Archive: Beyond Self-Improvement

It’s time America’s new religious upsurge went beyond spiritual self-indulgence, says renewal specialist Richard Lovelace

Developing the spiritual life is a growth industry today.

• Popular religious literature would displace other forms of non-fiction if it were allowed on best-seller lists.
• Lay people who have heard about personal commitment to Christ and the fulness of the Holy Spirit on television are urging their pastors to speak on these subjects.
• Scholars probing the roots of denominations are studying how to recover the spiritual strength of these movements which began in a blaze of religious experience.
• Even futurologists, scientists, and business leaders are admitting that the moral dilemmas created by technology force us back to religion, both for ethical guidance and for November/December 1985 courage to face the future.

In the church, the zealous activism of the 1960s has been overtaken by a new interest in evangelism, worship, prayer, and contemplation. Since the Jesus Movement of the late ’60s, young converts have been pouring into seminaries, tripling the size of some evangelical schools. The number of Protestant candidates for the ministry is up 30 percent.

The influence of evangelical students and the apparent conservative shift toward Protestant orthodoxy have begun to affect the shape of American seminaries. Many have begun to hire evangelical faculty, academic deans, and presidents.

Harvard Divinity School, a bellwether of American intellectual life which has been pointed to the left for almost three centuries, is now trying to endow a Chair of Evangelical Studies to be occupied by an evangelical. No wonder New York Times editor Kenneth Briggs has suggested that the theological leadership of the American church in the late 20th century, once occupied by neo-orthodox figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr, is shifting now to progressive evangelicals.

The effect of all this ferment in the life of the church has been no less startling. A recent Presbyterian moderator, Dr. Howard Rice, devoted his moderatorial year to the theme of prayer and spiritual renewal. A zealous activist in the Civil Rights struggle and other justice issues in the 1960s, Dr. Rice had to reorder his priorities when illness halted his movements, put him in a wheelchair, and forced him to center on his relationship with God.

In a series of prayer retreats across the country, Dr. Rice drew church leaders back into Scripture-reading, meditation, and prayer. A denominational mission paper reported the results with baffled respect: “Nothing happened. God was worshipped.”

But this headline has ironic overtones. In Scripture and in past religious awakenings, when God was truly worshipped, plenty happened! Not only did thousands become converted and spiritually concerned; society was powerfully changed for the better. But while some leaders of the electronic church have become activistic enough to frighten their political opponents, most of those involved in the new wave of spiritual interest seem passive and introverted. The Wall Street Journal put it this way:

Old Time Religion: An Evangelical Revival Is Sweeping the Nations, But with Little Effect Millions Quit Mainline Churches for Born-Again Sects that Focus on Inner Self, Shunning the Sinful World.

The article continued: “The spirit of religious awakening is once again moving across the land, but unlike a similar great religious awakening two-and-a-half centuries ago that helped sow the seeds of the American Revolution, the current evangelical revival has so far sowed little except curiosity among unbelievers and self-doubt among many faithful. ‘I heard on one of those TV evangelism shows that 33 percent of all Americans are born again,’ says Douglas Gallagher, pastor of the Broomfield Baptist Church, near Detroit, and an evangelical. ‘But if that is true, why is the crime rate still so high? Why is there still so much use of narcotics? Where is our impact?’ ”

Some of the apparent passivity in the new religious surge may really be constructive action focused on setting one’s own house in order. Bill Enright, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, comments in the same Wall Street Journal article:

“Two years ago I went on a retreat with the officers from my church and they all said they wanted more sermons that would give them a practical guide on how to live the Christian life in their families, their business, their friendships. Too often the church in the past has been esoteric, talking above the people rather than at their level.”

Whatever the reasons, even the conservative revivalists who are said to have influenced the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections have had trouble mobilizing troops for activities outside the church. “Robert Billings, [a] leader of Moral Majority,” according to the Journal, “says it is difficult to get people steadily involved in anything but their own spiritual lives. ‘We get all excited about an issue and go out and organize, and then three weeks later we are back inside the four walls singing Amazing Grace.’ ”

One of my students wrote recently praising Charles Colson’s second book, Life Sentence: “Colson’s realization that the Christian faith goes beyond mere self-improvement … proves that spiritual rebirth is not only possible and true but that it is the key to effective social action … I feel that too many evangelicals have become unwitting victims of the societal trademark they so vehemently decry, the ‘me generation.’

“It seems they get so wrapped up in this and that course, and that method, tape series, etc., on how to be a better Christian that it becomes the end rather than the means. Their concern seems mostly to center around self, although they hope that their spiritual growth will automatically osmose into those around them.”

This is not a new problem. And its presence does not discredit the reality of the current religious upsurge. Previous evangelical awakenings also went through growing pains and spiritual adolescence. John of the Cross, one of the great doctors of Christian spirituality, said that worldly self-interest constantly tries to re-enter the experience of the new convert, masking itself in impressively “spiritual” forms of pride, avarice, envy, and gluttony.

Nevertheless, the goal of authentic spirituality is a life which escapes from the closed circle of spiritual self-indulgence, or even self-improvement, to become absorbed in the love of God and other persons. The essence of spiritual renewal is “the love of God … poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). “My love,” said St. Augustine, “is my weight.”

The substance of real spirituality is love. It is God’s love moving into our consciousness in warm affirmation that He values and cares for us with infinite concern. But His is a love which also sweeps us away from self-preoccupation into a delight in the unlimited beauty and transcendent glory of God himself, and moves us to obey Him. It is a love which awakens us to cherish the gifts and graces of others and labor to perfect these.

Paul tells us that this love is a far more reliable measure of spirituality than our gifts or works or theological comprehension, and that this love is one of the few things which lasts forever (I Corinthians 13:8, 13). And Jesus said that the highest fulfillment of the will of God in our lives is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and to care for others as we care for ourselves (Mark 12:30-31).

Obnoxiously self-assertive

In the nonreligious world, self-knowledge and self-fulfillment are considered to be the core of human achievement. The classical Greek counsel was “know thyself.” Humanistic psychology and the human-potential movement, forces which helped create what Tom Wolfe called “The Me Decade,” have stressed the creative force in each individual which must be set free. Yet, the search for these goals has produced a lot of people who are at best self-preoccupied and at worst obnoxiously self-assertive.

Religious forms of self-improvement can also generate nervous self-concern and spiritual pride. If spiritual growth is built on repressed guilt, or if the means of growth is a set of laws to be followed or an intricate and arduous path to be mastered, spiritual self-centeredness will result.

Biblical self-knowledge and self-fulfillment have their focus outside the self. As John Calvin said, we can only discover ourselves by discovering God.

Realistic self-examination leads to an awareness of our limits, which also drives us to consider God. “Our poverty, ” Calvin wrote, “conduces to a clearer display of the infinite fullness of God. … Thus a sense of our ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, depravity, and corruption leads us to perceive and acknowledge that in the Lord alone are to be found true wisdom, solid strength, perfect goodness, and unspotted righteousness. … Nor can we really aspire toward Him till we have begun to be displeased with ourselves.”

“Feeling good about yourself’ is a primary goal of much popular psychology. But for Biblical religion such a goal is, at best, only a way station on the road to knowing God and, at worst, a deceptive trap. Only by fixing our attention on God can we accurately know ourselves-both the graces He has given us and the depth of our needs.

If we compare our lives with those of other human beings, it may be November/December 1985 easy for us to say, ‘Tm OK.” But if we measure our goodness by the holiness of God, that is another story.

Encountering the God of the Bible can be a deeply unsettling experience. The holiness of God is, as Rudolf Otto says, mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a tremendous and fascinating mystery.

God may be comfortably known and worshipped at a distance. But a more direct vision of His glory produces holy fear and awe, not so much of His power as of His purity.

This was Job’s experience when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6, NIV).

Isaiah reports the same result of his vision of God’s holiness: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5, RSV).

Even though self-despising is often pathological, and self-acceptance is surely a proper goal of both psychological stability and personal renewal, the Bible proclaims that self-fulfillment cannot be found apart from encounter with God. And, as Johann Tauler put it, “The pathway to God lies across the track of your own nothingness.”

Those who are traveling on that path, and find themselves undergoing “the dark night of the soul ” as God purges them from sin in the furnace of conviction, cannot be reassured by easy flattery about their gifts and potential or the quick-fix offer of cheap grace. And rightly so. For faith in Jesus which is not built upon a deep hunger and thirst after righteousness is shallow and fruitless.

The Great Awakening, that tremendous spiritual upsurge of the 18th century, motivated an explosion of activity which remade American society and led to the birth of a new nation infused with Christian principles. But there were deep roots to this activity which are often lacking in modern activism, both among evangelicals and socially concerned liberals. Much religious life in the 20th century seems to lose track of the One who is supposedly at its center: God.

In the 1960s, for example, God became so peripheral to much religious activity that it came as no surprise when some theologians announced that He was dead. Religious social activism not rooted in love for God is driven by love for idols. It pretends to come from concern for others or for God’s kingdom, but actually it is motivated by the worship of humanity or disguised forms of self-glorification.

Health and wealth

On the other hand, evangelical religion as an aid to self-assurance, health, or wealth short-circuits the soul’s path toward contact with God, which is the heart’s deepest desire. As Augustine observes, “Many cry to the Lord to avoid losses or to acquire riches, for the safety of their friends or the security of their homes, for temporal felicity or worldly distinction, yes, even for mere physical health which is the sole inheritance of the poor man. … Alas, it is easy to want things from God and not want God himself, as though the gift could ever be preferable to the giver.”

Only in the truly God-centered way of life will we find authentic spiritual renewal. If God is the ultimate reality of our lives, and if our main purpose in living is “to glorify Him and to enjoy Him forever,” then it is only realistic for us to live our lives increasingly with God at the center.

Richard Lovelace is professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is a regular columnist for Charisma magazine. He has authored several books including Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal and Renewal as a Way of Life from which this article is excerpted (© 1985 by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of the USA and used by permission of lnterVarsity Press).