“All spiritualities are based on a story. You have to know the story of a particular religion to understand its spirituality.” (14)

Story-less Spirituality

What does it mean to say “I am spiritual” in an individualistic, relativistic, and narcissistic culture? The possible answers are so varied that the statement means practically nothing. Unless one identifies the story that frames his or her spirituality (“I am spiritual in an Eastern way,” “I am spiritual in a Christian way”, etc.) then little of significance has been communicated.

This is the problem with most contemporary spiritualities – including much Christian spirituality –that is, they are separated from a story.

God’s Story

Robert Webber believes that the reason so much Christian spirituality is empty of power is that it is not thoroughly set within God’s story of redemption in Christ. In order to nurture and sustain a distinctly Christian spirituality, the church must recover God’s story as the source and context in which spirituality is grounded and lived.

Webber summarizes the story of God as follows: It is the story of “how God created us to be in union with himself, how this unity was broken, and how Jesus, by God’s Spirit, brought us back into union with God by becoming one of us, by living to show us what true humanity looks like, by dying to destroy all that is death in the world, and by rising to lift us up into a new life in God” (14).

At the heart of Webber’s story is the concept of “union with God.” This is a good place to start since union with God “is the most common description of spirituality throughout the entire history of the church” (18). For Webber, Christian spirituality is “God’s passionate embrace of us [and] our passionate embrace of God” (16). Webber’s shorthand for this is also the title of his newest book – The Divine Embrace.

In the first half of The Divine Embrace Webber demonstrates how Christian spirituality has been distorted throughout history by a progressive distortion and/or loss of God’s story. In the second half, he proposes a path to recover God’s story as the basis and context for a distinctively Christian spirituality.

How we Lost God’s Story: The Divorce of Theology and Spirituality

“The ancient church fathers understood that ‘attempts to speak about our understanding of God (theology) and our efforts to live in the light of that understanding (spirituality) cannot be separated.’ Spirituality is a lived theology” (32).

The story of God includes the movements of creation, incarnation, and re-creation. Each movement “was challenged in the ancient church by the emergence of various heresies” (33). By losing an essential element of the story, new spiritualities developed which had little in common with primitive Christian spirituality.

For example, the Gnostics rejected God as Creator and embraced a Platonic dualism that “separated spirit and matter and redefined union with God to necessitate a renunciation of the world” (24). By rejecting the goodness of creation and the renewal of creation through the incarnation, the good news of Gnosticism proclaimed liberation of the spirit from its bondage to the material realm. This was the first shift away from the full-bodied spirituality rooted in God’s story of creation, incarnation, and re-creation.

Against the Gnostics, the church fathers maintained the conviction that creation, though fallen, is good and has been (and will be) redeemed through Christ. In contrast to the Gnostic story, the Christian story upheld that “the spiritual conflict of this world is not between the spirit and physical flesh. Instead, this world’s spiritual conflict is a life lived under God’s reign versus a life lived in rebellion against God’s purpose for creation” (34). Creation is the place where God’s will is done. Spirituality encompasses all aspects of life in this world. As Irenaeus put it: the glory of God is humanity fully alive.

As history advanced, the story of God continued to be muffled. “[M]edieval mysticism separated spirituality from God’s story and redefined the spiritual life into the interior self” (24). The medieval fascination with contemplation of the interior life moved the focus from “the ‘indescribable wonder of God’ to the ‘wonderfully indescribable experience of God’” (51).

Medieval scholastic theology completed the divorce of spirituality from theology by separating “dogma” from “moral theology.” What was once united – theology and spirituality – was now divided. This was a far cry from the “lived theology” of the ancient fathers.

Two possible paths were now available: Either one could follow the scholastics and intellectually argue over theological fine points, or one could follow the mystics and immerse oneself in the pursuit of experience. Whichever path was chosen, the tragic result was that the story of God was detached from spirituality.

In the Reformation, Protestants recovered a diminished form of God’s story, yet retained the divide between intellect and experience. Essentially, an interest in “justification became the focus of an intellectually spirituality and sanctification was turned toward a preoccupation with experience… Reason and experience, now in conflict, produced two kinds of spirituality among modern Protestants: the spirituality of intellectualism and the spirituality of experientialism” (61).

The shift toward Enlightenment thinking widened the divide between intellect and experience – both still detached from God’s story. The Enlightenment’s method of knowing truth through reason and science transformed the doctrines of revelation (Trinity, creation, incarnation, resurrection, etc.) into “facts” to be believed rather than movements in God’s story conveyed in the ancient tradition of the faith, meant to be received, not “proved”. This proof-oriented Christianity continues today by those who argue that adherence to the “fact” of the resurrection is more important than living into the resurrection of Jesus. Romantics who opposed the Enlightenment’s analytical method “of knowing truth with its reason and science… called for a more intuitive, inner experience of knowing through the imagination, the senses, passion, and the will” (69). Faith was transformed from belief in “facts” to a “feeling” of absolute dependence.

Faith is not an assent to argued “facts” or a mere subjective “feeling.” Both errors put the emphasis on us rather than on God. Both are detached from God’s story of Jesus’ faithfulness in uniting us to God through the incarnation. Webber argues that separating spirituality from God’s story results in “spiritualities of legalism, intellectualism, and experientialism.”

The situation is even more precarious in light of our contemporary postmodern culture. Our culture of narcissism feeds a spirituality of self-realization in the context of moral relativism. A spirituality with no beliefs to which one must adhere, no particular community to which one need belong, and no demands on one's moral behavior is appealing to narcissistic individuals (115). This is a sorry substitute for a full-orbed spirituality rooted in a shared story, and yet for many, this is essentially what they mean when they say, “I am spiritual.”

Toward a Recovery of God’s Story

What must be done to recover a distinctly Christian spirituality rooted in God’s story? The first thing that must occur is to recover the narrative shape of the biblical story. The context of each biblical passage is not simply the surrounding text, but God’s story revealed in the totality of biblical revelation.

I’ve already quoted Webber’s summary of God’s story, but it bears repeating (and indeed, Webber restates it numerous times throughout this book): It is the story of “how God created us to be in union with himself, how this unity was broken, and how Jesus, by God’s Spirit, brought us back into union with God by becoming one of us, by living to show us what true humanity looks like, by dying to destroy all that is death in the world, and by rising to lift us up into a new life in God” (14).

A spirituality rooted in and shaped by this story will have a distinctly Christian shape. The second half of Webber’s book is an attempt to demonstrate what this may look like. Following are a few highlights.

Because the first movement of God’s story is creation and the final movement, re-creation, Christianity does not set up a dualism between matter and the spirit. The goal of Christian spirituality is not to transcend or escape creation. Instead, spirit and matter are brought together through the incarnation of Christ. “Christian spirituality is not an escape from this world, rather it is the discovery and the experience of spiritual purpose in the world” (126). Our experience of the transcendent takes place in the “here and now” and not “out of this world” as we passionately participate in God’s vision for humanity in this world.

Through the incarnation, God in Christ restores all that Adam ruined in the fall. All history is “recapitulated” in Christ. Humanity is restored to union with God. “Due to our identity with Jesus, a new creation comes into being” in our lives (148). We share in new creation through union with Christ.

Baptism is a symbol of our complete immersion in the triune God. It marks us as participants in the divine embrace. It represents our complete union with God. It is the moment we renounce evil and say “yes” to the Spirit. Our task, then, is to live out our baptism in a rhythm of dying and rising with Christ in every area of our lives.

Using the spiritual classic Unseen Warfare as a pattern, Webber reveals how this embodied spirituality of death and resurrection leads to conflict – spiritual warfare – on numerous battlefronts (189-194). We fight against ignorance and deceit in the mind (Romans 12:2). We train the will to conform to God’s desires rather than our own in order that we might please God with our choices. We guard our eyes against lust and vanity. We guard our ears against shameful speech, gossip, and flattery. We guard our tongue from hurting others. We put off the old self in order to live with a pure heart in conformity to God’s will. This comprehensive view of embodied spirituality is necessary in our day because “spirituality today is seldom viewed as the attempt to live a serious Christian life in which our union with God is embodied in the practicalities of everyday life” (194).

The spiritual life is lived out within a community of believers. When we live as a “people shaped by the embrace of God” rather than “a people shaped by culture” we become a dwelling place of God, a place of new creation. We become a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingdom – an eschatological community that lives out the life of the future in the present.

By sharing life together we experience others living out Jesus’ “way of life.” We enter into accountable relationships with others for the purpose of nurturing and promoting spiritual maturity in Christ.

Conclusion

Webber has provided us with a robust and compelling vision of a spirituality that is distinctly Christian. He places the gospel at the center of Christian life and experience. It is not reduced to “facts” or simply a means for “experience” but it is the source, foundation, and goal of our participation in God. By focusing on “union with God” as the heart of our spirituality, we find our life in the divine embrace of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Quotes excerpted from The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life by Robert E. Webber
© Richard J. Vincent, 2006