Is Yoga Safe for Christians?

One of the exercises I have begun to cherish is yoga. After sitting at a desk all day, my back or shoulders may be tight, and the stretches I learned in middle school gym class don’t really cut it. So, when we bought a Wii Fit I started doing the yoga to stretch several times a week and it has helped tremendously with my sore and tight spots, as well as getting me more in tune with how my body is connected.

This unfortunately, in the eyes of Al Mohler, makes me a wishy-washy Christian on a road to pagan-Christian syncretism:

“Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?” (The Subtle Body: Should Christians Practice Yoga?”

Mohler is saying yoga is unsafe for a Christian’s spirituality, which I find off base for my own yoga exercises, which consist of a video game and a balance board. No chanting. No meditation or emptying of the mind. Just stretching that works better than simply touching your toes and rolling my neck around like I did in gym class.  However, Mohler reminds me that this view of the physicality of yoga is wrong: “There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose.” Mohler, is pointing out that the physical exercise in yoga is spiritual, even when I am just exercising. This point I simply don’t understand. Exercise can be harmful or helpful to our spiritual life, depending on our relationship to our body image and eating habits, but using yoga for exercise in and of itself is not sinful.

There is a gymnasium on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary campus, where Mohler is president. It consists of various weight machines and benches, as well as saunas, treadmills, free weights and other exercise machines.  This is not a Christian method of exercising. We got all those saunas and free weights from the Greeks and Romans. You know, those pagans who worshiped multiple deities and burned Christians on the stake. Those people. So how can we accept one pagan method of exercise over another? We can’t, and we shouldn’t, for this is exercise. Just as when I lift weights I am not buying into Greco-Roman mystery religions or gnosticism, I am not participating in Hindu religious practice when I do yoga. I am just exercising.

Now some Christian adherents to yoga should take heed to the warning that Mohler gives concerning the spiritual components that may be included in yoga classes. Just as we don’t exercise to purge the body in a gnostic fashion, we should not participate in another religion’s spiritual practices. But, we should not stray from the physical as Mohler suggests. Mohler argues “Christians are not called…to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine.” What Mohler is saying is not Christian Instead, his view of the physical is leaning towards gnosticism. A Christian understanding of the body is that it is the image of God. God formed humanity out of the dust of the earth: very physical stuff. We are connected to God through the combination of our spirituality and physicality—the two cannot be separated. Jesus himself connected to God and knew God through his physical body, and his act of redemption for us was death and resurrection in the flesh. And when Jesus comes again, the kingdom and the resurrection will be both a physical and spiritual reality.

So is yoga safe for Christians? If it is treated as exercise, certainly so. But like anything, if it becomes something that leads us away from the kingdom of God, then it is not good. Turning anything other than Christ’s gospel into a religion is to go astray, and that applies to exercise as well as to shopping, gardening, sex, or work. In reality, what is truly unsafe for the Christian is the dichotomy between physical and spiritual that Mohler espouses, to not allow our physical bodies to participate in the worship of God. Let us pray every day that God not only renews our minds, but that he also establishes the works of our hands, the physical work we accomplish each day with our physical bodies as an act of worship before God, as we look to him who came in the flesh for us.

The Only Safe Way to be Friends with Sinners

There’s a perceived tension in the Christian life about being friends with sinners. We might backslide, we might get into a sticky situation, or we might have our reputations tarnished before other Christians for our unsavory friends. Jesus comes to the rescue for us, thankfully, because he was a “friend of sinners” when the Pharisees, or anyone else, for that matter, would not as much as wave.

I have a problem with this Jesus was a friend of sinners, so you should be one too formulation. The problem is, when you think about it, Jesus being a friend to sinners wasn’t that big of deal for him—it was only a big deal for those on the outside looking in. Anyway, he certainly didn’t have a choice in the matter. Since he was the only sinless guy around, he either had to go off and live out his days as a hermit with no social interaction or be friends with a sinner. Those were the only two options he had.

We are stuck with the same two choices. Since we’re sinners in a whole world of sinners, we can flee to the wilderness and have no friends or decide to stay put and talk to somebody or share a meal with them. That’s all there is to it.  The only safe way to be friends with sinners is to just be friends with them, because you’re one, too.

Is Laughter The Best Medicine?

My article, “Is Laughter The Best Medicine?” is now published in The Curator Magazine. An excerpt:

The old adage is that laughter is the best medicine, and some kind of medicine is needed in a world where one of the biggest TV shows in the country follows the misadventures of a bunch of beach-loving, hard-partying Italian-Americans stuck in arrested development. Laughter seems to take the edge off the world for those who want to cut through the mass-marketing of plastic trinkets and overwhelming cultural garbage of reality shows and politicians scheming about spending billions (or trillions). Laughing at the news every few days is an act of cultural catharsis, removing the stench of our world’s stupidity by laughing it away. But is a medicine that causes you to purge and forget, to just laugh the world’s wrongs away like you laugh it off after you fall out of a chair, really the best medicine?

Feeling Good About Hindsight

There are times, too many too count, when I look back on things in my life and in hindsight realize I did something foolish, illogical, stupid, or without caution. There are times though, when I can look back on decisions and feel good that I did make the right decision. James K.A. Smith brilliantly explains the thought process I took to make my decision about sitting on my M.A., which I got without incurring debt, and holding off on a Ph.D. in literature:

Here’s the baseline advice I tell my students: do not go into debt for graduate study. At least not a doctoral program in philosophy, theology, or literature. There might be a calculus in which taking on debt makes sense for a law degree, an MBA, etc. But in the fields we’re talking about, you should not be taking out loans to do a PhD.

In other words, if you do not get a “full ride” to a PhD program–that is, if you don’t get full tuition remission plus an assistantship (stipend)–then the Lord is telling you something. I really mean that. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh or callous. But if you’re trying to discern your future, and you’re admitted to a program but don’t receive funding (which probably only happens at lower tier schools anyway), that’s the Spirit speaking to you loudly and clearly. I’m not saying that will be easy news to receive. But take a breath, step back, and hear it for what it is. (From “So You Want to Go to Grad School: Money“)

I throw all I had at PhD applications to schools that offer funding and came up empty, and then I had to make the hard decision not to pursue a PhD for the time being precisely because we have no deb,t so why sink a ship when it’s floating so well? It’s hard to swallow. If I could, my dream job would be to win the lottery and get three PhDs. I always want to learn and teach, learn and teach…but there is something better out there. The system of higher education is changing so much that it feels comforting to not be going into a PhD program on a stipend with a baby on the way and little to no chance of landing a job when I get out. I’m debt free, an adjunct professor, and ready for any doors to open for the PhD, but if it’s not for another 5-10 years that’s fine with me.

How the Holy Spirit Moves Today…

I was asked to contribute to the Patheos network’s theoblogger reflection on “How the Holy Spirit Moves Today…in 100 words or less.”  You can read my response here.

There are some other great contributors, including Brian McLaren, Tripp Fuller,Monica A. Coleman, Sam Hamilton-Poore, Callid Keefe-Perry, Amy Julia Becker, Byron Wade,Carl Gregg, Alyce McKenzie and Bruce Epperly.

I really appreciated Monica and Amy’s responses.  I think they capture the beauty of Pentecost.
The whole post also made TextWeek as the link of the week and is now linked in their lectionary weblogs section.

The Postmodern Piper?

Sometimes I just read things and laugh.  Laugh hard.  I don’t really know how to explain the lunacy of this quote, so I’ll just reproduce it:

Another symptom of postmodernism’s influence on evangelical hermeneutics is what could be called “middle-ground mania.” The interpretive atmosphere of today appears to impose an insatiable appetite for theologians to have the best of two worlds-to locate themselves between established positions-thereby mixing literal and non-literal hermeneutical principles in various combinations.

John Piper provides an example of this by classifying himself in three theological camps, dispensationalism, covenant theology, and new covenant theology. (Robert Thomas, “Postmodern Hermeneutics and Biblical Prophecy“)

Piper as an example of postmodernism?  Bizarre. Far-fetched.  Unreal.  Those are the words that first come to mind.  This use of postmodernism as a bat to bash people with has gone way too far.  How can the definition of postmodernism be stretched to to include finding middle ground with people?  Does postmodernism just mean compromise now?  That’s kind of silly.

Piper, as well as any other large personality, can be open to lots of criticism and misinterpretation.  But there are two things I am certain about when it concerns John Piper: he’s currently on sabbatical and he is not a postmodernist.  He has always argued against the postmodern view.  While I don’t agree with Piper on a lot, he certainly gets his definitions of postmodernism semi-right, he uses the pop culture definition of postmodernism (plurality, poor doctrine and mysticism) and not the actual theological or philosophical definitions.  Yet, he still sticks with the pop definition, which is within the range of possibilities (postmodernism gone wrong equals Piper’s definition of postmodernism).  The equation of Piper with postmodernism is way out in left field.  Like outside of the ball park, way out in outer space, far beyond the Milky Way.  It just plain doesn’t make any real sense.