Are Personal Relationships with God Overrated?

Is a personal relationship with God really the be all and end all of the Christian faith?

I have been contemplating this for some time now as I am reading Ilio Delia’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I was prompted to write this blog post for two reasons: first, I have my new computer up and running (and it was rather strange to be disconnected from technology) and two, fellow blogger, Carl McColman has a helpful blog querying Tim Keller’s recent book on Prayer. In a Facebook post earlier this week I had written,

“Reading Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being as she reflects on the philosophy of Pierre de Chardin. She says, ‘If being is intrinsically relational, then nothing exists independently or autonomously. Rather ‘to be’ is ‘to be with.’ Reality is ‘being with another’ in a way open to more union and more being [shades of John Zizzoulas here eh?]. Since being is existence towards another, being is relational and exists for the sake of giving. I do not exist in order that I may possess; rather I exist in order that I may give of myself, for it is in giving that I am myself [shades of St Francis, huh?]. Cosmic life is intrinsically communal. Being is first a ‘we’ before it can become an ‘I.’…The universe is thoroughly relational and in the framework of love.”

In the light of this I recall the emphasis of the parable of the sheep and goats on inter-human giving and relationality. I wonder if the time for ‘mystical union’ with the divine is now being correctly replaced with the ‘mystical sociological union’ of you and I and all of us with one another. Isn’t this the point of the cross articulated in Ephesians 2? Perhaps we can say Jesus strips mysticism of it’s metaphysics, gnosticism and ladder climbing narcissism and replaces with a vision of a complete and total being-in-union, God and humanity, all of humanity who find God in one another.”

I have personally been particularly troubled by the way Evangelicals and then following them charismatics have co-opted our understanding of relationality with God, creator of all that is. First, Evangelicals, like Keller, have turned that ‘personal’ relationship into nothing more than a one way chat room. Evangelical fear of anything and everything right brained, like imagination, contemplation, and integration has turned prayer into an exercise in semantics and formulas.  On the other hand and secondly, I am also bothered by the charismatics who have turned prayer into the ‘experience of the bizarre’, like getting ‘drunk on the Holy Ghost‘ (or ‘toking the Ghost’) or Bethel Church’s ‘gravesucking.’ Charismatics, like John Crowder and Bill Johnson fear anything left brained, like logic, reason and structure. The charismatic extremists and the Evangelical anti-mystics are mirror images one of another for they both share a presupposition that is unexamined: relationship with God is a personal benefit. In short, in both cases, relationality is narcissistic. As Karl Barth has observed this anthropocentric turn in the Protestant tradition begins with Melanchthon who averred “to know Christ is to know his benefits.”

Is it any wonder that Progressive Christianity has reacted against this with its emphasis on the horizontal rather than the vertical?

As I read the New Testament, there is precious little on either ‘experiencing God’ or on having a ‘personal relationship with the divine’ as it is expressed by Evangelicalism or the reaction to Evangelicalism, Charismania. This is not to say that relationship with God is out of the picture, but rather to say that individual experience is not seen as the be all and end all of the Christian life.  Our modern Protestant separation of spirituality from liturgy, ethics and theology is what has brought about the demise of Protestantism in all its forms. The recovery of this integrated matrix where all Christian existence is grounded in the divine life, where reason and faith are not enemies, where the historical and the spiritual are but flip sides of a coin is given us in the great Catholic and Orthodox traditions if we would pay attention.

Evangelicals like Keller and pseudo-mystics like Crowder and Johnson both wrongly appeal to this history to justify what they see as a ‘proper’ relationship with the divine. Keller can quote Calvin and the Calvinists, Crowder and Johnson can quote Julian of Norwich and both camps, Evangelical and Charismatic, fail to recognize that we do not live in either the 14th or the 16th centuries. As Church, we are constantly called to forge new paths, ecclesia semper reformanda, never being content with building Empires at our rest stops but always forging ahead. The misuse of the Christian tradition by those who seek to justify their aberrant thinking and life, either doctrinal or experiential, ultimately crashes on the rocks of holistic thinking and an integral worldview. This is where we now live in the 21st century.

It is high time for Christians to be holistic, engaging both sides of their brain.

A word to the charismatics: spirituality in the 21st century is not about having a touchy-feely relationship with God. Mystical union is not about seeking to experience God 24/7. Like God who made a downward move, authentic spirituality is ultimately creation spirituality, a spirituality that engages the whole of the created order, including and especially, human relationships. Who among you, if you are a parent wants their child fawning all over them all time telling you “I am so glad to be in your presence, you make me feel so good. I like being with you, and I feel ‘drunk’ when I am around you. You intoxicate me. I want more of you, I want all of your time, I want you to be with me all of the time, I want to feel your presence all of the time.” At a certain point you are going to say “go play with your friends. All you want to do when you are with me is tell me what a wonderful parent I am. I know I am a good parent. Now go and play with your siblings and friends and come back and tell me stories about them, and how you helped them, cared for them, by this I will know that I have been a good parent.”

A word to Evangelicals: spirituality in the 21st century is not about a God who controls the universe. Prayer is not about getting God to do your will. How many of you would like to parent a child who only came to you dunning you with requests. “Please help me turn on the water, please help me cook some macaroni, please do this for me, please do that for me.” Wouldn’t you think you just existed to meet their needs? This is an infantile approach to faith and prayer. Wouldn’t you love to hear, “You know mother (or father) I was thinking about how you handled thus and so or how you spoke to the neighbor who was mean or how you dealt with such and such a crisis or about how you loved me when I disappointed you and I thought to myself that I could learn a lesson from that on how to love my brother or sister, how I could help my friend, how I could pay more attention to those around me.” Now wouldn’t that please you more than them asking, nay, dunning, you with request after request after request?

Genuine mysticism is about the whole person in relation to other whole people.

As I said in my Facebook post (speaking to the charismatics):

“Union with God then can only be found, not in ecstatic experiences with their concomitant gnosticism, secret privilege and narcissism, but only can be found when we have ‘mystic union’ one with another. In short, shalom, love, joy, peace [or the fruit of the Spirit] is meant to be manifested between us and not apart from our interrelatedness.”

Speaking to Evangelicals, I would add that union with God is not just some forensic reality, some fact or datum. Union with God is alive with possibility for transformation, relational transformation, real life, real world transformation. Union with God is full of wonder and imagination, and there is no fear in getting past language to the deep structure of Love.

We need both Love and Logic (Logos), both hemispheres of our brains working together. This is the spirituality of the 21st century.