The why of Christian practices
spiritual disciplines, what are they good for?
I think the reframing of ‘spiritual disciplines’ as ‘Christian practices’ is an incredibly simple yet powerful move, which takes them from “here are efforts of the will that you do in order to become a more spiritual and spiritually successful person” to “here are a set of (historically-lineaged and biblically grounded) practices that express Christian faith and apply the gospel to ways and modes of being in the world”.
That, at any rate, is what I mean by it. So, my post today is a rambling digression about trying to ‘get at’ a good and healthy orientation about what Christian practices are and do. I’m not so much interested today in talking about any particular one of them (worship, song, prayer, scripture reading, fasting, etc etc.. ad infinitum), but rather the category and idea of them.
Yarborough in his commentary on 1 John talks about the ethical, pistic and agapic dimensions. Which is a very fancy way of saying that John likes to talk about what to do (keep God's commandments), what to believe (that Jesus is the Messiah who came in the flesh) and what to love (God and God's children). This tripartite division doesn't quite match up to commonplace "heart, hands, mind" or Volition, Affections, Actions, but it's not too far from it. John's agape love probably shouldn't be reduced to the affective faculty, for instance.
But this way of thinking of humans as complex beings with multiple aspects, which we can sometimes lump and sometimes split, depending on our categorising tendencies, or the needs or our analysis, does help us make sense of us.
I am the product of a fairly cerebral ecclesial tradition, which generally suits me well because I’m a fairly cerebral kind of personality. But we are more than minds. We are bodies too. And we are minds and bodies together. Embodiedness means more than just a flesh robot with a brain controlling it. The embodiedness goes all the way down, so to speak.
Which is part and parcel of why physicality matters to spirituality. It's why sacraments. It's why anointing with oil. It's why foot-washing. it's why fasting. It's why kneeling to pray, or standing to pray, or raising hands. It's why all these things.
And so what any of these particular things is trying to do (I think) is engage the whole being in practices that articulate faith, and cultivate faith.
Now, to be fair, some of this involves reading against the grain a little. For example, a lot of our material on ‘spiritual disciplines’ comes out of a long tradition of monasticism. And very often the operational theology of the monastic tradition isn’t one I’d sign off on. If I had my historian hat on, I would definitely be asking, ‘how does practice X cohere with their theological vision of the time?’ But my devotional hat lets me ask, ‘what do they know about the human person and how can I charitably re-appropriate this?’
Which is also, by the by, how to charitably read theology from ecclesial traditions you don’t agree with. Ask, ‘what are they seeing that I am not?’ and ‘how can I take this and make sense of it in a way that makes sense to me?’ instead of ‘well this is obviously wrong because x, y, z’.
Another angle on this is to talk about means of grace: what ways has God put at our disposal for us to grow in grace towards godliness? This framing understands such practices not so much as outworkings of faith in action as God-given inroads into holiness. On that scheme, four immediately leap to mind as of prime importance: the reading/hearing of Scripture, prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. I can sense my contentious spirit already wanting to digress and defend why those four come to my mind as ‘in particular’, but I will leave off that argument.
Because while I think spiritual disciplines/Christian practices/means of grace are finite, I also think they are manifold. And (today anyway) I’m not drawing up lists or rankings.
Here’s my final pitch. Protestants with a very high view of justification by faith alone sometimes end up in a precarious position where they can no longer say “A Christian must do X”, because that sounds like “A Christian must do X otherwise they aren’t saved” which is a short hop, skip, and jump from “A Christian must do X so that they will be saved”. This is because they have an under-realised framework for commands. “A Christian must not murder”. No problem, but not-murdering isn’t a ground for justification. “A Christian must read/hear the Scriptures”. I have no problem saying that that is a logical consequence of being a Christian, because it’s not a statement that makes reading Scripture a grounds for salvation. The logic is inverted: if you are a Christian, how could this not shape you into a person who (regularly, in some way) reads or hears Scripture, unless something has gone terribly wrong in your Christian formation? This is the whole ‘imperative’ argument for Spiritual Disciplines: if you love God, you’ll keep his commandments, and those include things like hearing his word and praying to him.
