Pastor John Piper:

Audio Transcript – (original source and India who all want to know about yoga. Is it mere physical exercise or unavoidable participation in eastern spirituality? One listener, Todd, writes, “As a healthcare professional I am interested in the benefits of eastern practices like yoga and tai chi for the documented health benefits. Can a Christian practice such things with roots in mysticism in good conscience?” What would you say Pastor John?

One of the first things that I would want to say is that there are two kinds of approaches to questionable practices in life. One I would call a minimalist approach to holiness and godliness. The other maximalist.

In the first case, your typical question is, “Well, what is wrong with it?” It would apply to movies and music, and kids often ask their parents, “What is wrong with it?” And the other approach is not to ask, “What is wrong with it?” mainly, but, “Will it make me more Christ like? Will it make me more devoted to Jesus? Will I be more powerful and full of the Holy Spirit? Will I be more effective in prayer because of it? Will it make me more bold in witness or weaken me? Will it help me be spiritually discerning of the ways of Satan in the world and will it help me lay up treasures in heaven? Will it help me find joy in God and all that he is for me in Jesus?”

You can see that there are these two kinds of approaches to life. I want to maximize my godliness and my holiness by drawing nearer and nearer to God, and the other one is just trying to do as many things as you can do without being tripped up explicitly by sin. So I don’t mean to suggest that every time you face a questionable activity, you will opt for renunciation, because you have weighed things that way. I just want people to approach questions with the greatest passions for godliness and to not think minimalistically. That is the first thing I would want to say.

Secondly, I would want to say that both yoga and tai chi, the little I know and the little research I have done, have their roots in eastern worldviews and are profoundly in those roots antithetical to a Christian understanding of God and the way he works in the world. So yoga is to the body what mantra is to the mouth — that is the way I would put it anyway. One explanation says that for the mantra, “One has to chant a word or a phrase until he or she transcends mind and emotions and in the process the superconscious is discovered and achieved.” Note the use of “word” in that mantra-like way in order to move into the superconsciousness. In other words, yoga exercises are a spillover from that kind of verbal repetition and philosophy of how one moves physically and emotionally and intellectually to this superconsciousness.

So yoga focuses on harmony between mind and body. Yoga derives its philosophy from an Indian metaphysical belief. And the word yoga comes from the Sanskrit language and means “merger” or “union.” And the ultimate aim of that philosophy then is to strike a balance between mind and body and attain a kind of self-enlightenment through the use of mantra and through the use of certain kinds of physical exercises or meditative stances. To achieve this state, yoga uses breath, posture, relaxation, and meditation in order to bring about a healthy, lively balanced approach to life. That would be more or less the way they would say it on a lot of places on the web.

For instance, if you go to the Minneapolis YWCA website and click on “Fitness Classes,” you get 22 references to yoga including beginning yoga, MS yoga, youngster yoga, youth dance and yoga, yoga for everybody. And it is the same thing with tai chi, though a little less so. Tai chi has Chinese religious or metaphysical roots, and one definition says that tai chi is understood to be the highest conceivable principle from which existence flows, the supreme ultimate.

That is what the word tai chi means. The supreme ultimate creates yang and yin. Movement generates yang, and when its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquil. And through tranquility the supreme ultimate generates yin. And when the tranquility has reached its limit, there is a return to movement, and movement and tranquility in alteration become each the source of the other and the transformations of the yang and the union of the yin produce everything, and these, in turn, produce and reproduce, and that makes the process never-ending. That is more or less what I have learned in my little bit of research.

Christians have a radically different worldview than either of these or the view shaped by yoga, the view shaped by tai chi. Our approach towards history and towards God and towards well-being is radically different. In Christianity progress toward wholeness moves from a God who communicates intelligibly through language to be understood, through a person, Jesus Christ, who becomes fully human and speaks to be understood by the mind, not the canceling of the mind— through his death and resurrection objectively overcoming a real Satan and real guilt before God through a real gospel message for us, once for all in history with historical events behind it, through an understanding of that message in our minds consciously, through faith in Christ, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, through the promises understood and believed, through joyful meditation on those objective promises, through the transformation of the Holy Spirit, through objective word understood as we meditate in progressive likeness to Christ as we see his glory in the Word and in the gospel, through practical deeds that lead to help other people, and through a life of transformed godliness into eternal life where God is our joy forever.

That is Christianity. And it is totally different than the kind of worldview that lies behind the meditative, physical and emotional and intellectual practices that flow out of yoga and tai chi. So, consider Christian wholeness of the health and the body. If you ask, “How does that relate to the body? How does that relate to exercise and stuff you do with your body?” I would say Christian wholeness of the health of the body is a chastened and realistic view marked by these facts:

1) We are fallen and physically under a curse and emotionally and intellectually under a curse on the whole of creation. And, therefore, we will all die.

2) We will be raised from the dead if we have faith in Jesus, and this is the health we are ultimately aiming at mainly. We will be perfectly healthy — body, soul, and mind — in the new heavens and the new earth after resurrection, and that is our glory — that is our hope.

3) In the meantime, our outer nature is wasting away, but our inner nature is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).

4) So bodily exercise is of a little value as Paul says in 1 Timothy 4:8. But spiritual exercise is of value in every way in the way I described it a minute ago.

5) We should not unnecessarily damage our bodies which are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and we should seek their maximal usefulness in the goals that God has given us. So physical health is wonderful, but it is not the goal. It is a means to much greater goals and a qualified means at that, because there are more important means than having a body that is super fit.

6) We may accomplish our greatest goals by dying, by risking our lives and getting Ebola or malaria or river blindness in some missionary activity. We don’t strive for maximal physical well-being. That is a subordinate useful goal as a means to something greater. And it may be compromised intentionally by risking our lives for the sake of somebody else.

7) So any physical regimen that begins to take the place of the pursuit of holiness and sacrificial service by which we may lay down our lives is starting, probably, to become a religion for us. And it seems to me that yoga and tai chi have already declared themselves by their very names on that score. They have run up the flag of the eastern worldview by the very name yoga and tai chi.

So for my money at this point, as I assess maximizing rather than minimizing my pursuit of God’s goals and the flourishing of my own soul, I would go another way and find another kind of exercise.