A 'Christian alternative' to yoga?

This is a fascination one to think through, as much because I think that it shows up some common mistakes of Western evangelicalism [and maybe beyond the west?]. "You may say, 'Well, I'm not doing any of the meditation stuff. I'm just following the exercises.' It is impossible, however, to separate the subtleties of yoga, the technique from yoga the religion. I know because I taught and practised hatha yoga for years,' Laurette Willis."
First mistake: a convert out of something is authoritative.
Second mistake: the world-view context something was discovered and developed in is its true explanation and reality.
Third mistake: damn by association.
Let's take them one by one.
First mistake. The Authority of the convert. Because evangelicalism is big on conversion, we tend to love conversion stories and the narrative forms of conversion stories deserve some further analysis in themselves. However, there is a formula that tends to be privileged and conversion stories are tweaked and spun to fit the formula, normally. The formula is: before -bad stuff; encounter with Christ mediated by whatever; after -good stuff. The encounter has to include proper repentance and inviting Christ into your heart as Lord and Saviour.

This narrative framework automatically disses the pre-Christian context and outlooks ["All I once thought gain I now count as loss"]. And the drama of the story pushes the assessment of the 'before' into darker and more godless descriptions and 'lowlighting' as much as possible that was ungodly.

So a convert who has a particular background who narrates their story of conversion ion relation to leaving behind something like yoga is given the authority to pronounce the true viewpoint on that left-behind thing. The problem with this is partly explained in the second mistake but we should also be aware that because of the narrative dynamic, the convert may not yet have been able to process the way that something may have positively been used of God or how the spiritual search of other people need not be so negatively tied up with a particular practice or philosophy as perhaps theirs was. This gives rise to the kind of things that mission partners often wrestle with: the tension between wanting to find meeting points and ways to see Christ fulfilling religious searches and on the other hand the desire of some converts to put as much distance between themselves and what they were into before. It's as much about psycho-spiritual development and culture as about the truth of God's presence in something or not.

Second mistake -developmental context determines true understanding. This is actually a kind of etymolological or genetic fallacy. That is that 'the origin of a belief, claim, or theory is confused with its justification'. The etymological version is that the present meaning of a word is actually and truly the original meaning, so 'nice' would mean 'silly' or you could go further back .... What this means is that something that may not be in itself evil or ungodly is regarded as such because the context it is found in and the explanations therefore that are given for it may be alien to Christian discourse hitherto. Ie. because yoga is used by Hindus and has a place within certain Hindu beliefs and practices, this is the true meaning of yoga and therefore cannot be something that Christians can take up. Actually this is absurd: I don't think it would be right to give up eating wheat because its cultivation and selective breeding was carried out originally by pagans who saw it as a gift of the gods and goddesses and used it in their fertility ceremonies dedicated to these god/esse/s. We can detach their explanation and understanding of the matter from the reality and understand it within our own frameworks of understanding. We are not committed necessarily to someone else's explanation of somethig just because they are the first to offer the explanation or to incorporate something within their religious or philosophical system. I wrote something else about this in relation to acupuncture a little while back.

Third mistake Damn by association. In many ways this is another facet of the second mistake except that it is applied into the present rather than the origins of something. The twist here is that it is often a hotbed of magical or occultic style thinking -perversely! Something is avoided because it may be used by occultic practitioners or people of other faiths and the reason may be given that it is possibly going to open oneself up to demonic influence. This actually sound more like the 8-year olds' games about who has the 'lurgy' having touched whichever other child is currently being picked on for teasing or hostility because they are supposedly smell, have fleas, nits or something even less tangible. It sounds like a version of believing disease is spread by bad humours in the air.

Of course I see no difficulty with producing a version of yoga which is explicitly linked to prayer and Christian spiritual growth, However, using the 'ordinary' yoga for exercise is hardly a problem if it is outside of being passed on as a spiritual practice in Hinduism -and even then, a Christian who is strong in Christ arguably has nothing to fear. The one who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world, I think. Much else is Christian 'superstitiousness'.

Yoga :: Seeking a 'Christian alternative' to yoga: [:newagery::evangelicalism:spirituality:]