This week of Pentecost, celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit that launched the church, seems to me an especially appropriate time to consider new possibilities for what the practice of Christianity can be. An insightful book that helps in doing exactly that is Paul R. Smith’s Integral Christianity: The Spirit’s Call to Evolve.
Sometimes the right book crosses our path at the right time, and for me this is just such a book—one that articulates a vision of a more inclusive and spiritually oriented church, at a time when I’m asking how church can be better at fostering spiritual growth, and what might help it in moving forward. It is written by a pastor who cares deeply about his own congregation and about the church at large.
Smith begins by looking at the stages of religious understanding, recognizing the gifts and strengths of each stage while noting the limitations to be overcome. Each level builds on and incorporates some of those previous understandings about God and faith, while moving toward greater spiritual insight. His description of these stages is available in a series of articles here.
He then looks at the ways in which we can experience the Divine—as God around us encompassing all of creation, as God beside us in close relationship, and God as a divine spark within. He then explores ways of seeking connection with the Divine, an experience available at every stage of spiritual development.
He sees Jesus as a model of what human life can be, exhibiting the divinity at the heart of human beings, and revealing how we can live when we transcend ego, connect with God, and live according to our true Christlike self. The Bible shows faithful people moving through various stages, being led by those with greater understanding and experience. The kingdom of God is a term for a higher stage yet, when we are better able to move beyond ordinary, everyday awareness and into the spiritual reality in which we are one with Christ and with each other.
Smith sees the church as a place to deepen our thinking about God, to heighten our experience of God, and to be transformed by how we see ourselves in connection with God. He takes seriously the mystical experiences described in the New Testament, which mainline churches such as mine tend to overlook. Thinking people are suspicious of such visions and visitations, associating manifestations of the spirit with distasteful public spectacles and primitive theology. Smith points out that experiences of God or visitations of the Holy Spirit can take many forms, some dramatic and some more subtle. What’s more, we interpret those experiences according to our various stages of understanding. Experience of God is not something that we outgrow, nor is it relegated only to religion that denies the value of reason. He quotes Karl Rahner as saying, “The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, or not a Christian at all.”
He sees the role of the church as helping and encouraging people to grow spiritually, both in understanding and experience of God. In a healthy church, the members are encouraged to grow into the next spiritual stage of understanding, and to experience increasing closeness to God. It is from this transformation that good works will emanate.
We are best able to love and serve others when we operate in a climate of health and wholeness within ourselves. We need the loving, healing presence of God, and the world needs the love and healing we can offer out of that experience. These are the most valuable things that the church can offer, the source of all good gifts that the church and its members can share with the world.
Susan: a very thoughtful reflection, on some very meaty topics. 1. I’m imagining there are some people who’d find Smith’s argument that one tends to “progress” through “stages” problematic. Because my own life’s path has mirrored his in some ways, I tend to think of previous personal stages as less developed … but I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to those who find deep spiritual nourishment in more “traditional” forms. There is a danger in reading our own personal experience as the ONE that others must also follow.
2. In the link you provided I found the paragraph about the family particularly interesting: “Why did Jesus attack the family of his day so passionately? He did so because he knew that the strong family ties of his Jewish religion would keep family members clinging to their traditional religious ideas and practices rather than drinking the new wine of the Spirit. He knew that the strongly patriarchal family would resist treating women as equals to men and church history testifies to that very thing. Jesus subverted all systems that kept people from hearing what the Spirit was saying in new ways. That is why he attacked the family, social, political, and religious systems of his day.” This is an extremely intriguing perspective when we look at the “family values” bludgeon” used in the political realm in the past decades ….
thanks for providing a lot to think about! (I say as a Quaker who’s predisposed to seeing a turn toward the mystical as being a very good thing…)
Thank you for this article. I have lately been wondering about the role of religion. I was raised as a strict born-again Christian, and was fully immersed in the religion until age twelve or thirteen. At this time, I began experimenting with the “sinful” pleasures of this world and felt an unbearable guilt coming from my religion, that led me to self-hatred and self-harm. I broke away from Christianity, despite living with my grandfather who was a pastor. I began exploring many different religions, visiting different temples and quickly coming to the conclusion that any religion is constricting and forms more barriers between people rather than break them down, unite. I decided to draw wisdom from many different religions rather than devote myself to one, seeing their universal messages, universal truths.
I told myself at the time that I was not angry at Christianity itself and that I still had a relationship with Jesus Christ. But I never opened the Bible and kind of shunned those thoughts away. One night almost three years ago, when I was 15, I stumbled upon a block while reading a book and realized I couldn’t get a word further until I faced what I had been ignoring. Instantly, I felt His presence flood my room and I immediately came to tears. I felt as if I was meeting with an old friend, only in a new way. He was the same as He had always been, but now I was seeing Him in a new light, with my own guilt lifted.
I used to think religion was evil, but then I realized that my approach to it just wasn’t doing me any good. I still see Truths in all religions and believe our highest goals and life purposes can be reached through any and/or all. I will always draw on many spiritual beliefs and practices for guidance and, but I have been recently been liking the idea of the structure of one religion, the love and devotion toward one deity/symbol/manifestation of the Divine.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. I guess I am trying to say I like the way your walking and I like your approach to Christianity. You have to purify yourself first, then pure relations will follow: with yourself, with your world with your God. Thanks again.
Blues
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Gail. I find Smith’s reading of Jesus’ response to family demands to be interesting, as well. Those sayings are some of the more difficult ones, and his perspective is a way of making sense of them. You make a good point– we can make the case that “family values” has been a loaded idea for a long time.
As for the idea of stages, which Smith also calls worldviews or perspectives, he makes the point that it’s important not to try to rank them or to make judgments about people based on them. But understanding these different approaches to spiritual life can help in understanding what is important to people and how they think. Certainly deep spiritual experiences and nourishment are available to us in every stage, and the idea is to look for Christ in one another no matter where we are on the path.
Smith points out that the bible shows people at all these different worldviews and understanding of God. Stories range from seeing God as outdoing the magicians in Pharoah’s court, to demanding that the Hebrews kill every member of their enemies’ tribes, to seeing God as offering love and protection only to “us” and not “them.” Some see following the rules and traditional authority as most important, while Jesus places caring for others above traditional social practices. Some want to exclude Gentiles, or pagans, from the community of Christians, while Paul makes a point of preaching to them and bringing them into the church. While good and faithful people can hold different worldviews, different levels of understanding bear different fruit, some of which is more loving than others.
Thanks so much for sharing this beautiful story, and the perspective you’ve gained from your experience. It’s true that religion can be used for good or for harm, so we have to carefully discern what is truly of God and what is not. It sounds to me like you had an authentic experience of the presence of Christ, which helped you to sort out what was true and what was false.
The advantage of focusing on one religion is that we can enter deeply into the stories, practices, and community– much more so than if we dabble in many different faith traditions. There can sometimes be things we learn from other traditions that inform our faith in important ways, but I think that the structure and devotion you mention in focusing on a single tradition is both most challenging and most rewarding.
What a blessing to have found this kind of wisdom at such a young age. I wish you well.