Please come on this journey with me. Some parts of what I say need careful attention and thought. You may not always agree with what I say, but I believe that if you listen and follow it you will find yourself changed.
Note: 1. At the beginning of each chapter you will find quotations attributed to FELLOW SPIRITUAL PILGRIMS. Who are they? For years as I have taught biblical spirituality to students, I have found it to be a two-way street. They teach me too. Their words and papers (these quotes are from them) have also blessed me. Please join us as fellow pilgrims on this spiritual journey.
2. Please remember that when I quote or refer to other sources or authors it does not imply I agree, in all respects, with these authors or their writings, and/or beliefs and ideas.
Chapter 1: The Universal Hunger
“I sense that my deepest need is to make myself available to God so that He can speak to me. I really want to experience God in a full measure—not in some extraordinary way, but just to be able to feel His presence and guidance.”
“Theology may give you information that is important, but it cannot fill the deepest longings of the broken soul.”
“There is no journey to God—only a journey with God.”
— FELLOW SPIRITUAL PILGRIMS
An Urgent Hunger
Human hunger for God is intense and universal. Even if suppressed or denied, it cries out silently from the depths. Such hunger is not a wish to know about God, but rather a quest to encounter Him. People want to touch, experience, and feel the divine—not just discover facts about God. While the hunger affects all people, it is especially evident in the Western world, especially those places in which secularism and traditional Christianity have become most prevalent.
I understand the hunger because it has also gripped me. In 1984 I had recently finished doctoral studies in religion and was teaching at a Christian college. Earlier I had suffered a spiritual crisis while serving as a missionary in Thailand. Though raised as a Christian and knowing my beliefs intellectually, I had never come to an experience that told my heart that God had truly accepted me. Serving in another culture upset my equilibrium and brought me to a crisis. In the end, after an intense search and struggle, I found an assurance of forgiveness and acceptance by a gracious God. I had, in common parlance, been “born again.” It led, however, to challenging questions. How could one so socially and educationally steeped in Christianity and who had even been “born again” still feel so spiritually hungry and thirsty? I knew that God loved me, but why did I feel distant from Him? What was going on?
I began a search—a not-so-secret quest to find God. The Lord started me down the road by beginning to teach me about worship. He used the simple testimony of one who had seen renewal come to his church through heartfelt worship to awaken me to the wonderful sense of presence that comes as Jesus is adored. God used Quaker Thomas Kelly’s story in A Testament of Devotion1 to warm my heart and instruct me. Henri Nouwen intensified the craving.2 Through them and many other sources I slowly began to recover a sense of God’s presence and to transform a devotional life that had once been dry and almost nonexistent, even though I had served as a missionary and pastor.
As I began, at first hesitantly, to speak of what I thought was my solitary search, I quickly learned that I was not alone. Teacher colleagues of mine in other disciplines as well as my own began to talk about their own spiritual hunger. In fear and trembling a colleague and I taught an experimental class on the spiritual life. We took students on a retreat during which in small groups they talked about their spiritual journeys. To our surprise, students flocked to the class. Students of all types in large numbers took the class for general elective credit, something virtually unheard of. Clearly faculty and students alike shared the same hunger that I had experienced. I clearly remember the response of one student when I asked, “Why are you taking this class?” With clear conviction he said, “All the beliefs we’ve heard before, but this is what we need for our life.”
In the years following I have learned that this hunger is universal in my church. When they receive clear teaching on actually experiencing God, people respond, because it is food for their hungry souls.
The explosion of interest in spirituality in Christianity indicates that my hunger is a universal one in the Christian church. Books on prayer, meditation, Bible study, worship, and other topics of devotional theology have proliferated. Courses in Bible schools and Christian colleges as well as seminars for the general public have rapidly spread. The demand continues to grow.
It is easy to see the same trend in the West even outside the Christian stream. One can easily document the growing popularity of Eastern religions. New Age gurus find an eager hearing, and books and magazines on spiritual topics are popular. The issue today is deciding which spirituality to follow. Television, movies, and other popular media are full of angels, demons, spells, and every imaginable kind of supernatural occurrence. Even if people are not so interested in following traditional religions, at least they’d like to touch divine or supernatural power. The basic hunger is the same.
Reasons for the Hunger
The natural question that one asks at this juncture is “Why is such hunger so acute at this time in the Western world? What drives this insatiable craving?”
Part of the answer is our recent history and culture. As physical hunger results from the absence of food, hunger for God arises out of the absence of the divine. The “enlightenment” period of the past 150 years has intellectually squeezed God out of life. Even where a theoretical belief in God’s existence has lingered, He usually has little direct contact with daily life. Science can explain just about everything, even for many Christians. A subsequent chapter (12) will explore this in more detail.
Four main factors especially trigger this hunger among Christians and those in societies heavily influenced by the Christian faith. The first results from the way we have defined religion as accepting certain ideas with the mind. We traditionally use statements of belief to explain our brand of religion. Many churches employ such documents as the Apostles’ Creed. Denominations in the reformed tradition have “confessions,” such as the Westminster Confession. As theology students soon learn, these confessions are not acknowledgments of sin, but statements of doctrinal orthodoxy. Christians use such statements to show their orthodoxy and make clear their differences with other groups. All of these attempts, though, reflect an implied definition of religion that is primarily cognitive and intellectual.
The contrast of this definition of religion with those employed by non-Christians hit me with force one day as I was teaching world religions. Muslims define themselves by five pillars. The first pillar confesses that God is one and that Muhammad is His prophet. Outside of this first pillar, the other four pillars all deal with the spiritual life and not doctrine. They urge prayer five times a day, almsgiving to the poor, Ramadan as the yearly fast, and pilgrimage to Mecca. For a Muslim, then, religion includes some doctrine, but has more to do with the spiritual life than intellectual belief.
Many Hindus and Buddhists describe the particular sect or brand of their faith by the meditation type they follow. All these non-Christian religions, by their very practice, view religion much more as a devotional or spiritual experience than as a philosophy or idea.
Thus it is not strange that many Christians feel a hunger for God because their very definition (often only subconscious) of what religion is cuts them off from the source of spiritual life—communion with God.
The problem becomes even clearer as we look at the second reason for the hunger. The very definition of theology accepted by Christians militates against taking the devotional life seriously. Traditionally many in the church spoke in the plural about theology. There was not a theology but three major branches of theology. First, dogmatic or doctrinal theology dealt with doctrines and philosophy and taught people what to believe. Second, moral theology, concerned ethics and instructed people how to behave toward one another and in society. The third, mystical or devotional theology, focused on the spiritual life