Asceticism and Self Denial
On the Gnostic teaching vs. the Biblical teaching, fruitfulness vs. busyness, and putting down our dadgum phones.
The Ascetics were a sect in the early Church who practiced an extreme form of self denial. They were known not only for denying themselves even the most basic comforts and forms of self-care, but also punishing their bodies with various forms of self-torture — practices which were meant to achieve spiritual enlightenment and draw them closer to God.
This asceticism was a form of Gnosticism, rooted and grounded in the Gnostic, neoplatonic belief in a dualist nature in which we are divine spirit beings imprisoned in material bodies that are the source of all sin and suffering. By punishing the body, they believed, one would purify the spirit and achieve enlightenment and union with God — not YHWH, mind; they believed He was the evil Demiurge who was responsible for imprisoning us in the first place — but a distant, unknowable God who is the source of all life and knowledge. While I’m sure not all ancient Christian ascetics held this belief, nevertheless, this was the origin of the practice, leaven that infected early Church practices despite having been condemned in the writings of Paul (Colossians 2:18-23; 1 Timothy 4:1-5).
One contemporary, albeit less extreme, version of this is found in the Spiritual Formation movement, which teaches that by adopting and practicing a series of “spiritual disciplines” we can draw closer to Christ. On the surface, when you’re introduced to the shallow end of spiritual formation by teachers like the late Dallas Willard, it sounds like nothing more than discipleship. All good.
But the deeper you go, the more you learn that the “spiritual disciplines” aren’t just things like being disciplined in prayer and fasting and Bible study and Christian fellowship, but they include both ascetic self denial of physical comforts (beyond fasting) and unbiblical prayer and meditation practices that are rooted in Eastern mysticism. This is all ostensibly to make us more fruitful and Christ-like and deepen our union with the Holy Spirit.
But when you follow this teaching all the way home, you find that the end is not mature fruit of the Spirit and being conformed to the character of Jesus, but it’s actually achieving a state of “Christ consciousness” — a state of spiritual enlightenment in which the divine spark within you has been awakened and you, in fact, become your own Christ. This goes back to the early Gnostic belief that Jesus was merely a man who was imbued with the consciousness of “Christ” — a divine son of the Source who was sent to show us the way to enlightenment and liberation from the material prison inflicted on us by the Demiurge, a.k.a. YHWH. It’s Gnosticism all the way down.
Also, practicing the various forms of contemplative prayer and mysticism endorsed by the spiritual formation movement will open you up to hearing from and being influenced by all kinds of spirits other than the Holy Spirit — ask me how I know.
The problems with all of this should be self-evident to a Bible-believing Christian who actually studies and knows the word. But one particular issue is that we were never called to adopt an ascetic lifestyle. When Jesus said his followers would suffer for his sake, he didn’t mean self-inflicted suffering, but suffering as a consequence of living and trying to emulate him in a world that hates him.
Also, to say that the material, physical world, including the human body, is inherently evil and was from its inception, is in direct contradiction to the words of the Creator himself — that is, YHWH, the one, true and only God, who when he made the world called it “good,” and when he made humans called his creation “very good.”1 There’s also the fact that scripture teaches that at the resurrection we won’t only be raised in spirit, but our physical bodies will be raised and glorified and made immortal.2
Contrary to Gnostic (and also Luciferian) teaching, we are not dual beings with two natures constantly at war with each other. We’re tripartite beings, made in the image of a Triune God, consisting of body, soul (mind) and spirit, all created by him to function as a unit. It was the sin nature that was introduced at the fall, when Adam and Eve sought godhood through knowledge and enlightenment (Gnosticism again, or at least the inception of it), which corrupted our flesh and activated the human conscience, which are now at war with one another.3
So we’re not called to inflict punishment on ourselves to purify our souls. But we are called to lives of self denial. Is there a difference? Absolutely. The self denial Jesus talked about was not ceasing to take care of ourselves by denying our physical (or emotional) needs, or inflicting physical punishment and torture on ourselves. He was talking about living sacrificially, putting others ahead of ourselves and adopting the attitude of a servant. We’re called to deny any fleshly impulses and desires that get in the way of that and that are at odds with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, charity and good works, faithfulness, gentleness and self-discipline.4
We are called to deny our own comfort and care when necessary for the sake of the gospel, and to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of others. When we do these things, we are acting like Jesus. But our salvation doesn’t depend upon doing these things, and never are we told that this kind of self denial will lead us to spiritual enlightenment — although it will add to our Heavenly rewards, as well as help to grow us in maturity and deepen our faith.
With all of that said, is there a positive aspect to the idea of adopting a certain amount of asceticism, denying worldly pleasures and conveniences for the sake of growing in our spiritual walk? I think that’s self-evident. Of course, some Christians are called to various types of asceticism. Those called to the mission field, for example, must give up all kinds of creature comforts, as well as safety and security. Some people are called to lives of celibacy. And fasting for the sake of prayer and focusing intently on God is a Biblically-endorsed practice.
But in this post-postmodern era of lives ruled by technology and convenience, where most of us unthinkingly begin and end our days by scrolling on screens, I think there’s even more merit to being diligent to exercise self-discipline and denying ourselves in certain material matters. It’s not the idea or practice of a certain degree of ascetic self-denial that’s unbiblical and spiritually dangerous, but the motivations behind and the intended outcomes of both the ancient and contemporary Ascetic movements.
I know I’m shifting gears a bit, but what I’m getting at is that we have become a society of mindless addicts, patterned after Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World.5 The globalist goal isn’t to control the masses through fear, intimidation and coercion a la 1984, but to get us all addicted and to keep us complacent and compliant by giving us an endless stream of what we can’t get enough of. We’re not just headed that way — we’re there, and it’s working.
What we’re all addicted to is dopamine, comfort, and convenience. And also fear and outrage, which feeds the dopamine but is not enough to make us give up the comfort or convenience to take any kind of real action.
Another thing we’re all addicted to is busyness. Every waking moment is taken up with something. We no longer know how to sit still and just be. This is not healthy, and it’s not fruitful.
Something that has been on my mind lately in this vain is understanding the difference between fruitfulness and productivity. We have a God-given mandate to be fruitful.6 We translate that as being busy and productive (and also as having babies, but that’s another topic). It’s the Mary/Martha dichotomy.7 Martha busied herself doing a lot of good, productive things, but as a result she neglected the one thing that was actually needed to bear fruit: being still at the feet of Jesus and learning from him, which is what her sister Mary chose.
We can get so busy, filling all our time and using up our energy on things that are good (or at least seemingly so), that we don’t have anything left for the better things that will actually bear fruit for us.
This has been a theme for me this year — trying to be intentional about slowing down and making room for the better things. Choosing fruitfulness over busyness and merely getting things done. It hasn’t been easy, because busyness is so ingrained in us.
One change I made this year toward this end is listening to fewer podcasts. I had gotten into the habit of having a podcast or a YouTube video going every time I was doing something that didn’t require my full concentration. Usually, this was a sermon or a Bible lesson or a Christian podcast, and I felt like I was learning, and thus making productive use of my time. But I wasn’t leaving myself any time to just think.
One thing we’re instructed to do as Believers is to meditate on God, on his word and his works. The Hebrew and Greek words that are translated as meditation in our English Bibles mean the opposite of what we think of as Eastern meditation, which involves clearing or emptying the mind (often so that it can be filled with something else and become a portal to spiritual entities; the spiritual formation movement instructs this type of meditation in order to commune with and hear from what is ostensibly the Holy Spirit, but as this is contrary to Biblical instructions and outside of the parameters God gave us for communing and communicating with him, it’s not sanctified and it opens us up to hear from all manner of demonic and fallen entities who are happy to masquerade as angels of light. Again, ask me how I know).
Instead, Biblical “meditation” would be better translated as “contemplation” or “rumination” — it means filling our minds with the things of God. Memorizing and ruminating on scripture. Setting our minds on things above, and on things of the Spirit. Contemplating what is true, right, holy, just, excellent and praiseworthy. Putting on the mind of Christ — Jesus Christ, that is, not the Christ consciousness. Rejoicing always. Praying without ceasing. Giving thanks continually.8
It’s hard to contemplate scripture or the things of the Spirit, or all the reasons I have to rejoice and be thankful, or to pray without ceasing, if I’ve always got a podcast in my ears or a video going in the background. What’s more, I realized that never leaving myself time to think was making me intellectually and creatively dull. This is a big part of why I didn’t write much in this space last year. I would feel inspired to write about something during my early morning prayer and meditation, and then I’d get up to eat breakfast and putter around while listening to a sermon or a Bible lesson, and then I’d sit down to write and be completely unable to remember what I wanted to say, and my brain would already be full of fog from sensory overload.
So I’m denying myself one of my favorite pastimes — not completely, but I’m being a lot more disciplined about it — not in order to purify my flesh and achieve enlightenment, but in order to pursue a more spiritually and creatively fruitful use of my time.
Another thing I’ve found is that eschewing some modern conveniences and doing things the slow way can be a lot healthier and more rewarding. At the last house we lived in, for example, we had a clothes line carousel set up in the yard. Although we had a perfectly good electric dryer, when the weather was good I opted to use the clothesline to reduce our electric bill. At first I thought it was a chore, but I quickly came to enjoy the process of hanging clothes on the line, and then carefully taking them down after they had dried. It became a meditative process (when I wasn’t listening to podcasts, that is), and a much needed break in the middle of my busy day — still a physically active chore, but a mentally restful one.
My point is that I think we all need to take a step back and examine how we spend our time and energy and whether these things are bearing fruit, growing us in faith and love, and drawing us nearer to the Lord, or if they’re distracting us from our mission and calling, draining our energy and quenching the Spirit’s ability to produce fruit in us. And we need to examine our willingness to give up our comforts, our conveniences, and our addictions for the Lord’s sake. A little asceticism in our techno-industrial society could be healthy, if done in moderation and with the right heart posture.
Especially the nearer we draw to the end. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be found scrolling on my phone when the trumpet sounds. At this rate, I fear very much that I will be.
Genesis 1:25, 31
1 Corinthians 15, just for starters
See Romans 1 and 7
Galatians 5:22-23
My friend
did an excellent breakdown of the Huxley-ization of our society and the globalist agenda in a two-part YouTube series. Watch it here:Genesis 1:28, 9:1
Luke 10:38-42
