The Missing Piece In John Mark Comer’s Quiet Time

According to a recent Pew Research study, more than half of U.S. adults report spending too much time on their smartphones. Even those who acknowledge the negative effects of smartphone addiction find it incredibly difficult to cut back. Excessive screen time isn’t just harming our productivity and connection with other people; it also makes practicing spiritual disciplines more challenging.

In his latest book, Into the Quiet: Following Jesus in a World of Noise, John Mark Comer argues that “nurturing a practice of solitude, silence, and stillness is utterly indispensable to a flourishing spiritual life” (26). This timely book addresses important issues in a lively, engaging, and accessible manner. And though the staccato prose style sometimes borders on gimmicky, it’s never dull.

Comer dons three hats, appearing as technoskeptic, therapist, and mystic. I responded differently to each: cheering the first, querying the second, and rejecting the third. Into the Quiet effectively critiques the ills of our hectic cultural moment, but it also makes questionable claims about the spiritual value of silence and promotes a spirituality that could quickly become disconnected from Scripture.

Comer as Technoskeptic

Comer’s consistent message is that readers need to intentionally disconnect from an increasingly noisy world. By “noise,” he means both literal sounds and the ever-present flood of distraction enabled by digital devices. The result is that “it is now possible to go through our entire lives and never be alone” (18, emphasis original).

Channeling secular authors like Jonathan Haidt and Johann Hari, Comer argues that constant noise threatens our well-being, whether we’re religious or not. But this dynamic is especially harmful for Christians. “Are we really surprised that . . . when we sit down to pray, we can barely even pay attention?” he asks (20).

Our always-on lives differ greatly from the example of Jesus, who models a strategy of “retreat and return” (30). He ministers to the crowds and then withdraws to solitary places to pray (e.g., Matt. 14:23). This is the book’s strongest material, a timely warning with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Comer as Therapist

But then Comer moves in another direction. He advances therapeutic claims that may be helpful to some people but that aren’t clearly grounded in Scripture. According to Comer, solitude forces a confrontation with pain that serves an essential psychological purpose:

All of this stuff is in you . . . leaking out like toxic pollution into the water supply of your relational world . . . it’s asking to be dealt with. To be given a moment to speak, say its piece. To be healed. Released. (85)

While the imprecatory psalms and the psalms of lament certainly model honest prayer before the Lord, and self-examination is clearly a biblical imperative, Comer’s specific claims seem more informed by extrabiblical therapeutic practices than by Scripture itself.

Is it actually true that “naming our feelings out loud allows our bodies to process and discharge pain without it getting lodged in our cores” (100)? That doesn’t sound like Scripture.

According to Comer, solitude forces a confrontation with pain that serves an essential psychological purpose.

The primary biblical support he gives for the practice of naming feelings to discharge pain is Jesus’s prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, an incident that provides the “template” for “the moments of our own Golgothas” (101).

The problem is that Jesus in the garden isn’t surfacing old “toxic pollution” from “the water supply of [his] relational world” with an eye toward therapeutic healing (85). He’s facing an imminent crisis and asking the Father for either deliverance from or strength to face the trial set before him. Whatever the value of surfacing past trauma, Gethsemane doesn’t establish Comer’s claims on that point.

Comer as Mystic

It will be unsurprising for those who have followed Comer’s work, but he also emphasizes a form of mysticism that seeks direct, unmediated contact with God. This mysticism is an “aspect of our inner life” that is “a line of poetry from God . . . words fail here.” He concludes, “All I know is, when we sink down below the surface of all our busy, noisy, anxious minds, there is a vast ocean of peace deep inside . . . Oneing God” (194).

For Comer, this intense spiritual experience can be equated with the Reformed doctrine of union with Christ. He argues, “Reformed Protestants use totally different language for a remarkably similar idea; they laud the joy of ‘union with Christ’” (192).

Though it has experiential aspects and is sometimes referred to as “mystical union,” in Reformed theology “union with Christ” refers, in the first instance, to the objective work of the Holy Spirit through which a person is joined to Christ through faith and receives all his benefits thereby. It’s not a Reformed shorthand for a heightened, subjective, mystical experience that comes and goes.

Though Comer identifies as a Protestant, he relies on numerous quotations from “desert fathers and mothers,” medieval mystics, and modern Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians to justify his cafeteria approach to spirituality. As in his previous work, he engages with few heirs of the Reformation.

Comer insists that Scripture is essential, but, for him, it doesn’t stand alone. Consistent with this non-Protestant mystical tradition, the book strongly emphasizes subjective, immediate communication from God apart from God’s inspired words in Scripture. He writes, “While Scripture is arguably the most important, and certainly the most authoritative way, we hear God’s voice, it’s not the only one” (180).

In addition to the Bible, Comer stresses that we should “listen to the thoughts that come into our minds from God himself” (182). These messages arrive as the “faint whisper in the silence of our hearts,” and Comer claims that “hearing God’s voice” in this way is “just like learning to recognize any other voice” (183).

Comer insists that Scripture is essential, but, for him, it doesn’t stand alone.

Beyond asking whether a theological claim explicitly contradicts Scripture, we should also ask whether the Bible positively teaches it. Here’s where Comer’s presentation breaks down. Though Comer highlights mystical theologians who support his perspective, little biblical evidence supports the notion that one should, as a regular, ordinary part of the Christian life, expect God to speak apart from Scripture.

Comer cites Elijah hearing the “still small voice” of God (1 Kings 19:12, KJV) and Jesus’s statement that “[his] sheep hear [his] voice” (John 10:27). Yet he provides no biblical argument for why God’s miraculous dealings with an Old Testament prophet should be taken as normative today, nor does he explain how the context of John 10 supports the idea that Jesus is referring there to the sort of “hearing” that Comer has in mind.

Sola Scriptura or Silence?

Untethering communication with God from Scripture often allows people to move in unhelpful and potentially spiritually dangerous directions. According to Comer, in addition to knowing God through his word, “there are aspects of God that you can experience only in the quiet” (173). If Comer simply means that we must shut out noisy distraction to truly focus on biblical truth then there would be no problem. But he seems to be saying something more. While it is not always entirely clear what Comer believes will happen in the quiet, he seems to teach that direct divine encounter through silence provides a second and separate path to knowing God. “We enter the quiet to search for God himself. To encounter him, to hear his voice, and to know his love” (172). I understand him to mean that this divine encounter and voice are distinct from and in addition to what we would get from Scripture alone.

In this connection, he quotes Counter-Reformation mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) approvingly: “‘Settle yourself in solitude, and you will come upon God in yourself’” (173). What does this mean? It sounds like New Age messaging about discovering the divine within us. I’d assume that that isn’t actually what Comer has in view, but if not, why does he commend this unclear and seemingly unbiblical quotation? This sort of prescription implies that Scripture is insufficient to fully know and commune with God, and that after one puts down the Bible there is still more to discover through silence alone.

Moreover, if we follow this road, how do we know whether this new reality experienced in the quiet is from God or something else? An entire chapter of Into the Quiet emphasizes the reality of the demonic. There, Comer rightly notes that when Jesus encountered Satan in the wilderness, our Lord consistently rebuked the Devil by directly quoting Scripture, tightly tethering spiritual discernment to knowing God’s word (146). Yet later in the book, Comer encourages a wordless, and thus presumably extra-biblical spiritual process in which “solitude is a form of prayer, even when we’re not praying with words” (172).

The Protestant reformers stressed that we commune with God through his Word, and the Bible never suggests that as we deepen our spiritual life we will somehow move beyond Scripture or supplement it with an additional revelatory stream accessed only through silence. Comer’s advice that we seek experiential knowledge of God that transcends what God has revealed in Scripture is confusing and generates an expectation for an encounter that the Bible does not promise.

Comer is correct that we should, as Jesus models, carve out time for solitude and stillness. But when we do, Scripture itself reminds us that we only have one source of “God-breathed” words (2 Tim. 3:16). The Christian’s goal, amid noise or quiet, should be to hold fast to them.