Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Postmodern Spirituality in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
To speak of postmodern spirituality in the course of something under an hour is a bit of a challenge when both terms, postmodern and spirituality, are today freighted with all kinds of overtones that take a bit of unpacking. In some ways, this question of what spiritual is has been with us in particular twentieth-century, now twenty-first century, dress for some time.
When I was a young man studying chemistry and mathematics at McGill University, a member of my more extended family, a young woman, fell in love with a single clergyman from the Apostolic church. I drove up to Ottawa to meet this future in-law. We were driving around the wonderful sights of Ottawa where my parents lived.
I was driving, as a matter of fact, and next to me was my future in-law. Behind him was my relative, and behind me was my father. As we were driving around, this future in-law commented that he had been having his devotions from Matthew that morning in such-and-such a text, which said such-and-such, and the Holy Spirit had told him it meant such-and-such.
Now God does have a sense of humor. Although I was studying chemistry and mathematics, I had added classical Greek to my studies at McGill just to get cranked up in the area, and it so happened that that very day I had been reading that passage in the Greek text in Matthew. Being even more perverse then than I am now, I quoted it to him in Greek and then told him what the passage meant.
He said, “Oh no, that can’t be. You might have head knowledge, but the Holy Spirit has told me it means such-and-such.” My relative in the backseat behind me said, “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, Don,” which sort of told me where I fit into the scheme of things. I told you I was very perverse, so I persisted.
I tried to explain the syntax and got this rebuke again of the same order. So I drove a few more turns around the glorious scenic parkway of Ottawa, and then in a moment of supreme perversity I said, “Well, actually, what I meant to say was that the Holy Spirit told me that what I said it meant it really means.”
There was a long pause, a few more turns, and then this future in-law said, “I guess that means the Bible means different things to different people.” My father cleared his throat, which was probably the only wise thing said on that whole trip. This goes back 35 years or so. It was long before we were using terms like postmodern, but as I’ve reflected on it since then, it was a kind of forerunner to postmodernism in a certain way.
Let me tell you what I will try to do in this period. First, I’m going to take a few minutes to try to define postmodernism. That’s already a bit of a challenge. Second, I will outline for you just a wee bit of the term spirituality, because the term has been used across the centuries in several different ways, and it’s worth putting down a couple of posts. Third, I will talk briefly about the way spirituality is used in contemporary literature and ecclesiastical circles. Then finally, I will try to set out a brief framework of Christian spirituality, especially from Paul.
Let me begin by trying to define postmodernism. Postmodern is a terrible term. It was first used in the nineteenth century, and then it fell out of usage. Then it came to be used at the beginning of the twentieth century in the domain of architecture. There was a style of architecture that was called modern, and then the style changed. What do you call the next style after modern?
If modern means that which is contemporary, and then you move on to a new contemporary, you can’t call the next one modern too. Modern number two? Modern number three? So somebody coined postmodern, but what do you do after that? Post-postmodern? It really is a barbaric term no matter how you look at it. It’s not particularly enlightening.
Eventually, it has come to refer to all kinds of domains in culture, but from my point of view, the only really useful labeling function it has for contemporary discussions on postmodernism has to do with the realm of epistemology, how you know things or how you think you know things, how you come to know things. What is the basis upon which people know things? For our purposes, we will distinguish premodernism in this domain of epistemology, how you come to know things, then modern epistemology, and then postmodern epistemology.
In the premodern period, which for our discussion will be the end of the Middle Ages all the way through the Reformation to about the beginning of the 1600s.… Premodern epistemology found most thinkers in Europe recognizing that God exists and that he is omniscient. God exists and he knows everything. This God who knows everything is, therefore, the reservoir of our tiny little knowing.
All human knowing is necessarily a subset of his exhaustive and perfect knowing. That means that all of our coming to know stuff is always a coming to know stuff God already knows. That depends, in some sense or another, on revelation. All human knowing in premodern epistemology turns, in some sense or another, on God’s disclosing what he knows.
Then there were debates after that about how much God discloses of what he knows in various domains. God discloses something of what he knows in the material world. He discloses something of what he knows in Scripture. He discloses something of what he knows by the Spirit, in the church, in human relationships, all kinds of domains.
There there could be very serious disagreements. Thomas Aquinas at the end of the Middle Ages is convinced that God discloses so much of what he is like and what he knows in the natural world order that people could actually reason from what he discloses in the natural order all the way to becoming a member of the Catholic Church.
On the other hand, Calvin didn’t think so. Calvin was convinced that in the natural order you only get enough knowledge of things divine to condemn you good and properly but not enough to lead you to the truth. That took special revelation. That took the revelation that is in Christ Jesus and in Holy Scripture.
But on the fundamental issue, both Calvin and Aquinas were premoderns. They both believed that human knowing was a function of God disclosing some little part of what he knows so we could know some little bit of all that he knows perfectly and exhaustively. The turning point in a lot of contemporary discussion that brings us from the premodern period to the modern period is RenÈ Descartes and the dawning of Cartesian thought or Enlightenment thought.
Now history is messy. In fact, it overlaps and underlaps and all kinds of things, so using Descartes is in a sense not fair, but he’s a useful peg. At the beginning of the 1600s, in the 1610s, he was worried more and more about the number of people in European universities who were either agnostics or atheists and thus could not share his epistemology. The previous epistemology begins with a God who is there and knows everything.
Supposing you start talking about atheists and agnostics. Immediately, that presupposed epistemology is undercut. So he wondered what to do about that, and he set himself the task of doubting everything. Unlike a lot of first-year philosophy books, he was not himself a systematic doubter. All his life he was a member of the Catholic Church. He was doing this as an exercise in order to be able to talk with people, not because he himself was a systematic skeptic.
Out of this, he was looking for some common basis, some common foundation he could share with atheists and agnostic friends on which to build up a whole structure of thought, a new epistemology, a new way of reasoning yourself to knowledge. He came out with a slogan that every first-year philosophy student learns … in Latin, of course. That was the language of thought and scholarship: cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”
What he meant by that was that if you can doubt most things, surely you can’t doubt your own existence as long as you’re thinking at all. If you’re busy thinking about the whole thing, then there’s somebody doing the thinking. Therefore, you have to at least acknowledge your own existence. Whether this is good reasoning or not doesn’t make any difference at all. The point is that’s what he thought.
To this he added a whole philosophical structure I don’t have time to go into, and from this he wrote a voluminous work published in the 1630s to try to prove to people that from this foundation you could reason your way all the way to Mother Church. That’s what he thought. Now at that point almost nobody agrees with him today, but at the time it was considered a breakthrough work, because it was not beginning from God.
It was not beginning from God’s omniscience; it was beginning from nothing more, at the foundational level, than “I think, therefore I am.” Moreover, he wasn’t the first person to have said something like that. Saint Augustine in the fourth century had said si fallor sum, “If I err, I am.” When Saint Augustine said that, he was not trying to establish a whole epistemology. It was one of those wise remarks Augustine was prone to giving, and then he passed on to other things.
In fact, in my view, although I can’t prove it, there’s a jolly good chance that dear ol’ Descartes had picked up this thing from Augustine (everybody read Augustine in those days), didn’t remember the exact wording, and then thought it up his way and thought it was all his. I can’t prove that, but I would say there’s a pretty good chance of it.
In any case, note carefully what this finally led to. Modernist epistemology is characterized by six things. Let me go through them very quickly. The reason I mention these six is because postmodern epistemology, as we’ll see in a moment, either overthrows or revises all six of these things. That’s why it’s worth taking this small excursus.
First, transparently it begins with the I. “I think, therefore I am.” It’s not beginning with God; it’s beginning with the finite knower. That’s important. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
Second, it assumes that epistemological certainty, certainty about knowing things, is both desirable and attainable. It assumes that we finite human beings can know certain things certainly and that this is a jolly good thing. It’s desirable and it’s attainable. There was no one who was doubting that systematically at the time.
Third, it was profoundly foundationalist. It was looking for a foundation, a basis, a commonality that everybody could agree with. He wanted to find agreement between Catholic theists like himself and atheists on the other hand, and the foundation he thought he had was this cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Eventually, that came to be applied in discipline after discipline.
All of the disciplines begin with certain axioms, certain self-evident truths, things that are judged to be properly basic, foundational for all the kind of work you do. In fact, sometimes you have sub-disciplines of how you do this. There are whole schools of how you do history, for example. The Annales School of historiography in France is different from some other schools of historiography. They have certain foundations they lay down.
In the fourth place, they build up methods. You lay your foundation. Then you get your methods in place. The idea is proper foundation plus proper methods; turn the crank, and out comes truth. It’s a nice system. All of Western thought since about 1600 has worked more or less that way. If, for example, you’ve done a PhD somewhere in almost any discipline at all in the Western world (up until about 20 years ago when it began to change more seriously), your examiners were as interested in your assumptions and methods as they were in your conclusions.
Even if you came out with conclusions your examiners thought were really telling and insightful and right, if you got there by arbitrary methods or inconsistent methods, you would flunk. It was as simple as that. You had to have your proper foundations, and then your methods, and then you turned the crank and out came truth. So it was profoundly foundationalist, profoundly relying on method.
In the fifth place, it insisted that truth is ahistorical. It transcends history. It is objectively true. It transcends history and race and language and people. When you find truth, it really is always true everywhere for all people at all times. If you find out in Lima, Peru, that the water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, lo and behold, the thing is also true in Philadelphia. How about that?
It’s not only true in the nineteenth century; it’s true in the twentieth century, and it will be true in the twenty-first century. You can start putting extra little bits in. You can move from a circular vision of the orbits of atoms to orbitals and to energy levels and quantum theory, but at the same time, you still have these basic truths that are always true and always will remain the case. A water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. That’s just true truth, and it’s true everywhere at all times and in every place.
Even in the domain of history, for example, in the nineteenth century, a scholar of history called Leopold von Ranke in Germany said that history is concerned with the business of finding out things wie es eigentlich gewesen, as things actually were, as they actually took place. The real truth, the real chronicle of the whole thing. Truth, truth, truth.
Lastly, with time, this has tended to lead toward more and more naturalism, to the view that all that exists is in the domain of energy, matter, space, and time. That’s it. That’s not the way it was with Descartes. It wasn’t the way it was with the early scientists like Francis Bacon. It wasn’t the way it was with Isaac Newton.
Most of them were either deists or theists. Many of them were Christians. But with time, many scientists, especially this side of Darwin, moved to a position of espousing philosophical naturalism. Aldous Huxley used to say that Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable, but that’s another whole topic. This is modernism, then.
Postmodernism comes along and says, “Don’t you see the implications of what you’re doing?” You begin with the I, but the I is finite. The I looks at things from a certain point of view. When this I now addressing you speaks, it’s the I of a 55-year-old Canadian white male with this education and not that.
Would the I speaking to you look exactly the same if, instead, I was a 32-year-old semiliterate African prostitute on the streets of Mombasa with AIDS? Would I ask questions the same way? Would I look at things exactly the same way? My language would be different. My sense of humor would be different. My perspective of what’s important would be different. My outlook on life and death would be different.
This means, it is argued, that in point of fact there is no secure foundation. There are no secure methods, because all of the foundations and all of the methods are finally created by these I’s, by these finite beings, by you and by me. There’s nothing here that is objectively certain. Now that you’ve lost this anchor in omniscience, which premodernism had, you’re starting with finite I’s and trying to get to God.
Instead, what you’re discovering is that you can’t do more than probabilities on the one hand and on the other hand, and somebody else will look at it another way. There are in some disciplines, the hard sciences, a few more rules for locking things down, but there are so many theoretical elements even of science itself that nothing is finally all that stable.
You can overturn a whole paradigm and move from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics via relativity. All this shows is that nothing is stable in human knowledge. That’s what is argued. That means this vision of truth as objectively true and desirable and attainable.… All that’s a chimera. It’s promising something you can’t possibly have. It’s not possible. Moreover, to hold it as a good is itself an idol.
In fact, it’s far more interesting, more colorful, to recognize that there are many truths … truths according to what part of the world you’re from, what interpretive community you belong to, what subgroup you belong to, what gender you belong to, what age you belong to, how much education you’ve had, what health you’ve had, all of these different subgroups that give you a different perspective on things.
Therefore, to argue that objective truth is a good thing is not only stupid; it is impoverishing. The enriching thing is to recognize that there are many truths that are established from different perspectives, not universal truth, ahistorical universal truth. From that point of view, then, even naturalism itself becomes overthrown and there is a rise of a new spirituality.
The old modernist paradigm was heading more and more toward scientism and philosophical naturalism and all of that sort of thing, but now with postmodernism people are more and more and more into all kinds of “spiritual” things. There are endless programs on angels, or think of the science fiction literature or films that are out there. Science fiction films can be divided into two kinds.
There’s the “Bang! Bang! Shoot ‘em up” kind, where the extraterrestrials are basically a nasty lot, primarily because we need targets in order to become heroes. In the other kind, the extraterrestrials are wise. Think E.T. (“E.T. phone home”) or Jodie Foster’s Contact. It’s not very well defined what this other thing is. She’s not even quite sure she got there and how it or she or he, or whatever it is, is related to her daddy and all that. It’s not very clear but good and wise and soporific and ill-defined. That’s all part of spirituality.
All kinds of friends in the circles I move in don’t mind if I find Jesus helping out my spiritual life, so long as I don’t mind if they find crystals help out their spiritual life. It gives them really great vibrations. You realize that suddenly you’re moving in a whole different paradigm from the kind of hard-core Newtonian physics people dealt with a century ago. Nowadays, anything goes.
Of course, there are reactions to this in the scientific community. If you want to read a really funny book that is reacting to this from a purely modernist perspective (it’s not a Christian book at all), read a book published by Johns Hopkins University Press by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt called Higher Superstition published in 1995. It is outrageously funny and extremely rude but very perceptive from a modernist point of view.
It’s not a Christian answer, because I will argue in due course that Christians should not be either modernists or postmodernists. This is not the place for Christians to take a knee-jerk reaction to postmodernism and all revert backward to modernism. Postmodernism has given us some real help. It has overthrown modernism, for a start, which was producing its own idolatry. You don’t want to go down that track.
Moreover, from a certain perspective, I would say that postmodernism doesn’t go far enough. Postmodernism recognizes the finitude of the I, but surely we who are Christians not only want to recognize the finitude of the I but the corruption of the I. We insist on what theologians have long called the noetic effects of the fall, the effects of the fall on our minds.
In other words, not only are we finite; we’re perverse. Therefore, our thinking is slanted and restricted and twisted in all kinds of ways. In that sense, when I start talking with my postmodern friends, I keep ragging them and telling them they’re not nearly radical enough; I’m more postmodern than they are. They don’t know what to do with that. There is a sense in which their analysis is not deep enough, surely.
For about 10 years, I worked part time with an organization called the World Evangelical Fellowship, which brought together pastors and scholars from various cultures around the world to work on various theological projects. I always tried to have Ed Clowney there, who many of you will know, because he was one of these wise men who not only knew a lot of biblical theology but could handle people from everywhere.
Just to watch these people come into the room was culturally enlightening. In would come the German and shake everybody’s hand on the way in, and if he had to go out and get something from the car, he’d shake everybody’s hand on the way out. In would come the Latinos and kiss you. Well, I can handle that. I’m from French Canada. I have a bit of that in my blood. I can get away with that.
The Arab Christians were a bit difficult, because they wanted three kisses, and I can never remember which side to start on. That one was always a bit dicey, but I could usually manage it. Of course, the Indians are coming in with a lot of bowing, and the Japanese put their hands straight and they’re bowing too, but how far down they go depends on who’s older, who has more degrees, who has more power, who has more money. I never did learn all of those rules. I was always trembling whether I’d bow down too far or not far enough.
I will not soon forget the day when Pablo Perez from Mexico, all 300 pounds of him, descended on a Brit who was standing in the corner in Harris Tweed, slightly bemused by all of this. His hands were behind his back, and he was looking on this rather quizzically. This Pablo Perez started descending on this Brit. “Brother!” He was about to embrace him, and the Brit said, “Have we been introduced?” I saw it with my own eyes. I kid you not.
Then we got down to study one day, and in came Ed Clowney and said, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late,” and you knew the American was there. It’s culture. That’s before we even got started. Just watching how these people argue was a whole education. Postmodernism is not entirely wrong. People do look at things from different perspectives.
The difficulty is if you push that far enough, you can’t know the truth. The truth keeps changing. It all depends on your point of view, and your definition of spirituality will become very subjective. Then it’s impossible to speak of the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.” It’s impossible to get these linear connections through history. That’s the really scary part on the other side, and you start saying, “Let me have some truth here.”
Now I wish I could respond to this with a whole Christian epistemology for you, lay out the skeletons of it. I don’t have time. Let me just say this part as a way of moving in this direction before we get to the heart of what I’m supposed to be talking about this afternoon instead of epistemology. Almost all postmoderns when they’re talking to you offer you a certain antithesis. They offer you a certain pair of alternatives. “Either this or that.”
If you buy into that antithesis, they will trap you every time. You will lose in every debate you ever have with them. Every one. You have to see what that antithesis is. They keep trying to point out this antithesis. They say, “Either you can know something truly, exhaustively, omnisciently or you’re lost in a sea of relativity.” Those are the alternatives they try to give you again and again.
Somebody claims to know something, and they will very quickly expose how you don’t know everything about it or you don’t know all of its connections or that’s just your point of view or whatever. They’ll push again and again, because they’ve bought into the antithesis that says, in effect, “If you can’t know anything absolutely, you’re lost in a sea of relativity and we’ve really destroyed absolute truth.”
I think that thoughtful Christians, amongst other things they must do with their epistemology, must reject that antithesis absolutely. They must blow it up every time, expose it for the idolatrous thing that it is. It is wrong, deeply wrong. Human beings may not know anything omnisciently. Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God, an attribute of God that belongs only to God. We cannot know anything that way, but that does not mean we cannot know some things truly and partially.
If you buy into that antithesis, you will always be driven to the conclusion we cannot know anything truly, but I would want to argue in the strongest terms that human beings, by God’s grace, precisely because of his revelation, can know some things truly if only partially, and that gives an ability to know all kinds of things truly without knowing anything omnisciently. The antithesis has to be destroyed. That’s another whole topic I don’t have time to go on to.
At this point, let me give you a wee potted history of the term spirituality. Then we’ll bring these two together and you’ll see where we are. Spirituality as a word has not much been used in Protestant circles except for the last 100 years or so. It has been used much more in Roman Catholic circles.
If we forget just the term and think of the sort of thing it’s talking about.… If spirituality refers to something generic that we might call the spiritual life, spiritual living, then, in that sense, there has been some concern for spirituality since the time God called people to himself, and we will deal just with the church.
As the Christian church went through the centuries, increasingly, until the time of the Reformation, there were many different elements connected with spiritual life in the popular mind, and usually only a few of these were emphasized at one time: sacraments, community, prayer, asceticism, martyrdom, vows of poverty or celibacy, icons, love of images and the like, monasticism, and much more.
At different periods of time, people thought to be really spiritual, to really live the spiritual life, you ought to devote more of your attention to these sorts of things. Thus, implicitly, it was not for all Christians. That whole heritage tended increasingly to think of spiritual life as something for the elite of the elect, as it were, for the inside crowd, for those who were really serious, for those who really wanted to get to know God better.
They did not think so much of spiritual life or spirituality in terms of what was binding or normative for all Christians but, increasingly, for what the most zealous wanted. That meant you would become a nun or a monk or you would fast or you’d become like Simeon Stylites and live on the top of a tower. Then you could really be spiritual.
By the time you get to the beginning of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Scaramelli (this is still in Catholic circles) of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), building on these long established traditions, divided spiritual theology into ascetic theology and mystical theology. That’s very important. Now spirituality consists of two elements: the ascetic and the mystical.
The ascetic has to do with the exercises to which Christians who aspire to perfection will devote themselves. This could be fasting, becoming a monk, celibacy, vows of poverty, self-flagellation, acts of penance, so many “Hail Marys,” or whatever. All of these things are acts of asceticism or self-denial of one sort or another. On the other hand, mystical theology has to do with extraordinary states of consciousness and their secondary manifestations during times of special union with God, a special feeling that you’re connected somehow.
So spirituality in those circles came to be connected more and more with how you relate the one to the other, and this especially for the elite of the elect, for those who really were passionate about going on with God, how you relate your asceticism and all of the possibilities there with your mysticism and all of the pleasures associated with that.
In his three-volume history of spirituality, Louis Bouyer sought a more precise definition. “Christian spirituality (or any other spirituality) …” That’s already giving half the shop away. “… is distinguished from dogma [doctrine] by the fact that, instead of studying or describing the objects of belief as it were in the abstract, it studies the reactions which these objects arouse in the religious consciousness.”
The whole thing now turns out to be a study of how our consciousness is revised, affected, changed. It’s the mystical part. Spirituality itself is then considered to be those very experiences. That produced a whole lot of emphasis on studying the psychology of things, and then it mattered less and less what the undergirding beliefs were and more and more what the experiences were.
That led more and more to a study of the techniques that led to those experiences and less and less on doctrine or the like. It was not long before people discovered that most of the world religions have some streak or other of mysticism in them. For example, it has been well established in the laboratories that you can stick a .05-inch silver electrode into Broca’s area in the brain, pump in a tiny fraction of a millivolt, and you can produce phenomena indistinguishable from tongues-speaking.
What you do with your theology is entirely up to you. You can do all kinds of things with that, but those are the realities. You can’t deny it. There is tongues-speaking, whether you view it as sometimes legitimate or not, in a number of the sects of the world religions. In other words, you can have mystical feelings, mystical experiences, and connections with the transcendental in Buddhism, some sects of Islam, and passages in some shifts of Hinduism. This led, therefore, to a larger and larger vision of the importance of spirituality as a kind of thing that connects all religions.
By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Protestants were beginning to talk about spirituality. In the past they preferred to talk about spiritual life or walking with Christ or devotional. Protestants would write academic commentaries and devotional commentaries. Catholics would write academic commentaries and spiritual commentaries. In that kind of context, spiritual means something like what we mean by devotional.
By the middle of the century, Protestants were talking more and more of spirituality as Catholics did, sometimes connecting it with the Puritan movement or other sweeps in our own tradition. Nevertheless, with the impact of postmodernism, now you suddenly have spirituality being an essential good. It’s the experience that counts. What underlies it is relatively unimportant. That’s extraordinarily important. That potted history then brings me to my third point.
The way spirituality is used in contemporary literature. Let me just pick up a few quotes here. This sort of thing is everywhere. Here is a book on Asian Christian spirituality by Samuel Rayan, a Jesuit theologian from India, who proposes this definition: “To be spiritual is to be ever more open and responsive to reality.” That’s pretty generic.
Another recent history of spirituality constantly stresses the importance of feminist spirituality and rejoices that Christian spirituality is pluralistic (Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed, whatever; it doesn’t matter) and must become more culturally diverse even while warning that “In this movement outwards it is not helpful to be rootless or to wander aimlessly from one spiritual culture in search of somewhere to be at home. To enter fruitfully into the unfamiliar one needs a real sense of where one belongs.” Well, that’s encouraging.
Then a very important book by Moltmann called The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (1992). Part one deals with experiences of the Spirit and begins with a section on the spirituality of Jesus. Then he outlines the theology of mystical experience, where mystical means “the intensity of the experience of God in faith.” Any religion can talk that way, quite literally.
One reviewer, though deeply appreciative, comments, “The whole is passionate and impressionistic, authentic as a piece of literary art, and curiously unsatisfactory as a rational account of anything in particular.” That review wasn’t written by a fundamentalist; that was written by a liberal. The danger now is that everything turns on techniques.
I know confessional seminaries, for example, where they insist that all of their students, during the time these students are at seminary, discipline themselves with the practice of journaling, of writing a journal addressed to God, as it were, in which people confess their sins each day as an act of self-examination and record some of their prayers to God. This is to assist them in their spirituality.
Now believe me. I’m not against journaling. It has helped many Christians through the years to try to focus on God and to set aside a set time for self-examination, which is surely not a bad thing to do. We’re supposed to confess our sins to God and examine ourselves to see if we’re in the faith.
There are all kinds of good things that are tied up theoretically with that practice, but I worry just the same. Implicitly, it is giving those students the impression that the fundamental thing that establishes spirituality is journaling, and for the life of me, I can’t find any passage in the New Testament that says, “If thou wouldst be spiritual, make sure that thou dost complete thy journal before going to bed.”
Thus, it begins to worry me. It strikes me as in danger of being a new kind of legalism. It’s probably a better thing than the kind of approach to God that is really just absolutely careless and prayerless and essentially deeply secular, but it is not deeply gospel-rooted, and that is very troubling.
Here’s another one. This is from an article by Robert T. O’Gorman. The title is “Effect of Theological Orientation on Christian Education in Spiritual Formation: Toward a Postmodern Model of Spirituality.” Well, that sounds exciting. This is published in Review and Expositor, a Southern Baptist organ of the left. There are Southern Baptist organs of the right and others in between. This is a Southern Baptist organ of the left.
He’s going to begin with the recognition that there is a plethora of definitions of spirituality, but, he says, by its very nature spirituality is not definable. So now he spends 30 pages talking about what he can’t talk about. That’s already just a wee bit troubling. Then he goes on to say a little farther on.… He puts it positively, so he’s implicitly adopting what Sandra Schneiders says here in any case.
He says that spirituality is “the experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.” I would say that gives you some room for flexibility. Here’s another quote: “Spirituality is a way of life in which one is in relationship with the self.”
There’s a lot of talk of being in relationship with the self. How on earth is one going to be in relationship with the self? Look in the mirror? Give me a break. This is such fuzzy language. “Spirituality is a way of life in which one is in relationship with the self, one’s significant other …” One is not allowed to have spouses in this domain. One has “significant others.”
“… relationship with the self, one’s significant other, family, friends, neighbors, workmates, others with formal positions, the stranger, the cosmos, and even the ultimate Other.” Well, yes, I am impressed. You’re not allowed to use the G-word. “The ultimate Other.” Southern Baptism with a wheel come off, I would say. Believe me, I could give you Presbyterian and Lutheran examples that are every whit as interesting, so do not think I’m picking on this particular group.
What this suggests is now that spirituality is so ill-defined, anything that sounds even a bit like mystical experience or connecting with the universe or an out-of-body experience or a love of the transcendent or an aha experience as you contemplate an apple blowing in the sun or whatever.… It’s all part of this deep spirituality. A wonderful relationship with your mother or your significant other or even the ultimate Other. It’s all part of spirituality.
Within this postmodern world, the one thing you’re not allowed to say is that anybody else is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing you’re not allowed to say. As a result, spirituality has come to have roughly the positive overtones that apple pie, and motherhood had in the Eisenhower years. Nowadays, apple pie is bad because of all the cholesterol and sugar and motherhood is bad because the feminists are winning; therefore, we have spirituality instead.
That’s slightly cynical, but not by much. You must understand that sometimes you can have a kind of cultural faddishness about what’s appropriate terminology, and in this particular world, spirituality is in and anybody who raises the nasty suggestion that some spirituality surely is just plain idolatrous sounds right-wing, bigoted, nasty, and mean.
Nevertheless, having said so many negative things, there is something to be said on the other side, and it is important. Just because we want to overthrow false paradigms of spirituality does not mean we have the right to laugh at all that the Bible calls spiritual. The Bible does speak of being spiritual in several different ways. We’ll look at two of them in a moment.
Over against those who want Christianity to be nothing more than a system of beliefs, biblical Christianity insists that men and women do come to know God. Call that spiritual. The reason it should be called spiritual in the first instance is because of a passage like 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, to which I invite you to turn. Let me draw your attention to a few things.
The phrasing in verse 9 is often quoted at funerals. “No ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.” Although in the context it’s not referring to the afterlife but to what Christians enjoy now. Look at the next verse. “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.” With the coming of the Spirit, with the dawn of the Spirit
of the knowledge of God beyond what was expected or seen or commonly known before. That’s the idea. “What God has prepared for those who love him.” How does this come about?
“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.”
That’s very difficult Greek, but I think the NIV has it basically right. Then verse 14: “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment.”
Let’s just pause on those two verses. Clearly, in verse 14, the spiritual person is simply the person with the Spirit, who has, in the context of chapters 1–2, come to terms with the gospel, this wisdom of the cross, this wisdom from God. These things are spiritually understood. I’ve sometimes told people how my wife and I met.
I was single and doing doctoral work at Cambridge University and speaking constantly in one context or another, and a Christian friend dragged along my wife-to-be, whom I had not met and who was not then a Christian, to this evangelistic meeting at which I was speaking. Let the record show she was impressed neither by the message nor the messenger.
After a long period I won’t go into.… I was doing constant evangelism, and she was just one more. In fact, she still goes around telling people today that I was interested only in her soul and not her body. Eventually, I gave her a copy of John Stott’s Basic Christianity to read, and when I met her some months later, having not seen her for some period of time, I asked her if she had read it, and she said that she had read it and looked up most of the references.
I said, “And what did you think of it?” She said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Christianity is great for good people like you and Carol, but it’s not for me.” How does an intelligent young woman who is in graduate school education at Cambridge University, if you please, read somebody who writes with the perspicuity of Stott and come out thinking that’s what Christianity is about? That’s a good question, isn’t it?
As soon as she said it, I thought of 1 Corinthians 2:14: “The natural man does not understand the things of God. They’re foolishness to him. They’re spiritually discerned.” All of the categories were wrong. She didn’t have categories for them. By contrast, the spiritual person in this passage, then, is the person with the Spirit who does receive the gospel, who does understand it. That’s the whole point.
Verse 15 does not promise you privatized insight into all things such that you are above criticism. That’s not the point. That’s the way my relative took it in the car. “Don, spiritual things are spiritually discerned, you know.” That really doesn’t understand what verses 14–15 are saying. The point is that the natural person has access only to the whole natural world. That’s all they have.
Whereas the spiritual person has access to this whole natural world and to a whole spiritual dimension the other parties don’t know anything about. In that sense, they can’t possibly stand in judgment of us in any meaningful sense. They have no experience of it. It’s like a world in which half the people see and half the people are born blind. How can the half who is born blind now actually critique the experiences of those who see?
In fact, we’ll make it a little more telling. We were all born blind, and now some have come to see, and they tell their friends that they’ve now come to see. How can those who have never seen now criticize the experiences of those who, though born blind, have now come to see? That’s what verse 15 says. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, across the whole sweep of spiritual experience, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment.
That doesn’t mean he can’t be criticized by anybody. After all, the whole New Testament is full of people criticizing people, Paul criticizing Peter and Paul criticizing Demas, who has loved this present evil world. No, to be spiritual in the first place is to have the mind of God such that we accept the gospel. All of Christian spirituality begins from that point.
In the next chapter, there is a slightly different point that is made, the second usage. “Brothers,” Paul says, “I could not address you as spiritual …” He’s writing to Christians, brothers. “I couldn’t address you quite that way but as worldly, as carnal, as fleshly.” We can’t use carnal anymore, because in today’s usage carnal has to do with sexual sin. So worldly is probably a better way of putting it here than that. “Mere infants in Christ.” What here characterizes their infancy, their spiritual immaturity?
The reason I ask this question is because we have increasingly come, in parts of Western evangelicalism, to the view that all people can be divided into one of three camps: the natural camp, where people just aren’t Christians; the spiritual camp, where they’re not only Christians but pretty hot; and the carnal Christian camp or worldly Christian camp, where they really are regenerate in some sense or another but, God help us, they do live like the world, the flesh, and the Devil. Nevertheless, they’re saved.
Then, it is argued, this is what happens to them on the last day. It’s down there in verses 14–15. You’re saved, but so as by fire. You get in, but by the skin of your teeth. Everything you’ve done is burned up. So you have your escape ticket from hell, as it were, but apart from that, there’s nothing good to be said about you. You get in, and that’s it. Isn’t that what this text says? Not quite.
There’s one part of it that is right that we need to recognize, but there’s another part of it that is profoundly mistaken. The right part is that it is saying that after you’ve made the fundamental distinction between those who are natural and those who are spiritual in chapter 2, there comes a time sometimes when an apostle will write to those whom he recognizes as brothers and who are in that sense spiritual, but he can’t reckon them as if they’re spiritual; they’re carnal.
What constitutes their carnality here? What constitutes this nebulous middle category? Is it that they are like the world, the flesh, and the Devil? No. Look for yourself. “I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.” The first evidence of this immaturity is an inability to take in much of the Word of God. The second evidence: “You’re still not ready. Indeed, you’re still carnal, for there is jealousy and quarreling among you.”
These are people who are going to church, all right, but they’re fighting. They’re quarreling. There’s one-upmanship going on. Some are saying, “I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. I am of Cephas.” It’s not that they’re living entirely like the world, the flesh, and the Devil; it’s that in the church there’s still one-upmanship going on and not perfect relationships and not loving one another for Jesus’ sake. This is the mark of their carnality. Those are the two marks that show their immaturity here: inability to take in the Word of God in large substantial doses and bad human relationships. Interesting, isn’t it?
Now it’s worth understanding the flow of the next verses rather quickly to get this thing straight. What Paul does in the next two paragraphs is give us an agricultural metaphor and an architectural metaphor. In the agricultural metaphor, he depicts himself and Apollos as agricultural workers.
One plants, another waters, but God gives the increase. The reason he’s saying this is because these people are quarreling about who’s the best leader. He says, “No, that’s not the way to look at it. We’re all workers together in the same field, but we are God’s fellow workers.” Not God’s fellows who are workers. Rather, we are God’s (possessive) fellow workers.
“Apollos and I are fellow workers who belong to God.” That’s the idea. “We are God’s fellow workers, and you are God’s field.” Notice there’s a distinction in this passage between the workers and the field. That’s the only way this agricultural metaphor will work. Is that clear so far? There’s a distinction between the workers and the field, everybody else. Now go to the architectural metaphor.
Instead of a field you have builders. Somebody lays the foundation, and somebody else builds on it, so it goes up and up and up. You don’t have the image of life anymore, but you have the image of different people building. This does not speak well to us today because one builder puts up the whole house, but in those days, when you put up a cathedral it could take several generations.
One person laid the foundation, then the next generation put on the next layer, and so on. That’s the idea. That means there’s a distinction between us, the workers, and you, the building, which is also found right at the end of verse 9. “We are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.
By the grace God has given to me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and then someone else came along, namely Apollos. If any of these workers builds on this foundation using, on the one hand, gold, silver, costly stones, and on the other, wood, hay, straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light.”
Then you get this warning: “If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved.” Who’s it talking about here? It’s talking about the leaders. It’s not talking about these carnal Christians in the church. All the way down you’re making a distinction between the leaders and the rest of the church.
It’s saying that there are some church leaders who apparently are building the church of God who are building so poorly that a lot of these so-called living stones, these so-called choice things that are being put into the temple, will all be burned up on the last day. You can add a lot of people to the church numerically without seeing them regenerated. Just give me a good program and I can do it. I might even be orthodox while I’m doing it.
On the last day, no doubt, I who believed the gospel and preached the gospel will still be saved, but it doesn’t mean I have much to show for it. In this context, therefore, this is not saying that there’s a huge category called the carnal Christian, where you can live like the world and the flesh and the Devil, be indistinguishable from it, but nevertheless still get in by the skin of your teeth, as it were. It’s not saying that at all.
It’s saying that even amongst Christian leaders some will only get in by the skin of their teeth, and meanwhile, it is thoroughly irresponsible for these Christians to be carnal at all, and what their carnality consists of is a continued inability to absorb large quantities of the Word of God and one-upmanship and bad relations amongst fellow Christians. That’s what the text says. Spirituality, thus, in this frame of reference turns on taking in more and more of the Word of God, the glorious good news of the gospel, all that God has disclosed.
“How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to his word.” Or Joshua when he comes to power: “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous. Then you shall have good success.” Where is it in the New Testament that we are told if we want to be really spiritual, on a really great inside track with God, we ought to join a monastery? You can’t find it.
Spirituality in this sense is bound up with increasing conformity to Jesus. It’s bound up with integrity of relationships, with death to self-interest, with service toward others, with the proclamation of the gospel, and above all, with absorbing great quantities of the Word of God so it shapes how we think, takes over our minds, and we think God’s thoughts after him, and it shapes all of our lives, our hopes, and our values.
I’ll tell you frankly that within that framework, some Christians do have remarkable mystical experiences, but the aim of the exercise is not, in the first place, a certain degree of mysticism. The aim of the exercise in the first place is conformity to the gospel of God. It’s conformity to the pattern laid out in Scripture. It’s obedience to Christ Jesus and love among the brothers and sisters. There is the mark of genuine spirituality, the mark of conversion, the mark of growth, integrity, and maturity.
Within that framework, undoubtedly, it requires that we pray and meditate on the Word of God. There will be some moments when we do that that call us heavenward, and an hour, two hours, five hours will slip by and we’ll wonder where it has gone, but our aim will not be the next day to repeat the experience.
The aim the next day will be still to absorb more of the Word of God, still to be useful, faithful, devoted disciples of Jesus Christ, understanding that all is so much of grace that even when we’ve done everything, we’re still unprofitable servants and we stand under the pattern of grace. Let us pray.
Lord God, we are afraid of the kind of aridity that is doctrinally robust but that does not love you with heart and soul and mind and strength and does not love our neighbors as ourselves, but in our day and age, Lord God, we are also afraid of this kind of selfish pursuit of experience that really doesn’t give a rip what the truth is so long as we can have some feeling of transcendence.
Forbid that these idolatries should take root in our lives, but work out your own pleasure within us, we pray, by the power of the blessed Spirit of God, who convicts and regenerates and renews and illumines and conforms us to Christ now and forever. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
