Christian Spirituality: Inward Piety or Outward Practice?
By Ralph C. Wood,
University Professor at Baylor University
Editor`s Note: Originally delivered at the International Symposium on Evangelical Theology and Christian Spirituality at Beeson Divinity School October 2-4, 2000, the essay will be part of a forthcoming volume, For All the Saints: Christian Spirituality and Evangelical Theology, edited by Timothy George and Alistor McGrath, published by Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002.
It`s a delight to return to the Samford campus after two year`s absence and in fond remembrance of the very happy year that Suzanne and I spent here in 1997-98. It`s also a pleasure to receive this invitation from a friend of nearly three decades, Dean Timothy George. And it`s a special privilege to respond to a scholar whose work I have admired for many years, Professor Alister McGrath of Oxford University, in his plenary address today on "Loving God with Heart and Mind: The Theological Foundations of Spirituality."
Unlike other failed preachers who`ve found no one willing to lay the hands of ordination on them, I have only two points to make. Both of them operate on the assumption that Christian spirituality is outward no less than inward: that the Christian life consists of outward habits and practices that form our inward character into the image of Christ. My model, in this regard as in so many others, is a Baptist preacher named Warren Carr. He calls himself a "Flip Wilson Christian." Wilson was a brilliant black comedian of the 1960s and 70s who, among other roles, acted as pastor of "The Church of What`s Happening Now." Warren Carr has adopted Flip Wilson`s salutary motto as his own: "What you see is what you get." My chief thesis, therefore, is that we are not secret "inner Christians" who have hidden "spiritual selves." We are the outward and public persons, I will argue, who have been formed into the image of Christ by the visible and audible practices of the Church.
I want first to question Professor McGrath`s contention that spirituality consists in the heart-felt application of Christian truth to the inner life of faith. I will insist, by contrast, that we can never assume that we know the Gospel in advance, nor that we need only to put it into practice-whether outwardly in social gospel fashion, or inwardly in pietistic devotion. I will maintain, on the contrary, that the Gospel is something not yet fully known, and thus that it requires our ever-fresh rediscovery and conformity to it. In the second case, I will propose that our crying need is not so much for a renewed emphasis on meditation, as Professor McGrath claims, but rather on theological preaching and authentic worship. It is the poverty of our preaching and our worship that has made so many of our people into mere sucklings of spiritual milk and thus perpetual "children in Christ."
I.
Professor McGrath asserts that we must accept the term "spirituality" because it has won nearly unanimous endorsement in our time. I fear, on the contrary, that the word has become unredeemably vague and monstrous. It is an abstract noun so devoid of theological content that it can be attached to almost any modifying phrase. My graduate student assistant made a Web-search for the word "spirituality" and got 10,000 responses. Even when he added the genitive "of," there were still several hundred sites. Here are but a few of the many "spiritualities" advertised on the Internet. I challenge anyone to specify what they might mean: the spirituality of unity, the spirituality of work, the spirituality of simplicity, the spirituality of intimacy, the spirituality of non-violence, the spirituality of the body, the spirituality of imperfection, the spirituality of indigenous cultures, the spirituality of food, the spirituality of letting go, the spirituality of the feminine, the spirituality of the good herb, the spirituality of aging, the spirituality of the religious educator, and –most revealing of all –the spirituality of wildness. This last "spirituality" is described as follows: "religion that is lived, felt, and experienced-rather than simply believed-real and ecstatic and visceral [religion]. Wicca, neo-paganism, ecospiritiuality, shamanism, totemism, shapeshifting, therianthropy, nature magic, animal and plant lore, and earth-based spirituality of all kinds." Surely the one thing missing from this sorry litany is the spirituality of abortion. No wonder that the late president of Wake Forest University, James Ralph Scales, used to say that, whenever he heard the word "spirituality," he grabbed first for his wife and then for his wallet-because somebody was about to be diddled.
Yet why shouldn`t we courageously retrieve the fad-word "spirituality" from its contemporary abuse? Didn`t Calvin adopt the old Latin word for "piety" to describe the practice of the Christian life? Yes, but there is a huge difference between the two. Piety does not entail the often self-serving subjectivism that seems inherent in the current vogue for spirituality. Pietas was a word redolent with rich and quite specific meanings. It connoted a sense of duty and responsibility and even patriotism, a deep devotion and loyalty to one`s family and homeland, as well as a kindness and tenderness towards others in need. In every case, pietas pointed the Romans to a reality beyond themselves-namely, to a huge sense of indebtedness to their country, to their parents, and of course to their gods. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the early Christians, like Calvin and the Puritans much later, adopted this ancient word to describe the nature of the Christian life. They, too, believed that life in Christ takes us out of ourselves-out of our pathetically small subjectivity-and into the grand public realm of God`s own mercy and holiness. Which is to say, of course, into the Body of Christ: the life of the church and its practices.
Professor McGrath warns of the dangers inherent in an overly cerebral Christianity, and he traces this danger to the Enlightenment`s stress on objectifying reason. This strikes me as a skewed reading of the Enlightenment. Certainly the 17th century did mark a new turn to the outward and observable world that can be known rationally and scientifically. Yet even this empiricist turn was not purely outward objective; it was also deeply inward and subjective. The notion that nature can be viewed neutrally was itself another lensed way of seeing. Even Descartes` famous formula-Cogito, ergo sum-is marked by its emphasis on the thinking subject: I think. Surely this highly individualized and reflexive self is the chief creation of the Enlightenment. It is no accident that Christian pietism arose right alongside secular rationalism as its close cousin: they are both marked by this turn to the subject. I believe, therefore, that while the contemporary demand for spirituality speaks to a very deep human need, it is fundamentally a need created by Enlightenment self-referentiality.
The biblical tradition knows little of this concern with the inner and subjective self. The Hebrew tongue has no equivalent for our word "soul." Nephesh, so my Hebraist friends remind me, should be translated "animated mud." For the Jews, we humans are nothing other than inspirited dirtballs! Jesus joins the whole of the scriptural tradition in refusing our convenient modern distinction between the outward and inward life. Our Lord condemns the Pharisees, of course, for being whitewashed tombs full of dead bones. He accuses them of cleansing the outside of the cup and the plate while leaving the inside of the dishes dirty. But note ever so well that Christ doesn`t call the Pharisees to greater spiritual inwardness by abandoning their so-called legalistic tithes on mint and dill and cumin. He commands them, instead, to practice greater faithfulness in the keeping of Torah, which these smaller observances are meant to prompt: "You have neglected the weightier matters of law," declares Jesus, "justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others" (Matt 23:23).
So it is also with St. Paul. His distinction between the spirit and the flesh is not a distinction between inner and outer so much as between the godly and the ungodly. Only because our carnality is often the locus of our consuming selfishness does Paul condemn it. Yet even then, its sins are less egregious than those of the flesh. When, therefore, Paul announces that "our outer nature is wasting away, while our inner nature is being renewed every day" (2 Cor 5:14), he is making no plea for us to forsake the outward life for the inward. Rather is he summoning us to make a full and perfect sacrifice of our bodies no less than our souls to God (Rom 12:1)-in and through the Body of Christ called the church. Paul knew well that the Greek persona means "mask," and that we are Christian persons only as we wear the right mask: the mask of Christ.
This accounts, I believe, for Paul`s strange admonition that we must not be caught naked and unclothed at the Second Coming. He commands us to put on the persona of Christ, and thus to be rightly clothed at Christ`s Return. Notice, by contrast, how many of our highly spiritual folks do not find anything extraordinary about this personifying of Christ. In their conviction that only what is inward and spiritual truly matters, they enter the presence of the Lord wearing backward baseball caps, thigh-high skirts, muscle-exhibiting shirts, and knockabout shoes. Thus do they make an unconscious statement that, for them, worship requires no drastic reclothing of our lives. I read only recently of a Christian death metal band (whatever that is) whose leader made this declaration: "God can change you without changing how you look." Our fellow believers in the black churches deny this false distinction. They worship God in the beauty of their best attire. They want their clothes to reflect the glory of God`s own holiness. They have no dress-down days at church. Their spirituality is first of all outward in order that it might also be clothed in the whole armor of God and the garments of true righteousness. Like the well-dressed royalty whom God has made them and all of us to be, they intend to enjoy the marriage feast of the Lamb in style.
Consider these other arresting examples of outward and public piety. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of 19th century England, joined his friends at Oxford in practicing what they called "the discipline of the eyes." They believed that what we see shapes our souls. To behold ugliness and vulgarity and crudity is to risk the twisting and perversion of our very character. Yet many of us believe that, so long as we are attending to our inward spirituality, it doesn`t make much difference what we look at or provoke others to look at. Karl Barth also believed that what he heard shaped his soul. He began every day by listening to Mozart for an hour and then praying for another hour. Barth was not seeking to put himself into something as silly as "the mood for prayer." He wanted, instead, to hear earthly echoes and musical parables of the heavenly Kingdom, so that when he prayed he might participate in the very life of God. In order that his prayers not become mere subjective meanderings among his own small-minded concerns, Barth always prayed aloud, even though he prayed alone. Thus did Barth confess that in prayer we commune with the God who is closer than our own breath at the same time He is farther than we can imagine.
Once when two friends of C.S. Lewis came to collect him for a day`s trip outside Oxford, they noticed that Lewis was walking up and down in his garden while they sat impatiently in the car. Lewis finally joined them, and his friends wanted to know why on earth he was pacing back and forth in the side yard: "What were you doing out there while we sat here waiting for you?" "Oh," replied Lewis, "I wouldn`t dare leave home without first saying my prayers." Prayer, for C.S. Lewis, was an outward, even visible, habit that shaped his inward and spiritual life. Hence this hard but true saying from one of the Desert Fathers, Abba Agathon, as summarized by Bishop Kallistos Ware: "Prayer is the hardest of all tasks. If we do not find it difficult, perhaps it is because we have not really started to pray." It is largely in prayer, I believe, that we discover the awful otherness and hiddeness of God, no less than the wondrous nearness and dearness of God. We err, I believe, when we pray on the assumption that we know the Gospel in advance, and that we need only to apply it to our personal lives. Because God`s Word is a sovereign, free and living Word, it is a Word which comforts only as it also terrifies. God`s Word can never be comfortably assumed. The Cross is at once the place of God`s supreme revelation as well as His complete hidden ness. Surely this means that the Gospel awaits our astonished rediscovery; indeed, our trembling re-conversion every day.
II
In the second place, I want to contest Professor McGrath`s claim that good theology is not enough, and he laments what he calls "theological correctness." If he refers to the theology practiced in the American Academy of Religion, then he should have said that bad theology is not enough! I believe, on the contrary, that good theology always issues in good preaching and good worship. Professor McGrath is right to protest against those few folk who believe that, by subscribing intellectually to certain prepositional claims-for example, about atonement or eschatology-we have become fully Christian. Yet I confess that I don`t know many, if any, such folk. Our real problem lies not with those few remaining dispensationalists who get out their Schofield Bibles every morning and trace the successive ages of divine dispensation, nor with the tiny tribe of Calvinists who ponder the Synod of Dort every night before bed. It seems to me, therefore, that Professor McGrath has things exactly backwards when he approves of the Archbishop Donald Coggan`s claim that "The journey from the head to the heart is one of longest and most difficult that we know."
I believe, quite to the opposite, that the journey from the heart to the head is not only the most difficult but also the most necessary in our subjective and emotion-bingeing age. Our real summons is to follow the example of St. Augustine in making sure that our faith seeks ever greater intellectum-ever greater understanding. It is not the brain-strained, therefore, but the brain-lamed believers who are often a scandal to our Faith. Many advocates of Christian spirituality strike me as having over-emphasized the heart at the huge expense of the head. We have failed to follow the clear progress that St. Paul traces in Romans 6:17: "Thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed" (emphasis added). Obedient faith does indeed spring from our trusting hearts, but it also presses outward to the theological doctrines which keep it from becoming a spiritual form of self-indulgence.
Professor McGrath warns that knowledge can be a temptation to arrogance and a distraction from God. But surely he doesn`t mean theological knowledge of a deeply doctrinal kind. I maintain that Christian doctrine is not only a reflective distillation of Christian experience but also a powerful spur to Christian experience. We come to know and to experience God more profoundly, I believe, in and through the bedrock claims contained in the great confessions of the Church. "Whoever has a little creed," said Charles Spurgeon, "has a little church." C.S. Lewis was once asked what kind of devotional reading he most favored. His interlocutor perhaps assumed that he would answer by referring to something like Oswald Chambers` My Utmost for His Highest. Instead, Lewis replied that his spiritual life was prompted by such theological treatises as Athanasius` On the Incarnation. Lewis was not preening. He was making the salient point that a spirituality which is not based upon-and which does not lead to-a profounder knowledge of God is bogus and bankrupt. "If you have a false idea of God," declared William Temple, "the more religious you are, the worse it is for you-it were better for you to be an atheist." For Lewis as for Temple, all thought that is sufficiently rigorous and thorough cannot but redound to the glory of God. After all, Jesus Christ is the Logos (i.e., Thought) become flesh.
In the opening pages of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis tells of an atheist whom the devil`s minion named Screwtape had noticed to be reading in the British Museum. The satanic Screwtape immediately sought to interrupt this man`s concentration. Screwtape tempted the atheist to think about his forthcoming lunch, to take a break, above all to go read a newspaper. Yet why would a devil want thus to distract an atheist? Any sustained argument, says Screwtape, even if it`s atheistic argument, concentrates the mind on universal issues and thus proves dangerous to the Kingdom of Evil. Such serious thinking, Screwtape confesses, withdraws human attention from the realm where the demonic thrives-namely, from what Screwtape calls "the stream of immediate sensate experiences."
These words were written in 1942. Surely Lewis, were he living, would describe our entire culture as nothing other than "a stream of immediate sensate experiences." Its effect has been deadly for the life of the church no less than for our common social and academic life. I have students who confess that they can no longer take even a two-hour exam, much less a three, because their nerves cannot stand it. The reason is not far to find. The average television image lasts less than two seconds. Our minds and souls are sensorily pummeled by the nihilistic images of modern advertising. We are thus rendered virtually incapable of sustained thought. Indeed, we find it almost impossible to imagine the regimen of reading and study that John Wesley set for his followers-a regimen which began, by the way, at five o`clock in the morning. Alistair Cooke, the former host of Masterpiece Theatre, has said that reading is such a rapidly disappearing art that its fate in the late 21st century will be akin to the fate of hand-quilting the late 20th-namely, that it will become a merely curious pastime. W.H. Auden rightly called ours the Age of Anxiety. Our stomachs churn, our ears roar, our fingers thrum, and our colons are knotted with silent terror and secret unbelief. Most of us are so dependent upon medications that either "rev" us up or calm us down that one of my witty friends has formulated this aphorism: "Reality is for those who cannot stand drugs." T.S. Eliot described our sense-saturated culture even more chillingly in his Four Quartets. There he says that we are "distracted from distraction by distraction." Can it be that our current mania for spirituality is yet another distraction from our distraction?
I believe that we can answer in the negative only if our piety is rooted and grounded in theological preaching, even as it is also sustained by liturgical and sacramental worship. For St. Paul, the Gospel is not something to be preached so much as it is preaching itself. Faith comes by hearing, he declares on Romans 10:17: fides ex auditu. We are saved by the response which proclamation enables. Authentic preaching is thus necessarily and inherently theological. It is meant to feed us with such rich spiritual food that our souls will be nourished and our minds concentrated upon ultimate things. Far from being theologically stuffed and satiated, I find that my students and fellow church members are theologically starved and emaciated. Let a single example suffice. My upbringing in an East Texas church pastored by graduates of our Baptist seminaries was biblically rich and evangelistically strong, and I am ever so grateful for it. But I confess that it was theologically barren. I could have been spared enormous spiritual shallowness and immaturity by learning even such basic doctrines as justification by grace alone and sanctification through faith alone.
Yet I was never taught, from either the pulpit or the Sunday School room, the importance of even such an indispensable doctrine as the Trinity. No one proclaimed to me the Good News that we Christians are necessarily Trinitarian in our faith. Only because we believe that God has a rich and complete life unto himself-only as the three Persons of the Holy Trinity give themselves utterly to each other-only thus is God free to act in our behalf, delivering us from our present misery, as He enables us to participate in His own triune life of total self-surrendering love. To illustrate what a fearful price we pay for the neglect of this doctrine, Fisher Humphreys of the Beeson faculty tells a sad but funny story about one of his students who decided to observe Trinity Sunday by preaching a sermon on the Trinity. Afterwards, a deacon accosted him and pressed him with this question: "Preacher, why are you messing around with all that Catholic stuff?"
Even so, good preaching and teaching will not sustain Christian life if they do not issue in good worship. Especially for those who stand in the non-creedal traditions, the heart of worship lies not only in our preaching and praying but also in the music. Our hymns are our sung creeds: they often set forth what we believe and practice more sharply and freshly than either our prayers or our sermons. Yet in many evangelical churches, our richly theological hymns are being rapidly replaced with praise songs. So far as I can see, they are useful mainly in helping young Christians memorize scripture. I am not calling for high falutin` anthems and cantatas, nor for a return to hymns with archaic words and unsingable tunes. Rather am I calling for a recovery of the theologically and imaginatively rich music that characterizes the greatest of both our ancient and modern hymns. Consider, for example, four works that very few of my students know: "A Mighty Fortress I Our God," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and "Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy." Then consider a praise song that they all know: "Majesty." The hymns and the gospel song, both in their lyrics and their melodies, make us shudder with awe, tremble with thanksgiving, stand astonished at Calvary, mark the wonder of Christ`s intimacy with us, and ponder the cost of our glad surrender to the God who has yielded himself up for our sake. The praise song, by contrast, has rhymes that are banal, a tune that is saccharine, and a meaning that is sentimental if discernible at all. What is the nature of this "Kingdom authority [that] flows from his throne unto his own"? Surely not the magisterium of the one holy catholic and apostolic church?! The praise song`s effect, I fear, is to make us feel what a Peter De Vries character honestly confesses: "Deep down, I`m rather shallow."
Having offended perhaps everyone in the room, allow me to offer a final gesture of peace. I would remind us all, but especially the young people present, that Isaac Watts began his greatest hymn (and I believe it to be the greatest hymn in the English tongue) with these lines: "When I survey the wondrous cross,/Where the young Prince of glory died." Watts knew that our Lord did not die as an old man but as a man on the very threshold of adult life, and therefore that the Gospel is surely meant for all men and women-for the exuberant young no less than for us who are gray and bald and deaf. Hence my hope that you might join me in protesting against those squeamish spiritualizers who have excised the most vivid stanza from Watts` great hymn. This eradicated stanza plumbs tremendous depths by linking the drastic visibility of Christ`s saving act with our equally drastic response to it:
His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o`er his body on the tree:
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.
Christ`s body was drenched with gore, but this oozing blood became his great gown of glory. For here was no noble martyr`s death. Here the King of Cosmos bore our sin away. Only such Love can demand our bodies and our souls, or minds and hearts, our very life, our all.
