Our compartments

I’m supposed to be finishing my papers, but I had to share some thoughts from my last senior capstone class today, and I’m afraid I won’t remember what we talked about. I seriously wish I could have taped every class time, because I was surrounded by so many brilliant, creative people. It was very intimidating! Anyway, I definitely learned a lot, and today was no exception.

We were discussing Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus, specifically the meaning of praxis. What do we need to change in the American church? Well, we had the usual gripes: we’re too individualistic, private, we don’t have community. But I realized a new part of this hyper-individualism that we American Christians tend to have: the fact that it’s dualistic. We compartmentalize—we have our spiritual life, and then the rest of our life. That’s what the concept of a quiet time implies. One guy in class commented that his church tradition had this “enthroned idea of a quiet time.” I loved that, and definitely knew where he was coming from.

I mentioned how one of my friends, who is in an evangelism class, was panicking because she has never explicitly discipled anybody. She was feeling pressure from what she was learning in class to lead a discipleship group or to disciple somebody one-on-one. I started thinking about the assumptions behind her concern, and something wasn’t right about it. I realized that she has been discipling a lot of people, but it just hasn’t been explicit. Through my friendship with her, I have learned a lot about faith in God and what it means to live it out. We didn’t sit down and decide one day to disciple each other. We didn’t compartmentalize and say, okay, for about 30 minutes we’re going to be spiritual and talk about faith, and then we can continue on with our lives. It didn’t happen that way at all. And if it would have, we would have been dualistic.
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Someone in class made the comment that, because we are the body of Christ, when we are together, we’re discipling and building one another up. He just spent a semester with Christians in Argentina, and he told us how a friend he made had a hard time compartmentalizing his faith like many other Argentinean Christians do. When he and his friend would get together to pray, they would just end up talking. But they realized that they had been praying together all that time. I used to be in a “discipleship group,” and I ran into the leader of that group the other day. She asked me if I was meeting with anyone nowadays. I told her no. She gave me a stern look and said, “You know what I think about that…” That bothered me, because I have had rich experiences with friends and classmates and have learned a lot about faith along the way. When I think about watershed moments in my faith, none of those contrived “discipleship” times ever come to mind. Instead, it’s those late-night conversations I’ve had at my friends’ apartments, or the great discussions I’ve had in classes like senior capstone.

Someone else mentioned in class that this dualism, this compartmentalism, is why the American church can get away with being so inauthentic. If we do our quiet times, meet in our small groups, whatever, we’re okay, right? As long as we can check off those things from our list, we’re good. That is why a man can be a jerk to his wife and children, but say deep down that he loves them. What? There’s no “deep down.” You are what you do. Your faith is what you do. It’s not those ten minutes a day when you read a passage from the Bible and then pray.

I’m still digesting a lot of this stuff, and I still don’t know what to think about it. What about spiritual disciplines that we know we should practice? There are some things we should still do, right? Maybe the problems start when we take those things out of the context of community, or when we divide up life into the spiritual and everything else? Or maybe it doesn't always have to be in the context of community, because I can say that other defining moments in my faith have been things like sitting on top of Kendall Mountain or reading a book?

Comments

[Wasp Jerky]

Those are some really great insights, Natalie. Dualism is something Christians do well. Life is divided into the spiritual and the unspiritual. It just doesn't add up.

If you believe God made the world, whether through evolutionary forces or with the standard Genesis creation model, then that creation is good. God didn't print Bible verses on tree leaves. God didn't make birds to sing hymns.

As Franky Schaeffer once noted, "Reality is one and it is all God's. There is nothing intrinsically more spiritual about saving a soul than filling a tooth. And there is nothing more spiritual about feeding the hungry than taking a walk with your children....The pietistic need to 'Christianize' reality indicates a worldview that does not fundamentally understand or believe that reality is already God's and that historic Christianity is truly Truth. We do not need to 'Christianize' breakfast by memorizing a daily Bible verse. Breakfast is already God's."

[Todd]

Outstanding observations Nat. How about another illustration - the dichotomy in many who refer to music as either "sacred" or "secular."

Personally I have always had trouble with the "patterned" quiet time thing. Sounds odd, but out here where we live, I have a good bit of time talking with God on the lawn mower. How's that for quiet. Sometimes I think that activity puts me more in line with what God intended me to do from the beginning that I really find moments of inspiration, clarity and conviction all at the same time.

I found Kevin's comments equally compelling.

Good stuff.

While this may be on the down-low, congrats - Dad told mee some good news.

[Adam]

I loved this post Nat.

I spent alot of time at college trying to conjure up my "spirituality" and it was so affected and trite. The times I really felt connected to this reality that I call God was in those moments when I least expected it and definately wasn't working at it. I think I would have met God much more often if I hadn't been "looking" for her.

[jvpastor]

Doesn't this dualism come from Greek thought, or hellenism, I remember learning that Jewish life was wholistic, everything revolved around the YHWH, and then entered Hellenism. Now we can compartmentalize everything, Work is seperate from fun, Homelife seperate from Church, and so on....

Great post, NT Wright is grrrreat!"What St. Paul Really Said" is a must read.

[Leighton]

Blaming the Greeks for all dualism isn't entirely justified; there are dualities implicit in the OT codifications of clean vs. unclean, righteous vs. unrighteous, and holy vs. that which is not set apart. And oversimplifying a bit, the Babylonians and Medo-Persians were also influential in smuggling in an antidivine archetypical Evil which became Satan in later Jewish thought, leading to the fundamental division of reality into Good and Evil (as opposed to the older view of YHWH in relationship to his creation).

But the Greeks did contribute more than a little to the idea that it's good to separate reality into various categories--sacred and secular, body and soul, rational and emotional; and the views of Christianity in the NT (as opposed to, say, the views championed by the Gnostics) buy into a great many of these dichotomies. This is obvious, for example, in Heb. 4.12 which decribes the Word of God in the same way Philo describes human reason: as a severing sword that divides reality into intelligible categories. This Hellenization of Jewish thought is one reason (out of several) why Christianity didn't appeal to a great many Jews in the first and second centuries.

[Streak]

Yeah, this dualism is a real bitch. Or can be. Seems to have taken hold during the reformation, at least that is what I thought. At least in how it pervades the people and how they can both pursue their individual wealth while having a "siloed" relationship with God?

The wonderer makes a great point. I also tried to "conjure" something with quiet times and the like. I appreciate Todd's comment on mowing the lawn. I probably have more insight doing that than anything else. Some of these things like discipleship and even worship are hard to force, right? They may be worth pursuing, but sometimes, just like a good party, they just have to happen.

[Paul]

I recently got an e-mail from an old college/seminary friend. He told me that I was one of the most influential people in his life at the time, and that he really looked up to me and considered me a great example of Christian faith.

Funny thing is we were never in a discipleship group or prayer group or anything together. He was simply watching me live my life.

I don't say any of that to brag. There were apparently a WHOLE LOT of things he never saw. I do see it as an example of how you describe discipleship as more about how we share life together and less about how we spend a specific 30 minute segment of time with each other. Mark tells us that Jesus called his disciples "to be with" him. This may be too crude (maybe I should save it for my own blog) but don't you ever wonder if a part of that life together meant that the disciples were there on more than one occasion when Jesus passed gas?

[Natalie]

Loved the Schaeffer quote, Kevin.

Whew. Now I don't feel so guilty about never having had consistent quiet times...

[Wasp Jerky]

Thanks, Natalie. The quote is from Sham Pearls for Real Swine. It's a really great book about the way Christians have defaulted from the arts. I'm sure Wheaton has it in the library. Or we've got a loaner copy if you wanna snatch it sometime.

[dufflehead]

you should check out Erwin McManus