AncientFutureWorship.com

Ancient-Future Talk
Monday, May 3
Chapter 1-What Is Spirituality?

WANTED: Respondents. I am writing a book on Ancient-Future Spirituality. Over the next eight weeks, I am going to send a brief article on each chapter. I am looking for short interactive responses to include in the book. What do Monday, May 4 Chapter 1-What Is Spirituality?you think about the issue . . . An illustration to use, a difference of opinion. If I quote you, full credit will be given, so please state your position, church, location. Thanks. Your contribution will make this book much more interesting because it will reflect what is happening and what needs to happen.

What Is Spirituality?

I regard spirituality to be one of the most misunderstood aspects of the Christian faith.

Many of us work with the notion that spirituality is something to be attained (a psychological approach). The confusion that stands behind all attempts to achieve a personal spirituality is the teaching that spiritual life originates within the self. Consequently, we try to become spiritual through experience (feeling God), doing right (legalism), thinking correctly (intellectual understanding), or expressing romantic feelings about God (sentimentalism).

Spirituality is none of these. Consider these truths:

Jesus alone is our spirituality.
Because we are defined by our participation in the first Adam, we are incapable of generating a relationship with God.
Spirituality must come from outside of the self.
God became incarnate, uniting himself with man in Jesus. Jesus, the second Adam, reversed the disobedience and rebellion of the first Adam. He did this for all (see Rom. 5:12-21).
Jesus is the one true human being. He is the one who restores the nature of man and opens the window to heaven (paraphrase of an ancient prayer).
Our spirituality is a gift given to us by God through participation in Jesus. He does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He is our sacrifice for sin, he wins for us a victory over the powers of evil, he has set before us an example of how to live.

In short, spirituality is union with Jesus through whom we have union with God. For he alone, of all persons in the entire history of the world, is united to God (see Romans 6). Through his person and work he unites us to God. All personal attempts to attain this union or relationship with God must be set aside as straw. In the words of the early church axiom, "Only God can save and only that which God has assumed has been healed." Write me at: rwebber@northern.seminary.edu

Bob Webber
Myers Professor of Ministry
Director of M.A. in Worship and Spirituality
Northern Seminary—www.seminary.edu
(See Northern's M.A. in Worship and Spirituality and D.Min. in Worship by clicking on the website.)