Gospel Prism

(HT: PastorBlog)

I don’t think “yoga” is a verb, but I’m going to use it that way anyway. Can Christians yoga without compromising their trust in Christ?

When I was in college, I took a class on Buddhism and our professor was not only a staunch Buddhist but an actual yoga teacher as well. She did both because the two really did go together. Yoga is the Hindu form of prayer, the attempt to clear mind, body, and spirit of any thoughts of distraction for the purpose of understanding one’s wholeness. And before the class began, she would have us meditate, breathe, sit up straight, and clear our minds of any distracting thoughts.

Ever since that class, I have always associated Yoga with Hindu and Buddhist prayer and ritual. This was years ago when only New Age beatniks and Hindu worshipers practiced Yoga. Now that yoga has become culturally relevant and significant, more and more ‘normal’ people practice yoga regularly. Many have found that yoga actually has physical benefits. But is yoga spiritually beneficial to the Christian, or is at best neutral or at worst detrimental to one’s soul?

John MacArthur and Doug Pagitt were recently interviewed on CNN regarding the subject. You can read the full transcript on Pulpit Magazine’s blog. John MacArthur pastors Grace Community Church and part of Together for the Gospel. Doug Pagitt pastors Solomon’s Porch and is a recognized leader of the Emerging Church. Here are some of the excerpts:

HOST: But let’s start with you, John MacArthur. Alright, let’s say I do decide to try yoga, head to the local gym, give it a shot. What am I opening myself up to spiritually that could go against my Christian faith?

John MacArthur: Well that would depend on how the yoga is conducted. If it’s just purely exercise, and you’re a strong Christian, it probably wouldn’t have any impact on your faith. But in the big picture, why would Christians want to borrow an expression from a false religion, from pantheism (god is everything, you’re god, everything is god), when we believe there’s only one true God (the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ). Why would we need to import that? If you want to exercise, exercise. But why borrow a term that has been part of a false religion for centuries?

Doug Pagitt: Well, for people who perform yoga, what they’re normally trying to do is to find a whole and complete and healed life. So when people participate in yoga, most of them aren’t on some kind of a yoga agenda. What they’re trying to do is use whatever practices they can find that would help them have a whole and complete life. And for a Christian, that’s certainly what we’re after. The Jesus agenda is a whole life, is a complete life, is a healed life. So when people use it to relieve stress, to be healthy in their relationships, to feel good in their body, that’s a really good thing.

Doug Pagitt: Hey, I have to confess that I’m not very good at it? Yoga, it’s really hard to hold these postures, to hold these positions. And I’ll tell you that from my own experience, and the many, many people that I know who participate in yoga, none of them have ever found themselves to be opened up to something negative or something demonic or something evil. In fact, many of us find the high benefit that comes from body mind connection, and from knowing that we are pushing, that we are stretching, that we are sending our body into an exercise. And that exercise is not wholly disconnected from our will or from our mind or from our spirit; it’s a complete practice. And I’ve never known anybody who has had anything detrimental come into their spirit because of their practice of yoga.

John MacArthur: Well, let me just respond to what I’ve been hearing. That doesn’t sound anything like Christianity. If you want a whole life, if you want your life to be what it should be, you don’t put yourself in some weird physical position, empty your mind, center on yourself and try to relieve your stress. You go to the word of God, to the gospel of Jesus Christ, you embrace in faith the sacrifice of Christ in his death and resurrection as your savior and redeemer. God comes, regenerates you, transforms your life, makes you a new creation, and you’re saved and you’re on your way to heaven, and you can live a life of peace and joy. That’s the promise of the gospel. There is no contribution made to that by any physical position or any kind of meditation.

The idea of Christianity is to fill your mind with biblical truth and focus on the God who is above you. That’s Christian worship. The idea of yoga is to fill your mind with nothing except to focus on yourself and try to find the god that is inside of you. From a Christian viewpoint, that’s a false religion. Exercise is a different issue.

Doug Pagitt’s responses seem to fall far short. I agree with JM in that the goal of the Christian life is not to find wholeness through breathing and exercise but in the Word of God. But one comment on this blog does a good job of rebutting JM by noting the following:

I hate to disagree with Pastor MacArthur, and even more hate to agree with Doug Pagitt. But, I do think MacArthur’s argument is flawed. First, the Hebrew term for God (”el”) is borrowed from the pagan religions of the Old Testament period—it was common to all of them. There is nothing inherently wrong with borrowing such terms. Both Paul and Peter (particularly 2nd Peter) incorporated pagan terminology and gave it a new, Christian meaning.

Secondly, yoga is the act of meditation combined with pagan religion. A Christian is called to meditate. There is of course a key difference, as MacArthur rightly notes. Namely, we do not “empty” ourselves, but rather “fill” ourselves (chiefly with the Word of God). Thus, for Christians yoga should be very bible-centered.

As for the physical positions, while I admit some of it is silly, some of it actually works. Are we surprised that God, who created humanity as a whole being, designed us in such as way that our spirits and bodies have a mutual relationship to one another? For example, if I overwork myself to the point of exhaustion, my spirituality suffers. I become angry, ill-tempered, and lack the fruit of the Spirit. Yes, it is a sin, but I can only correct that sin by ALSO making sure I have adequate rest. Why is it so hard to imagine sitting in certain physical positions helps our souls?

Perhaps God knew this, which is why we have numerous example in Scripture of people prostrating themselves before God. In other words, we could only experience a spiritual reality (humble submission to God) by participating in a physical reality (bowing the knee). The key is that the physical act doesn’t guarantee the spiritual reality–but it also cannot be divorced from it.

I think MacArthur, in reaction to pure paganism and emergent repackaged paganism, may be failing to see the fullness of humanity and the inter-relatedness of our component “parts”.

Yet again, I am a puppy in the faith compared to MacArthur, and I value his wisdom highly. If you have to choose between my thoughts, and his, if I were you I would set your default to “MacArthur”. Blessings. I should note that my wife is a Christian from India, so I also may be biased regarding yoga. But, living in a pagan context, she has been forced to think deeply about if and how to incorporate pagan practices in her daily life. )

Is it possible for the Christian to practice yoga? I would say, ‘Yes.’ If we were to get rid of everything that had pagan roots in the Christian life, we would be making rules about Halloween (which there might be reasons to leave Halloween behind but rules regarding it is not the answer), Christmas trees (from pagan rituals), Valentine’s Day (a Catholic saint). There are ways to take such pagan entities and make them into something that is God glorifying. After all, all that God created was good and can be “made holy by the Word of God and prayer” (1 Tim 4:4-5).

BUT…

Yoga can also be a stumbling block to someone’s faith. If one is not judicious and genuinely and actively worshiping God through His Word and through prayer, even while doing yoga, then the act of yoga can certainly lead one away from the Lord. Also, if a class is actively promoting Hindu worship and asking the students to focus on nothingness (this is part of the Hindu and Buddhist goal to achieve nirvana), which is essentially worshiping another god called ‘nothingness,’ then there is the real danger of idolatry.

I would never make a rule for our church members to stay away from yoga any more than I would make a rule regarding alcohol or fantasy baseball or going to the mall. But there must be an active thought process to guard our hearts against an enemy who is always on the prowl since this is a spiritual war (Eph 6:10ff.). I hope whatever we do, whether we eat or drink, we do it for the Lord’s glory (1 Cor 10:31), especially something like yoga.