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I’ve had this nagging question about the relationship between virtue or disciplines and the unexpected movement of God’s grace. I’m sure most people are familiar with the contemporary turn to virtue and spiritual disciplines. If not, hopefully the names Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and, according to Time magazine, America’s best theologian , the paradoxical Stanley Hauerwas might jog your memory.

I could find passages from any of those authors that highlight the tension between grace and discipline; but I would rather turn to my friend Ben Patterson’s new book, He Has Made Me Glad. In his first chapter where he tries to figure out how we can be formed in joy through spiritual discipline, he writes, “The Spirit cannot be controlled—as Jesus said, the Spirit is like the wind. But we can spread our sails to catch the wind when it blows. That’s what the spiritual disciplines do for a Christian…. A spiritual discipline positions our soul to recieve the light that changes us into the image of Jesus Christ” (25). The metaphor of a sail helps Ben fit together the two pieces that seem to defy my conceptualization. According to John 3:8, God’s movement and the movement of God’s people defies expectation; thus, as Ben put it, the Spirit can’t be controlled. But here lies the problem: If God’s grace moves without explanation or expectation—totally free from human determination and manipulation—don’t we deceive ourselves when we confidently attempt to control the flow of the Holy Spirit with patterns of virtue and discipline? That’s where the sailing image does some (daring?) work for Ben’s constructive spiritual discipline project: Habituation in virtues position us to receive God’s gust of wind. Yet how do we resist the (Pelagian?) temptation to think that human activity can direct the flow of grace? And, on the other hand, what keeps our concern for morality from falling into the abyss of the absurd when we say that human agency doesn’t bear any weight in the realm of the gratuitous freedom of God’s embrace of humanity?

I think about the experience of Saul/Paul who apparently excelled in the virtuous life. He was an expert in the demands of God, and put what he knew into practice. He was the most righteous of the people of God. If anyone had the right sails up to catch the wind of the Spirit, he was most prepared. But that righteous zeal led him in the completely wrong direction. Jesus appears to Saul on the road to Damascus and says, “Why do you persecute me” (Acts 4:9). Instead of finding himself in an ideal position to receive the new work of God in Jesus, his Messiah, Saul’s spiritually disciplined life proved to be the basis of his persecution of Jesus, the refusal of God’s grace. It seems like what we can learn from this story (and all the others where God graciously invites the inadequate to join in his work) is that God’s grace overcomes all our illusions of morality, all our attempts to secure a place in God’s good standing. So, is there no preparation for the presence of the sactifying Spirit of God? Are all human struggles to match our path to the joyful way of God’s Spirit absurd?, a meaningless “chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14)?

Maybe Colossians 2 and 3 have something to say here. At the end of chapter 2 Paul talks about all the laws of man that shouldn’t hold us down (see Col. 2:16-23). According to Paul we are dead to all those principles of behavior, those spiritual techniques, that claim to purchase God’s gracious waters of life. The “regulations” only have “an appearance of wisdom” (v23). Paul declares, we are free in Christ—our lives are now “hidden with Christ in God” (3:3). I guess the thing to figure out is what sense to make of our freedom to be human and those things that we need to learn to stop, those things that de-humanize us. But that’s the thing; even disciplining ourselves can’t earn the regenerative work of God’s grace. That’s the whole trick: nothing earns what God gives freely. The logic of the Christian life is cross and resurrection—and between those two events there is no ‘logical’ connection. It defies all rationalism, all formulations, all attempts at effectiveness, or success, or progress, or holiness.

The danger we face is using spiritual disciplines or habituation in virtues as techniques to achieve holiness, to gain access to a moral stability above the shattering grace of the cross. Our achieved morality, our well ordered, disciplined life easily turn into towers that secure our meaningfulness, make us feel like we are important in God’s eyes. The question I ask myself is whether or not my conceptions of the moral universe allow enough permeability for God’s Spirit to sneak through and turn the whole thing upside-down—to save me from myself.

All this may not make sense. I struggle these days to put into words all that I feel. But Sebastian Moore captures what I feel and says more than I can say. Forget what I just wrote and read below. The quote is from his book No Exit

“What does the cross show us? It shows us life. Life at an intensity and of an abundance that we cannot bear. It reveals our best efforts to be sin; and this is not as a discouragement but the reverse, calling forth from us a desperate courage in default of which we have chosen to be good after our fashion. It looks over the whole world of man, of what he calls good and what he eschews as evil, and, in the words of Paul, ‘concludes all under sin’. This is what the cross shows. It calls forth all our poetic rebellion in a great paeon of praise for life…. All our sick Christian attitudes consist in allowing the Christian fact to blow up the old world, the good old sins, without bursting; in reinforcing the old skins so that they can hold the new wine.” (77)

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