Why Should Thoughtful Evangelicals Read the Medieval Mystics?
Carl Trueman is Academic Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Westminster Theological Seminary. In a recent class on the medieval church, I did my traditional two hours on medieval mystics, covering such personages as Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. I also included Thomas Aquinas to make the point that mysticism, at least in a medieval context, does not exclude solid theological discussion, biblical exegesis, and propositional truth. Anyone who has read Aquinas’s prayers can scarcely doubt that this was a man with a deep knowledge of the transcendent mystery of God and of the fragility and inadequacy of his own language to express that. Indeed, that is an important connection to make today. We live in a time when mysticism has become really rather trendy for a whole variety of reasons. When language is so often under suspicion as being something manipulative and deceptive, the symbolic and apocalyptic genres used by medieval mystics e
