Evangelicals Today: Spirituality and Maturity

“You’re only young one, but you can always be immature,” quipped Dave Barry. So it is with American Christianity, Evangelical and Catholic. On no current issue is this more true than our present fin de siecle fixation with spirituality.

Faced with the recent profusion of literature on the inner life, one is tempted to endorse Rudolf Harnack’s harsh, turn-of-the-century verdict that mysticism “begins in a ‘mist’ and ends in an ‘ism.'” Yearning for the holy, longing for some “whence” to life in our addictive society’s frenzied squirrel cage, has become epidemic. The historian Steven Ozment was right: with institutional decline and its accompanying dissent comes the rise of mysticism.

The Evangelical world in America is especially porous to these sweet fragrances of Eden. As Harold Bloom has chronicled in The American Religion, this is the land whose soil gave birth to the peculiarly New World gnosticisms of Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, the Latter Day Saints, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Even the so-called mainline Protestant denominations representing historical Christianity of European lineage are vulnerable. With no institutionally embodied teaching office (“Lutherans don’t do canon law,” snapped George Forell in a recent national debate of his denomination), save perhaps for a de facto magisterium of the manager and the expert, Evangelicals are abandoned to the rigors of a personal and ecclesial frontier from which they must trust that the Gospel will truthfully disclose itself. As we forage in the wilderness of human dislocation, we await the “good news” — which Luther measured by the rule “was treibt Christ” — to publish itself to the faithful. Are we equipped to sort the wheat from the chaff in the New World’s current harvest of spirituality?

As early as Augustine, the Christian life was understood as a spiritual journey along the three-fold path of purgation, illumination, and union with God. Much of the new spirituality makes a promise the faithful find hard to refuse, namely, that we can pass “Go,” collect two hundred dollars, and head straight for the unitive way. Union with God becomes the purchase of a cheap grace, not the blood of the Lamb’s dearly bought atonement.

Eden is restored, but at what price? The tree of the knowledge of good and evil remains standing, yet to be dislodged by the Tree of Life. Union with God ends up meaning fusion, which is foreign to the mutually enriching bridal mystery of “the two become one.” The character of the true mystic is one of utter self-definition and self-differentiation, grounded outside the self in the beyond who is within.

What is really at issue in much of the new spirituality is something rather homespun: maturity. This is the apostolic yardstick by which is measured the integrity of any supposed union with God. The spiritual life’s consummation is simply the fulfillment of the Scriptural design to “present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28, NRSV). If it is truly Evangelical and Catholic, then, the unitive way is not a path strewn with the boundaryless souls of those who have been seductively reduced to undifferentiated states of being. Union with the society of the three-personed God leads above all to adulthood.

Sooner or later those of us in Christian service admit that the greatest issue in our work and lives is not competence, skill, or professional expertise. It is the formation of our character. It is the removal of that character’s defects. To be precise, it is maturity. This is both our stumbling block and our stepping stone. Growing up is hard to do. But as an imitation of Christ, and consequently as a real theology of the cross, the telos of the unitive way is to “grow up in every way into him who is the head” (Ephesians 4:15, NRSV).

How mature am I? How mature are you? Within the Jewish and Christian heritage, that is the root matter in any growth that can be said to be Spirit led. No, we understand that this does not mean giving up the blessed childlikeness which Jesus celebrated. But it does mean giving up childishness and our childish ways. Among other things, it means the ability to delay gratification, to live amidst ambiguity, to abandon the need to fix and control others, to take a stand, to accept a challenge, to give up approval seeking and impression management, and to be less reactively/emotionally driven and more guided by self-definition from within.

Mature persons are those who define themselves, yet are responsive and stay connected with others. Their boundaries are both firm and flexible, much like an NFL defense which bends but does not break. They clearly know who they are apart from all others, yet they openly enter into covenant and maintain solidarity with the whole race of Adam and Eve. They neither fuse with nor are cut off from their world. Thus, they are whole and empowered, so that both attachment and detachment are integrated in their functioning, forged in the deeper passion of the crucified God’s loving detachment from our old adamic self-life.

Neither absorbed nor self-absorbed, such persons know the glorious liberty of the children of God. Yet, they also know that in acting toward the least of their brothers and sisters they enter into the passion of the Lord. Because their existence has become paschal, they know with equal certainty that nothing matters . . . and that, passionately, everything matters.

This experience of the unitive way as the way of maturity has little to do with self-actualization as understood in popular culture. Too, it leaps beyond what certain schools of psychology mean by individuation. Indeed, it has everything to do with the death of all that. Crucified are what the unknown author of the Theologica Germanica calls “I-dom,” “Me-dom,” and “Selfdom.” In their place arises a child of God on the way “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13, NRSV).

Author

  • John A. Berntsen

    John A. Berntsen is a graduate of St. Olaf College, Yale Divinity School, and Emory University. At the time this article was published, he was senior pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA), Perkasie, Pennsylvania.

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