Tag: Spiritual Formation
As a a pastor I regularly interact with people in desperate situations, even now I agonize over a homeless family with two small children who have no where to go. They come with their stories of impossibility, tragedy, and poverty and on a shoe-string of hope ask for help. Sometimes we can help, sometimes there […]
“I know God has forgiven me but I just can’t forgive myself.” I have sat in my office or at a coffee shop with many a soul whose despondency over their oppressive guilt was literally eating at them from the inside. The above statement or something similar to it has been, from out their condition, […]
I suppose I have been trying to tackle some of the evangelical jargon that has actually enslaved us to an anemic spirituality (most recently “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship”). Being raised in and inculcated with these phrases I only know them as an insider. I didn’t always think these phrases were odd except […]
“I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” Mark 8:24 The evangelical church seems to waffle between some form of antinomianism (a rejection of God’s law as no longer binding for spiritual growth) and its equal opposite moralism (an affirmation of God’s law as the solution to spiritual growth). We struggle profoundly with knowing […]
We evangelicals tout the battle cry “its not a religion its a relationship,” eschewing institutional formality, priestly orders, and list-based self-justification. We say it as if it’s obvious what we mean. Yet it doesn’t seem at all obvious to me, sin-stained as I am, how to have a “personal relationship” with an infinite, immense, self-existing, […]
As of late I’ve been pondering dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction, in my mind, is a gateway vice – a vice that subtly lures you into the whole panoply of vices. It is so subtle, I think, because it hides behind other vices. You spend your time lamenting your lustful heart (or restless, prideful, etc.) and really the […]
Much of the texture of our lived existence depends upon our presuppositions about what growth looks and feels like. For some, the call to "be holy as I am holy" is a very literal endeavor, where we truly do take on holiness in a real sense. For others, the Reformed tradition for instance, it is not that we take on holiness as much as we learn dependence. We abide, to quote Jesus, in the vine. As a branch, it is not that we somehow come to take on the life-giving elements of the vine, but the connection we have with the vine deepens.
Along these lines, note Jonathan Edwards’s point about the texture of growth:
"A man that is very poor is a beggar; so is he that is poor in spirit. This is a great difference between those affections that are gracious, and those that are false: under the former, the person continues still a poor beggar at God’s gates, exceedingly empty and needy; but the latter make men appear to themselves rich…"
I’ve been working through and re-editing what I believe to be Jonathan Edwards’s greatest work, a book called Charity and Its Fruits. It is, even if in brief, Jonathan Edwards’s spiritual theology. Interestingly, it was really a sermon series through 1 Corinthians 13, the most over-read and under-lived Scripture references for weddings. One of Edwards’s tasks in the volume is to provide a series of reflections on virtues and vices. In his chapter on envy, he suggests that Christians often turn envy into something more palatable – we subconsciously tweak envy to try and make it seem virtuous. Edwards suggests that we do this in four ways: We 1) undermine the worthiness of the person we envy; 2) claim that our envy arises from a love to justice; 3) undermine the honor of the person we envy by questioning the use of their prosperity; and 4) question if the person we envy is spiritually mature enough for prosperity.
There are two things that Edwards sees clearly here. First, making up the second point, is that our subconscious functions in an attempt to justify our sin and turn it into something palatable – what ancients used to call beautiful vices. We turn envy into a zeal for justice. This point, secondly, builds on the other three, all of which turn our attention to the other person. Our hearts, out of self-protection, guard us by judging others. Envy leads us to conclude that others are not worthy, honorable, or mature, and therefore lifts us above others to judge them through our own elitist mindset. Envy is a fruit of self-exaltation, just as it is achieved through the degradation of others.
As many of you may know, I am a Jonathan Edwards scholar. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t mean all that much, expect that I read a lot of Edwards’s work and spend a great deal of time thinking alongside of him about the nature of the Gospel of God for our salvation. From time to time, I come across a really great nuggest in Edwards’s theology. What I mean by "nugget" is this, what I consider one of the great misfortunes of Edwards’s legacy is that we have next to nothing on what he was supposedly best at – spiritual direction. His daughter, in a letter to a friend, once commented on how blessed she was to have someone like her father to help her navigate her relationship with God. Edwards was, it would seem, a fantastic and discerning director of souls. Fortunately, we do have some evidence of this. Edwards wrote a letter to a woman who just saw her only son die. In it, he tells her that he writes about the one thing he knows for a time like hers – Christ. You can read the letter in its entirety here, but I have copied the last portion below.