Spirituality

This past Thursday I finished listening through the Bible using my 90-day reading plan from last year. I began on Saturday, February 12. The audio Bible I listened to was The Bible Experience, which I highly recommend. I don't remember exactly why I began listening when I did, maybe because I felt I needed more spiritual input, but as I progressed I found more reasons to be doing it.

Once in college I tried reading the Bible in large chunks, and it was much easier to observe the large scale themes that way. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far before giving up, probably somewhere in the Kings, which is where I usually stop. This time I knew I could finish the whole Bible, because I'd done it before, and I wanted to see how well the themes emerged at this rapid rate.

I also wanted to see if it was a reasonable reading plan. I found that it was, in the sense that I didn't feel too burdened by it. It helped that I was listening rather than reading. I'm sure I would have gotten behind if I'd had to set aside time to read, but I typically have the listening time I needed, about half an hour per day. I listened at twice the normal speed, since this production was read slowly, at about half the rate of normal speech. I actually could have finished the Bible in fewer than 90 days, because some days I could have listened a lot longer, but I wanted to stick to the schedule to get a true sense of the reading plan.

Another reason for trying out this reading plan is that I wanted to get a better handle on the overall structure and contents of the Bible. I grew up in the church, and so I knew the basics and a lot of the details, but the Bible still had plenty of parts I didn't know well because I hadn't spent much time in them.

The only other time I'd gotten through the whole Bible, I was listening to the NIV Audio Bible Dramatized, which I do not recommend. I had arranged the chapters in roughly chronological order, which I also don't recommend, because it was jarring and confusing to flip between books and time frames without warning or explanation. This time I wanted to listen in plain vanilla canonical order in hopes that it would make more sense, which it did.

When I first created my reading plan, one or two people said they'd rather read the Bible slowly and take time to reflect on it. Normally I would too, and whipping through it definitely had disadvantages to go along with the benefits. The litany of kings got confusing, and I certainly didn't have time to ponder all the proverbs.

Listening to the Bible rather than reading it also gave mixed results. On one hand, hearing each word spoken gives them all an emphasis they don't have when your eyes are flying across them on the page, so I noticed things that had escaped my attention before. For example, I had never noticed Jacob's angel sighting in Genesis 32:1.

On the other hand, if your attention strays during a recording or a public reading and you miss things, it's harder to go back and pick them up than if your eyes can freely wander the passage. People sometimes say the Bible was written to be heard rather than read, and that may be true in some ways, but surely the more intricate parts of the Bible, such as Paul's letters, need to be seen and studied in written form.

Some other random things I noticed:

• The OT is even more violent than I remembered. The sound effects helped there. The Bible Experience doesn't hold back.
• I had my epistemology glasses on, paying attention to how knowledge happened in the Bible. I was surprised to hear how often God's chosen leaders and prophets turned out to be wrong in their disputes with other people (e.g., Lev. 10:16-20). I always assumed they were supposed to have all the answers.
• Isaiah is very confusing because it jumps from topic to topic and doesn't give much context, but the other prophets are much less confusing.
• I don't know what it's like for Jewish readers, but to me Isaiah 53 stuck out like a rose bed in a field of grass. My immediate reaction was to ask myself why we needed the NT at all after that. The foreshadowing of Christian theology in that chapter is striking.
• Before this run through the Bible, I didn't remember the whole section of Jeremiah devoted to the people who returned from the exile.
• I didn't remember just how much measuring Ezekiel's prophecy of the future temple involved.
• Among the prophets, I especially liked Daniel because it was directed at Israel's oppressors for a change rather than Israel itself, on top of being interesting, weird, and largely narrative.
• I found that I was less familiar with Luke's accounts than with Matthew and Mark's versions of the same events. It was refreshing to hear his "new" take on things.
• The epistles really are a different animal from the rest of the Bible. They're more personal and open up a lot of new themes.
• Balaam, Cain, and Sodom seem to have been turned into the early church's symbols for everything that's wrong with the world. They show up as warnings in several of the epistles.
• Hebrews, James, and 1 John form a nice almost-bookend to the Bible. Hebrews: All those sacrifices in the old covenant? Jesus is better. James: All those things Scripture's been telling you to do? Do them. 1 John: Love--it's what it's all about. And of course, it's hard to imagine a better bookend than Revelation.

I found the prophets depressing, because Israel and Judah were so stubborn and because I felt the prophets' threats of doom overwhelmed any hope they offered. I worried that God might not have really been just and that he had no qualms about sweeping away the righteous with the wicked. Thank goodness for Malachi 3:16-18, where God specifically addresses this question. Still, I struggled. This is one place where reading more slowly might have served me better, because I could have lingered on the prophecies of restoration.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to the Gospels. I breathed a bigger one when I got to the epistles. They encouraged me. The prophets were writing to stiff-necked people who were headed for judgment. But with the Gospels at last I was back to a message written for people who actually wanted to follow God. Jesus had plenty of harsh things to say, but the balance between that and the messages of restoration was greater. And the epistles were even more encouraging, because more than any other books, they dealt with how to handle suffering, and they injected it with hope and dignity.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

There are many kinds of spirituality floating around out there--New Age spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, Hindu, Wiccan. You can even mix and match. Since I am a Christian (and a conservative one), the Christian variety is the kind that I pursue, so that is what you will find here. But even Christian spirituality comes in a wide array, and this fact is what has launched me on my current voyage.

When I was young, I didn't think about spirituality as a thing in itself. I just went about my business of going to church and listening to Christian radio and evangelizing my friends, and my spiritual life went rather well, at least by my standards then. But over time things fell apart. In high school my evangelistic activities took me into apologetics, which was so absorbing that I forgot all about basic things like praying and reading the Bible and, to some degree, even evangelism. Spiritually I dried up. I suppose my spiritual life was dependent on all the evangelism I was doing. Once that dropped off, prayer got boring, and the Bible no longer seemed relevant. I still cared about God; my relationship with him had just lost its earlier vitality.

The groundwork for my spiritual reawakening was laid at youth camp the summer after my junior year in high school, but my renewal really began halfway through my senior year. By a sort of accident I began corresponding with one of my friends at school, and she and I were able to encourage each other in some areas of insecurity. After two or three weeks of this, she wrote in one of her letters that she thought this accidental correspondence was "meant to be." The idea intrigued me, so I started looking for other things that might have been "meant to be." And I found them. This started me on an amazing, spiritual roller coaster ride. God became the Great, Good Conspirator controlling my circumstances behind the scenes to build me up and give me opportunities to minister to those around me. My relationship with God became more conversational. My prayers were now a matter of listening as well as talking. That is, I paid attention to what God might be saying through my thoughts and circumstances. I even began to read the Bible much more regularly and with an enthusiasm that had always been lacking, though my interpretation of the Bible was very subjective.

Then began the Crisis. In the fall I went off to Wheaton, where I continued the same pattern of interaction with God. This was also the time I was introduced to Reformed theology. I had read a little about Calvinism two years earlier on the Internet, but that semester I had Theology of Culture with R. Scott Clark. He showed us not only the doctrine of election but also bits and pieces of the rest of Reformed theology. I never knew you could fall in love with a theological system, but I did. That class sent my thinking in a whole new direction; and like many converts to Calvinism, I felt like my theology had suddenly matured.

That summer I read a lot of Reformed theology on the Internet. While doing a web search for Scott Clark, I found a group called the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. He had written an article in their journal, Modern Reformation. They were Reformed, of course, so I listened to them. Their main focus was not on theological instruction, however, but on cultural commentary, specifically commentary on the state of the evangelical church. It turned out there was not much about the contemporary evangelical movement that they liked. Contemporary worship music, listening prayer, "felt needs" evangelism, in fact anything that smacked of subjectivity was suspect. Christian spirituality, they said, was about the objective, historical, physical, earthy reality of Christ's atoning work on the Cross, communicated through words, water, bread, and wine. And since at that point I implicitly trusted Reformed theologians, I adopted their critique.

I can't say their denunciation of subjectivity came as a complete shock. I had been questioning it myself. In my conversational relationship with God, I tried to be very sensitive to the Holy Spirit and listened very carefully to every little thought I had that sounded like a promise or a command. And I tried to have conversations with God during my quiet times. But I was never sure if the thoughts I heard were God or my mind's own random productions; and in my conversations with God, my side of the conversation was a lot louder and clearer than God's. After about a year and a half of trying to listen to God, I gave up and decided that if God was speaking to me, I couldn't hear him very well.

So when I came back to Wheaton, I had much to complain about, and I didn't mind sharing. But still I was frustrated and confused. I couldn't support any of the restrictive claims and criticisms I was making. I could only cite my Reformed teachers, and their arguments were curiously lacking in Scriptural argumentation. Essentially my new beliefs were just as subjective as my old ones, based only on the authority of the modern Reformers and the new values I had picked up from them.

This threw me into an agonized confusion. I didn't know how to be a Christian anymore, and I was no longer sure anyone else around me knew either. My confusion itself astonished me. I never expected to find so much diversity of opinion within Christianity. I was used to having my beliefs unsettled by atheists. But here were two Christian groups with diametrically opposed ideas about how believers should be carrying out their spiritual lives and ministry. Who was I supposed to believe?

I wasn't just going to leave it at that. No one I talked to had answers that satisfied me, so I concluded I had to find them myself. During Christmas break, I decided to put all of these issues together and figure out this question of Christian growth and experience. So I set to work cataloging my questions and recording my reflections in a notebook. It was sort of an extension of my journal and a precursor to my thoughts pages. Over the next many months I worked very hard at defining the differences between the "objectivists" and the "subjectivists," as I called them. I also tried to define my own reactions to the issues, to lay out the possible answers, and to reason out what the Bible had to say about these things. Now at last I was getting somewhere!

By the end of that summer, my confusion had begun to settle. While I hadn't answered my questions completely, I had developed opinions I could live with, at least for the time being. I concluded that my Reformed friends had in many ways been too hard on evangelicalism. In some cases I thought they were too restrictive. In others I thought they were out of touch with the movement, at least its best sides. And in the case of my central struggle, listening prayer, I began to have doubts about my doubts. My argument against listening prayer was that since the source of inner voices was so uncertain, God wouldn't use thoughts to convey information. Upon reflection, this struck me as a fairly shabby argument. And besides, some people simply had convincing experiences of hearing God speak to them through their thoughts! I was open to the possibility, then, that these other people's experiences were valid and I was just too immature to discern God's voice clearly.

Since then my thoughts have been percolating, and my spirit of independent inquiry has been growing. My questions have changed, too. Since I had some provisional answers to the dilemmas from my crisis, my thoughts shifted to the general question of how one grows spiritually. I spent quite a long time at first fretting over the fact that I was not a very spiritual person. But over time I came to several decisions. First, since I didn't even know how to become a spiritual person, worrying about it all the time was a waste of energy. I wasn't about to give up on the idea of being a devoted Christian, but I figured (and hoped) that God was at least as patient with me as I could be with myself. Second, I wasn't going to obligate myself to anyone and everyone's ideas about what was spiritual, though I did listen more carefully to certain people. Third, it would be better to be somewhat systematic and purposeful in my investigations than to make desperate, haphazard guesses.

Some of my more productive thoughts have revolved around certain other concepts that Wheaton introduced me to during my prior years of confusion. The main thrust of these ideas is that the church has a wealth of wisdom about the spiritual life hidden in the works of its ancient devotional writers. These were people who carefully observed the behavior of the soul and who seriously trained themselves to be godly by means of spiritual disciplines in a way that is rarely seen today. These writers aren't the Bible, of course. Strictly speaking, they are only interpreters. But as people who have been shaped by Scripture's values, they speak with some authority, both about Scripture and about human spiritual experience in matters that Scripture doesn't directly address. They deserve careful consideration. So do many modern teachers, of course. I don't think that wisdom passed from the earth with the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

My penultimate goal is to develop a system for spirituality, as far as I'm able, and my ultimate goal is to live it. I don't mean I want to "put God in a box." I'm aware of that danger, and I believe it can be avoided. I hope so anyway. I thrive on systems. I also don't think I have to have the whole system worked out before I begin to put it into practice. That would be disastrous because in a sense the system is never finished. The best course is to develop both theory and practice at the same time. But the point is that the theory serves the practice and not the other way around.