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Renovare and Its Founder, Richard J. Foster

“Christianity Today” Endorses Foster’s Celebration of Disciple

Renovare is the movement of Spiritual Formation, headed by Richard J. Foster, a Quaker. Foster edited the Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible. Twenty-five years ago Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, “hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality and described by Christianity Today as one of the best ten books of the twentieth century.

Foster Advocates Reviving Roman Catholic Disciplines

This book of Foster’s advocates the Roman Catholic disciplines from Confession to the Spiritual Directorship, Foster, and his book, Celebration of Discipline, perhaps more than any other single effort, started the massive avalanche of Protestantism’s enthusiastic slide into Roman Catholic disciplines-especially Spiritual Formation and Spiritual Directors.

To understand the global movement of Spiritual Formation, which now is in virtually every Protestant denomination, including the Adventist Structure, we must go to the source-to Renovare, the organization that has been pushing Spiritual Formation for 25 years, and its founder, Richard J. Foster.

“Celebration of Discipline explores the ‘classic Disciplines,’ or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith.” So reads the flyleaf of the Celebration of Discipline. (New York: Harpers San Francisco, 1978, 1988, 1998).

Foster Advocates Jesuit Spiritual Directors

In this book, the Quaker, Foster, reintroduces modern Christianity to medieval Roman Catholic Christianity and Jesuit Spiritual Exercises. Foster writes in his section on “The Spiritual Director,” “In the Middle Ages not even the greatest saints attempted the depths of the inward journey without the help of a spiritual director. Today the concept is hardly understood… That is a tragedy…” Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, 185.

Foster upholds the Roman Catholic Desert Fathers, the Cistercian lay brothers in twelfth century England, the seventeenth-century Benedictine mystic, Dom Augustine Baker. For pages he develops his advocacy of Spiritual Directors. Foster quotes Virgil Vogt of Reba Place Fellowship [who] says, ‘If you cannot listen to your brother, you cannot listen to the Holy Spirit.” (Celebration of Discipline, p. 187). Foster quotes the mystic Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, as well as the psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was taught his deepest insights by the evil spirit named Philemon.

Foster Introduces Loyola

Foster introduces the reader to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, on page 29 of his book. On page 41 Foster describes the same kind of scenario, based on the Spiritual Exercises, that Pastor William Loveless used in the early 1990s, when he led the pastors of the Structure conference in the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises.

On page 64 Foster recommends the Rosary or a prayer wheel. On page 102, Foster favorably tells a story about St. Dominic visiting St. Francis, when neither one of them spoke a single word to the other. Then Foster goes on to introduce the reader to St. John of the Cross.

On page 51 foster speaks highly of the second Council or Orleans in the sixth century when regular fasting was made obligatory

Foster Advocates the Concept of the Confessional

On page 148 Foster speaks of the ‘advantages” of the Confessional, or Sacrament of penance, listing three advantages: 1) that the Confessional is “Reality Therapy of the best sort;” 2) that the person receives the word of forgiveness in the absolution [note: the priest saying, “I absolve thee”] 3) the “third” advantage of the institutionalized Confessional, [is] namely, penance.

Foster Advocates the Confession With Journaling and the Examen

Then Foster proceeds to spend nine and a half pages describing how confession should work with journaling, and how confession is to be given, quoting St. Alphonsus Liguori, who gives three things necessary for confession, one of which is the examination of conscience, which Ignatius Loyola called the examen. Liguori is the Roman Catholic founder of Redemptorists, and a Roman Catholic moral theologian.

Liguori Advocated Elimination of Scriptures in the Vulgar Tongue

Liguori, one of Rome’s highest authorities on Canon Law, is the Roman Catholic author considered more authoritative and probably more often quoted than any other, who is often quoted in justification of the behavior of the Jesuits. Liguori wrote:

“The Scriptures and books of Controversy may not be permitted in the vulgar tongue, as also they cannot be read without permission.” (Quoted in Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1962, p. 98.)

One of Liguori’s books is the Glories of Mary, where Mary set forth as a “mediatress of peace.” Liguori wrote: “He fails and is Lost who has not recourse to Mary.” (The glories of Mary, p. 94). “The Holy Church commands a WORSHIP peculiar to MARY.” (Glories of Mary, 130).

Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible Approaches “The Bible Through the Lens of Christian Spiritual Formation

Therefore, Foster quotes one of Rome’s greatest Canon Law authorities on the elements of confession, a man who wrote that the Scriptures must not be translated into the vulgar, or common tongue, and that the Scriptures cannot be read without permission. And here is Foster today, coming out with a Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible, a Bible written for the purpose of “approaching the Bible through the lens of Christian spiritual formation.” –Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible, p. xv.

Forster Wants Confession Recovered by the Church

Confession is one of the disciplines that the Christian world needs to recover, says Foster: “May God give grace to the Church once again to recover the Discipline of confession.” –Foster, Celebration of Discipline, 157.

Foster Advocates Spiritual Directorship

Another discipline for the church is “Guidance,” or Spiritual Directorship. Clearly Foster, though a professed Quaker, is steeped in Roman Catholicism, and is one of the foremost advocates of Rome, leading all of Protestantism into the most advanced discipline of the Roman Catholic Church, especially Jesuit Spiritual Formation.

All Organized Protestantism is Following Spiritual Formation Enthusiastically

And all of organized Protestantism is welcoming it and following it enthusiastically, including the Adventist Structure, which implemented Spiritual Formation globally in September, 2001, for the training of all of its ministry in all 13 regions of the world field.

The Renovare With-God Life Conference Ministry Team includes Michael J. Sheeran, S.J., a Jesuit, along with Protestants from Southern Baptist and Nondenominational to Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Quakers, Salvation Army, Christian Reformed, Methodist, various Roman Catholic speakers, Christian Missionary Alliance, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and much, much more.

Vatican II and Renewal

Renewal and Vatican II

Vatican II attempted ‘to present its age old doctrines and moral outlook in a new way that would be intelligible to the minds of modern men and women.” The Jesuits, 477. The very first Apostolic Constitution in Volume II of the Vatican II documents, Post-conciliar Documents, called for “continuous need of conversion and renewal, a renewal which must be implemented not only interiorly and individually but also externally and socially.” –Vatican II Documents, Volume II, More Post-Conciliar documents, Gen. Ed. Austin Flannery, O.P., “Apostolic constitution of Penance, Paul VI, Paenitemini, 17 February, 1966, p. 1.

Decree on the Up-to-date Renewal of Religious Life

An entire section in the Documents of Vatican II is devoted to the Decree on the Up-to-date Renewal of Religious Life, Vatican II, Perfectae Caritatis, 28 October 1965, pp. 611-655.

Today All Mainline Protestant Churches, Including the Structure, Have Implemented Spiritual Formation

The Jesuits took the turning to the world and ran with it with their movement of “Renewal.” Today, Renewal and Renovare have swallowed up all the mainline churches-Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Seventh-day Adventist, --all have implemented Jesuit Spiritual Formation. The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible is designed to entrench the reading of Scripture into the mould of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises and Roman Catholic thinking.  It blends “Renewal” [the English term], or Renovare [the Latin term meaning “Renewal”], with Jesuit Spiritual Formation, which is calculated to train the mind and conscience to submission to an earthly hierarchy as a cadaver is moved. It is called “cadaver obedience.”

Turning Light Into Darkness

Thus we are looking at what Winston Churchill in another setting, called, the danger that the human race will “sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more, sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted” reading of the Scripture. Churchill here used the word “science’ referring to Nazi science in his speech in the House of Commons, 18 June, 1940. We here take his statement and apply it to what the Jesuits are now doing with the reading of Scriptur

The Jesuits would twist and channel the power of Scripture into Jesuitical Spiritual Formation.

Part II

From Protestant, Biblical Spirituality to Ignatian Spirituality:





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