This focus on God's transcendence and Christ's commitment to justice, peace, and wholeness is a strength of mainline Protestant spiritual traditions. This recognition that the desire to manipulate God—either through official structures or for personal ends—is ubiquitous is an insight that has contributed to Protestants’ suspicion of any authority that lacks checks and balances.
Mainline Protestants are especially aware of the way in which statements about the nature of God and claims about “what God wants” can quickly become self-serving and idolatrous on the lips of believers. Because of suspicions regarding authority and idolatry, they have a natural propensity to look behind religious language to see if other human motivations are guiding the religious discourse. Whose needs are being met by claims that God wants this specific action? Does the stated action bring justice or peace for the oppressed, or does it maintain the status quo of the speaker? Who speaks for God? What criteria must be used to discern if the message is of God? Protestants recognize the timeliness of these questions.
Unfortunately, these compelling sensitivities also make many Protestants wary of making any claims about God's activity beyond the most basic and fundamental statements about God's creative, sustaining power and God's self-revelation in Christ. Although mainline Protestant believers are willing to affirm in a general and vague way that God's love creates and ultimately sustains life, they often fear looking for God's activity in the day-to-day activities of living. Addressing this spiritual malaise will require discovering that theological affirmations may address not only these foundational issues of existence but also the issues of daily living. The cutting edge for many mainline Protestants is the recognition that it is possible to maintain one's suspicion of authority and one's fears about speaking for God and still sustain an experiential relationship with God that offers nurture, correction, transformation, and redemption. An engagement with the spiritual practices provided in this book offers an avenue for affirming Protestant suspicions while affirming the meaning that comes from an experiential relationship with the divine.
Although it is probably true that some people are not interested in developing an experiential relationship with the divine, the option for this form of spiritual development should not be anathema to mainline churches. Even for those not interested in further spiritual development, this issue will not simply “go away.” The pluralism of the contemporary period precludes that option. As mainline Protestants are in dialogue with African American Christians, Asian Christians, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists not only from North America but from other parts of the world, they discover that people from various faith traditions have an intimate, experiential dimension to their faith. Even nontheistic believers often have a deeply affective relationship with the sacredness of the cosmos.
I believe that mainline Protestants can make theological claims that are both consonant with their tradition and that will open them to the affective dimension of an experiential relationship with God without offending their analytical and critical sensibilities. The theological affirmations that follow may seem commonplace, but they provide a starting point for understanding the relevance of theological reflection not only for the ethical demands of daily life, but also for the spiritual growth and development required for finding life's deeper significance and sustaining a prophetic vision.
If mainline Protestant faith is once again to shape the lives of believers in life-giving and powerful ways, the spiritual malaise described above must be addressed. In order to address it, mainline Protestants need to celebrate the spiritual gifts they have received from their Protestant heritage: the mandate for ethical reflection and prophetic social action; the critical and analytical sensibilities that have committed Protestants to an understanding of modern worldviews and the Word of God; and the Protestant commitment to a transcendent God whose mysterious nature makes one suspicious of all authorities who claim to “know God's will” or “speak for God.” These attitudes and beliefs are gifts of the Spirit that must be celebrated as well as augmented.
THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF FAITH
We turn now to the understanding of spirituality that informs this work by noting five theological affirmations that are central to the lived experience of faith of mainline Protestants: (1) creation from breath and dust; (2) creation in the image of God; (3) justification by faith; (4) sanctification; and (5) the reign of God. In each case the theological affirmation is explicated with an eye not only to its intellectual context but also to its experiential potential.
Creation from Breath and Dust
The creation account from the Yahwist tradition in Genesis 2 says that “God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). This combination of dust and breath brings together in the life of humankind the matter and spirit aspects of being human. For the purposes of understanding and using spiritual practices, it is crucial to acknowledge the significance of both matter and spirit in spiritual development.
The contemporary tension in the minds of many Protestants related to the relationship between body and spirit is present as early as the second and third centuries in the works of Christian theologians. Influenced by Greek philosophical categories, these theologians differed in their understanding of how matter and spirit were related to being created in the image of God. For example, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215) and Origen (c. 185-c. 254) contended that the image of God is the preexistent Word (the Logos); thus they identified the image of God with humankind's soul and not with matter. Irenaeus (c. 130-c. 200) and Tertullian (c. 160-c. 225), on the other hand, contended that the image of God was the image of the incarnate Son. Because this Son, Jesus Christ, makes the invisible God visible, then both the soul and the body are fundamental aspects of being “created in the image of God.” The bodily resurrection of Jesus sanctifies both the matter and the spirit.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus notwithstanding, in mainline Protestant traditions matter has often been understood as inferior to spirit. There is a lingering feeling that even though God loved the world, somehow immaterial aspects of being are more significant than material. Yet the magnificence and beauty of matter as it is manifested in the natural world has always grabbed humankind's attention. For example, the story of Noah and the flood in the Hebrew Scriptures concludes with the divine-human covenant being embodied in the world of matter with a rainbow. The beauty of the rainbow inspires and awes people to this day.
In this book it is essential to recognize that being created from dust and breath involves an understanding of spirituality that embraces an integration of both matter and spirit. In the contemporary context, it is crucial to affirm this commitment to matter as well as spirit because the word spirituality is frequently used to reference exclusively matters of the spirit—as if the spirit and the body have little to do with one another. Such approaches use the word spirituality to refer to interior acts of devotion, primarily meditation or contemplative prayer. Although prayer and mysticism are certainly important aspects of spirituality for many persons and traditions, they are not the exclusive domain of the term. For example, the last chapter of this book begins with exercises that deal with both body and spirit: the Relaxation Exercise and the Rule of Life.
Within theological education, emerging definitions of spirituality provide understandings that are concerned not simply with interior spiritual matters, but also with the way in which spirituality relates to all of life. As beings of body and spirit, our spirituality must be concerned with prayer and meditation as well as the rich texture of our lives. Sandra Schneiders describes the focus of spirituality for those following Christian traditions as the “lived experience of the Christian life.”2 Spirituality therefore