Joan Carroll Cruz, *Prayers and Heavenly Promises: Compiled from Approved Sources* claims: >PROMISES: According to St. Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), the Blessed Virgin grants seven graces to the souls who honor her daily by saying seven *Hail Marys* while meditating on her tears and dolors: > > 1. “I will grant peace to their families.” > 2. “They will be enlightened about the divine Mysteries.” > 2. “I will console them in their pains and I will accompany them in their work.” > 2. “I will give them as much as they ask for as long as it does not oppose the adorable will of my divine Son or the sanctification of their souls.” > 2. “I will defend them in their spiritual battles with the infernal enemy and I will protect them at every instant of their lives.” > 2. “I will visibly help them at the moment of their death—they will see the face of their mother.” > 2. “I have obtained this grace from my divine Son, that those who propagate this devotion to my tears and dolors will be taken directly from this earthly life to eternal happiness, since all their sins will be forgiven and my Son will be their eternal consolation and joy.” Where exactly in *The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden* do these promises occur? I couldn't find them there.

T.M. Luhrmann cites many instances of this practice in her book *[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God](https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275)* . Below I share some quotes to illustrate this point: > **ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS a person must master at a church like the Vineyard is to recognize when God is present and when he responds.** **This can seem odd to someone raised in a mainstream church, where God is usually not imagined as a person with whom you have back-and-forth conversation throughout the day**. **At the Vineyard, people speak about recognizing God’s “voice.” They talk about things God has “said” to them about very specific topics—where they should go to school and whether they should volunteer in a day care—and newcomers are often confused by what they mean. Newcomers soon learn that God is understood to speak to congregants inside their own minds**. **They learn that someone who worships God at the Vineyard must develop the ability to recognize thoughts in their own mind that are not in fact their thoughts, but God’s**. **They learn that this is a skill they should master. At the beginning, they usually find both the skill and the very idea of the skill perplexing.** > It is indeed a striking God, this modern God imagined by so many American evangelicals. Each generation meets God in its own manner. Over the last few decades, this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God, a God who not only cares about your welfare but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table. These Americans call themselves evangelical to assert that they are part of the conservative Christian tradition that understands the Bible to be literally or near literally true and that describes the relationship with Jesus as personal, and as being born again. But the feature that most deeply characterizes them is that the God they seek is more personally intimate, and more intimately experienced, than the God most Americans grew up with. **These evangelicals have sought out and cultivated concrete experiences of God’s realness. They have strained to hear the voice of God speaking outside their heads.** They have yearned to feel God clasp their hands and to sense the weight of his hands push against their shoulders. They have wanted the hot presence of the Holy Spirit to brush their cheeks and knock them sideways. > In effect, people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s. **They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness**. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events, mapping the abstract concept “God” out of their mental awareness into a being they imagine and reimagine in ways shaped by the Bible and encouraged by their church community. They learn to shift the way they scan their worlds, always searching for a mark of God’s presence, chastening the unruly mind if it stubbornly insists that there is nothing there. Then they turn around and allow this sense of God—an external being they find internally in their minds—to discipline their thoughts and emotions. **They allow the God they learn to experience in their minds to persuade them that an external God looks after them and loves them unconditionally**. > I call this point of view the anthropological attitude. Anthropologists are taught as students to seek to understand before we judge. We want to understand how people interpret their world before passing judgment on whether their interpretation is right or wrong. And so I will not presume to know ultimate reality. I will not judge whether God is or is not present to the people I came to know. **Yet I believe that if God speaks, God’s voice is heard through human minds constrained by their biology and shaped by their social community**, and I believe that as a psychologically trained anthropologist, I can say something about those constraints and their social shaping. The person who hears a voice when alone has a sensory perception without a material cause, whether its immaterial origin is the divine presence or the empty night. **Only some religious communities encourage people to pay attention to their subjective states with the suggestion that God may speak back to them in prayer. I will ask how a church teaches people to attend to their inner awareness and what training in prayer and practice they provide—and I can answer that question**. Only some people have those startling, unusual experiences (although more people, it happens, than most of us imagine). I will ask whether some people are more likely to have those experiences than others, and whether there are differences in temperament or training that might set those who are able to have such experiences apart from those who don’t—and again, I can answer that question. What is the Biblical basis for this practice? --- ### Similar questions I found on the site https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/85819/61679 - This question focuses on denominations that believe in hearing from God. Very insightful, but not exactly what I'm asking here. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/16215/61679 - This question sounds like a question that someone who is joining the Vineyard for the first time would probably ask. Related but not exactly what I'm asking here. The question was also closed as opinion-based. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/8564/61679 - This question captures the frustration of someone who would like to hear from God, but hasn't had the privilege yet. Interesting and related, but not exactly what I'm asking here. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/80658/61679 - This question does provide examples of Biblical passages documenting cases in which the Holy Spirit spoke to certain individuals for specific purposes. However, I'm not entirely sure if those passages would constitute the entire Biblical basis that someone from the Vineyard or similar denominations would utilize to support their practices. In addition, that question is concerned with the cessationist perspective, so the focus is different.

To clarify what I mean by *private revelations*, I'm referring to revelations by God through extra-biblical means, such as prophecies, dreams, and visions. Is the Westminster Confession's doctrine of *Sola Scriptura* incompatible with a continuationist view on private revelations? Some appear to think that the two are incompatible. For example, [Mike Riccardi writing at The Cripple Gate](https://thecripplegate.com/strange-fire-the-puritan-commitment-to-sola-scriptura-steve-lawson/) affirms: > Think of a magnificent, ancient temple and a foundation upon which everything rests. That’s *sola Scriptura*. Everything that we believe, obey, embrace, and hold dear in the convictions of our soul is based upon this foundation of *sola Scriptura*. Rome said, “We accept Scripture, but it is Scripture *and*. Scripture *and* church tradition; Scripture *and* ecclesiastical hierarchies; Scripture *and* the church councils; Scripture *and* papal authority. And the Reformers said, coming back to the Bible, “No, it is *sola Scriptura*: Scripture alone.” And if anything else is added to the foundation of the church, there will be cracks in the foundation and it will not hold up the teaching and the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. **At the same time, they said no to the Anabaptists and the libertines who wanted to add their dreams and visions and new revelations. They said no; it is Scripture *alone***. > > ... > > And what I want you to note is in [WCF] chapter 1 section 1, **they begin with a statement on the cessation of any new revelation. They were determined to state that they will believe only the Bible**. So please note, in the first section of chapter 1, they saw it necessary for the preserving and propagating of truth that would make the Holy Scripture to be most necessary. In other words, it has to be written down, so the message would be preserved and propagated far and wide with a uniformity of statement. > > **“Those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being *now ceased*.”** This is front-loaded at the very outset. No wiggle room. These Puritan divines who gathered perhaps the greatest generation of believers in the UK, began with this cessationist statement. > > ... > > In the sixth section [WCF 1.6], we read of its sufficiency. **“The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life is in Scripture.” No need to look anywhere else. No need to have anything else added. No appendices needed**. They affirm the Scriptures that I have already read to you, that all things necessary for salvation and sanctification, for the glory of God is found in our Bible. In this sixth section also is another cessationist statement: **“Nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.”** Do not be bringing your “Thus says the Lord” into this house if it’s not found in chapter and verse. > > ... > > Number 10 [WCF 1.10] is a final summation of the authority of the Scripture. “The supreme judge by which all controversies are to be determined and…examined…can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” **Not speaking in your revelations, in your dreams and visions, in your tongues. Speaking in the Scripture *alone*.** And the Word of God will be the highest arbitrator in all matters in the life of the church. > > ... > > ### Sola Scriptura: Deluded by the Quakers > > Whenever God opens the windows of heaven to bless his people, the devil opens the gates of hell to blast. While the Puritans were meeting in Westminster in the 1640s, at exactly that same time virtually across town, the devil was doing his work. There arose a fringe group that would come to be known as the Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends. **They claimed to be receiving new revelations, prophecies. And with that they were being led astray into hyper-emotionalism and mysticism**. > > ... > > And out of this commitment to be “open and uncautious” to **continuing revelation by the Spirit, they were led into all kinds of mystical experiences and bizarre patterns**, not the least of which was going naked as a sign. > > He was the person al chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. John Owen Addressed Parliament. This brilliant man gave himself to **combat this Charismatic emotional departure from *sola Scriptura* with its new revelations**. And Owen affirmed the deeper issue, which was *sola Scriptura*. --- I got the inspiration to ask this question from: https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/101344/61679 https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/101366/61679

Several sects place a high premium on personal spiritual experience and/or personal revelation as a means for discovering Truth. For example: angelic visitations, miracles, dreams, visions, LDS's "burning in the bosom". Others (likely *Sola Scriptura* believers in particular) would say that these experiences can be demonic in origin and are not trustworthy. In particular, they might argue that common beliefs of such sects are untrue and dangerous because they contradict Scripture (e.g. a Christian confronted by an alleged supernatural experience of a Muslim would likely assert said experience to be demonic in nature on the basis of Scripture contradicting the Qur'an). **What *Scripture passages* exist (if any) in support of the idea that "spiritual" experiences can be misleading?** Relatedly, which verses speak to the necessity of reading Scripture rather than relying entirely on spiritual experiences and/or private revelation?

Looking for some guidance from Catholic theologians or people well familiar with Catholic theology. Is is okay to say, that someone **"must always wear their brown scapular"** in order to achieve some desired spiritual end? Even if this requirement is not on its own, but as part of a number of other well established practices? For example, "In order to bring the Triumph of Immaculate Heart, one must pray the rosary, consecrate one's life to Mary .... and **always wear their brown scapular** as a sign of this consecration"