Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, St. Benedict, Julian of Norwich
and many more. Their ideas, voices and examples have shaped my own
words and experience of the disciplines. (Acknowledgment’s page)

If you are not familiar with these names,
please take some time to study them. They are all mystical advocates.
Calhoun’s book does not belong in any school that calls itself
Christian. You can see on the Biola website
that Calhoun spoke at the school in 2013 as well. In our review of
Calhoun, we showed how she advocates the spirituality of Catholic
panentheists Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington.
If there is a Biola student reading this
article, we beseech you to weigh this matter out in light of
Scripture. Your president is pointing you to a spiritual outlook that
negates the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is as New Age, panentheistic,
and universalistic as it gets. Henri Nouwen, whom you have most likely
heard about in some of your classes at Biola, said this statement
near the end of his life after spending years practicing contemplative
prayer:

Today I personally believe that while
Jesus came to open the door to God’s house, all human beings can walk
through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see
it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to
God.”—From Sabbatical Journey, Henri Nouwen’s last book, page 51, 1998 Hardcover Edition

Nouwen came to this conclusion after
immersing himself in the very same contemplative silence that
Glasonbury Abbey lives by. If the above statement by Nouwen were true,
then everyone (even Hitler) will be saved, and it really doesn’t
matter what belief a person holds to because every way, every path (be
it Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism) will be a path to God.
Biola University has been introducing
students to the beliefs of Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and many other
mystics for a long time. Forty thousand dollars a year is a lot of
money to pay for an education like that!

Note: Any Biola student, professor, or staff member who would be willing to read A Time of Departing,
the book we publish that explains contemplative spirituality, we will
be happy to send a free copy. Please just email us at
editors@lighthousetrails.com. Your name will be kept confidential.
Some of our other coverage on Biola University since 2006:
2017 – Biola University Brings in Emergent Speaker for Students, as Pathway to Apostasy Continues
2017 – Evangelical
Universities & Seminaries Offering Master of Arts in Spiritual
Formation – Going into the Deeper Waters of Contemplative Spirituality
2016 – Erwin
McManus, Moody, Liberty, Cedarville, and Biola Help Pave the
Emergent/Social Justice/Progressive Future with Barefoot Tribe
2016 – Mindfulness! Heard of It? What Does it Mean, and Where is it Showing Up in Christian Circles?
2014 – Letter to the Editor: Rick Warren, the Road to Rome, and More Trouble at Biola University
2013 – Biola Conference Welcomes Ruth Haley Barton as it Continues Heartily Down Contemplative Path
2008 – Lee Strobel’s Son – Founder of Contemplative Ministry – Biola Named as “Partner,” Lee Strobel as “Supporter”
2008 – Biola Magazine Managing Editor Admits Biola Promotes Contemplative Spirituality
2008 – Biola University Student Reports on Contemplative Chapel Services – Warns Parents to Avoid Biola
2006 – The Shape of Things to Come: Biola University Embraces Contemplative Spirituality
2006 – Biola University … and Emerging Spirituality