The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment: A Review
Noticing only a handful of books on the market that covered the topic of spiritual discernment and a dangerous tendency towards spiritual immaturity in the Church today, Tim Challies set about the task of speaking into the chaos that has ensued. The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment (Crossway, 2008) is the masterpiece that has come out of his effort. Not bad considering it’s his debut.
Being a thoroughly modern Christian, reading Challies’ work made me rethink much of how I approach what it means to be a mature believer. What I have viewed as authenticity he views as spiritual immaturity. While I have viewed honest doubt with a humble spirit and perceived total assurance as a sign of pride, Challies sees this as foolishly dangerous to true Christian faith. Those in the blogosphere who have been critical of his authority to speak on such a topic without classic theological training need not worry themselves. He commands the material with grace, stating from the beginning that he has nothing to give himself, rather pleading that “If you are to remember anything from this book, let it not be my words, but the words of the Bible.”
Challies holds off defining what discernment actually is until the third chapter, choosing first to give a rallying cry to the Church to make it a passion to be a spiritually discerning people and then letting them know the challenge that lies ahead once that decision has been made. Drawing readers in with illustrations of Solomon’s prayer for wisdom to guide his people and juxtaposing that against his own constant prayers for wisdom in leading his wife and children, Challies has struck a unique balance of engagement without sacrificing content. Many debut authors spend a great deal more time communicating their own personality than they do the point they are actually trying to with their argument. One does not get than sense here. Challies has a clear mandate in writing The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment and the message here far outweighs the methodology.
In this book, discernment is defined as, “the skill of understanding and applying God’s word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong.” A great deal of time is spent in the third chapter of the book hammering out exactly what he means by this definition. Even after he is done explaining the definition, Challies clarifies the source of discernment, where it derives its power, the process of discerning, the purpose of discernment, and the ultimate end of the spiritual discipline. His answer is couched in Christ.
“As we discern between what is good and evil and between what is right and wrong we necessarily make judgments,” Challies writes in Chapter 4, “We weigh evidence in the balance and decide what represents truth and what represents falsehood. But judging is not popular in our society. The phrase ‘Don’t judge me’ is seen as an inviolable mantra in this postmodern society. We live in a culture that values autonomy to the point of irrationality.” This is very true and throughout the book Challies is constantly making straight-forward common sense statements that one would think everyone agrees would be the case. However, the very existence of this volume is proof-positive that such is not the case—that, in fact, people do not view the way they think about good and evil, right and wrong as irrational, even Christians.
The remainder of the book focuses mainly on discernment’s relationship to everything else in the Christian’s life, how we ought to view it, and how we can maintain and grow as discerning individuals and as a discerning church. Of those chapters, Chapter 8, “The Dangers of Discernment” I feel is the most important chapter to be read here. You really cannot skip the other chapters, as Challies has taken a more incremental approach to writing his book, and necessarily so. This means that you cannot understand Chapter 8 without having read the chapters that precede it or the chapters that follow. However, “The Dangers of Discernment” is to this book what J. I. Packer’s “The Study of God” was to his seminal work, Knowing God, and could have very easily appeared as Chapter 1 of this study (as Packer’s did). Packer believed that “If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us.” Challies seems intimately aware of discernment’s ability to go bad on us and outlines 10 pitfalls Christians must strive to avoid as they seek to be discerning. These pitfalls, Challies believes, can lead to a sort of “counterfeit discernment,” developing within the believer a cancerous growth rather than a well springing up to life.
At times, Challies’ opening illustrations do not always seem to match the point he is trying to make. This makes for a rough segue into a few of his arguments. However, this may be a testament to my inability to detect literary nuance and may be no fault of the author’s. Even more, the arguments he makes are sound and bear further study.
Each chapter ends with a section called “Key Thought” that sums up the point Challies is trying to make, which is helpful for those who have a difficult time “landing the plane.” At the end, a series of resources are given for readers to go deeper into some of the topics he could only give a survey overview or cursory glance at in this book. Also included is a study guide that can be used for individual or group study.
Overall, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment is a book that Christians should read and read more than once. As Challies pointed out early on, there are very few books on the market that talk about or attempt to define spiritual discernment. This book helps to fill that void.
