That it's a kind of specialized form of being a Christian, that you have to have some kind of in. It's elitist. Many people are attracted to it for the wrong reasons. Others are put off by it: I'm not spiritual. I like to go to football games or parties or pursue my career. In fact, I try to avoid the word.
Many
people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with
God.
That's a naïve view of spirituality.
What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus.
Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years
just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning
to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
This promise of intimacy is both
right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other
intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don't feel
intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a
mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain
transparency.
Doesn't
the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?
One of my favorite stories is of
Teresa of Avila. She's sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she's
got it with both hands, and she's gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken.
One of the nuns comes in shocked that she's doing this, behaving this way. She
said, "When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray."
If you read the saints, they're
pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once
every 10 years. And even then it's a surprise to them. They didn't do anything.
We've got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is.
It's a wonderful life, but it's not wonderful in the way a lot of people want
it to be.
Yet
evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a "personal relationship
with God." That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.
All these words get so screwed up in
our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don't
have veils, or I don't have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that's
wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with
some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life.
Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable.
Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary
intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just
screws the whole thing up.
It's very dangerous to use the
language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be
chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We've got a pretty good
vocabulary and syntax, and we'd better start paying attention to it because the
way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.
This
corruption of the word spirituality even in Christian circles—does it have
something to do with the New Age movement?
The New Age stuff is old age. It's
been around for a long time. It's a cheap shortcut to—I guess we have to use
the word—spirituality. It avoids the ordinary, the everyday, the physical, the
material. It's a form of Gnosticism, and it has a terrific appeal because it's
a spirituality that doesn't have anything to do with doing the dishes or
changing diapers or going to work. There's not much integration with work,
people, sin, trouble, inconvenience.
I've been a pastor most of my life,
for some 45 years. I love doing this. But to tell you the truth, the people who
give me the most distress are those who come asking, "Pastor, how can I be
spiritual?" Forget about being spiritual. How about loving your husband?
Now that's a good place to start. But that's not what they're interested in.
How about learning to love your kids, accept them the way they are?
My name shouldn't even be connected
with spirituality.
But
it very much is.
I know. Then a few years ago I got
this embarrassing position of being a professor of "spiritual
theology" at Regent. Now what do you do?
You
make spirituality sound so mundane.
I don't want to suggest that those
of us who are following Jesus don't have any fun, that there's no joy, no
exuberance, no ecstasy. They're just not what the consumer thinks they are.
When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world's values, we lie to people.
We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It
involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our
lives.
The Gospel of Mark is so graphic
this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live.
He's healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing
people how to die: "Now that you've got a life, I'm going to show you how
to give it up." That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die.
And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start
being capable now of true intimacy and love.
It involves a kind of learned
passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting,
instead of giving and getting and doing. We don't do that very well. We're
trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.
Repentance,
dying to self, submission—these are not very attractive hooks to draw people
into the faith.
I think the minute you put the issue
that way you're in trouble. Because then we join the consumer world, and
everything then becomes product designed to give you something. We don't need
something more. We don't need something better. We're after life. We're
learning how to live.
I think people are fed up with
consumer approaches, even though they're addicted to them. But if we cast the
evangel in terms of benefits, we're setting people up for disappointment. We're
telling them lies.
This is not the way our Scriptures
are written. This is not the way Jesus came among us. It's not the way Paul
preached. Where do we get all this stuff? We have a textbook. We have these
Scriptures and most of the time they're saying, "You're going the wrong
way. Turn around. The culture is poisoning."
Do we realize how almost exactly the
Baal culture of Canaan is reproduced in American church culture? Baal religion
is about what makes you feel good. Baal worship is a total immersion in what I
can get out of it. And of course, it was incredibly successful. The Baal
priests could gather crowds that outnumbered followers of Yahweh 20 to 1. There
was sex, there was excitement, there was music, there was ecstasy, there was
dance. "We got girls over here, friends. We got statues, girls, and
festivals." This was great stuff. And what did the Hebrews have to offer
in response? The Word. What's the Word? Well, Hebrews had festivals, at least!
Still,
the one big hook or benefit to Christian faith is salvation, no? "Believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." Is this not something we
can use to legitimately attract listeners?
It's the biggest word we
have—salvation, being saved. We are saved from a way of life in which there was
no resurrection. And we're being saved from ourselves. One way to define spiritual
life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something
better, which is following Jesus.
But the minute we start advertising
the faith in terms of benefits, we're just exacerbating the self problem.
"With Christ, you're better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some
ecstasy." But it's just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored
with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus.
We've all met a certain type of
spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and
reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a
selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.
"How can I witness better? How can I do this better? How can I take care
of this person's problem better?" It's me, me, me disguised in a way that
is difficult to see because her spiritual talk disarms us.
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