To mark the beginning of Providence’s new sermon series on the seven letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3: Albrecht Dürer’s rendering of Christ in Rev 1:12-20
Finished reading: Becoming a True Spiritual Community by Larry Crabb 📚
A compelling account of what makes a community genuinely spiritual. Crabb writes like a modern mystic, with passion and emotional intensity. Because the reality he’s trying to describe is so ineffable, his language sounds a little odd at points. Even so, his vision is one worth pursuing.
Alastair Roberts, explaining why he traded in his obsessive reading of a certain brand of political theology for deep immersion in the gospels:
I determined to go completely cold turkey on the political theology. I stopped reading it. I stopped thinking about it. I stopped arguing about it. In its place, I steeped myself in the Gospels, reading and meditating upon them. And I prayed. […]
It was not long until I experienced a significant change; the appeal of the political theology largely dissipated. While I could make seemingly scriptural arguments for it, so much of the spirit of the politics I had been getting into was alien to the spirit of the Gospels. Reading the Gospels deeply and out of delight in them, rather than as fodder for political argument, was like leaving a thick miasma and breathing fresh air.
Part of the shift I experienced was a shift in my posture towards scripture, which led to changes in my hearing of scripture. When I was chiefly animated by political positions and debates, my approach to scripture became increasingly subservient to those. I had been “listening for” things that seemed to back up my positions. I knew all the prooftexts. I could defend my position “from” scripture too: I knew how to counter all sorts of biblical arguments against my position. […]
When I stepped back, the arguments, debates, and ideology no longer mediated my relationship with the text. I started to read it on its own terms; I started listening to it, rather than listening for things that served interests and concerns I was bringing to it. As I did, I began to feel the grain of the text and to learn to move with it. Biblical statements ceased to be brute facts to be marshalled into an extrabiblical system.
Among other things, I started paying more attention to the manner of the text and its unifying movements of thought. While I could incorporate abstract biblical verses into my former political system, I discovered that it was more difficult to honestly account for the ways the Bible itself held everything together – what it prioritized, what it said, how it said it, what it didn’t say, what it downplayed. Had the biblical authors truly believed what I had believed, they would have written very different books, with a very different animating spirit to them. And while many of my former beliefs weren’t straightforwardly wrong (although some certainly were), the spirit that animated them was, producing distortions that twisted everything.
The second to last sentence deserves serious reflection: “Had the biblical authors truly believed what I had believed, they would have written very different books, with a very different animating spirit to them.” We could change it into the form of a question, which would be a very searching question indeed: Do my beliefs about X (ostensibly drawn from Scripture) actually breathe the same air as Holy Scripture? Or we could ask: Would Paul and James and John and Peter (et al.) see the fit between their writings and the beliefs I’m espousing? Obviously, describing the “animating spirit” of a text can be a tricky business, and it’s not always a straightforward endeavor to say whether this or that biblical writer might endorse my beliefs about X. Nevertheless, I do think these sorts of questions can be useful for the person honestly trying to read with the grain of Scripture.
Alan Jacobs, arguing re: digital technology’s negative effects on us and our kids that everyone knows all this—by this he means that screens are making us miserable, that they’re terrible for our kids' mental health (and they’re terrible tools for their education), that Silicon Valley cares not at all about these adverse effects—which means that our problem runs deeper than mere ignorance:
So our problem is not a lack of knowledge; it’s a deficiency of will and a malformation of desire. St. Augustine explained it all to us 1600 years ago: My actions are determined by my will, and my will is driven by what I love. We do badly by our children because we do not love them sufficiently or properly; we do badly by our neighbors for the same reason; we do badly by ourselves for the same reason, because narcissists — and one of the things everyone knows is that all the forces named above breed narcissists — do not rightly love themselves.
Those of us who care about the future of our children, our neighbors, and ourselves don’t need to repeat what everyone already knows. We need to devote our full attention to one question and one question only: How do we love rightly and teach others to love rightly? If that’s not our constant meditation, we’re wasting our time. If we cannot redirect our desires towards better things than Silicon Valley, AKA Vanity Fair, sells, then nothing, literally nothing, will get better.
The Oaktree in the Snow (1829) by Caspar David Friedrich:
Memories of the Giant Mountains (c. 1835) by Caspar David Friedrich:
The spirituality of a community can be measured not merely by its doctrinal statement but by the passions that are most deeply aroused. Is our passion for worship elbowing out our passion for self? Does our passion to trust nudge aside our passion to control? Does our passion to grow make us willing to suffer whatever pain is needed? Is our passion to obey relieving the pressure to do something right? Instead, is it causing us to delight with anything we do right?
Spiritual passions, those generated by realizing the staggering provisions of the New Covenant, are the centerpiece of spiritual community. They are what we pour into one another. Truly spiritual passions communicate more truth to deeper places in people than well-presented teaching, because they can exist only if the gospel is true.
Trooper
