There has recently been a flourishing of new spiritualities. An Oprah video is a case in point. Hundreds of thousands of people are said to be following her views of spirituality and God. Is it so? Here’s a brief summary of what she says: 1) It is mistaken to think that there is one way to God – there are many paths. 2) We need to open our minds to the indescribable. 3) If God’s a jealous God, then God can’t be God as this doesn’t feel right to her – because God is love. 4) God is not something to believe – God is. God is a feeling experience, not a believing one. 5) If it’s about belief, it’s not about God.
Depending on one’s definition of spirituality, Oprah’s point of view may be spiritual, but an important question for us all is whether it leads us towards life or death.
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In Revelation 3:14-22 Christ wishes that the Christians in Laodicea were either hot or cold. It is often assumed that hot means ‘on fire for the Lord’ or a full commitment, while cold means, ‘no fire for the Lord’ or no commitment. If this is the case, the question we’re faced with is why Christ would approve of no commitment at all? This doesn’t make sense. Hot and cold are not to be taken as positive and negative descriptions, but both are positive in regard to what the church’s actions should be. Problem is being lukewarm, which seems to identify all too many churches. We, as the Laodiceans, proclaim we’re rich, but Christ says we’re impoverished. True riches are spiritual, not found in material possessions, but in Christ himself.
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Carol was always busy in a flurry of activity. She did, and did to the point of exhaustion. What was behind it all? Why the stress and anxiety to do and do? Carol thought she needed to do so that God would declare her righteous. This required her constant performance for others and for God. She learned how to make herself appear to be a strong Christian, but she came to realize she was wearing a mask. She thought God should hide her sin—not because she was sorry for it, but so that she might look better before others and not be rejected.
A powerful legalism flourished in Carol’s life. Everything stood or fell on how well she followed the laws. If she thought she had done enough in a day, then she was entitled to see herself as worthy and meriting justification. If she didn’t measure up to her codes and regimes, or those that others had imposed upon her, she viewed herself as condemned. This vicious circle led her to repeated defeat and perplexity, with seemingly no way out of the maze.
Carol needed to become aware of an entirely new way of seeing things. It was a revelation to her to understand that Christ did for her what she could never do for herself. And that she had misconstrued what she was asking God to do for her. God is not out to hide our sin, but to expose it. In Christ, God had already done everything necessary for her justification. If she confessed Christ as Messiah, she was justified. To be justified by God, to be declared righteous, was the gift she could accept with the empty hands of faith. Carol had been so caught up in a doing mentality that she missed the essential truth of justification as a gift. There is, of course, a place for a being-and-doing connection, but Carol had put doing before being a Christian. She came to realize that doing is crucial, but that it comes out of being justified.
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Coleridge in Aids to Reflection, 1825, Aphorism XXV, puts it this way:
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
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If you've ever thought about Heaven, check out this portrayal by NT Wright.
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Rather than secondary, ornamental, or aesthetic renderings of the real; metaphor, symbol and story may be first order forms of discourse that need to be taken seriously as we seek to understand God, ourselves and the world. Poetry, for example, may be a fuller expression of truth than mathematical formulations and imagination may prove a reliable guide to the real over the unreal.
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I like these words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s What is Life? around 1805, where he expresses conflict like this:
Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?
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Terry, a student in our community, mentioned: “I’m frustrated with what is often portrayed as Christianity today. There is so much that is trite and superficial, without a care for depth and a connection between truth and love. How can we move in new directions?”
My take on this was: “Seems to me, you should be frustrated. The current portrayal of the Christian faith, in many circles, is not only frustrating to you, but no doubt to God as well. From what I can tell, God doesn’t appear to endorse the shallow and trivial. If that’s the case, you’re right to protest, seek new directions, and an increased credibility. God is on your side. What is passed off as ‘Christian’ today often goes against the very core of what it means to follow in the footsteps of Christ – the crucified and risen One. Somehow we’ve lost the vision that love and truth are to go together. To move in new directions it is imperative to understand that Christianity is about as deep as it gets. First and foremost it’s about being in community with God, through Christ, in the power of the Spirit, and being in community with others—from there we are then called to live in love on the basis of the truth of redemption and forgiveness situated in the reality that the God of Scripture exists, has created this world, and sent Christ to restore it. There’s real depth here: deep, deep love and deep, deep truth in contrast to the trite and superficial.”
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Dear Greg,
I can't figure out why it's so hard for me to be happy. I miss my job; I miss feeling like I have something to offer. I know all this work is for the purpose of getting me to a place where I can do better work, but that is so hard to remember. I've consistently been unhappy at …. . I've gone to counseling, a spiritual director, I run, I employ all my anti-depression strategies (including medication), I live in an intentional community- but I'm unhappy there and can't figure out why. I believe part of it is feeling like my major issues- is God good? What does it mean to live as a Christian in a messy world? etc- aren't any closer to being resolved than before. Not that I necessarily assumed they'd be resolved- I just want to be able to live better- to live without so much doubt. What frightens me is that I spent so much time really pouring over these questions and I came to some good conclusions and yet I keep slipping back into the questions. I don't think that means that the conclusions I came to weren't good or valid, rather, I seem to have a faulty memory. I need to work on remembering what I've learned. Will you pray for me about that? I really do believe that God is present and good, but I don't live that way. I still drink too much and sleep with the wrong people. It's more practice that I need to work on- how to live well, how to be healthy, even when I see and interact with sad or frightening things everyday.
Dear Friend,
I'll start out my response to what you’ve written in this way: where would you be happy? What is happiness? In whatever we do, won't we miss not being able to be doing something else? Granted, not everyone cares, but some of us are harder to satisfy than others. I would think that you'll always have something to offer because you're you and that is true wherever you are.
Life and the Christian life don't seem to be about resolution, but tension. The two questions you mention about God’s goodness and living as a Christian in a messy world are somewhat unresolved for me too. Doubt is present in my life, but it doesn't reign in my life or rule it. Slipping back into the questions will always be with us - it's inevitable if I’m going to be honest - but I never start at zero, because I live on the basis of answers that are adequate. Every time I fall into severe doubt I find there are authentic intellectual and spiritual responses that point me back to the Living God and his goodness. Doubt and its power can diminish in a messy world. Ah, yes, memory and remembering. I'll pray.
Living "as if" is part of living as we seek to follow in the footsteps of the crucified and risen One. If you're not living as if God is present then you're shooting yourself in the foot and we do that sometimes, but the redemptive power of Christ sweeps us up into deep consolation and memory becomes actuality - we can start again and learn to live better and be well in the shadow of the cross.
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Notice in the Genesis 1 and 2 (now would be a good time to open your Bible and study these chapters) there is no confusion, in contrast to many versions of spirituality today, between the Creator and the created. In Genesis, God is not nature, nor is God confused with it. Genesis depicts God as involved with nature, but God is never portrayed as entirely related to or distinct from the created world.
This is an important clarification for at least two reasons. First, and more generally, it begins to diminish spirituality confusion. It reveals something of who God is, something of who we are, and something of what nature is: God is Creator and not nature, humans are not God or nature, and nature is created not Creator. Second, and more specifically, the clarification allows us to contest theologies and spiritualities that speak of God as being entirely one with the created world (related) or having utterly nothing to do with it at all (distinct).
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In our contemporary context, with its diversity of maps and guides, there is a bewildering and powerful attraction to a make it up as we go along when it comes to the Holy Spirit. The broad availability of diverse spiritualities accompanied by the increasing levels of ambiguity and misunderstanding in our Christian circles, gives rise to a myriad of perplexing notions of spirit, which are connected to almost anything.
There are no limits or parameters to these kinds of logic. High ambiguity is what it’s all about. Whatever spirit is, it is utterly unbounded and undefined, and there is no way of identifying any of its substantial activities or core characteristics. The very thought of defining spirit is assumed to go against the nature of spirit; it is to remain vague and nebulous.
Think of expressions like, the spirit of our times or the spirit of the film. No one is quite sure what such a spirit is, but it is thought to have something to do with becoming aware of and recognizing the spirit in all things. For some this means that spirit is a concoction of new age and pagan forces focused on self-realization. Others emphasize that spirit—such as animal, river, mountain, and home spirits—make their presence felt as a sort of elusive and mystifying element that is interwoven into all things, appearing around every corner in mysterious ways. We may hear of spirit as ecstasy without argument or labyrinth without direction. Supposedly, the infinite, whatever that may be, is to be discovered everywhere. All that is finite has infinite spirit.
It is important to underscore that in such contemporary expressions of spirit we are left to our dreams and reveries, our personal opinions and feelings. So be it, many might say. Be creative. Make it up as you go along. Everyone has their own spirit and spirituality, and may define both in anyway they please.
Now let’s look at this. In theory, Christians acknowledge the importance of having the Bible as the map for the journey, but in practice they tend to ignore it in favor of the direct intervention and revelation of the Spirit. Personal immediacy and prompting are assumed to be more spiritual than carefully contemplating and following the map. And at what cost? In my view, the expense is spiritual impoverishment. There are an unfortunate set of similarities between some of the make it up as we go along views, and those operating in Christian circles. This should remind us of our tendency to falsely absolutize and of the need to be aware of the danger of self-deception.
Lamentably, biblical map studies often turn into mumbo jumbo, where similar degrees of ambiguity and an increasing reliance on the hyper-subjectivity that we find in non-Christian contexts, are prominent. Cultivated and honed map-reading skills that will help us to be living in the Spirit should be on the rise and increasingly have more and more to do with our views of the Holy Spirit and spirituality.
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The poetry of the Psalms addresses us as a bundle of life in community with God. While God, Psalmist and Israel wrestle, darkness hovers over the landscape of time. Light escapes, but is captured again when God graciously illumines the path ahead. In the covenantal mapping literature of the Psalms, we find powerful claims of trust and gratitude mixed with disclosures of deep despair and estrangement.
In the Psalms we see creational affirmations and covenant shattering, combined with a longing for a renewal of relational safety and stability. As the Psalmist might cry out, May your goodness, oh God, shine through and lament not be our lot in life. Lord keep us by your side in the land of the living.
Living spiritually is enhanced and enriched through the Psalms and their frequent affirmations of and appeals to God’s covenant loyalty. Many of these writings, however, may shock us with their realism. In the midst of our sometimes automatic pilot spirituality, where everything is supposedly bright and happy, some of the Psalms remind us that community with God and the path to life are far from straight forward.
There is and will be brokenness, mystery, dark times, judgment, desperate searching, and much more. Though these circumstances frequently lead to illumination and new understanding, arriving there means going through—not taking a detour around—facets of spirituality that may not fit our desired schemes, notions, and expectations of God. The path may become difficult and the destination may seem far away, but God is faithful to lead us forward. The Psalms are a richly textured slice of life with God, and they offer us revelatory insights into humanness and living spirituality.
Read some of them this week and in the year ahead.
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As those who follow the crucified and risen One we’re to grow increasingly aware that love is engraved on us, and etched into the depths of our souls. Love should be the imprint that produces Christian unity and identifies us to the watching world. When people look at us, they are to see our love for each other and the unity that results from this.
John 17:20-23 makes this directive abundantly clear. Our unity and community like that of the Father and Son has an impact on the world. This unity is one of the central features that make it possible for the world to know that the Father sent Jesus, and that he loves us. A scriptural mapping confirms that this is the path to life and that these are the chief characteristics by which the unbelieving world will recognize that we are in community with God and true disciples of Jesus.
We have at times expressed this love and unity poorly. We have been unloving to those seeking by not giving honest answers to honest questions, and we have not shown enough love to our brothers and sisters in Christ to have unity wherever it can be found. As disciples of the crucified and risen One, we are acting as if there is no engraving, no etching, and no imprint; as if we have not been loved by Jesus, and as if the Father has not sent the Son. Lamentably, we are missing the mark of a Christian: failing to truly love others and to be unified. This is, it must be said loud and clear, deplorable.
Growing numbers of Christians and non-Christians are bewildered by a sense of the inauthenticity and the lack of real and genuine love among us. The words fake, arrogant, and aloof all too often describe and characterize us, both inside and outside the Christian community.
Believers become apathetic and cynical. They’re floundering and drifting. Unbelievers look and say, “Who cares.” There’s nothing different in the Christian community. Then, these unbelieving observers turn away and go about business as usual. And all the while we are consumed with constructing our Christian bowling alleys and health clubs, dogmatically privileging our doctrines over people, constructing our apologetics without love, chasing after making more and more money, or performing in the theater of being cool. Living love and unity gets left behind in the shadows.
Where is the true Christian response of costly love today? Where have we lovingly given answers to a lost culture and comforted the souls who are trapped within it? Whatever happened to welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the disenfranchised and following the crucified and risen One in offering hope and hospitality to the other?
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I wonder if the old tendency to possess absolute knowledge on the basis of human reason has been exchanged for the new tendency to possess absolute humility on the basis of human feelings. I’m not sure, but it seems to me that we may have been captured by false options here. Do you think Christianity offers us a true one?
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The perspective that God’s Kingdom has already arrived and is not yet complete is marked by a tension. Living tensions will proliferate in this context, but it is imperative to realize that tension is not to be understood as a flaw in our spirituality. Tension is not a negative thing. It is not something we should attempt to disguise or destroy.
Christians devote a tremendous amount of time and energy attempting to exorcise tension. In my view, this is a utopian misinterpretation of living spirituality and not the direction God has for us. To be in tension is to be in-between. And being in-between corresponds to 1) the theological marker of the Kingdom of God, 2) to life in the world, and 3) to who we are as creatures of God.
Given the contours of these three correspondences, this tension is positive and appropriate. Its explicit marker on the map is the character of the Kingdom of God, but tension is also true for the whole of living spirituality; we live in the sufficiency of the already and await the completion of the not yet.
In this context, it is important to see the already part of spirituality representing God’s work in the world and in our own lives at the present time. In spite of the truth that not everything is resolved now, we have great hope rooted deeply in God’s truth and living in community with him and his people. God’s faithful present is already ours, as we patiently await the culmination of his faithful not yet.
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When Christians take the role of “know-it-alls” or “know- nothings,” they are contributing to impoverished spirituality. A living spirituality reversal of this impoverishment should evoke a life of tension between confidence and humility. We have good and sufficient reasons and can confidently know that Christianity is true, but there is also a place for humility in recognition that we don’t have all the information necessary for a neutrally perceived knowledge that is exhaustive. An over-emphasis in one direction or the other detracts from community with God, the centrality of Christ, the work of the Spirit, and Christian identity in the world.
The apostle Paul is making a similar point in his letter to Corinth, which I summarize as, “Now, we see through a glass darkly or in a mirror dimly, but when Christ returns we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). A careful study of this chapter reminds us that we still await the day when Christ returns. This powerful truth is to be taken seriously into account when it comes to our views of knowledge, as we live spirituality in the present.
On the day of Christ’s return, the redeeming activity of God in the world and in his children will be complete. As we wait for the arrival of the day of Christ, there is already a present redemption that helps us—in spite of our sinfulness—to see more clearly, although this clarity never gives us perfect vision or exhaustive knowledge.
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Romans 6 takes us far from the impoverished notions of spirituality in the ME-centered culture we are part of, and reorients us with a radically counter-cultural emphasis centering on the crucified and risen One. And it is here, as followers of this One, that we are truly rebels who stand against the mirage of the status quo of ME, and rest in community with God, through Christ. It is he, not we, who has rightful place at the center of living spirituality.
Christ is not, in Paul’s portrayal, a figure that can be reduced to being raised merely in our hearts. He is truly the Messiah, the crucified and risen One, who inaugurates the Kingdom of God, and lived, died, and was raised in history. There is nothing that will have greater significance in the unfolding rule of God until we reach the end, culminating in God’s final restoration and renewal of all things.
Christians, Paul makes evident, have a new orientation. We are moving toward Christ—not Adam or Eve—as Christ is now our representative. Having died to sin, we are alive to God. As a result of being alive to God, we receive the gift of community with God, which in turn enables us to be engaged in living and true spirituality, expressing love and grace toward others. Being in community with God offers us the opportunity to be in authentic community with each other, and to live this authenticity out into the world for the sake of Christ.
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It is essential to be aware that as Christians we are holy and becoming holy—sanctified in Christ Jesus. That is, we find ourselves in the tension of the already and not yet. We are in-between being holy on the basis of the finished work of Christ and our appropriation of this through faith, and becoming holy when we will be more fully and completely like Christ.
God has a marvelous promise for those who follow the path of the crucified and risen One. By God’s grace, we are being transformed into the image of Christ. This reality and truth has extraordinary implications that are intimately connected to living spirituality. Explore this one. Our orientation and destination are not back to the creational garden, but to a past before time and to a future beyond it. I hope that this statement provokes you to reflect on this carefully.
Think for a moment about Adam and Eve and Christ. Adam and Eve imaged God, but Christ images God in a greater way than they ever could have. Adam and Eve were created. Christ is divine and pre-existent. And post-incarnation in his life, mission, death and resurrection, he now lives forever; he who had no beginning, and who now has no end.
Here, in Christ, we find the past before the garden and the future beyond it aligned. This perspective clearly explains why those who follow Christ are able to break out of and surpass the garden, and do not have it or its images as their destiny. Being transformed into the image of Christ is to image one who both precedes and goes beyond creation as we know it. This means that our imaging transformation has a present and from age to age significance. That is, Christians are now marked out as the living redeemed in that they follow the crucified and risen One, which means they are a testimony to the assured promise that the life they have is never-ending and not conditional.
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In the last couple of weeks I have posted on Real Grace and Needing Grace. Today, I would like to post something on Living Grace. When it comes to grace, I wonder if it’s usually thought of as something given by God and received by us. No doubt this is a profound truth, but it is often framed in this way: God gives, we receive – end of story.
While God giving and we receiving grace is essential, I think we should see this as the beginning and not the end of the story. This may be a new way of configuring grace, but it is crucial. Here’s why.
The apostle Paul points out in 2 Corinthians 8-9 that received grace is to be passed on to others. He passionately shows his readers that grace is not merely to be experienced as passive, but is to be an action from those who have received it towards those in need. This is living grace as both verb and adjective. God’s grace is living and it is to be lived. Quite simply: grace is giving to others for it to be fully grace. When there is an overflowing reception of grace, there should be an overflowing giving of grace. Grace is not a private matter, nor is it something to keep within the walls of our bodies, houses, churches or computers. If you’re on the verge of giving grace to another, then go ahead – complete the action – release grace out into the world.
This grace of giving, it should be noted, is to take place in the context of freedom, which allows each to give according to their means. Paul will have none of the strong arm or calculated manipulating tactics that often identify so much of contemporary Christianity. There is a great deal of deception in today’s world, and it can all tend to be about money, money and more money.
Let’s move in a new direction. Living grace, grace and more grace. Giving grace is not to be done grudgingly, but out of a joy to help. God loves a cheerful giver because this is the attitude from which giving is to take place. There are no stipulations concerning quantity here. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is attitude – a living grace attitude.
The God of grace is able to make grace abound so that we will abound in every good work. And we will be made rich in every way in order that in turn we might be generous to others and through this bring thanksgiving to God. His superabundant manifestation of grace should produce an abundant manifestation of grace, which will result in enlarging and increasing our harvest of righteousness.
The key to unlock the door to all this is interchange. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich.”
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There is so much pressure to measure up to false standards, rules and regimes. Freedom is always just around the corner, down the street, and in flight to somewhere else. God, we need your grace.
All of us face notions of counterfeit guilt and shame, which hang around our necks like the massive crosses of stone that adorn our churches of iron and steel. We need God’s grace.
In the midst of individual or community conflict where boundaries have been inappropriately violated and we have caused or received from others pain and hardship. God, we need your grace.
When we are mired in and weighed down by spiritual adultery. We need God’s grace.
Huge inequalities exist between men and women that have resulted in ruinous oppression and social degradation, while racial hatred escalates and skin color fallaciously attempts to describe humanness. God, we need your grace.
Some preachers have become rhetors seeking to cure us of all ills so that our lives would be blessed and rewarded with windfalls of cash. We need God’s grace.
Ridiculous divisions over petty and inconsequential issues characterize so many Christian lives. God, we need your grace.
Mission has been buried under a tombstone of self preservation. We need God’s grace.
And love? Whatever happened to love? God, we need your grace.
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