The Christian mystic, Evelyn Underhill, still remains a popular figure in certain Anglo-Catholic groups, spiritual retreat movements, and among those interested in Christian mysticism and contemplative spirituality—especially as a means of coping with secularization and what such people consider to be sterile doctrinal rigidity—i.e., confessional Protestantism. Her views still find an eager audience among the “spiritual but not religious crowd” being addressed by Michael Horton’s three volume series on the subject. Underhill died in 1941, but her books became popular in the 1910s, drawing scrutiny from the guard dog of Old Princeton, B. B. Warfield.

In Part One, I addressed the background to Warfield’s stinging review of Evelyn Underhill’s works championing a so-called “Christian” mysticism—a subjective religious impulse grounded in what my late colleague Rod Rosenbladt called the “liver shiver,” an ecstatic experience not based upon the clear voice of God found in his Word when it is read and preached.

Warfield’s “review” addresses the challenge raised by mystics that doctrine divides, but spirituality—such as a “conversion experience”—unites a broad segment of Americans, which includes many professing evangelicals who do not agree with each other on important fundamental doctrines. In Part Two, Warfield points out that the “Absolute” supposedly encountered by Mrs. Underhill has much in common with the inscription on the infamous Athenian altar dedicated to an “unknown god,” mentioned by Paul in Acts 17:23. In fact, a better term for the “religiosity of the human spirit,” might just be “the flesh,” as identified by Paul in Romans 8:5-8.

In part three of my look at Warfield’s “Review” of Underhill’s works (his “Review” was written in 1914), he continues to press her on her slippery definitions—a nagging problem associated with mystical religious experience, which claims to be “felt,” and therefore difficult to put into explanatory words. This matters because Christianity is essentially a religion of objective truth (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; 2 Corinthians 5:19) revealed in revelatory speech and acts, not in subjective experience. The heart should follow the mind, not leap-frog over it.

Warfield continues to press her on the matter of definitions.

Miss Underhill reformulates her definitions thus (p. 97): “Mysticism, then, is not an opinion: it is not a philosophy. It has nothing in common with the pursuit of occult knowledge. It is not merely the power of contemplating Eternity. It is the name of that organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God: the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man. Or, if you like it better—for this means exactly the same thing—it is the art of establishing his conscious relation with the Absolute.”

But just who or what is the “absolute”? Here the mystic runs into reality that the God of the Bible is holy and those who encounter him experience nothing but sheer terror due to his glorious transcendence and holiness (see Isaiah 1:1-7; Hebrews 12:29). This is why any proper Christian relationship to God must be established in and through the incarnate Son (whose glory is veiled in human flesh) and through the indwelling Holy Spirit who enables us to approach the holy God as Father, without fear or terror.

Warfield sees the inconsistency in Underhill’s attempts at definition as highly problematic.

What was formerly declared to be a “science” has now become explicitly an “art”: but in varying the term we do not escape from the thing—behind the “art” the “science” necessarily lies. Miss Underhill says the Mystic is the man who has attained to union with the Absolute. Let us be more modest and say that the Mystic is the man who professes, or supposes himself, to have attained to union with the Absolute. Then Mysticism surely may be fairly described as that congeries of notions which are presupposed or implicated in this profession; or, if we choose, in the practice of the art by which this end is supposed to be attained. It would seem, therefore, that it must inevitably embrace a doctrine of the Absolute; a doctrine of the relation of the human spirit to this Absolute; a doctrine of the possibility of the human spirit attaining “union with the Absolute”; a doctrine of the nature of this “union with the Absolute” which the human spirit may attain.

But the subjective nature of Underhill’s enterprise means that no real definition of the “absolute” is possible and all we have is mere opinion—“I think,”, “I feel.” Such subjective claims, with little or no reference to any sort of objective reality, sadly, is the way in which many of our contemporaries determine their “personal truth.” What some describe as an “experience of the divine,” might just a weird thought, or an idea, a dream, or perhaps, lunch not properly digesting.

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