Christian Mysticism

mysticism

noun

mys·​ti·​cism ˈmi-stə-ˌsi-zəm 

1: the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality reported by mystics

2: the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight)

3a: vague speculation: a belief without sound basis b: a theory postulating the possibility of direct and intuitive acquisition of ineffable knowledge or power

Mysticism has existed for as long as man has conceived of a god. Christianity was no sooner born than it began to find root in the minds of the new converts. It has been a constant struggle throughout the history of the church and our tendencies toward mystical thought and forms of worship have driven many outside of orthodoxy. In its most subtle forms, it has affected us all in varying degrees. We should be aware of it and its dangers to the faith.  

The popularity of the "Jesus Calling" series by Sarah Young has done much to promote mystical thought and practice within the Church. It almost always comes by some well-meaning though misguided individual. In her popular devotions, she gives daily encouragement from the Savior Himself. The idea is simple, during times of meditation and contemplation, she receives these thoughts from Christ, and she then pens them down in the first person. Christians all over the world are now reading these thoughts as daily devotions as though Christ himself was speaking to her by direct revelation in real time. 

However, long before I heard of Sarah Young and "Jesus Calling" I was doing the same thing myself. In the Christian circles that I was associated with I was instructed by a Pastor to keep a notepad next to the bed; you never knew when you might have a dream from the Lord and need to write it down so as not to forget it. People or ministers would get a "word from the Lord" for you, and it was considered wise to write those words down. You wouldn't want to forget a personal message from God as to miss it when it happens or forget to do it. If you woke up at night and couldn't go back to sleep, you were to assume God wanted to show you something, so you would get up and pray or study to try and determine what he was saying.

Other forms of mysticism I practiced were in times of prayer. If there was a decision I needed to make, I would go spend time in prayer, mostly then speaking in ecstatic Pentecostal (tongue speaking) while expecting some thought or unction that would direct me in the right direction. It is not uncommon for non-Pentecostal Christians during prayer to wait and listen in their minds for God to give them specific instructions as answers to their prayers. Sometimes simple thoughts or events are interpreted as answers to those inquiries. 

In studying the Bible, if a particular scripture seemed to draw our attention more than usual, we were to consider God wanting to show us something about that passage. Whatever understanding could be gained from it during that time would be considered God's instructions or revelation concerning that passage. All of these things are mysticism and should not be a part of Christian worship. 

This all comes from our desire to feel close to God, if we can experience something, a feeling, or a perceived thought from God, we feel as though we have bridged the gap and touched the figure of God! 

It might be asked what good is our prayer if God doesn't answer or speak back to us? The answer of course rests in the fact God does hear and respond to our prayers, He just doesn't engage in mysticism when He does. We as Christians I am afraid are confusing feelings with assurance. It is not necessary to hear something in our head or look for some mystical experience to have an assurance that God has heard us and will answer our prayers. 

Our life that is hidden in Christ in God is not subjective, but a life of objective obedience. The author of Hebrews tells us, Hebrews 1:1-2 ESV

(1)  Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,

(2)  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

God truly is speaking to us today, He is doing so through His word. The Holy Scriptures is His revelation on the earth today. Our time spent in the word is time spent with God himself. It is a simple and objective way to live, it removes all the shadows and uncertainty of our walk with Him. If we need direction concerning some change in our lives, we can pray to Him and ask him to guide us in His providence. Then we can get up and make our decision with confidence knowing His providence will eventually bring us where He has determined. Romans 8:27-28 ESV

(27)  And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

(28)  And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Sometimes it might appear to us we made the wrong decision, but all the while God was using an adverse and uncomfortable situation to grow us in grace and assurance. In those times, if we were walking in mysticism and thought we heard some voice in our head or followed some omen we perceived to be from God and it all went wrong; well then our assurance would be shattered and our mind confused because we must have missed God. We get all distracted trying to follow all these perceived and subjective messages instead of a confident walk with God in His word. 

Christian mysticism is dangerous, many well-meaning Christians have been led astray. Many have become disillusioned and confused, even to an abandonment of the faith. It changes the Christian way of life into a life similar to other world religions. There are all kinds of religions promising mystical connections with God. Their testimonies sound intriguing, even desirable, and no doubt they are experiencing something. Christianity is unlike the religions of the world, it is not man trying to get to God, it is God coming to man in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Britannica identifies mysticism as being taught by the Apostal Paul and John stating, "The earliest form of Christian mysticism was the Christ-mysticism of Paul and John. Although Christian mysticism in its traditional expression has centered on the desire for union with God, Christ-mysticism has always been present in the church." They point to such verses as, Philippians 3:8-11 ESV

(8)  Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

(9)  and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—

(10)  that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,

(11)  that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Such verses in Scripture Christianity are sometimes perceived to be mystical, this is a wrong view of Christianity. This is not Paul seeking some mystical experience with God. It is a response to his own salvation and calling into the ministry. It is Paul recounting His desire to walk in active objective obedience to the highest measure possible. There were outstanding encounters with supernatural gifts and abilities experienced during the Apostolic times, all of which served their purpose ordained by God. However, those experiences were never meant to be the average everyday life of the believer throughout church history. Every time someone has tried to recover those times it has led to unorthodox and damaging practices. 

Peter assures us it is not visions, voices, thoughts in our head, and experiences that are to determine our choices, but the Scriptures. 

2 Peter 1:16-21 ESV

(16)  For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

(17)  For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,”

(18)  we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

(19)  And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts,

(20)  knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

(21)  For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Paul warns us mysticism will always be present with us, 2 Timothy 4:2-4 ESV

(2)  preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.

(3)  For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,

(4)  and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

We will turn away from listening to the word and wander off into these mystical means of communication, seeking personal fulfillment in some kind of experience with God. John points us back to fellowship with God through His word and our obedience to it. Real objective life of obedience to God's word does of itself bring experience, great experience of peace and assurance, great grace, and hope of salvation! 1 John 1:6-7 ESV

(6)  If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

(7)  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

May God bless,

David

CBGM and the Bible

 

So what is the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM)? I'm not quite sure, it sounds complicated and probably is, however, let's see if we can get it down to a level that even I can understand.

We probably need to start with a little on Bible translations. Until recently Bible translators essentially had three choices of Greek texts: the one based on the oldest and considered by some, probably the best manuscripts called “Alexandrian” manuscripts. They are really old and surprisingly in very good condition. Also the Textus Receptus or TR (used for the KJV) and earlier English translations. The term Textus Receptus is Latin meaning "Received Text". Desiderius Erasmus first published this collection in 1516 and the edition was given the title Textus Receptus in 1633. Erasmus was the author of five published editions from 1516 to 1535. His Greek text was based on seven minuscule manuscripts of the Byzantine text type that he had access to in Basel at the time, and he relied mainly on two of these, both dating from the twelfth century. It seems he did not have a Greek text of Revelation to work from, therefore he translated Revelation from the Latin Vulgate into Greek. Then there is the Majority Text or MT (similar to the TR but differing from it in significant places of especially weak manuscript support). The Majority Text is a Greek text produced by a method within textual criticism that uses “majority rules” to determine which variant is most likely to be original. While the Majority Text method does result in the most likely original reading in most instances, it should not be employed universally or exclusively. The "Alexandrian" text could be found either in the NA (Nestle-Aland) or in the Greek NT published by the UBS (United Bible Societies). The TR and MT are similar because they are both Byzantine texts. Nearly all modern Bible translations were, and continue to be, based on the NA text. The NKJV, as its title implies, has followed the TR with noting readings in the MT and NA. The KJV and earlier English translations used only the TR (Textus Receptus) published by Erasmus as its base. It is from these sources we have our English Bibles today to study and read from. 

As we have discussed before, changes or errors occur by the copiest over time, and in any passage of which there is more than one version in the extant Greek manuscripts, the goal is to determine the original reading, which must have been changed.  Of course, we cannot talk to the scribe who copied the manuscript, he has been dead a very long time. So assumptions are made that he is competent and conscientious unless the manuscript he has produced is a sure nuff mess. The high degree of agreement that we find among the manuscripts tends to confirm these assumptions. The methods listed above have produced the text we are now reading.

These manuscripts we are told disagree in many places, and this is where CBGM comes in. Using this method we now know that the level of agreement between all the passages that feature variants in the General Epistles at least averages about 88% and this agreement they call “coherence”. This understanding has caused them to consider that there were “families” of manuscripts with differing levels of quality. A family of manuscripts would be something like the early (Alexandrian) family and the later manuscripts, would be called the Byzantine family. There are many more Majority Texts and the third family is usually called the Western text. There are much fewer Greek Western texts than the East. This is due to the fact the West adopted Latin early on in the Church and culture while the East continued to use the Greek language for another 1000 years. As you can imagine, there are many more Eastern Greek manuscripts available. However, if we wanted to add the Western Latin texts we could tilt the scales back in favor of the West. 

A characteristic of the Byzantine family is that when there are differences with the earlier manuscripts, the Byzantine readings seem “easier”, sometimes the reading is smoother, and at other times it avoids a theological difficulty or some other problem. This has led some to the conclusion that the Byzantine family was the result of misguided scribal attempts to correct or improve upon the original and therefore was to be rejected. Therefore, many prefer the more ancient Alexandrian manuscripts. Advocates of the Byzantine family have argued that the scribes wisely corrected corrupt readings found in the earlier manuscripts. We know under the rule of Charlemagne libraries were built and scribes were gathered for this very purpose. It is very possible the same occurred with all of the Byzantine family of manuscripts.

Some scholars have argued the claim that we have the original text whenever the two leading manuscripts of the family–Aleph (Sinaiticus or 01) and B (Vaticanus or 03) agree. They are both old manuscripts from the 4th century. Most think that assumption is going a bit too far, they prefer a more contextual approach. For example, a reading found in B (Vaticanus) is taken seriously at the outset because (Vaticanus) is an old (fourth-century) manuscript rated as very high in quality. Whereas a more contextual approach would not consider B’s pedigree, as all-important. The reading is judged to a high degree by how likely it seems to be the original, given the context and any transcriptional issues. It seems that when using CBGM, the manuscripts play no part in the analysis; they are merely the physical carriers of texts, and only the texts they carry matter. Consequently, the date of an individual manuscript is of doubtful or no importance, and users of the method are told to set aside previously held views of the quality of any manuscript, which can get in the way of doing an objective analysis of the text. This is obviously very different and will take some getting used to. However, getting used to it we must, for it appears that CBGM will probably be the future of textual criticism for the forseeable future.

CBGM is basically a computerized database, a collection of all the variant readings in carefully selected Greek NT manuscripts (well over 100 so far) converted to machine-readable code for the purpose of analysis. At present, only the general epistles and Acts are the only ones that have been converted. Because all of this data has to be entered into the system, it looks like it will be a long time before we see a fully revised Old and New Testament produced by CBGM. In the meantime, we get to see slowly, just how efficient and promising it may or may not be.

Coherence is the basis of CBGM, it is the level of agreement between any two texts that are found in any two manuscripts, down to individual characters and spaces. An example would be if I printed this post out on paper, and then copied it with a photocopier, it would produce the same document exactly. It would have 100% Coherence between it and the original. Whereas if I copied the text by hand numerous times, the errors induced by my mistakes would cause less than 100% coherence. If I make very few mistakes, it might be as high as 98% coherence, if I rush it and induce many, it might be as low as 50% coherence. 

Now let us consider how some of these variants or non-coherent changes occur. Obviously, in the example above the variant reading would be a result of a mistake, the amount of mistakes directly relating to my ability to copy by hand accurately and the amount of pain-staking time I wanted to take to do it. Let's add to the equation several people copying the same text. Say 20 people copy it and every year 20 more people copy the text from their copies and so on for a decade. As you can imagine, after a decade you would have some copies with more coherence than others. Some errors would have been induced by accident, the amount depending on the dedication of one or more of the copiers. Some might have been entered purposely, the copier might have considered a better way to say something, or perhaps had access to other copies which had a different reading and he decided to change his copy to the other variant reading. As you can see, there are many ways a variant reading can occur with handwritten material. With our Biblical text, this has occurred for 14 centuries of human history. Surprisingly, the high percentage of coherence we find in our Biblical text gives testimony to the matchless effort and care that has been taken by the scribes who have copied them over the centuries. Since the average agreement among the Biblical texts that feature variant readings is about 88%, the assumption we must make considering our Biblical scribes is they were relentless in making their copy as good as possible.

This is good for CBGM because it is going to associate witnesses (witnesses being the common variant reading in a group of manuscripts) with each other and somewhat build a family tree of manuscripts. For instance, if I have two manuscripts and each has used a different word in a particular passage. CBGM would look for other manuscripts that use these words (these are called witnesses) or similar wording and associate those with many other manuscripts. This association builds the so-called manuscript family tree.  When we find two witnesses that agree with each other in variation units and of course, the remaining text agrees in the high 90% range, then by CBGM reasoning, we are probably looking at two texts that were on a scribe’s desk, the copy he is working from and the one he is making. As the percentage decreases, we are probably looking at a witness a few scribes or more removed from the ancestor to which it is being compared. 

A low percentage of coherence may not necessarily mean we are looking at sloppy scribable work, we may be looking at a manuscript in a particular family that has a large gap existing between it and its ancestor, for many manuscripts have been lost. Another thing to consider is the text we are looking at is older than the manuscript. For example, Codex B (Vaticanus) is originally thought by some to be a fourth-century recension (edited compilation), but the discovery of P75 (‘P’ for “papyrus”) proved that B’s text was at least early third-century. That simply means, though the manuscript we are looking at is a fourth-century manuscript, it is very plausible it was copied from a manuscript written soon after the year 100 AD. CBGM can help us in these determinations.

This diagram is a bit over my pay grade, I'm told it's not as complicated as it looks, probably not to someone familiar with the system, but it also appears to be necessary to have a working knowledge of the original language. You can examine the program yourself and see what you think of it at this link. CBGM

“A” is supposed to represent the A-text, the hypothetical text constructed by the ECM editors in which all the variant readings have been chosen by them. The numbers associated with "A" are the existing manuscripts (Text) that are designated by those numbers. In the case of the manuscript (93), the numeral 5 indicated beside it represents how far it is removed genealogically from "A". Therefore, "A" ranks as its fifth potential ancestor. The same example is demonstrated in the manuscript (6). Witness 1501 indicates that it has the same reading as A, but does not have any of the other witnesses within the box as its ancestor at this level of connectivity. The CBGM is programmed to connect it to its closest ancestor even though that ancestor has a different reading, and this is indicated by the dotted arrow.

The diagram above suggests that the scribe of witness 1501 more likely miscopied witness 424, resulting in what is called “spontaneous” of the variant rather than “inheritance” of it from another witness. For the particular witness of 1501 to have been inheritance, it would have been necessary to have already existed in witness 424. Since it does not exist in 424 the scribe himself must have made the mistake in witness (Text) 1501 of his copy. 

As we mentioned earlier a text can be older than the manuscript it is written on. Codex Vaticanus for instance is a 4th-century manuscript, but the text could have easily been copied from a 2nd Century manuscript. This is important to know with CBGM because in the diagram above, witnesses 1739, 81, 02, & 03 are all demonstrated to be the first descendants of "A" and all appear to have equal value. However, Witness 1739 and 81 are 11th and 12th-century manuscripts. Apparently, CBGM sees the text as close to the original autographs as the others because of its demonstrated high rate of coherence.

CBGM seems to be able to identify scribal changes when more than one manuscript is used while making choices to enter corrections. It also seems to be able to identify these events and suggest possible witnesses used, however, the reason the scribe would choose one variant over another will continue to be known only by the scribe or scribes who entered the corrections. The main objective of the CBGM is, of course, to deal with the contamination found in NT witnesses.  There is no detectable algorithm or routine for employing the age of a manuscript as a criterion, its appraised quality, or any geographical data. 

One of the assurances conservative textual critics and translators have given the public over many years is that we have every word of the New Testament existing somewhere in the thousands of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts extant today. They also assured the public that we have the means to determine the original reading. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is a very close reality. It is understood that of all the variant readings that exist in the extant manuscripts available to us, only about 1% are of any real concern or would have a doctrinal effect. With that much assurance, one might wonder why so much effort is exerted and even controversy over CBGM? It is simply because the Christian wants to know what the original autograph said, even if it doesn't change any doctrinal position of the text. Inquiring minds want to know! CBGM has yet to prove how beneficial it can be in acquiring a better more accurate Biblical text, and it does have its nay-sayers! However, it seems to me every available tool at our disposal should be applied in the preservation of the Scripture. I might assume that if a Scribe in the 4th Century had had a computer program like CBGM available to him, he would have made use of it to the extent it was helpful. This genealogical method potentially is another useful tool even for the traditionalist. This of course has been a very basic and general look at CBGM, most of what I have read to prepare this post has been way beyond my ability to understand. However, I felt necessary to post something on it, or at least become somewhat familiar with it. It is exciting to know there is a system becoming available that can look at the text of Scripture in ways the human mind has not been capable of until this age. The use of algorithms and A.I. is changing our world, hopefully, many of those ways will be positive. For a more academic explanation of CBGM, the following link will be helpful. Christian Publishing House Blog.

Hope this has been helpful,

David