Biola University
If you have read my blog for any recent length of time, you have probably heard me talking about the importance of a developmental spirituality. But, admittedly, it might not be clear what I mean. There are, in fact, many things that could go under the banner of “developmental spirituality.”
As I’ve been using the phrase, I am focusing on one thing in particular. My goal in this post is to explain how I am using “developmental spirituality,” then give what I hope will be a helpful example, and, finally, address what happens when we fail to do this well.
A developmental spirituality is a vision of the Christian life that recognizes that Christian growth is always on a spectrum of maturation. This means that we cannot talk about the Christian life in black-and-white realities or talk in reductionistic “on or off” categories. Just as parenting a child to become an adult does not happen in a day, we have to talk about the Christian life as something that develops.
What this means, therefore, is that we cannot simply name imperatives, give spiritual disciplines or assert ideals of Christian faithfulness. We actually have to narrate a lived-life with God.
Importantly, articulating a developmental spirituality requires lived-wisdom. It is hard to fake, and when people try, it is typically pretty obvious. So, often, folks don’t try. It proves much easier to just talk about spiritual disciplines, or assert ideals of the Christian life at people. Unsurprisingly, this is rarely fruitful.
Before I say more about this, let’s turn to an example:
In Proverbs 9:10 we discover one of the core biblical axioms of wisdom: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” For much of my early Christian life, the idea that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord haunted me.
How could I know God as the God of love if I was supposed to fear him?
Today, it is tempting to think we can choose one over the other, and which side you land on — either a God to fear or a God to love — says a lot about you theologically. But, of course, these are not two sides. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, but that is not the end of wisdom. The end of wisdom is love, and perfect love casts out fear, as John reminds us in 1 John 4:18.
Our temptation is to see these as opposed to one another — as fear or love — so we imagine we are confronted with a choice. But that isn’t what Scripture is doing. Rather, what we find is a developmental feature of the Christian faith.
It is significant that when we hear that love “casts out fear,” we need to hear this as casting out the fear of punishment and not fear itself. The fear of the Lord does not go away. Perfect love does not annihilate it. The goal is not to rid yourself of something called “fear.” Rather, perfect love transforms fear into something like awe.
I hope you’ve noticed a problem though. You might have had someone tell you that when the Bible says to “fear the Lord” this really means “awe.” But that isn’t true.
Saying that fear means awe is well-meaning but ultimately unhelpful. Notice what that person has tried to do. They have tried to bypass the developmental features of love. They have tried to bypass maturation to arrive at awe as if it could just be achieved on our own. It isn’t your job to be in awe, it is your job to draw near to the God to fear — the God who descended with fire and fury on Sinai — and to discover that this God is the God of love. This God is the God who gave himself to you in Christ Jesus. It is this God who calls you to be known in the truth, and as you draw near in fear to him who is perfect love, your fear will be transformed.
It is true that fear will become awe, but this does not happen by replacing fear with it. Fear is transformed into awe only when it knows perfect love (this is when fear becomes “evangelical fear” rather than “legal fear”). The idea of perfect love does nothing to fear, and tragically, there are many who are trying to beat their fear into submission with the idea of perfect love, and, unsurprisingly, choosing one over the other.
Instead, we need to be afraid — we need to stand before the whirlwind of fire and fury — and we need to hear the call of love by the God who is love.
When we mistake a developmental spirituality for a bare assertion (“Be in awe of God!”) we are doing little more than asking people to bypass God in their formation (you might as well tell an infant to be an adult). Instead, we need people who fear God, and who have met God’s perfect love in their fear, to help shepherd souls to their Lord. We need people who can help others navigate the odd tensions we discover in all of this. We need people who can help direct souls to their God and show them the ways they do not seek him in truth. We need people who will expose the temptations folks have to either seek a god who is not worthy to be feared or create a god of love that needn’t be.
Our God is both greater and more gracious than all of that. But also, our formation is greater and more complicated than that. What we find in Scripture isn’t clean or tidy, but is often a messy vision of growth that takes us to a place of stability and then immediately reveals ways we are building on shifting sand (the Gospel of Mark, perhaps most obviously).
So when John and I wrote a book on developmental spirituality, it was clear to us that we had to focus our attention on the ways that our maturation in Christ becomes messy and confusing. This, of course, is where most of us live, and yet it is the reality so few talk about. It has proven easier to just assert imperatives (“Just do more of this!”) or to evoke guilt and shame in folks to try to generate activity than it is to shepherd people to their Lord. We are hoping to do something different.
It turns out, however, that these are harder things to write about, and, I would add, harder to read about. These topics require more of us, but it is only in wrestling through them that we can actually make sense of our lives.
The reason these are harder to read about is simple. Unlike programmatic models of growth that simply give us more things to do, a developmental spirituality requires us to consider what has really happened in our life. What has really gone on? Why do I actually go to church? Why do I actually read my Bible? What am I actually doing when I pray? What is going on in my experiences of guilt and shame, fear and anxiety?
It turns out that God wants to purify these things in love. But as with all things in the Christian life, we cannot send our avatar to live life for us. We actually have to show up. We have to come to God as we are.
This is what I find so frustrating about so much devotional literature that does not send us to the Lord in the truth, but (even if just implicitly) asserts that if we just do more, or get passionate enough, or just do the right sorts of things, then life will finally make sense. So often, the underlying imperative is “Get your act together,” and the thrust of the guidance is to push you back onto your own resources.
Pastorally, when we either give people grace without developmental guidance or present people with ideal realities or imperatives without developmental guidance, what often happens is either a lax spirituality or despair. So we find people bouncing from one program to another, or one ideal to another, until one day they wake up realizing that none of this is working.
