The New Year can be a good time to give yourself a spiritual MOT and a tune-up. Why not think through the insights Philip Rice gives?
I have this sneaking regard for the anti-hero. I have this insofar as he stands for an intolerance of falsehood. If he can identify the pretence that passes for Christian behaviour and the delusions that pass for Christian understanding, then I am with him.
I would rather be an Amos than an Amaziah, or a John the Baptist than a Sadducee. I think the genius of such people as Amos or John was fourfold: (1) to understand the times in which they lived, (2) to understand themselves, (3) to live passionately, and (4) to live on the frontier.
Seeing our times
These men are the great 'survivors'. It may seem odd to call John, who lost his head, a survivor. But he, like the others (and there is a list of them in Hebrews 11) was not corrupted or destroyed by his contemporary society.
You cannot insulate yourself against society. Having a spiritual life unaware of its environment is monasticism.
Spiritual life is defiant and defined. It defies the take-over of knowledge by secularism. It resists the reduction of understanding into exclusively human categories.
No retreat
I have spent a great deal of my time and energy challenging the assumption in young minds that a Christian understanding of the universe has been shown to be false. We do not surrender that part of the battlefield. Spiritual life is unequivocally tied to doctrine. In particular, it cannot yield either the truths of creation or providence; if it does it cuts the roots of its own being.
To be aware of our environment means to make distinctions, and the essential one is that between science (which seeks legitimately to explore and to understand) and scientism (which seeks illegitimately to explain everything away). The 'survivors' refused to retreat from a biblical world-view which insisted on the creative energy, initiative, wisdom, justice and compassion of a sovereign Creator and Lord.
No reduction
Spiritual life also has a definite content. There is no sense in pretending that present-day ideas have not reduced cultural and moral categories. The interaction of the heavenly and earthly, the human and divine, the eternal and temporal, infinite and finite, is no longer understood by many people.
Spiritual life, however, is 'fullness of life' and has a dignity that cannot accommodate itself to this minimalism. Those who have received Christ can scarcely forget the conferred privilege of becoming sons and daughters of God. Nor can they opt out of the honour of being constituted 'priests and kings unto God.' It would be falsely humble to deny that 'All things are yours . . .' (1 Cor. 3.21). At all times the Christian feels the claim of the unseen and eternal, of the permanent and glorious.
Revolt
Retreat and reduction appear to prevail in society but there is also revolt. It is - alas - a revolt that has an incoherent, often sinful, and negative voice. It speaks destructively in indiscriminate violence and vandalism, in casual and dehumanised sex, in peer-group control and anarchy.
Christians see the need to reject retreat and reductionism. Their revolt, however, has positive content. They have weapons unlike those of the world (2 Corinthians 10. 4,5), and have found liberty in captivity to Christ. It is no empty phrase that 'his service is perfect freedom'. There is a compatability between the liberated energy of a re-deemed heart and service for a Master 'full of grace and truth' (John 1.14).
Seeing ourselves
I return to my anti-hero. Spiritual life is an alien growth in a world nurtured on the denial of a God-given meaning and purpose. But is it not, thereby, the preserve of 'plaster saints' and 'heroes'? I confess I was never much helped by some kinds of Christian biography. I had the odd warm feeling and a renewal of aspiration, and, of course, I truly admire the conventional heroes of the evangelical establishment. But the effect of such hero-worship can be to emphasise distance, and encourage an inappropriate imitation.
John Wesley rising at 4.00 am, Henry Martyn eating his meals in freezing temperatures, C.T. Studd sitting in his faded 'Blues' blazer reading his Bible, these images were light years away from a post-war, working-class student. Yet they were regarded with such reverence as to induce guilt in anyone who could not metamorphose himself into a 19th century early-riser.
I am thankful that other Christian biographies can be more down to earth.
The end of the beginning
Healthy spiritual life requires a growing self-knowledge. The notion that conversion signals arrival is a delusion, it is but the end of the beginning and not the beginning of the end.
The old view that this world is a vale of soul-making is true. We are only always becoming what we should be. Christian certainty is a curious mixture of arrival and pilgrimage, of present possession and future inheritance. It is a combination of 'having passed from death to life', and the not yet of 'what we will be has not yet been made known' (1 John 3.2).
Inevitably there will be chastening. Only thus will Christian character be produced. It will be refracted through the prism of our own individual personality and temperament and shaped by our environment. Both the 'nurture' and the 'admonition' of the Lord will be formative.
But reality is both rhythmical and profound. There is a rhythm about life. Tension is paralleled by relaxation, work by leisure, study by exercise, solitude by companionship, ambition by acquiescence. Life is to experience a variety of moods. To try to live on a Christian 'high' all the time is neither possible nor desirable. Keyed-up decision times are properly isolated in an experience that is normally routine.
No tricks
Knowing ourselves, however, also means no self-inflicted confidence tricks. I sometimes wonder which is the real 'me'. As I sit in church, am I the apparent hearer of the sermon, or am I the inward thinker and plotter or wrestler? When I pray, am I the verbaliser of requests and of confessions and worship, or am I the wandering thoughts? Which is myself? Most of us, I suspect, seek to suppress the alter ego which is operating on a different level.
It struck me that we could learn from Hannah (1 Samuel 1). She eventually recognised the existence of her deep, hidden self and she articulated it to God: 'I am a woman who is deeply troubled . . . I was pouring out my soul to the Lord . . . I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.' No wonder 'her face was no longer downcast' afterwards. The psychological strategy of Jesus was always to probe the depths, and to bring to consciousness the true burden of the soul.
Now I feel strongly that we are pressurised to suppress this deep self. We 'kid ourselves on', because everyone else appears to live victoriously - by which they give the impression that there is no inward crying at all. This defence mechanism is a self-delusion. Why do we have to pretend that we are superior to the Psalmist or to Jesus himself who 'offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death' (Hebrews 5.7)? Let there be frankness.
Living passionately
Spiritual life cannot flourish without a growing awareness of who I am and how I 'tick'. But it is not lived in loneliness. It has to engage in relationship and in responsibility. To be fully spiritual means to be fully personal. It seems to me that I cannot be a person unless there is a range of relationships in which I feel and know what Martin Buber called the 'I-thou' dimension.
I have no right to treat another person as an 'it'. The 'I-it' relationship is a subject-object one. The rapport between persons is between two subjects. There is a proper passion in such rapport. Consequently if I am to live personally I have to identify all the social areas, and seek to introduce into them the governing principle of personal regard.
Spiritual life presupposes that I live in the sight of God. Since he is the living God I cannot treat him as an object. He is personal, omniscient; he has emotions, he has will. What he makes of our approach to him and our mode of addressing him I sometimes do not know. Jesus warns us that meaningless formulae and mere wordiness close his ears to us (Matthew 6.7). I am sobered by the thought that if I were to be interrupted in my prayers and asked: 'What are you saying? What do you mean?' I should be speechless with confusion and embarrassment. May God deliver us from word-magic.
The constant note
Actually, genuineness towards God is normative, a quality control that decides how I am to behave with regard to others. We have many roles: member of a family, citizen, colleague, friend, employee/employer, having authority and under authority. The constant note in the Bible - whether in the Decalogue, the prophets, the sermon on the mount, or the epistles, is that my enjoyment of friendship with God opens my heart to all of his creatures (1 John 3.17). Mutuality is what God is educating us into, both with himself and with others. Social breakdown is the expression of the aversion of God (Romans 1.28). Hell will be a terribly lonely experience. 'Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence.' (1 John 3.18,19). Such living is passionate and personal.
Frontier life
None of the people registered in Hebrews 11 lived safe lives. They were all people who felt the claim of God and responded to it, whose eyes were trained on the unseen. They were men and women of extra-terrestrial loyalties for whom religion was not 'the opiate of the masses' but a dynamic ideal and source of creative energy. They focused God's authority, power and reconciling grace and brought them to bear on their own time and place. Their sustaining quality was resilience, what the Bible commonly calls 'endurance'. It is the characteristic of the Christian who lives on the frontier.
The equipment of the pioneer is detailed by Peter (2 Peter 1.5-8). He asserts that the development of faith and character is the best defence against the 'corruption in the world' and the guarantee of spiritual effectiveness and productivity. Peter's list commends the frontier virtues of tough-mindedness, discernment, 'gravitas', resilience, unfussy piety and mutuality.
'Maintaining the spiritual life' requires a mind well-protected against the climate of opinion and its windy fashions, a heart that knows its own secrets and who to confide them to, a will constrained by the love of Christ, and a spirit responsive to Christ's call to live by faith, in situations both humdrum and critical.
Philip Rice
This article was written some while before the author's death from cancer in 1985 and was sent to us by his son.
