includes index and biblioraphy

This book should be understood as a delineation of competing types of spirituality and a warning against an injudicious blending of these types in order to achieve a supposedly higher unity. The current move toward eclecticism is especially damaging to the christian understanding since the latter is founded on a divine revelation in a particular history. At the same time, it do not deny that there are things of value in the older mysticism and even in the new spirituality, which stand at marked variance with biblical claims. There is dross as well as gold in the mystical heritage of the church (Wesley), a heritage that goes back to the synthesis with hellenism, which accounts for the enduring tension between the old spirituality and the new mysticism of the earth. We must recognize that biblical faith creates its own form of spirituality, which resists any accomodation to cultural ideology and religion.