Why Christianity Is a Spiritual Practice, Not a Set of Beliefs
Early Christianity soon developed into a correct set of beliefs and social mores rather than a spiritual practice and way of life. it still suffers from this detriment.
After the period when documents that would eventually become the New Testament were initially written and circulated, the ancient church began to develop out of the Jesus-focused assemblies scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. Through meditative prayer practices, early Christians sought to imitate Christ by cultivating a mindset of kenosis or self-emptying.[1] There was affirmation early on for understanding Christianity not as a set of correct doctrines or beliefs, but as a practice of spirituality that connected Christians with God beyond all thought, speech, and emotion. This reflects an apophatic theology that places God beyond our finite definitions and categories.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers separated themselves from society and developed techniques for entering inner silence and stillness. They also chanted and meditated on scripture, sought to cultivate lovingkindness and hospitality, and practiced either mendicancy or some craft to support themselves (see Christianity Was a Religion of Silent Meditation from the Start). Early monastics began to speak of contemplatio—the word for meditative prayer, rather than oratio—the word for spoken prayer. Constantine’s empire had co-opted oratio, and prayer had become a formulaic repetition of telling God certain things or announcing one’s needs to God. This contradicts Jesus’ teaching that ‘the Father’ already knows one’s needs. Out of the desert practitioners’ networks developed the vast monastic system that would sustain and develop Christian meditation and contemplative prayer for a thousand years, until monastic institutions began to be suppressed at various times and places, starting with the Protestant Reformation and continuing through the Enlightenment period.
After Paul of Tarsus (see Why Prayer Has Nothing to Do With Asking for Things), arguably no theologian had a more profound impact on Western Christianity than Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (354–430). The highly influential Augustine affirmed inward spiritual awareness as cultivated through silent contemplative prayer as the place in human experience through which one may know God. The Desert Fathers’ and Mothers’ ancient, apophatic spirituality of silence flourished in the medieval West, greatly influenced by translation into Latin of the sixth-century text by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite that describes their spirituality.
In reaction to the speculative theology of the late Middle Ages, a new kind of individualistic mysticism and practice developed that shallowly focused on physical sensations and emotional ecstasy. Influential reformers Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91) helped reorient the contemplative tradition back toward disciplined practice in the context of community support, and a transpersonal focus beyond the self with its constant play of thought, sensation, and emotion.
However, contemplative spirituality began to seem less relevant amid the social, cultural, political, and intellectual changes happening at the beginning of the modern era. During the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a turn toward the certainty of precisely defined dogma negated the inward spirituality of self-emptying kenosis and apophatic unknowing. Some sense of an inward journey was preserved in the Pietism of ordinary Christians during the Enlightenment era. But the stress on doctrinal correctness and emotionality that characterized the new strain of evangelical Christianity left it without ancient rituals, tools for contemplative prayer, or any practices that would develop inner consciousness.
Both New Testament scripture and the earlier history of Christianity indicate prayer as either a set of affirmations to cultivate the right state of heart and mind before God, or a technique of silent meditation to subtly perceive God beyond all names and forms, in whom we live and move and have our being. Despite this, the most recent five hundred years of Christianity have been largely devoid of teaching and practice concerning prayer as any form of meditation. It is time to pick up the thread of these lost traditions and reconnect with Christianity’s ancient past for the sake of its current and future evolution.
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There is rising interest in meditation as a way to cultivate the very attributes that fulfill the teachings of Jesus. Per developmental psychologist and theologian James W. Fowler (1940–2015), one aspect of the level of consciousness he called the practical postmodern temper is that while it integrates a plurality of external perspectives, it also turns inward to seek ultimate reality. Per Integral Christian writer Paul R. Smith (b. 1935), the Christianity of postmodern consciousness is interested in the inward journey of spiritual development.
While postmodern prayer can take any approach, it often involves silent meditation or other contemplative practices. These have an ancient and longstanding place in both the scriptures and traditions of Christianity. They may be anathema to some, because they are associated with ‘pagan’ religions, or because the inner self is seen as the frightening site of one’s depravity. However, these ancient and scriptural approaches to prayer have the potential to provide something spiritually relevant to people who otherwise are rightly disillusioned with Christianity.
In a January 2021 article in Harper’s about the contemplative movement in Christianity, author Fred Bahnson writes this (emphases mine):
[American Christianity] has become faith as public spectacle, faith as political engagement, as party affiliation, as reputation—anything but faith as paradox, as mystery, as the hidden and seductive dance between spiritual desire and satiation, the prolonging of a hunger so alarmingly vast and yet so subtle that is disappears the moment it’s made public.
In early monastic Christianity, that hunger was acknowledged and channeled, given shape and form and expression. It went by different names— contemplatio (silent prayer) or hesychia (stillness)—which led first to an inner union with Christ, and then to a deep engagement with the suffering of the world. The order was important. In John Cassian’s Conferences, a fifth-century account of the early Christian monastic movement in the deserts of Egypt, a certain Abba Isaac describes how the monks modeled their prayer on Jesus’ practice of going up a mountain to pray; those who wished to pray “must withdraw from all the worry and turbulence of the crowd.” In that state of spiritual yearning, God’s presence would become known. “He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for,” Abba Isaac said. “He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath.”
What the early monks and the Christian mystics who followed sought was union—an intense experience of inwardness that is glaringly absent in what many of us get from American Christianity today. Perhaps this absence is the real reason for the mass exodus from churches. Perhaps it is not Christianity that many followers are disappointed in, but Christendom.[2]
Some de-churched people do miss aspects of their former religious participation, seeking replacements through time in nature, meditation, and physical activity as ways of transcending the self and finding peace. Scripture contains instructions for early Christians on practices of prayer that accomplish these same spiritual objectives. So do ancient and longstanding contemplative traditions developed throughout Christian history. It is time for Christian churches to make these a regular feature of their essential teaching and practice going forward. Christian prayer can and must become something of practical use to the increasing numbers of people whose consciousness is more or less current with the state of the postmodern world.
[1]Phil. 2:5-7.
[2]Bahnson, Fred. “The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere—Among the Contemplatives.” Harper’s, January 2021.