Augustine and Luther for and against contemporary "spirituality".

So who, one might ask, could be against spirituality? And why drag in Augustine and Luther, for and against contemporary spirituality? Are we not all for "spirituality," even if we can hardly define it? In our neighborhoods and communities, are we pastors not understood to be in the spirituality business?

There's the problem: the spirituality business as a profitable boomlet of books, videos, Web sites, and bumper stickers has been a mixed blessing for thoughtful pastors. Spirituality, not religion, has been all the rage, and long enough to prompt parodies and the inevitable backlash. Whenever Hallmark cards and bumper stickers catch up to a grass roots trend and profit from it, we know the satirical counter-trend is not far behind. From my medieval corner of church history, I have watched Gregorian chant recently rise and fall, and then angels ascending and now descending the ladder of popularity and profit. Barnes and Noble has long carried sincere testimonies about visits from angels and more recently added the cynic's guide to "101 Uses for a Dead Angel."

"I'm not religious," went the trend, "but I want to be spiritual." A recent issue of dialog examined the popular distinction between "spirituality" and "religion," even as The New Yorker just then ran a cartoon poking fun at such a dichotomy. (1) A woman at the cocktail party, eager to be hip, asks the man in fashionable clerical collar, "Do you think of yourself as a spiritual person?" The spirituality trend has become a fad, eligible for satire not only at the (Wittenberg) Door but even at The New Yorker.

September 11, 2001, with all that it meant and means for our awareness of the precious fragility of human life and our awareness of evil, may change the landscape here, too, but it is too soon to know exactly how. Personal spirituality was not enough for those who flocked to church in September 2001. They wanted more, in that crisis. The rituals and communal relationships of religion reentered national consciousness, at least briefly, and we do not yet know the results. Seminaries are now receiving record numbers of applications, as some young professionals see the value of the institutional church and of the ministry. (Yet, graduate schools in all fields are having a boom year in applicants, so perhaps all these career changes are prompted less by soul-searching and more by the economic downturn.)

In any case, Christian theologians were criticizing contemporary "spirituality" long before the recent backlash. Such criticism seems obvious enough, in hindsight, when it comes to the non-Christian New Age spirituality of the neo-Gnostics, or what Philip J. Lee wrote Against The Protestant Gnostics almost fifteen years ago, or even this past Winter Olympic slogan about "finding the light within you." The "inner divine spark" has been an easy target for doctrinal cold water, and there's no need to take new aim. Within Christian communities, however, there is also considerable disagreement about spirituality. Just as some emphasize our prayer lives and spiritual formation, others see here an overly optimistic view of human potential or even a dangerous emphasis on our works and merits. James Kittelson critiqued all this self-help talk as "Contemporary Spirituality' s Challenge to Sola Gratia" back in a 1995 issue of Lutheran Quarterly. (2)

Yet if we want to suggest a Pelagian works-righteousness here, we'd better go back to St. Augustine himself. After an appreciation of the Bishop of Hippo, for and against "spirituality," I will sketch an emerging academic version of spirituality along with an antidote in Martin Luther, and then suggest some implications and application, not for the unsuspecting public but for ourselves as pastors and presiders on Sunday morning.

Augustine, for and against "spirituality"

Why does Augustine, especially in his Confessions, still command such interest today, and how does his classic work correct the popular notion of "spirituality"? Lutheran pastors usually have a copy of the Confessions but often have not spent significant time with it. Some meditative rereading is worth the time here, because Augustine both supports and challenges the contemporary interest in our own spirituality.

Unlike college sophomores, who open this work looking for racy "confessions," pastors know that the title means the confession of sinful pride, a confession of faith and trust in God, and especially the confession of praise. Years after writing it, Augustine said that the work praises the righteous and good God, is intended to excite the reader's mind and affection toward God, and has done so often for himself and for many others. As a prayer of remarkable length, the whole book is about God, relentlessly about God, and thus directly opposed to the spiritualitas of Augustine's time and our own.

The problem with "spirituality," from an Augustinian point of view, is not the obvious profit-hungry perversion ("Seven Spiritual Secrets for Fiscal Success"?), but at the very core, the simple starting point of our own "spiritualness" instead of God. This critique of optimistic navel-gazing has some warrant in the Bishop of Hippo's own day, for the very word "spirituality" was coined back then in a letter stressing our ability and responsibility for our own spiritualitas, or spiritualness. The very first appearance of the Latin word spiritualitas is in this specific text. This letter was long thought to be by St. Jerome but is known now to stem from Augustine's opponent Pelagius or from his immediate circle of followers. Suspicions that today's spirituality industry trades on an (unfounded) optimism about our innate abilities to improve our own spiritual life can cite the very creation of the word "spirituality" as infected with Pelagian works-righteousness. (3) Etymology and word history aside, the core iss ue for Augustine is the emphasis on God, on who God is and what God does, rather than any confidence in our abilities, spiritual or otherwise.

Pastors may want to reread Augustine's Confessions first because we want to read about him, but when we have the time to take our time, we realize to our own devotional and pastoral benefit that it is all about God. The first challenge is to slow down and adapt to this kind of meditative reading. Pastors need to reclaim contemplative reading, preferably away from the office, and definitely away from any computer! In so much of our reading, perhaps especially as pastors who are busy professionals, we are calculating consumers: How fast can I get what I want? "Instant access" indeed. Our reading is swift, silent, solitary, and sovereign. I'm in charge here, and I'll click when I want. If I am really interested, I may print, but that's all. Don't expect me to ponder it or otherwise get involved. A slower, communal experience, at least in hearing the text in our mind's ear, subjects us to the rhythms and influence of someone else. We're not in charge here, and we might even be changed.

The Confessions subtly combine scriptural images with theological-philosophical themes and Augustine' sown testimony, all in the genuine voice of prayer. The familiar motif of departure--from home, from mother, from the church, and from God--and then returning again combines elements of the parable of the Prodigal Son with Homer's Odyssey. We have here the philosophy of Platonism (procession and return) along with the literary symmetry of chiasmus (Books 1 and 9, 2 and 8, and so on). Here and in many of his works, Augustine's spiritual guidance moves us from the external world of nature in to the interior self as the image of God and then up to the superior realm of God's own nature and attributes. This pattern guides Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity as well as his spirituality and even the literary design of the Confessions.

Significantly for pastors, the Confessions also seem to assume some critique or challenge to Augustine's own ministry back home. Some said: You fought the church, rebelled, went far away and got converted somewhere else, and now you come back and want us to accept your ministry?! As he elsewhere explicitly opposed the Donatist insistence upon the personal history and integrity of the minister for the effectiveness of the ministry, so he here in the Confessions implicitly gives the anti-Donatist reply about himself as a minister of God: Yes, I opposed the church and ran from God, but God pursued me and changed me, and now my ministry in your midst depends upon God's faithfulness and not on my own. The priority, you see, is on God and what God does, not on us and our spirituality.

Augustine's most poignant passages in the Confessions press this relentless emphasis on what God has done and is doing, not on us and our spiritual gifts, indeed despite our deafness and blindness. "You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness." (4) He knows that God overcame him, and he is not lamenting a loss of freedom. One loose translation makes it sound like that old love song, "You made me love you," and this is no complaint. The credit, the praise, the glory, and the thanks always go to God.

The Confessions reward our contemplative rereading today regarding spirituality because they are all about God, about God's transcendent majesty and humble incarnation, about God's justice and mercy, about God as source and God as goal. Reading the Confessions again, slowly, is not finally about a book, or a theologian, or ourselves and our spirituality, but about God. The experience of reading it that way, paradoxically, can change us and our spiritual lives, but only as the by-product of keeping the emphasis where it belongs. If we lose ourselves in the focus on God, we again find ourselves and indeed as changed.

As in Benozzo Gozzoli's beautiful (and fanciful) rendition of Ambrose baptizing Augustine, the text, traditionally from Ambrose himself, says it all: Te deum laudamus. We praise you, God. In that beautiful phrase, like the Confessions so ancient and so new, is the enduring power of Augustine's masterpiece and the only version of "spirituality" with a future. The main point is what God does--what God has done, is doing, and will yet do.

Luther and contemporary spirituality

It is quite simple, of course, to continue this emphasis on the priority of grace straight into Martin Luther. It is so simple and obvious, in fact, that we should avoid the temptation, for three specific reasons.

First, the harder task is to apply the priority of grace to pastoral and liturgical practice, as I will attempt shortly.

Second, Lutherans are too quick to assume that our Martin was the only Augustinian at work in the sixteenth century, when in fact many members of his own order stayed loyal to Rome and made their contributions to the Council of Trent as Augustinian advocates of grace. Sixteenth-century Augustinians split into the Roman or evangelical camps not so much over grace alone--they were all against Pelagius--as over "faith alone" and over the application of the emphasis on grace (and faith) to other aspects of Christian life and worship. The Council of Trent taught an Augustinian theology of grace formed in love and condemned those who taught justification by faith alone. Even today, with such condemnations formally lifted, there is not yet ecumenical agreement on how to apply the doctrine of justification to other topics such as indulgences, purgatory, and ecclesiology. We don't even agree among ourselves as Lutherans on how to apply grace to the liturgy, as should be apparent shortly.

Third, and most to the point here, I'll not bother invoking Luther as an Augustinian champion of grace because there is another trend in modem, or rather post-modern, spirituality needing his critical help, namely, a destructive variation on "apophatic" or negative theology.

The apophatic tradition in Christian theology recognizes first and most of all the transcendence of God beyond all our names, words, and thoughts. The classic exponent is the Dionysius long thought to be apostolic, the Areopagite from Acts 17 now called Pseudo-Dionysius, my longstanding research interest and suddenly the darling of some post-modems who want to "retrieve" the apophatic dimension in theology. The apophatic way, meaning the way of negations, first establishes the utter transcendence of God. "We offer worship to that of the divine which lies hidden beyond thought and being. With a wise silence we do honor to the inexpressible," said Dionysius himself. (5) Thus all affirmations about God fall short, and only negations about God are really true: God is invisible, ineffable, beyond our names, beyond our words.

The current academic interest in negative theology is fueling a new movement in spirituality. The apophatic tradition is being used to qualify all our names for God, even the biblical revelation, indeed to de stabilize all talk of God, such that anyone's knowledge of God is relative and becomes strictly an issue of private preference or irrefutable religious experience. No one can really know God, so my experience is what counts, whether the light within or dreams or daydreams. This nihilistic post-modem isolation of the apophatic insight from its larger context in traditional theological method is not really Dionysian in the end and should not be charged (or credited) to the Areopagite's account. His use of negations is to separate ourselves from everything that is not God, and thus to find oneself in mystical union with God, a union without distinction of self and God, which is another topic. Yet it is Martin Luther's critique of the Dionysian understanding of negative theology that may equip us to refute the growing interest in this apophatic move by academic post-modernity.

Luther knew negative theology well, as medieval mysticism had inherited it from Pseudo-Dionysius.

Therefore Dionysius, who wrote about "negative theology" and "affirmative theology," deserves to be ridiculed. In the latter part of his work he defines "affirmative theology" as "God is being." "Negative theology" he defines as "God is nonbeing."

But if we wish to give a true definition of "negative theology," we should say that it is the holy cross and the afflictions in which we do not, it is true, discern God, but in which nevertheless that sigh is present of which I have already spoken. (6)

For Luther, saying that the transcendence of God remains hidden in darkness is just the beginning. The question is, Then what? Not a retreat to private experience, to the divine within, as the spirituality enthusiasts would have it! Precisely because God's transcendence is beyond us, we must look to God as revealed in Christ, specifically on the cross. Negative theology, for brother Martin, points us away from God's transcendence to God's incarnation and even death. That's the darkness or cloud of unknowing, to Luther.

I have been reduced to nothing and know nothing. Entering into darkness and the cloud, I see nothing. I live by faith, hope and love alone, and I am weak (that is, I suffer) for when I am weak then I am stronger. This leading the mystical theologians call going into the darkness, ascending beyond being and non-being. Truly I do not know whether they understand themselves, if they attribute it to [humanly] elicited acts and do not rather believe that the sufferings of the cross, death and hell are being signified. The CROSS alone is our theology. (7)

Yes, God transcends all our names and concepts, such that the apophatic tradition will always contribute a helpful corrective to earthbound simplicities. Nevertheless, the next move is neither despair nor some inner light but rather the simple Christian confession of Christ, and him crucified.

Luther's critique of the Dionysian apophatic, however, is not some Protestant innovation, as I have documented in my Lutheran Quarterly essay. St. Bonaventure made the same point in the thirteenth century; the divine darkness of Dionysius really means being crucified with Christ. Even the earliest commentators on the Areopagite's negative theology made almost this same point. Maximus the Confessor said it best back in the seventh century:

The knowledge of himself in his essence and personhood remains inaccessible to all angels and men alike and he can in no way be known by anyone. But St. John, initiated as perfectly as humanly possible into the meaning of the Word's incarnation, claims that he has seen the glory of the Word as flesh, that is, he saw the reason or the plan for which God became man, full of grace and truth. (8)

Before any of them, St. John the Evangelist said it first of all: "No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, close to the Father's heart, has made God known" (John 1). Luther adds a distinctive emphasis here not merely on the incarnation in general as the revelation of this otherwise transcendent God but more specifically on the cross, on the mortality and passion and death of this God the Son, for us.

In a way, this second trend in contemporary spirituality, this postmodern turn of the apophatic, is the opposite of the first, more familiar trend of Pelagian spiritual disciplines. The Pelagian stressed what we can do and know, out of an optimistic anthropology. The apophatic stresses what we cannot do and cannot know, out of a pessimistic epistemology. In both cases, the main point in response is what God does-what God has done in Christ and what God is doing and will yet do. The crux of it is Christ crucified, for you and pro me, and the challenge for pastoral ministry is to get this across from pulpit to pew, from table to communicant, from the church to the world. People in our spirituality culture are seeking more yet do not even know what they seek. We have a word to speak, a liturgical and corporate word of life that goes beyond private spirituality. It is nothing less than life and salvation in the words "for you, for the forgiveness of sin."

Implications and application

We learn from Augustine and Luther that the essential emphasis is not on what we do or offer or know (or do not know) but on what God has done and does and offers us. What are the implications and application for pastoral practice regarding contemporary spirituality?

Of course we need to evaluate critically (that is, theologically) the popular spiritual trends in these New Age greeting cards or so-called negative theology. Yet we must go beyond self-satisfied critiques of the unsuspecting well-intended laity and eager yet inexperienced seminarians. Let us reexamine ourselves here, as Lutheran pastors who preach and preside. In our Sunday worship habits and patterns, is the clear emphasis really on what God does in Christ crucified for us, or is it rather on what the congregation does and offers? After September 11, people need more than subjective individualized spirituality, and that's where the gospel comes in, in Word and sacrament.

Early in 2002 Bishop Mark Hanson told the New Jersey Synod that the ELCA is formulating a set of "principles for worship" so that new worship materials can be developed accordingly and that he hopes this will mean reclaiming the phrase "means of grace" with all that it entails. The American public knows and likes the word grace, as in Amazing Grace," and our local congregations, in Word and sacrament, can offer the concrete means of such grace, the very way God's gracious love comes to us, he said. The Augustinian and Luther-an emphasis on God and Christ, not on ourselves, the clear priority on the means of grace, has multiple implications for our liturgical decisions, I think, and some of them are perhaps unsettling and thus unwelcome in our midst. Pastors know that worship patterns are hard to change, not only for our members but also for ourselves. There are no absolutes here, no condemnations; but the priority of grace at least raises questions about our corporate habits, and I here suggest some implicat ions regarding the means of grace.

Consider, to start with, which sacramental name befits the means of grace. Should we call it the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper? Set aside for a moment whether in-house ecclesial terminology such as Eucharist helps or hinders evangelism, as compared to common names like "supper" and witness words like "Lord." The question is whether to name it after our thanksgiving, Eucharist, or after the gift itself, the Lord's Supper (1 Cor 11:20).

Well, comes the obvious response, how simplistic; it is both the gift and the thanks. Yet if our time calls for a clear emphasis, as in Augustine and Luther, should that emphasis not be on what God does in Christ, on the means of grace, rather than on what we do, on our spirituality, on our means of thanksgiving? It is first of all the gift of the Lord's Supper. To name the sacrament "eucharist" is to displace from the center the gift itself--the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation--and to emphasize our gratitude, our thanksgiving, our spirituality, our Eucharist. Where such an inversion prevails, the eucharistic tale has wagged the evangelical dogma (you should forgive the pun). As if we can take for granted the gift of God's grace in Christ, as bestowed elsewhere, some other way, perhaps long ago or directly to the individual heart, without such here-and-now corporate means as words, bread and wine. In that case, the words and the elements could be taken over by our celebration and offered to God in ou r sacrifice of our praise and our thanksgiving, namely, our spirituality. Yet such an emphasis converts the sacrament from a means of grace to a means of thanksgiving and furthermore suggests that our thanksgiving is dominated by worship rather than flowing out into the work and witness of daily life.

Naturally, this priority emphasis on God's gift, "for you for the forgiveness of sins," rather than on our eucharist or thanksgiving, which should follow, also applies to the so-called eucharistic prayer, or Great Thanksgiving. Those who agree with my Augustinian and Luther-an emphasis on what God does in Christ may already proclaim the "words of institution" as gospel, as grace, "the body of Christ, given for you," instead of enclosing them in our prayer, our thanksgiving, our spiritual self-offering to God. An ecclesiology of the whole Christ, including his body the church offered to the Father, is still a Godward direction, whereas the gospel emphasis should be "usward." Luther himself was clear about the difference in direction. "The one [the Words of Institution] comes from God to us;... the other... from us to God. The former descends, the latter ascends." (9) The sacrament is not our sacrifice or even our prayer but the gift of God, as proclaimed and given to us. Then, our thanksgiving spills over int o lives of witness and service to the neighbor.

Going out into the world suggests one last implication regarding an offertory procession, again as a challenge to our trends and current emphasis. Biblically, historically, and theologically, there is a growing ecumenical consensus that the offertory procession of bread and wine wrongly emphasizes our initiative, our offering, again our spirituality, instead of God's gracious gift in Christ crucified coming to us in bread and wine. Anglicans who once promoted this as the first of the "four-action shape" have been particularly critical. Bishop Colin Buchanan here makes my Augustinian and Luther-an point: "to emphasize our provision of [the elements] is to distort the simplicity of the central concept in the sacraments--that God affirms and uses his created order as a means of his grace." (10)

If we want the emphasis to be on God's gifts to us, we do not presume to initiate the exchange. The bread and the wine come to us, and then we give ourselves to God's world as we go out to serve. If the Lord's Supper, as a means of God's grace, is clearly Christ's self-giving for and to us, for the forgiveness of sins, with the bread and wine on or near the table until they are given to us, then our true self-offering can follow, from the post-communion thanksgiving (now so brief) through our departure out the doors to give ourselves to God in the world all week long.

Imagine, for a fanciful moment of liturgical re-creation, a post-communion offertory and processional out into the world. The ushers could start the collection at the back, passing the plates and moving forward. In post-communion thanksgiving, the earthly gifts of our resources and daily lives are offered to God first in prayer, with specific intercessions for the members' weekday ministries, and then in the actual processional down the aisle and out the doors. The ushers lead the way, and the money is symbolically aimed at God's purposes in our world. The worshipers follow in the self-giving of daily life. Church exit signs imply the subtitle of "servants' entrance," for beyond those doors we serve others with the grace and strength we here receive. When the liturgical emphasis is on what God does in Christ given for us, our self-giving as response is not in ritual but in ethics and evangelism.

Conclusion

When the emphasis is on what God does, as in Augustine and Luther, God's Spirit moves us out into the world, in witness and service. Mission statements regularly make this same move, from God's Word to the church's mission to the world. In that movement, the goal is not our own self-absorbed spirituality but evangelism for the world's sake and social justice for the world's need. The movement is not our self-offering to God at the altar but God's self-offering to us in Christ and then our self-offering to God in the world. Augustine and Luther may point the way, but the emphasis on God's gracious love in Christ for the world's sake must be renewed in our time as the only version of spirituality with a real future.

(1.) dialog 40.4 (Autumn, 2001). Cartoon by Sipress, The New Yorker (October 22, 2001), 70.

(2.) James M. Kittelson, "Contemporary Spirituality's Challenge to Sofa Gratia," Lutheran Quarterly 9 (1995): 367-90. See also Scott Hendrix, "Martin Luther's Reformation of Spirituality," Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999): 249--70.

(3.) On this and many other issues and texts relating to the history of spiritual theology and mysticism, see the ongoing multi-volume work of Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God, in this case vol. II, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p.473 n. 14.

(4.) Augustine, Confessions 10. xxvii (38), trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 201. There are so many good translations readily available that the issue is not availability of his text but commitment of our time.

(5.) The Divine Names, chapter 1, in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibbeid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 50. Further, see my Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

(6.) Regarding Psalm 90 (1534), Luther's Works, American Edition, 55 vols., ed. Pelikan and Lehmann (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1955 ff.), 13:110 ff. For the fuller context, see my essay "Martin Luther's Christocentric Critique of Pseudo-Dionysian Spirituality," Lutheran Quarterly 11(1997): 291-307.

(7.) Operationes on the Psalms (1519-1520), Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. J. F. K. Knaake et al. (Weimar: Bohlau, 1883ff.), 5. 176. 27-33. The capital letters emphasizing "cross" are apparently original.

(8.) Chapter on Knowledge, II, 76. Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 164.

(9.) Luther's Works 36:56. For a fuller statement, see my essay "Luther's Objection to a Eucharistic Prayer," The Cresset (March, 1975): 12-16.

(10.) Colin Buchanan, The End of the Offertory (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1978), 38. For more detail, see my "The End of All Offertory Processions," dialog 35 (1996): 247-50.