James Wood provides a helpful intervention into the “spiritual formation” conversation by utilizing Aristotle’s Four Causes. (He seems to have done this independently of Luke Stamps, though happily their treatments do not contradict.) I imagine this article will complement Mere Fidelity’s recent conversation around spiritual formation.
Prayer is not a patient wait for the rule [of God] to come into effect at the end of history, it is a patient participation in present rule. God’s rule is not being held in reserve to be inaugurated at some future date, after centuries of human rulers have done their best (or worst). It is in operation now. It does not depend on public acknowledgement.
Whether men and women know it or not, they are now living under God’s rule. Some live in rebellion that can be either defiant or ignorant. Some live in an obedience that can be either reluctant or devout. But no one lives apart from it. It is the premise of our existence. There are no days when the rule is not in operation. The week is not divided into one Lord’s day when the rule of God is acknowledged and six human days in which factories, stock exchange, legislatures, media personalities, and military juntas take charge and rule with their lies and guns and money. Nor is the rule restricted to occasional interventions that are later remembered as great historical events—exodus and exile, Christmas and Easter.
It is, of course, not obvious. The decrees of the rule are not audible to unbelieving ears, the beauty of the rule is not visible to unbelieving eyes, the presentness of the rule is not apparent to anxious minds and hurting bodies. But many great and important realities are not obvious: the atomic structure of matter, for instance, or the properties of light, or the complexities of language. All the same, even when we misunderstand or do not understand we continue to pick up objects, see forms, and speak words. Likewise, neither ignorance nor indifference diminishes God’s rule. Day after day “the Lord reigns.” Taking into account the rebellious passions, malicious temperaments, and slothful wills of millions of people, along with the good intentions, misguided helpfulness, and ill-timed ventures of other millions—not to speak of the disciplined love, purged obedience, and sacrificial service of still other millions—our Sovereign presides over and works with all of this material, personal and political. With it and out of it he shapes existence. He seems to be in no hurry. But prayer discerns that leisure is not indolence. Slowness is not slackness. In the end the sovereign will is done.
In commenting on Psalm 93, Eugene Peterson offers these words deserving of our most serious reflection:
God, it seems, does not abandon his essential character when he rules. A God of steadfast love and deep holiness, he is more himself than ever in his rule. He does not set aside the robes of holy love when when he exercises his rule in the mud of human history. The means of God’s rule are consistent with the ends of that rule: holiness, the gradual, patient, penetrating beauty of God’s rule in our desecrated, violated, profaned world.
The blessed assurance of grace announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed. […]
[T]he key question of the Christian life becomes one of freedom: What would you do, what risk would you take, what would you say if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you truly believed your standing with God was secure, the ultimate threat of judgment was removed, and you didn’t have to do anything? How would you spend your time and energy if you could undertake something for the sheer joy of doing it rather than any outcome it might produce?
These are scary questions, but I suspect their answers have something to do with exercising the unique gifts God has given each of us. We may even find ourselves free to think of others and their well-being rather than anxiously safeguarding our own.
The single most widespread American misunderstanding of prayer is that it is private. Strictly and biblically speaking, there is no private prayer. Private in its root meaning refers to theft. It is stealing. When we privatize prayer we embezzle the common currency that belongs to all. When we engage in prayer without any desire for or awareness of the comprehensive, inclusive life of the kingdom that is “at hand” in both space and time, we impoverish the social reality that God is bringing to completion.
Solitude in prayer is not privacy. The differences between privacy and solitude are profound. Privacy is our attempt to insulate the self from interference; solitude leaves the company of others for a time in order to listen to them more deeply, be aware of them, serve them. Privacy is getting away from others so that I don’t have to be bothered with them; solitude is getting away from the crowd so that I can be instructed by the still, small voice of God, who is enthroned on the praises of the multitudes. Private prayers are selfish and thin; prayer in solitude enrolls in a multivoiced, century-layered community: with angels and archangels in all the company of heaven we sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.”
We can no more have a private prayer than we can have a private language. A private language is impossible. Every word spoken carries with it a long history of development in complex communities of experience. All speech is relational, making a community of speakers and listeners. So too is prayer. Prayer is language used in the vast contextual awareness that God speaks and listens. We are involved, whether we will it or not, in a community of the Word — spoken and read, understood and obeyed (or misunderstood and disobeyed). We can do this in solitude, but we cannot do it in private. It involves an Other and others.
Currently reading: Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community by Eugene H. Peterson 📚
Moral transformation isn’t something we do; it is something that happens to us, often in unexpected and painful ways. With few exceptions, the pattern is fairly uniform: life must break us in order for God to break in. Grace initiates, enables, empowers, sustains, and completes the whole process.
Currently reading: The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld 📚
Finished reading: The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin 📚
So much still to chew on here. I’ll have to re-read several sections in the coming weeks and months…
Even when the church has done its best to discern the signs of the times, to understand what are the powers at work in the world, and to point to the issues where decisions have to be made in the conflict between the reign of God and the power of evil, this understanding is partial, limited, and distorted. The human situation is more complex and subtle than even the best Christian analysis can penetrate. Therefore the church cannot make a total identification of conversion to Christ with a particular set of ethical decisions based on its own analysis. It must speak to the best of its ability about what obedience to Christ will involve. But it must also recognize that its own ethical perceptions are limited and blurred by its own sinful self-interest. In preaching Christ it will certainly make clear (perhaps more effectively by example than by word) that conversion will have ethical implications. But it must also be ready to be surprised by the fresh insights of the converts into the ethical implications of the gospel and must expect to have to revise and correct its own patterns of obedience. This point is obscured when we think of mission in terms of “foreign missions.” In this case the sending church is insulated from the correction that it needs to receive from the new converts. Mission, as I have insisted, is not just church extension. It is an action in which the Holy Spirit does new things, brings into being new obedience. But the new gifts are for the whole body and not just for the new members. Mission involves learning as well as teaching, receiving as well as giving.
The church misunderstands itself if it thinks that it is itself the place where the truth and righteousness of the reign of God are embodied as against the reign of evil in the world. This ancient temptation to identify the church with the kingdom of God seems to be present again in some manifestations of the theology of liberation. The relation of the church to the kingdom is a more complex one and, I am convinced, can be truly grasped only by means of the trinitarian model.
Conversion is to Christ. It is primarily and essentially a personal event in which a human person is laid hold of by the living Lord Jesus Christ at the very center of the person’s being and turned toward him in loving trust and obedience. Christ is the Son of the Father by whom all things are made, sustained, and ordered toward their true end, anointed by the Spirit to proclaim the kingdom of his Father and to manifest it in bearing upon himself the sin of the world.
Conversion to Christ is therefore also commitment to be with him and with all who are so committed to continuing in the power of the same anointing, proclaiming, and bearing. It is commitment to follow Jesus, with all who are so committed, along the way of the cross—the way of fearless and trustful encountering and enduring the power of evil in the contemporary world.
The company of those so committed and so following does not possess in itself the fullness of understanding or of obedience. It is a learning community. Part of that learning will be the prophetic discernment in the power of the Spirit of the issues where evil is to be encountered and endured. Part of it will be the receiving of correction and enlargement by those whom the Spirit calls in discipleship. The Spirit is not the property of the community but is its lord and guide, going ahead of the church and using both its proclamation and its endurance to bring fresh people to conversion. The church cannot lay down in advance for such people what commitment will mean but must, like Peter in the house of Cornelius, learn from them new lessons about its own obedience. As a learning community that can only press forward from partial to fuller understanding of the Father’s reign, the church will know that it cannot impose its own ethical insights at any one time and place upon those whom the Spirit calls into its company. It must always press on toward fuller obedience but at the same time proclaim Christ as Lord above and beyond its own faulty obedience, and expect and welcome the correction of those whom the Spirit calls into commitment to Christ.