Why did Paul care about spiritual maturity and why, for that matter, should we?
At first glance, this question seems too trivial to need an answer. We care because we want to become the people we were made to be, right? To develop our gifts, and to put them to work in the world.
But for Christians, that doesn’t quite settle the issue. Christians look forward to a greater moment of spiritual transformation, ‘when Christ appears,’ and ‘we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3.2). And if that’s the end game, why doesn’t God just bypass the toilsome process of sanctification and beam us up to experience that ultimate existential transformation immediately?
Retaining our saltiness
An important – but counterintuitive – answer to this conundrum, is that God wants us to serve Him as salt and light in this world, and maturity gives our saltiness longevity.
Saltiness might seem, of course, to be threatened more than enhanced by the passage of the years. Jesus seems to confirm that in Matthew 5.13-16. Is it only me who reads this passage as a call to retain the zeal of the new convert, not to settle for the plodding progress of long-running spiritual transformation?
But this is a mistake. Though it surprises us to hear it, in the New Testament, contentment with an immature faith is the fast way to lose whatever saltiness we have because it leaves us exposed to the withering influence of residual counter-Christian habits.
Residual counter-Christian habits
As Christians, we’re inclined to think of ourselves as clean slates. And this, of course, is true – from a certain point of view. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul reminds his readers that they were ‘washed,’ ‘sanctified,’ and ‘justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ’ at conversion. But that doesn’t stop him noting, just two chapters later, that the past still has an impact on spiritually immature people in the present.
Dealing with the very Corinthian question of eating, or not eating, in idol temples, Paul tells immature believers that they will think once again like the idol worshippers they used to be if they go back to their old places of worship and go through the same motions (1 Cor. 8.7).
Contemporary psychologists call this ‘embodied knowledge’. We get so habituated to the norms and expectations of our past that it invades and co-opts our present when we’re exposed to certain physical triggers. Put believers back in a situation or even a physical posture associated with idol worship in the past, and the fear and reverence that marked that experience will reassert itself without them realising what’s happening.
Embodied knowledge
In Galatia the problem is even worse (and even more contemporary). Paul tells a bunch of recently converted Gentiles that if they embrace Jewish law, they’re going to find themselves returning to the same kind of enslavement they experienced in the past (Gal. 4.8-11). But this makes no sense. Even the most anti-law interpretations of Paul baulk at the idea that obedience to God’s commandments had become equivalent in his mind to worshipping pagan gods.
But the solution is obvious if we see this as another instance of embodied knowledge. Pagans, it turns out, were very used to keeping religious commandments, attending festivals, and making costly offerings. When Jews showed up in Galatia telling them to do similar-looking things as part of their devotion to Jesus, it shouldn’t surprise us that they did so with the same motives that drove them in the past. They didn’t keep the law the way Jews were taught to keep it – as an expression of thankfulness to the God of grace. They kept it as a way to make their new God bless them, just like they’d hoped to get blessing from their old gods.
Maturity and immaturity
The problem with immaturity, then, is that immature Christians have little protection against the resuscitation of the counter-Christian expectations that characterise the world around them. Without a sustained work of spiritual transformation, our reflexes are still too shaped by the surrounding culture to engage it securely without becoming its mirror image. Despite a Christian exterior, our underlying pagan expectations inevitably reassert themselves.
Filling churches with worldly cues ‘for the benefit’ of new converts, therefore, runs heedless onto the knife that Paul endeavours to expose here. But there’s no room for complacency in churches that resist this temptation. Where maturity means comfortable estrangement from the world with its own in-house vocabulary and its own set of in-house issues to fret over, saltiness may be preserved, but its fundamental purpose is neglected. Maturity allows us to enter the world, to love the world, and to bless the world without becoming the world. The Spirit rewires our reflexes for a reason.
