I Can't Get No
Sanctification
Disappointment with
God
Last week I made the
claim that we can get as close to God as we want to. And I stand by that.
But there is another side to the thing. And that is this: in due time, I
suggest, you will find yourself against a blank wall. You will conclude
that with your mind you serve the law of God, but with the flesh you obey
the commands of sin and death. And then what are you to conclude? You may
look back in shame, or perhaps in bitterness, at what now seem the
over-optimistic and inflated terms of the promise of sanctification that
you once embraced. You may find that the straight and narrow path of
sanctification is none other than the Boulevard of Broken Dreams!
There is such a
thing as spiritual disillusionment, disappointment with God. You feel far
from God, but you know that despite the face-saving slogan, it was not
you who moved. Rather, you take as your own the plaintive words of George
Harrison's psalm:
"I really want to
know you, but it takes so long, my Lord." If you have reached this point,
I have some things to say to you. Or, even if you aren't there yet,
perhaps you can remember them in case that rainy day ever comes.
The first is this:
remember that spiritual growth is receptivity, and that receptivity
requires emptiness, poverty of spirit, an empty cup. For spiritual
fullness is a plenitude of emptiness. The sense of hunger and longing is
itself the satisfaction. Or, at least, that is certainly my
experience. I have found a greater spirituality in seeking answers I knew
I did not have and was not likely to get, than in assuring myself that I
did have them. The intellectual quest for answers that will never come is
another form of the fullness of emptiness, the blessed poverty of spirit.
When Antonius Block (in Bergman's The Seventh Seal) asks in his
travail, "What will become of those of us who want to believe but are
unable?" blessed is he.
It is only those who
continue to seek who continue to find. They are like Diogenes of Sinope,
holding aloft his lantern as he walked the ways of the world in search of
an honest man. He himself was the man he sought, and if he ever
realized this and stopped, the world would have forfeited its single
honest man.
In all this I am not
talking about a mere period of "spiritual dryness" which one might expect
to endure for a while, a dark night of the soul which one hopes will end
but fears will not. I am talking about the result of maturity, a
mid-religious-life crisis, if you will, when you just have to realize that
you are not going to become the pious angel you once thought you might be.
You realize that it was never a realistic goal. You come to accept that
Karl Barth wasn't being pessimistic, he was being realistic, not
unbelieving, but free of "childish things," when he said,
Let us be honest. If we relate to
ourselves, to you and me, to this or that Christian (even the best),
that which is said about the conversion of man in the New Testament...
it will have the inevitable smack of hyperbole and even illusion -and
the more so the more we try to introduce it... [into] the Christian
life. What are we with our little conversion, our little repentance and
reviving, our little ending and new beginning, our changed lives...? How
feeble is the relationship, even in the best of cases between the great
categories in which the conversion of man is described in the New
Testament, and the corresponding event in our own inner and outer life!
(Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, pp. 582-83. Quoted in James
M. Gustafson, Christ and the Moral Life. Chicago: University of
Chicago
Press, 1968, p. 95)
Let's turn it the
other way around. Let's look at the preface of Monsignor Knox's classic
study of religious fanaticism, Enthusiasm Listen to his description
of the typical enthusiast:
He expects more from the grace of God
than we others. He sees what effect religion can have, does sometimes
have, in transforming a man's whole life and outlook; these exceptional
cases (so we are content to think them) are for him the average standard
of religious achievement. He will have no 'almost-Christians', no weaker
brethren who plod and stumble, ... whose ambition is to qualify, not to
excel. He has before his eyes a picture of the Early
Church,
visibly penetrated with supernatural influences; and nothing less will
serve him as a model... Quoting a hundred texts – we also use them, but
with more of embarrassment - he insists that the members of his society,
saved members of a perishing world, should live a life of angelic
purity, of apostolic simplicity... (Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A
Chapter in the History of Religion. NY: Oxford University Press,
1950, p. 2)
What immediately
occurred to me the first time I read these lines is a possibility that
would also explain the distressing gap measured by Karl Barth: perhaps the
New Testament writers were sectarians and enthusiasts (religious fanatics,
in short) of the kind Knox describes! Indeed, they must have been! The
initial fervor of any new religious movement glows with fever heat in the
pages of the New Testament. When enthusiasts read it, they find the page a
mirror, and they hear the Spirit say to come join the sect, imbibe the
heady wine of its fervor.
But inevitably the
fire burns low, and one adjusts to reality even as the early Christian
sect itself did, and one (as Knox and Barth say so well) finds oneself
quoting those passages with embarrassment. The claims made for “entire
sanctification,” for Christian perfection, in the pages of the New
Testament, become as much a stumbling block as its statements about demons
and a flat earth. We have to take them as equally mythical.
There are plenty of
people who do a passable job mimicking New Testament Christianity in our
day. They are the pietists, the literalists, the adventists, the
dogmatists, the exclusivists, the tongue-speakers and miracle-believers.
Anyone else, they regard as mere worldlings, half-Christians. They point
to their greater numbers and condescendingly tell mainline churches that,
if they would embrace full-bodied Evangelicalism they would be growing.
There is a great irony in that claim, for sooner or later, it is they
who will be jumping ship.
The adolescent
grandiosity that colors their religious life now will eventually die down,
and they will become contemptible "half-Christians" like those they now
pity. But they will be worse hypocrites than those others because, unlike
them, they will continue to quote the fanatical texts of the New Testament
as if they really believed them.
End of the Rope
Let me draw
attention to one pitfall of the spiritual life, indeed perhaps the very
one that has led so many to despair of sanctification. It is the dynamic
of striving and resting. In the literature of religious conversions
and "deeper-life" experiences, one finds story after story of frustrated
seekers who just could not receive the blessing of spiritual power they
sought, no matter how they prayed and fasted. At length they just threw in
the towel--and, what do you know, that was precisely what it took to gain
the blessing! Pietist literature explains it this way: all one's own
efforts at spirituality are the efforts of the flesh, of sinful human
nature, which unwittingly exalts itself as it seeks God, foolishly
imagining that it might produce him like a product by enough strenuous
effort. One must come to the point of exhaustion to see the limits of the
flesh and to make room for something better to replace it: the grace of
God, which then pours through an unclogged conduit unopposed. Psychologist
William James explained it this way:
A man's conscious
wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at
something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the
forces... ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured
result... It may consequently be actually interfered with (jammed, as it
were like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by
his voluntary efforts... "Man's extremity is God's opportunity" is the
theological way of putting this fact of the need for self-surrender;
whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, "Let one do all in
one's power, and one's nervous system will do the rest." (William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience NY: New American Library,
1958, p. 171)
James thinks nothing
is lost to conversion-religion by admitting this. But even Bultmann's
existential gospel could not survive it. Even Bultmann insists that as
long as we rely on what we believe are our own human resources, we can
never find grace. James is popping the bubble by revealing that what you
thought were extra-human forces of divine grace are themselves after all
simply reinforcements from the subconscious.
But we did not need
to wait for William James to come along to throw a wrench into the
mechanism of pietism. If one reads closely enough such handbooks as Andrew
Murray's Abide in Christ, one will sooner or later become uneasily
aware of precisely the same Catch 22. Murray tells us that the secret of
the victorious Christian life is "simply" to stop trying to live it in
one's own strength ("the arm of flesh will fail you; ye dare not trust
your own"). Instead one must resign oneself to utter spiritual impotence
and let the indwelling grace of Christ emerge to transfigure and sanctify.
"Let go and let God." Simply rest in the everlasting arms.
But then one finds
oneself unable to make the leap, unable to rest, to be forever mindful of
the benefits of Christ, to practice God's presence--whatever devotional
idiom you prefer. And then inevitably--one strives to rest, and
the whole maddening cycle begins again. Before, one strove for victory,
gave up striving and surrendered, then received the victory. But now this
very act of self-surrender, no longer a wonderful surprise to the
despairing soul, is too well known. One is led to expect it as part of the
process of sanctification, one of the necessary stages, one of the
preliminary things one must do. It becomes a holy charade. It
worked once, when it happened spontaneously, unexpectedly. But it's too
late for that now. And devotional systems based upon it merely torture
their adherents with a will-o'-the-wisp of a victorious Christian life
that never comes, and thus they send the seeker into a profounder Slough
of Despond.
But, as Gandhi once
said to a despairing man, "I know a way out of Hell." Surrender the whole
endeavor of piety. Face it: it doesn't work. I say unto you: Drop it.
Follow the example of Pontius Pilate and wash your hands of the whole
stinking matter. I have always enjoyed C.S. Lewis's advice in The
Screwtape Letters on how one ought to react to a vicious cycle of
spiritual frustration. The veteran tempter Screwtape instructs the novice
Wormwood thusly:
Catch him at the moment when he is
really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying
reflection, "By jove! I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride -
pride at his own humility - will appear. If he awakes to the danger and
tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt -
and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don't try this
too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in
which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed. (C.S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. NY: Macmillan,
1970. p. 63)
What should the
earnest pietist do when he realizes the trap he's in, striving to rest
from strife? Awake to the absurdity of his predicament! Laugh it off and
go on to something else, anything else, in fact, except more pietism.
Do you remember the
strange words of the Sermon on the Mount which advocate a secret piety?
Matthew tells us to hide any religious devotion we may have from the
approving or disapproving eyes of others, and then--to hide it even from
oneself! "Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing." The
person who is pious in a Sermon-on-the-Mount sort of way might be the one
who would be surprised to hear himself or her self described as Christian
or righteous or spiritual. Here's how Lewis puts it in another book,
Mere Christianity:
Do not imagine that if you meet a
really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he
will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you
that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him
[i.e., the truly humble] is that he seemed a cheerful intelligent chap who
took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it
will be because you feel a little envious of someone who seems to enjoy
life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be
thinking about himself at all. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. NY:
Macmillan, 1960, p. 114.)
Or as Bonhoeffer put
it in his Letters and Papers from Prison:
To be a Christian does not mean to be
religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of
asceticism..., but to be a [human being]. It is not some religious act
which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of
God in the life of the world..(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers
from Prison. Trans. Reginald H. Fuller. NY: Macmillan, 1953, pp.
222-223.)
There is the essence
of Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity," to do what Christ did and
leave the magic circle of heaven where only religion matters, where
religion sets the parameters of discussion, and to enter into worldly,
profane existence, truly incarnate as a human being, not trying to be
something else, an angel walking the earth mindful only of God.
Maybe that is the
true sanctification: no sanctification.
That's what I say.
Copyright©2009 by Robert
M Price
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