Reformed Media Review

In this review, we consider CM, Christian Meditation: What the Bible Teaches about Meditation and Spiritual Excercises by Edmund P. Clowney and published by Regent College Publishing.

Writing in 1977, Edmund P. Clowney addressed the growing popularity of transcendental meditation (TM). TM started to develop roots in America in the 1960s and took off in part due to high-profile endorsements, including one from The Beatles. You may be tempted to think this is old news and a long-passed fad, yet with the rise of meditation apps such as Headspace, Calm, or Sam Harris’s Waking Up, Clowney still has much to say for our contemporary context.

This book’s 108 pages are divided into four major sections: (1) TM Challenges the Christian Church (2) The Yoga of Discipleship (3) The Delight of Communion, and (4) The Practice of Praise.

As Clowney unpacks the details of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s system of TM, he pulls no punches, remarking that no Christian could partake of the initiation ceremony without violating the second commandment given that gurus are venerated and the Hindu gods are invoked (p. 8). Such candor is refreshing and timely. In our present day, people seek to approach meditation from a purely secular vantage point, which may lead many Christians to think these spiritual disciplines are neutral or at least compatible or reclaimable within a Christian worldview. But there are deeper matters at stake. This is not a mere matter of form but also one of spiritual substance.

The discipline of TM, for example, is rooted in Hindu monistic philosophy. Clowney writes,

Stages have been marked out in gaining this [transcendental] experience. First is the state of pure awareness. In this state we are no longer aware of any thing or idea but only of awareness itself. The repetition of a word or syllable aids in this, for the mantra first blocks out all other ideas and then loses all meaning or suggestive power of its own. The resulting state of mind is called transcendental consciousness. Beyond this lie cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness, and unity consciousness. These are progressive steps in a “pure” awareness that experiences identity with the cosmos and the absolute. The oneness with the absolute that the Maharishi pictures as the goal of human destiny is really the opposite of Christian fellowship with the living God. It is not the experience of knowing God but the delusion of being God.

In other words, it is pantheistic. It is directly opposed to the wonder and joy we come to experience through covenant. It fundamentally misses what Geerhardus Vos called the deeper Protestant conception. It also presupposes that God cannot be known except through this transcendental experience via a different type of consciousness. Yet God has revealed himself to us. Even his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived through the things that have been made (Rom. 1:20). Clowney explains how Christian meditation is (1) rooted in God’s truth, (2) responds to the love of God, and (3) is an excercise of praise unto him.

It is critical for Christians to be self-conscious about their practices. The type of meditation described in God’s word can bring focus to our lives especially when we have become complacent, living on auto-pilot. Clowney remarks,

But too often, through lack of meditation, Christians become secularized and their capacity to see the world before the Lord shrivels. It is not a fixed stare at a stone or a tree that aids meditation. Such fixity leads to illusion not perception. But a focused seeing, a contemplative examination of both the richness and reality of one of God’s works—that is productive if done in fellowship with the Creator. If you are looking for a place to begin, try meditating on your own hand—not on one spot, but on your whole hand as God’s creation. Read Psalm 139, then look at your hand again. Write down some of your reflections. Then praise God for your hand, claim his cleansing of your hand, and seek his blessing on it (cf. Ps. 90:17). How will you use it in his service?

When influential voices ranging from Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan to Michael Pollan suggest or propose the use of psychedelics as a means for accessing a greater reality, Clowney reminds us that God’s word advocates for the reality of God’s presence accessible through his personal revelation. We do not need to escape ourselves, to disintegrate the ego, in order to commune with the triune God. We simply must seek him in spirit and in truth.

Clowney’s CM, Christian Meditation is a delightfully succinct yet significant book for our present moment. It is a call and encouragement for all Christians to take seriously their daily spiritual disciplines and to seek the Lord while he may be found (Isa. 55:6).

Participants: Camden Bucey

In this review, we consider CM, Christian Meditation: What the Bible Teaches about Meditation and Spiritual Excercises by Edmund P. Clowney and published by Regent College Publishing.

Writing in 1977, Edmund P. Clowney addressed the growing popularity of transcendental meditation (TM). TM started to develop roots in America in the 1960s and took off in part due to high-profile endorsements, including one from The Beatles. You may be tempted to think this is old news and a long-passed fad, yet with the rise of meditation apps such as Headspace, Calm, or Sam Harris’s Waking Up, Clowney still has much to say for our contemporary context.

This book’s 108 pages are divided into four major sections: (1) TM Challenges the Christian Church (2) The Yoga of Discipleship (3) The Delight of Communion, and (4) The Practice of Praise.

As Clowney unpacks the details of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s system of TM, he pulls no punches, remarking that no Christian could partake of the initiation ceremony without violating the second commandment given that gurus are venerated and the Hindu gods are invoked (p. 8). Such candor is refreshing and timely. In our present day, people seek to approach meditation from a purely secular vantage point, which may lead many Christians to think these spiritual disciplines are neutral or at least compatible or reclaimable within a Christian worldview. But there are deeper matters at stake. This is not a mere matter of form but also one of spiritual substance.

The discipline of TM, for example, is rooted in Hindu monistic philosophy. Clowney writes,

Stages have been marked out in gaining this [transcendental] experience. First is the state of pure awareness. In this state we are no longer aware of any thing or idea but only of awareness itself. The repetition of a word or syllable aids in this, for the mantra first blocks out all other ideas and then loses all meaning or suggestive power of its own. The resulting state of mind is called transcendental consciousness. Beyond this lie cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness, and unity consciousness. These are progressive steps in a “pure” awareness that experiences identity with the cosmos and the absolute. The oneness with the absolute that the Maharishi pictures as the goal of human destiny is really the opposite of Christian fellowship with the living God. It is not the experience of knowing God but the delusion of being God.

In other words, it is pantheistic. It is directly opposed to the wonder and joy we come to experience through covenant. It fundamentally misses what Geerhardus Vos called the deeper Protestant conception. It also presupposes that God cannot be known except through this transcendental experience via a different type of consciousness. Yet God has revealed himself to us. Even his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived through the things that have been made (Rom. 1:20). Clowney explains how Christian meditation is (1) rooted in God’s truth, (2) responds to the love of God, and (3) is an excercise of praise unto him.

It is critical for Christians to be self-conscious about their practices. The type of meditation described in God’s word can bring focus to our lives especially when we have become complacent, living on auto-pilot. Clowney remarks,

But too often, through lack of meditation, Christians become secularized and their capacity to see the world before the Lord shrivels. It is not a fixed stare at a stone or a tree that aids meditation. Such fixity leads to illusion not perception. But a focused seeing, a contemplative examination of both the richness and reality of one of God’s works—that is productive if done in fellowship with the Creator. If you are looking for a place to begin, try meditating on your own hand—not on one spot, but on your whole hand as God’s creation. Read Psalm 139, then look at your hand again. Write down some of your reflections. Then praise God for your hand, claim his cleansing of your hand, and seek his blessing on it (cf. Ps. 90:17). How will you use it in his service?

When influential voices ranging from Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan to Michael Pollan suggest or propose the use of psychedelics as a means for accessing a greater reality, Clowney reminds us that God’s word advocates for the reality of God’s presence accessible through his personal revelation. We do not need to escape ourselves, to disintegrate the ego, in order to commune with the triune God. We simply must seek him in spirit and in truth.

Clowney’s CM, Christian Meditation is a delightfully succinct yet significant book for our present moment. It is a call and encouragement for all Christians to take seriously their daily spiritual disciplines and to seek the Lord while he may be found (Isa. 55:6).

Participants: Camden Bucey

A Book on Notetaking? It’s Not What You Might Expect Amazon showed me Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers about twenty times in sponsored posts before I finally broke down to see what it was all about. I decided to retrieve a sample chapter on my Kindle. I couldn’t put the book down and read it well into the night. My wife even asked me what in the world I was reading, to which I sheepishly confessed it was a book on taking notes. This book is not about Reformed theology, church history, or even philosophy, but I’m confident many of you will be intrigued. I loved this book so much that I ordered several copies to give as gifts to friends. This book isn’t what you might expect. It’s not a self-help book with tips for becoming a better student, for listening better, and capturing your thoughts for better processing and recall later on. I believe that following the model suggested in this book may in fact make you a better student and researcher. It will certainly help you to process your thoughts. But this book goes much deeper than a series of tips and tricks. It’s a proposition for a more disciplined—yet much more liberating—process of contemplation and writing. The Heart of the Book At the heart of Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes is a somewhat idiosyncratic notetaking system developed by German sociologist Niklaus Luhmann. He used a system that is known as a Zettelkasten, or notes box. Ahrens categorizes notes into three types. • Ephemeral notes (these get thrown out) • Literature notes (write these as you read a book, but keep them separate) • Zettelkasten (process your literature notes and write permanent notes—one per idea)

Link your note to the other notes in your existing network or note-ideas.

In my conceptualization, Luhmann’s method is a form of atomic writing. You must force yourself to formulate your thoughts and write them as if writing them for someone else. This can be difficult, and you may find much personal inertia to this approach. That’s because you think you know the subject matter better than you do. Writing is the thinking process. By using this method, Luhmann was able to write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles before he died at the age of 70. That is impressive. But perhaps even more impressive than his scholarly output is the nature of his scholarship. He was able to approach subjects in fresh ways, finding surprising connections among disparate disciplines. This was due in part to the unexpected connections made by his Zettelkasten.

Luhmann wrote his notes on cards and filed them in a physical catalogue. There is much to be said about the benefits of handwriting and the tactile qualities of this form of note-taking, yet there are also many limitations—particularly with linking and searchability. For those who are interested in a digital approach to Zettelkasten, an entire ecosystem is developing around what generally is called Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). People not only use the Zettelkasten method and its variants for academic research and writing, but also for all types of creative work, personal journaling, and even for CRM (customer/constituent relationship management).

I am currently exploring how to link my thoughts as I read and contemplate Scripture. Intelligently linking all the Scripture references in my notes and sermons may prove to be immensely useful when approaching related texts in the future.

Amazon showed me Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers about twenty times in sponsored posts before I finally broke down to see what it was all about. I decided to retrieve a sample chapter on my Kindle. I couldn’t put the book down and read it well into the night. My wife even asked me what in the world I was reading, to which I sheepishly confessed it was a book on taking notes.

This book is not about Reformed theology, church history, or even philosophy, but I’m confident many of you nevertheless will be intrigued. I loved this book so much that I ordered several copies to give as gifts to friends. I should say that two of the first five paperbacks I ordered were very poorly bound. These appear to be self-published through Amazon’s CreateSpace. The glue on the bindings did not hold well, and pages were falling out of the defective copies. I asked for replacement copies, and Amazon promptly sent them—even before receiving the bad copies in return. The new copies were fine. Whether or not they will hold up in the long run is an open question. To appropriate the profundity of Samuel Roy Hagar, “only time will tell if [they] stand the test of time.”

This book isn’t what you might expect. It’s not a self-help book with tips for becoming a better student, a better listener, or to improve your ability to capture thoughts for future contemplation and recall. I believe that following the model suggested in this book may in fact make you a better student and researcher. It will certainly help you to process your thoughts. But this book goes much deeper than a series of tips and tricks. It’s a proposal for a more disciplined—yet much more liberating—process of contemplation and writing.

I need to warn you now, that for some of you, what you’re going to hear next is going to send you down a deep, deep rabbit hole on the Internet, and what you find will affect many aspects of your life. Consider yourself warned.

At the heart of Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes is a somewhat idiosyncratic notetaking system developed by German sociologist Niklaus Luhmann. He used a system that is known as a Zettelkasten, or notes box. If you’re old enough to remember physical card catalogues, Luhmann used two of these. Ahrens proposes dividing your note-taking into three types.

• Ephemeral notes (these eventually get thrown out)
• Literature notes (write these as you read a book, but keep them separate from the next type)
• Zettel (process your literature notes and write permanent notes—one note per idea)

Once written, you must then link a note to the other notes in your existing network of note-ideas.

In my conceptualization, Luhmann’s method is a form of atomic writing. You must force yourself to formulate your thoughts and write them as if writing them for someone else. This can be difficult, and you may find much personal inertia to this approach. That’s because you think you know the subject matter better than you do. Writing is the thinking process.

By using this method, Luhmann was able to write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles before he died at the age of 70. That is impressive. But perhaps even more impressive than his scholarly output is the nature of his scholarship. He was able to approach subjects in fresh ways, finding surprising connections among disparate disciplines. This was due in part to the unexpected connections made within his Zettelkasten.

Luhmann wrote his notes on cards and filed them in a physical catalogue. There is much to be said about the benefits of handwriting and the tactile qualities of this form of note-taking, yet there are also many limitations—particularly with linking and searchability. For those who are interested in a digital approach to creating a Zettelkasten, an entire ecosystem is developing around what generally is called Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). People not only use the Zettelkasten method and its variants for academic research and writing, but also for all types of creative work, personal journaling, and even for CRM (customer/constituent relationship management).

I am currently exploring how to link my thoughts as I read and contemplate Scripture. Intelligently linking all the Scripture references in my notes and sermons may prove to be immensely useful when approaching related texts in the future.

• Sönke Ahrens’s website
• Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen Notes
• Obsidian
• Zettlr
• Roam
• Notion
• Nick Milo, Linking Your Thinking
• Bryan Jenks, Personal Knowledge Management and Zettelkasten playlist on YouTube

Participants: Camden Bucey

Michael A. G. Haykin, “‘The Best Friend in the Worst Time’: Pandemics in Church History” The Banner of Truth Magazine, No. 689, February 2021, pp. 4–8. We are prone to think we are the only people ever to experience something like our present pandemic. This last year and last, we have heard the phrase “in these unprecedented times” so often that it has become a cliché. In five brief pages, Michael Haykin surveys the church’s experience with pandemics throughout history. Our times are not so unprecedented as we might think. Still, it is important to consider what is unique about our circumstances even while we contemplate what lessons we might learn from church history.

# On Our Radar

Crowe, Brandon D. The Path of Faith: A Biblical Theology of Covenant and Law (Essential Studies in Biblical Theology) (IVP Academic, March 2, 2021). 208 Pages. Paperback

Harmon, Matthew S. The Servant of the Lord and His Servant People: Tracing a Biblical Theme through the Canon (New Studies in Biblical Theology series, edited by D. A. Carson) (IVP Academic, January 2021). 272 pages. Paperback

Maag, Karin. Worshiping with the Reformers (IVP Academic, February 2021). 248 pages. Paperback.

Carrick, John. Jonathan Edwards and the Immediacy of God (Wipf and Stock, December 2020). 174 pages. Hardcover or paperback.

Reeves, Michael. Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord (Union Series) (Crossway, January 2021). 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket.

Bullinger, Henry. The Decades of Henry Bullinger, 2 Volumes (Reformation Heritage Books, January 2021). 2055 pages. Hardcovers with dust jacket.

Davies, Samuel. Sermons of the Rev. Samuel Davies, 3 Volumes (Reformation Heritage Books, February 2021). 2016 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket.

Carr, Simeonetta. Phillis Wheatley (Christian Biographies for Young Readers) (Reformation Heritage Books, January 2021). 64 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated.

Camden Bucey reviews Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters (IVP Academic, 2020) by Dr. Sandra L. Richter, the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. In this book, Dr. Richter addresses humanity's role as stewards of creation—those entrusted to care for that which God has placed in their charge. In exploring this theme, Richter addresses issues such as the ethics of sustainable agriculture, the consumer's role within the supply chain, and even mining practices and pollution in light of Scriptural examples and biblical-theological themes.

Danny Olinger and Camden Bucey discuss Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, which raises many questions about the nature of faith, ordination, and the sacraments through the lens of Roman Catholic theology. Greene said, “The aim of the book was to oppose the power of the sacraments and the indestructibility of the Church on the one hand with, on the other, the merely temporal of an essentially Communist state” (Goodman, 88). John Updike called this novel, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece.”

Danny Olinger is General Secretary for the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Danny Olinger and Camden Bucey discuss Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, which raises many questions about the nature of faith, ordination, and the sacraments through the lens of Roman Catholic theology. Greene said, “The aim of the book was to oppose the power of the sacraments and the indestructibility of the Church on the one hand with, on the other, the merely temporal power of an essentially Communist state” (Godman, 88). John Updike called this novel, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece.”

Danny Olinger is General Secretary for the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

• Christ the Center episode 644, Catholic Theology and the Novels of Graham Greene
• Christ the Center episode 560 with Lawrence Feingold, The Beatific Vision and the Eucharist in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Danny Olinger

Jim Cassidy discusses two recent publications from Lexham Press. In Challenging the Spirit of Modernity: A Study of Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution, Harry Van Dyke places Groen van Prinsterer's foundational work into historical context. Van Prinsterer addressed the inherent tension between the church and secular society, and Van Dyke demonstrates how this work still speaks into the fractured relationship between religion and society. Abraham Kuyper's Collected Works in Public Theology was created in partnership with the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society and the Acton Institute. It marks a historic moment in Kuyper studies.

Jim Cassidy discusses two recent publications from Lexham Press. In Challenging the Spirit of Modernity: A Study of Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution, Harry Van Dyke places Groen van Prinsterer’s foundational work into historical context. Van Prinsterer addressed the inherent tension between the church and secular society, and Van Dyke demonstrates how this work still speaks into the fractured relationship between religion and society. Abraham Kuyper’s Collected Works in Public Theology was created in partnership with the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society and the Acton Institute. It marks a historic moment in Kuyper studies.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy