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Lent 2012 — Will
Willimon Article
“Spiritual
but Not Religious”
William H. Willimon
North Alabama Conference, United
Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
In a January 2011
interview with Piers Morgan, Oprah
Winfrey announced that her most
important role is “spiritual leader”:
“This isn’t about me. I am the
messenger to deliver the message of
redemption, of hope, of forgiveness,
of gratitude, of evolving people to
the best of themselves. So I am on my
personal journey. My personal journey
is to fulfill the highest expression
of myself here as a human being here
on earth,” said Oprah. This surely
makes Oprah not only a savviest of
business persons but also the national
leader of the burgeoning “I’m
religious but not spiritual” movement.
I resent
Oprah’s assumption of “spiritual
leader.” Unlike Oprah I had to labor
three years in seminary before anybody
was allowed to call me a spiritual
leader. Moreover I fear that some
uninformed person in the hinterland
might be mislead by Oprah into
thinking that the “spiritual” is
roughly analogous to “Christian.”
I agree
with Lillian Daniel who says -- in
response to the dear, dumb flight
companion who intones “I’m spiritual
but not religious” -- “Please stop
boring me.” Now that everybody is
“spiritual,” it has taken all the wind
out of spirituality. Boring.
What, in
Jesus’ name, hath “spiritual” to do
with the Christian faith?
Martin
Luther notes that in his sermon on the
Sermon on the Mount,1 Jesus begins his
sermon on the First Beatitude by
attacking “the greatest and most
universal belief or religion on
earth”-- those “crazy saints” who
think that the purpose of the
Christian faith is spiritual
aggrandizement. Luther says that Jesus
makes “blessed are the poor in Spirit”
the First Beatitude because, if at the
beginning of the sermon one feels that
one is spiritually well endowed,
spiritually rich, then by the end of
the sermon – after the preacher has
pummeled you for marrying after
divorce, looking at a person
lustfully, not turning the other
cheek, and returning evil for evil –
everybody looks spiritually destitute!
So the
first thing to say to those dear,
sweet folk who, when invited to sign
on to the church as a means of grace
say, “I’m not religious; but I’m very
spiritual,” is “Where the heck did you
get the idea that Christianity gave a
rip about either religion or
spirituality?”
Spirituality
is another means of turning faith in
God into a commodity for our private
consolation. (Thank you, Karl Barth.)
This privatization of God was done by
the modern democratic, liberal nation
state in order to neutralize
Christianity, to marginalize it from
the common life, to bury God in the
confines of the self, to trivialize
the Trinity, and to keep this
governmentally troubling faith from
going public. (Thank you, Thomas
Jefferson.) What passes today for
“spirituality” was invented to silence
the church in order to make way for
the omnipotent state and its
capitalist economy. The government has
found that Christians (well, any
believer who thinks that his or her
God might be more important than the
state) are easier to manage if they
will confine their faith to something
within.
We’ve got
our own theologians to blame for this
sad state of affairs, with vast
numbers of Americans running around
thinking that religion is vague and
personal. In an attempt to rescue some
shred of the Christian faith from the
ravages of the modern world,
Schleiermacher thinned the gospel
down: the essence of religion is not
thought or action but feeling and
intuition, faith that dare not utter
its name, religion that is felt but
seldom seen. God is forced to retreat
from the stage of history and to work
exclusively within the confines of the
modern self.2
Thanks to
folk like Schleiermacher and Borg,
spirituality has made religion
successful and safe, enabling 90
percent of all Americans to say they
believe in God. If you crank “God”
down low enough, make the term vague
enough and emptied of any intellectual
content, everybody is a believer.
Spirituality enables us to be the
first generation of Christians in
history who cannot get hurt by
following Jesus. Thus the NPR show,
that I happen to enjoy on my podcast,
renamed itself from “Speaking of
Faith” to the even more vague and
generic “On Being,” when even “faith”
proved to be too loaded a word for
NPR.
“Spirituality”
is but our most recent attempt to
mitigate demands of having God come to
us as Christ. “Revelation” is reduced
to a class of phenomena that some
individuals experience more
dramatically than others, an innate
something within. We have thus found a
way to give credence to Feuerbach’s
claim that “God” is another name for
the projection of the deepest human
desires. Thus Barth warned that
“Whoever is concerned with the spirit,
the heart, and conscience,
and…inwardness… must be confronted
with the question of whether he is
really concerned with God and not with
the apotheosis of man.”3
Barth
believed that we know humanity only on
the basis of what we know of God in
Jesus Christ. Spirituality gets it the
other way around, beginning with human
subjectivity and asking what we can
know of God based upon what we know of
ourselves. Christians may not know
everything, but we do know Jesus
Christ as God’s self-definition that
we didn’t respond well to from the
very beginning. Spirituality, in its
present form (a pale, cobbled together
imitation of that risky piety once
practiced by the saints), is but our
latest effort to fashion a God more
congenial to how our God ought to look
if God were worthy of worship by
people like us.
My theory
is that when Christian spirituality no
longer meant “piety,” it ran unchecked
and untethered. Now God means whatever
we want God to mean, whatever is
practically helpful to us in our
pursuit of whatever it is we want more
than God, whatever, whomever we find
credible within the limits of modern
imagination. Christians historically
thought of their piety not primarily
as a technique to get them up to God,
but rather as God’s appointed means to
get down to them. Thus John Calvin
defined piety as “that reverence
joined with love of God which the
knowledge of his benefits induces.”4
Note Calvin’s linkage of piety with
knowledge of God in Christ, whereas
much that passes for spirituality in
our age begins with the claim to
complete ignorance of who God actually
is. “God? Oh can’t say anything for
sure about God. That would be
intellectually arrogant.”5
We wish.
Christology gives specific,
unavoidable, prophetic content and
necessary theological control to
pneumatology. Our imaginations are
prone to fanciful constructions of
God. Incarnational faith regards
“faith” as less interesting than
“faith in whom?” Solid, interesting
intellectual content is precisely what
is lacking in so many contemporary
treatments of “spirituality.”
For
Christians, “God is God, not in the
mists of some transcendence, not on
the basis of their own opinion,
thought, or speculation, not in the
form of an image projected by them,
but in Jesus Christ,” thunders Barth.6
I know
this is a prejudiced ecclesiastical
statement (the only kind you should
expect me to make), but whenever I
hear the now commonplace “I’m
spiritual but not religious,” my
reaction is similar to the one I had
to generations of Duke students who
pled, “Since we love one another, why
do we need to stand up in a church and
say it? Can’t we just live together
without all that marriage stuff?”
Because
“I love you,” so often means in this
culture, “I love me and want to use
you to love me even more,” the church
has found it helpful to test our
declarations of love by submitting
them to the vows of marriage. Can your
“love” endure the test of a lifelong,
exclusive, morally formative promise?
“So you say that you are ‘spiritual’?
Any specific flesh or muscle on that
‘spirit’ whom you worship? Can your
‘faith’ in God endure the test of
obedience to a First Century Jew who
lived briefly and died violently and
returned unexpectedly? Are you able to
love God without despising those whom
God loves? If not, why bother?”
See you
in church on Sunday.
Notes
1 “The Sermon on the Mount,” Luther’s
Works (American Edition),
(1955-1976), 11-19, (1530-1532).
2 Barth said that Schleiermacher made
Spirit “identical with subjective
stimulation,” a merely “supreme
enhancement” of the human spirit that
eventually degenerated, in Barth’s
estimation, to Troeltsch’s equation of
the Holy Spirit with “direct religious
productivity of the individual.” Cited
in Eberhard Busch, The
Great Passion: An Introduction to
Karl Barth’s Theology, trans.
Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed. Darrell L.
Guder and Judith J. Guder (William B.
Eerdmans Publ. Co. Grand Rapids,
Mich), 2004), 221.
3 Karl Barth in his introductory essay
to Ludwig Feuerbach, The
Essence of Christiainity (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1957),
xxlv.
4 John Calvin, Institutes
of the Christian Religion,
trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T.
McNeill, Vol 20, Library of Christian
Classics, 2 vols (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1960), 1.2.1.
5 Kant, precursor to Schliermacher
said, “I had to do away with knowledge
in order to make room for faith.”
Kant, Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965/1787), 29. John Milbank
has had lots to say about the “false
humility” of modern theology.
6 Karl Barth, The
Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV,
4, Lecture Fragments, trans.
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