“You need to stop talking,” his wife whispered. The small group leader had been answering his own question for several minutes while the rest of the group shifted in their chairs and looked down at their Bibles. He had decided that the 5–10 seconds of silence following his question was enough time to wait. Sometimes, in a social setting, we need someone to remind us when it’s time to stop talking and to start listening. The same can be true of our growth as disciples of Jesus.

Examine the table of contents for most books on spiritual disciplines published since the late 1970s and you will almost certainly find a chapter or two on solitude and silence. Richard Foster included such chapters in his massively successful Celebration of Discipline (1978), so did Dallas Willard in The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988), and Donald Whitney in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (1991). Between these three books alone, millions of Christians have found instruction in the disciplines of silence and solitude. Some scholars have asked whether it is right to consider these practices as regular “disciplines.”[1] The question is fair and here I want to answer a qualified “yes.” Silence and solitude might be best described as the context in which Christians practice other disciplines but these actions also require self-control and form believers in their own specific ways.

It is fair to say that the “default mode” of the Christian life is one of speaking and community. Jesus gathered his disciples around him during his ministry, taught them, prayed with them, shared meals with them, and traveled with them. His followers gathered with one another to pray before Pentecost (Acts 1) and afterwards, regular gatherings typified the church in Jerusalem (Acts 2:42–47), Corinth, Ephesus, and so on. When Christians in the New Testament were together, their normal mode was one of speaking, teaching, singing, exhorting, encouraging, etc. Christians are normally together and when we are gathered, we talk to and with one another. But there are times when we do otherwise. Solitude and silence are temporary breaks in the normal pattern of speaking and gathering with others so that we may learn to truly listen and relate to others.

As I have argued elsewhere, Jesus provides the clearest biblical witness for the practice of solitude.[2] All four gospel writers remembered Jesus’s tendency to withdraw from the crowds, and even from his own disciples, for prayer. This tendency is present, although less obvious in John’s gospel, but has abundant witness in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).[3] The first three Gospels all record Jesus’s withdrawal for extended times of prayer as part of his personal piety. Luke 5:16 offers a clearer detail that this activity was regular or habitual: “But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray” (NASB 1995). The NASB translators italicized the word “often” to show its absence from the Greek text, yet why did they include it at all, especially since many other English translations omit it? The reason for this dynamic translation is a grammatical function where two participles (hypochōrōn, “withdrawing” or “going away” and proseuchomenos, “praying”) are used with the imperfect form of the verb “to be” (ēn) to express iterative, or habitual, action.[4] Perhaps Jesus’s own habit shaped his admonition to his disciples to seek seclusion, rather than publicity, when they prayed (Matt. 6:6) and helps explain his desire for semi-solitude in Gethsemane before his betrayal and arrest (cf. Matt. 26:36–46). Following Jesus’s example, believers are right to seek occasional opportunities to withdraw from the normal routines of life and ministry for seasons of prayer in solitude, be it on a mountain, in the wilderness, or in a “closet.” Seeking time and space for solitude is indeed a discipline, for it requires us to be proactive in identifying and maintaining our temporary distance from community (such as family, work, or church). Solitude is also the context in which the discipline of prayer can deepen and flourish in rich soil.

Jesus also shows us the power of disciplined silence. When the scribes and Pharisees pressed Jesus for an answer about whether a woman caught in adultery ought to be executed, he held his tongue, so they “continued to ask him,” and his brief, wise, and restrained response brought spiritual conviction (John 8:3–11). When he was brought before Caiaphas the high priest and given the opportunity to defend himself against charges of blasphemy, Jesus restrained his speech (Matthew 10:63). When the eunuch from Ethiopia first heard the gospel, it came about from an exposition of Isaiah 53, a text that described the Son of Man’s silence in the face of death (Isaiah 53:7, Acts 8:30–35). It is right to see Jesus’s typical ministry as characterized by teaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom (Mark 1:15), but we ought not overlook the place of disciplined silence in Jesus’s life.

We tend to consider speech and silence as binary choices when it would be better to see them along a continuum. To be sure, Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (3:7) and these are the “ends” of the continuum, for both are disciplined actions. In Ecclesiastes 3:7, keeping silence (ḥšh) and speaking (dbr) are both verbs. Proverbs is very helpful in forming a wise biblical practice of silence. In Proverbs, the wise are those who learn to “restrain” their speech (10:19, 17:27), to avoid speaking hastily (18:13, 29:20), to “ponder” how to answer (15:28), and to guard one’s words (21:23), to answer in an “apt” or “timely” way (15:23, 25:11), to persuade by forbearance (25:15), at times, to “conceal” knowledge (12:23), and at other times, to remain completely silent (17:28). James, the New Testament’s wisdom book, echoes these sentiments, by reminding Christians, especially teachers, of the power and danger of the tongue and the disciple required to restrain it (James 3:1–11). Mature disciples who are growing in devotion are those learning to balance silence and speech.

The “normal” Christian life is one lived in regular community and marked by wise speech and one punctuated by occasional and temporary withdrawal and restraint. We withdraw from community for seasons of prayer and refreshing that we may enter back into community better able to serve our brothers and sisters from the fruit of our private prayer, study, and communion with God. We live in community as those who practice growing restraint on our speech, exercising Spirit-given self-control over our tongues when our flesh longs to defend or justify our actions. Silence and solitude are not ends unto themselves, but means by which the Spirit is forming us more and more into the image of Christ.

 

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[1]Robert L. Plummer, “Are the Spiritual Disciplines of ‘Silence and Solitude’ Really Biblical?” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 2 (2009): 101–12.

[2] This section is adapted from my book 40 Questions about Prayer (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2022), 182–83.

[3] See Mark 1:35, Matthew 14:23, Luke 6:12 and 9:18, and John 6:15 as representative examples.

[4] See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke (1–9), Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 575.