blip : Basic Living Instruction Protocol :

I am still thinking about my last post. Maybe I am thinking about this all wrong when I try to figure out how virtue or spiritual disciplines help us to tap into the flow of the Spirit. The standard argument goes something like this: the Christian engages in virtue/disciplines with others and through this effort in mutual accountability the Christian is formed in holiness, or she learns how to participate in the divine life or kingdom of God.

That’s the stream that flows into Brian McLaren’s “deep ecclesiology” as articulated by one of his voices in his new book: The Last Word and the Word After That . His post-protestant church seems to be all about this sort of spiritual formation. He writes, “post-Protestant churches see everything as spiritual formation—everything worth doing, that is. Public worship is an exercise in group spiritual formation through rituals like the Eucharist and preaching. Fellowship is exercise in the spiritual practices of community. The success of a church isn’t measured by the numbers who attend but by the formation of people as agents of the kingdom of God” (142). He seems a little too excited about this concept (spiritual formation)—and the concept threatens with totalitarian inclusion to incorporate the various aspects of the christian life; it sounds like it forces all aspects of the Christian life into an all-encompasing framework, a stabilizing order. To use McLaren’s new found friend Jacques Derrida (p.106) against him, McLaren inscribes all Christian difference and otherness into the Same (cf. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference).

Anyhow, my worries center around agency. McLaren’s church is measured by “formation”; that is, the value of the church is registered according to its production of kingdom agents. At times I see this same logic of spiritual productivity—the need to hope for results or successes at the end of faithful activity—in more profound thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas who wants to argue for the “necessity of the church’s witness” for God’s redemptive work in the world (see chps. 6-7 of his excellent book, With the Grain of the Universe). But I wonder if sometimes its ok to say we do stuff even though it doesn’t produce a result. There might not be any connection between preparing or disciplining or forming or habituating ourselves in our apparent patterns of morality, and how we are able to discern the right thing to do in a particular situation. What if there is no continuity between our present projections of morality—our moral universe ordered according to the principles formed through spiritual disciplines or virtue—that guide our descisions, and the ethical dilemna we encounter tomorrow? What guarantee do we have that our communally constructed lens through which we view the moral world actually helps us capture the illumination of the Spirit?

If we think of the ethical life primarily in terms of doing godly activity for the sake of formation or witness, can we ever be sure that we escape the moralism of the Pharisee? In my last post I pointed to Saul who became Paul as a way of questioning the certainty of those who trust spiritual formation to place oneself in a better position to receive the direction of the Spirit. Remember, since Saul excelled in righteousness and knew the Law inside and out, he should have been in the best possible position to receive Jesus, his Jewish Messiah. But the reverse was true: his habituation in virtue set his ship on a ramming course into the Messiah—”Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 4:9). Thus, we must wonder if, as Sebastian Moore puts it, “we have chosen to be good after our fashion.” And if that possibility might be true, then we end up pursuing the wrong end—that is, thinking we’re on God’s path, when in fact we are trailblazing some other way.