4 Key Points On Spiritual Formation

If you miss these, you miss a lot

Even though I wrote a lengthy piece in Mere Orthodoxy defending the idea of a Rule of Life, there are still a few things that I think I left out. I’d like to add a few more ideas to the conversation that I think are crucial for talking about spiritual formation.

These points are things that I assume in the background of the spiritual formation conversation but haven’t always had the chance (or frankly, just forgot) to say outright. Each of these has been brought up in one way or another over the past couple of weeks, and so it seemed like a helpful thing to do would be to put them in one place so that my assumptions are on the table and they can be easily referenced.

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1. Union With Christ

The most important one is this: all of our spiritual formation flows from our union with Christ. While I commend the gospel-centered movement for keeping the gospel central, there’s a big part of me that wishes that the part of the gospel that is more emphasized is our union with Christ. Certainly some people do emphasize this, but I wish I saw it more.

Justification is a necessary part of that. There is no union without justification. But the point of justification isn’t simply the pardoning of our sins. Our sins are forgiven so we may be united with Christ. In Galatians 2, Paul talks about our justification through faith in Christ and not by works.

…we know that a person is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we ourselves have believed in Christ Jesus. This was so that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no human being will be justified.

Galatians 2:16

Paul then moves right from justification into talking about union with Christ.

I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Galatians 2:20

These two doctrines are connected, and the fountainhead of our spiritual formation is our union with Christ. Henry Scougal made this connection in the 1670s when he wrote,

True religion is a union of the soul with God. It is a participation in the divine nature. It is the very image of God drawn upon the soul. In the apostle's words, it is Christ formed within us.

Union → Formation. This is the logical progression of the Christian life.

Focusing on justification to the exclusion of union with Christ creates something like what Dallas Willard called a Bar Code Gospel, where people think all they need are the right beliefs and no obviously horrible actions for God to scan their spiritual bar code so they can go to heaven when they die. However, emphasizing our union with Christ puts justification in its proper context and communicates the spiritual reality that justification provides us. It creates a more holistic picture of the Christian life.

However, focusing on formation without union is how this conversation turns into more pelagianism self-help, self-actualization. Our formation doesn’t come from our ability to make ourselves more like God but from the reality that we have already been united with God.

The Christian life is not simply a judicial transaction or a individualistic self-actualization project; it’s a spiritual, existential, and transformative reality. Once you grasp union with Christ, spiritual formation is natural and logical conclusion. If I am united with Christ, I must be transformed into his image.

2. The Church

The primary location of spiritual formation is not a personal quiet time, the morning office, a family sabbath, or any other private practice. These are all good things and are, indeed, formative. We should be doing them.

However, the primary location of spiritual formation is the local church.

The spiritual disciplines should flow out of and back into a local congregation. This is one of the reasons why having a thick Sunday liturgy is important. The Sunday service is the primary place where Christians read scripture together, pray together, worship together, submit to the teaching of scripture together, confess their sins together, give together, and partake of the sacraments together. In the Sunday service, every member of the church practices the spiritual disciplines together as the body of Christ.

This rhythm is the heartbeat of the Christian life. Our private spiritual disciplines are miniature versions of the disciplines that are practiced together as a church. And our private spiritual disciplines are formative insofar as they flow back into the life of the church.

There is a fear that a focus on spiritual formation and the disciplines runs into the issue of becoming just another self-help, self-actualizing tactic for the therapeutic and wellness bent of our day. I think that’s a fair critique, even if I think it’s overplayed. The way to help prevent that from happening is to center the church in spiritual formation.

The goal of our spiritual formation isn’t to become better people. It’s to obey the greatest commandments to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves and to become the kind of people who can obey those commandments.

Love is always flowing outward to others; it never terminates on itself. This is why our spiritual formation must flow back into the church. We are formed as we interact with others. As we serve, forgive, are encouraged, taught, and rebuked, as we give guidance and counsel to others, as we hear other people’s stories and share our own, as we welcome the sinner, foreigner, and stranger, as we develop spiritual and relational bonds with people who are nothing like us.

The late medieval monk, Thomas A Kempis, wrote in The Imitation of Christ,

True progress consists of redirecting love from yourself to others, and the person who has done so is extremely free and very secure.

Yes, we will experience things like joy and peace as we are formed, but we will also be confronted and challenged, we will suffer and stumble. The key is realizing that the confrontations and challenges and sufferings and stumbling will lead us to greater love, joy, and peace—as well as patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-mastery—if we give them to God and allow him to use them for our transformation.

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3. Affections, Not Feelings

I’ve found this to be a remarkably helpful distinction. Even though affections and feelings sound like the same thing, they’re very different.

There are two environments where the category of spiritual formation can go off the rails: revivalistic evangelicalism and a therapeutic culture. In both of these environments, it’s possible for people to expect the spiritual disciplines to produce a constant emotional high. That the way you would know the spiritual disciplines are “working” is that you feel some sort of constant, passionate inferno of emotions that either can’t be put out or, if it is, the disciplines should restoke. If you don’t feel something, then you must be doing it wrong.

I don’t see anything like this in scripture, and I also don’t think it’s realistic. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has Screwtape tell Wormwood to keep “The Law of Undulation” out of his client’s mind. To make him forget that life is a neverending movement through a series of peaks and valleys. It goes up and down, back up, and back down again. On and on forever.

John Calvin wrote,

For whomever the Lord has inducted into and favored with his fellowship should prepare himself for a life that is harsh, arduous, and turbulent, filled with various kinds of troubles. It is the heavenly Father’s will to train his people in this way to produce definite proof of those who belong to him. He follows this procedure with all his children, beginning with Christ, his firstborn.

Thomas A Kempis, again, in The Imitation, said,

There is one thing that keeps many people from gaining ground and from fervently striving to improve: the dread of difficulty, or more accurately, the effort of struggle. Those people progress most in virtue—truly, they progress beyond all others—who make a valiant effort to overcome the things that are most troublesome to them, that work most against them.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the goal of the spiritual disciplines isn’t to produce a feeling, but to change our affections. By affections I mean our desires, our will, the things we want. That’s very different than our feelings. What you want really has very little to do with what you feel.

I admit that a gap in my reading here is Edward’s The Religious Affections, but from what I understand, it’s getting at this point.

Being formed into the image of Christ is not about experiencing a constant emotional mountaintop but about our desires being transformed and God’s will becoming our will so that God’s will is done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Bit by bit, over time, you begin to desire the fruit of the flesh less and less—sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar—and begin to desire the fruit of the Spirit more and more—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. A Rule of Life is simply how you plan and order your life to starve yourself of the former and submit yourself to God and allow him to produce in you the latter. And that is produced, primarily, in what you desire, your affections.

4. Rule Of Faith

I plan on writing about this more, so I won’t say too much here. But it needs to be said that a Rule of Life always stands side-by-side, or it might even be better to say stands under the Rule of Faith.

The Rule of Faith is what we believe about the Christian faith. It’s our doctrine.

Dallas Willard wrote,

A bad theology will kill any prospects of a spirituality that comes from life in Christ.

Paul told Timothy to “Pay close attention to your life and your teaching” (1 Timothy 4:16).

The reason we can talk about union with Christ, the church, and our affections is because we have doctrines of salvation, the church, and humanity. Doctrine allows us to think clearly and rightly about reality and the way God has created things. It gives us categories for navigating life and not making things up on our own.

To quote Calvin one more time,

The gospel… is not a doctrine of the tongue but of life. It is not grasped merely by the intellect and memory like other disciplines, but it is taken in only when it possess an entire soul and when it finds a seat and place of refuge in the most intimate affection of the heart.

I think that ties everything I’ve written here together nicely.

While our doctrine isn’t enough, we need our doctrine to get into our affections, to possess our soul. That’s what the spiritual disciplines are for. You cannot separate life and doctrine. You can’t separate theology and formation. Our Rule of Life is always in the context of the Rule of Faith and our Rule of Faith is always meant to be formative.

Conclusion

I’m positive there are more points than these four that I’m not thinking about while I write this, but it seems to me that these points (at a minimum) are pre-requisits for being able to have a good conversation about spiritual formation, the disciplines, and a Rule of Life.

Without these points, it makes sense why people are worried about individualism, pelagianism, self-actualization, and everything else. What I’ve noticed is that once you have these four ducks in a row, the rest starts to fall into place much more naturally and it helps prevent you from falling into some sneaky spiritual formation ditches.

I hope this provides some additional context and categories for this conversation moving forward. Feel free to interact with any and all of these points as you wish.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.