Monday, May 24
Ch.4 What Is a Spiritual World View?
WANTED: Respondents. I am writing a book, Ancient-Future Spirituality. Over the next few weeks I am sending a brief summary of each chapter. I am looking for short interactive responses to include in the book. What do you think? Do you have an illustration? 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.
Is the way we interpret the world, its history, and our place in it a matter of spirituality? Is the Christian faith (Jesus Christ) into whom we have been baptized an invitation to have "a brief interpretation of everything?"
The dualistic interpretation of life that separates spirit from matter, the secular from the sacred, will answer "No." Spirituality, the answer goes, is a matter of the heart. It is an individual and personal relationship with God that is anti-material. True spirituality is a negation of the world, a turning away from life. It is a private "spiritual" affair with God.
The pantheistic interpretation of life (more a New Age spirituality) locates spirituality in the self. All is one. We all participate in God. Spirituality is "getting in touch with the divine forces of life."
Christian spirituality is neither dualistic nor pantheistic. Instead, it is rooted in the transcendent God who becomes immanent with world history from creation to re-creation.
Spirituality calls us to "see God's world as God sees it." In God's story, Adam and Eve were called to be in "union" with God. But they rebelled against God, and their rebellion has been expressed in all the structures of existence so that the "creation is in bondage to decay" (Rom. 8). Because of sin, all is under death (Rom. 5:12-21).
How can union with God and man be restored?
How can creatures and creation be rescued?
No man is capable, for "all have sinned."
So God in the incarnation is united to Jesus, the second Adam (God himself) who recapitulates the first Adam. By his death he pays the penalty for sin. By dying, he overcomes death. By his resurrection he begins a new creation. By his life he sets forth what it looks like to live in union with God. At the end of history he conquers all the powers of evil. He sets up the new heavens and the new earth. His creatures and creation are restored. He reigns forever over all.
Spirituality is a vision of history, of all reality from beginning to end, in which Christ is truly seen as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. In him and in him alone are we one in whom all things exist, the one through whom all things are reconciled (Col.1).
Spirituality is a participation in this reality.
Response? 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.)
