Mystical/Puritanical
1 Corinthians 2: 12-16 New Revised Standard Version
Our text makes clear that spirituality is required for a correct understanding of the things of God. Those who cannot discern things spiritually will never understand. Both mystics and Puritans would agree on this, but they differ over how the mind of God can be known.
Mystics seek a direct communion with God. That communion produces insights and knowledge of God’s mind and will. Puritans seek a life obedient to God’s will, believing that obedience leads to insight and knowledge of God.
Mystical spirituality finds greatest support in the ancient orthodox churches, which still interpret Scripture and the world with heavy emphases on union with Christ and what they call theosis, which is humankind’s elevation toward divinity by means of that union.
Puritanical spirituality is grounded in the simplicity of obedience. Obeying God’s Word yields the good life on Earth and treasures in Heaven. We’ll start with the mystical.
Mysticism depends upon extraordinary personal experiences. Jacob’s ladder, Moses and the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, John’s Revelation at Patmos—these are individual experiences of God that continue to feed the faith of God’s people. But the whole community did not have such an experience; just one specially called person at a time. Mystical spirituality is founded upon the extraordinary religious experience. It is extremely personal and subjective, though it may yield fruit for the whole community.
Beyond the biblical accounts of theophany—wherein God speaks or appears to an individual—church history has its mystics up to the present day. Christian mystics are those who found themselves met—or even seized by—the Holy Spirit. They may have been given visions, clarification, or just been given a glimpse of Heaven.
Matt mentioned Hildegaard of Bingen, a 12th century mystic whose visions, music, meditations, and writing continue to inspire Christian faith. Other significant names well worth studying include: Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662), Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274), Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), Julian of Norwich (1342–1416), The Cloud of Unknowing (c.1345-1386), Joan of Arc (1412–1431), Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Lucia of Narni (15th c), Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), John of the Cross (1542–1591), and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).
But once we get into the 1800s, the number of mystics explodes. With the Second Great Awakening came a revival of mystical spirituality. Every evangelist in every town was having visions and making prophetic utterances. We have Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a panoply of end-times visionaries as the result.
Some denominations came to elevate personal experience to a position of chief authority. Your Christianity, in their view, depends upon your having had a significant, personal experience of God’s love—perhaps dramatic, but nonetheless something clearly “spiritual.” That is mystic spirituality at work in modern American churches. It’s more than just a blessing to have such and experience; it is your membership card. Some denominations expect a personal, mystical encounter with the Holy Spirit before your Christianity can be validated. If you have not had a personal, mystical experience of God, then you’re not really a Christian, they would say.
I understand this because I, like many of you, have had religious experiences. I’ll tell you about one:
When I was 15, my parents and I were returning to Omaha from California after Christmas break. We had a big, yellow, 1968 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon, a banana boat of a car. We passed through Denver on I-80 about 9 o’clock at night, pushing our way forward thinking we’d find a place to stay somewhere just ahead. By 12:30 in the morning, we arrived in North Platte, Nebraska, but found no vacancies. We sat down in a truck stop for a late meal. I don’t know that breakfast can ever taste better than it does at 1 in the morning when you’re still feeling wide awake.
Since we were anxious to get home, we decided to go for it and drive through the night to Omaha, about 4 hours. We’d be glad to be home.
The great thing about the Bonneville is that you can level out the back seats—and the way-back, which faced out the back window—and comfortably stretch out in a big sleeping bag. I laid there, riding through the western Nebraska desert, looking out the long side windows at the enormous expanse of stars, which seemed especially bright on dark, winter nights out in the middle of Nebraska nowhere.
Then came my mystical experience. I was touched by the Holy Spirit.
As I looked at the stars, all of a sudden, the whole sky seemed to snap into 3D perspective, like one of those MagicEye posters. It was as if I were able to take in the whole cosmos in a single glance.But it was something more. I thought, “Of course God is real—only a total fool could think otherwise.”
Light and clarity seemed to pour into my soul from a source beyond anything in myself or even my Christian environment and upbringing. I felt the Spirit of God and knew that he loves us all more than we can hope or imagine. I also knew that everything I had been brought up to believe about Jesus was attached to and had grown out of this same love. Jesus is the story of God’s love and not just the story we tell, but He is the actual, historical event of God’s love for all people.
My heart was full to bursting. I knew God and knew that God knew me. To know that is to have love—like discovering the fountain of living water inside—and I felt two feet taller.
The importance of love was impressed upon me. I thought about how important love is and how resistant, how hesitant, we all are to its free expression. Fear is indeed the opposite of love. Fear makes us silent when we should speak up in love, and fear makes us say a lot of stupid stuff to cover over the discomforts of failing at love.
I thought of all the old guys at church—these old Swedes who linger around in suits on Sundays and serve as ushers and greeters—these older men and women who I walked past every Sunday and tried to avoid so I could hang out with my friends. Now, I loved those guys and wanted to be with them. I wanted to wear a suit and greet people at the door with them. I wanted to share their company, for Christ was present in them as He is in all His church.
I loved my friends, but wasn’t mature enough to tell them so, but now I to do better. I felt the Spirit and the nearness of Christ, and I knew this was the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the most important thing in all existence, and I knew as well that nothing in the world would satisfy me outside of this love and awareness. God has a plan, I thought, and the plan is the same as this love. This love is the same as His presence. To know God’s presence is to feel His love, and there’s no hope in this world outside the awareness of His love. But in His love, all things are fulfilled, and human beings taste the perfection of Heaven.
It was, for me, a night of life-changing conviction. I had been given a personal experience of God’s love. There are lines in the hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation,” that came to me:
Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won:
O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we,
Like them, the meek and lowly,
In love may dwell with Thee.
It was that mystic, sweet communion, given by the Holy Spirit, that sealed my heart and destiny.
Problems with Mystical
But there are problems with the mystical experience. The downside of that experience is that it couldn’t last forever, though I hoped and prayed it would.Mystical spirituality is not in our control—it comes or it doesn’t—and the Spirit blows like the wind.
There are certainly forms of Christianity that attempt to recapture or reinvent the mystical experience. Some Pentecostals thrive on trying to lasso-down the Spirit in worship, falling all over themselves like the prophets of Ba’al to prove their sincerity and worthiness for such an epiphany.
Others seek it through meditation, or self-denial and fasting. Mystical types may shape their entire life around trying to recapture that old feeling or seek to work their way up into it. Personally, I dont’ think God works that way. The prophets didn’t study to be prophets; they were simply chosen by God. They spoke God’s Word because God gave it to them to speak.
The chief problem with mystical spirituality is that it’s so subjective and personal. As Paul tells the Corinthians about tongues,
“Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church.” (1 Corinthians 14:4).
Those who have grand religious experiences benefit from them, but what use are they to the Church and greater witness to Christ?
Who can really put words to such an experience? The great poets—especially the great Christian poets like George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Richard Crashaw, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot —all tried, and the best of them manage to capture and communicate at least a taste of divine revelation; but they are few and far in between. We can thank God for choosing the ones He does.
In modern times, spirituality has been taken over by “spiritualists” and psychedelic explorers. Timothy Leary led many people to believe that an authentic, religious experience was available to all through LSD, comparing stoned-out hippies to the great mystics and geniuses of history (who, by the way, all came by their insights after years of devotion and dedication, not by dropping a tab of acid).
If spirituality works that way, it is revealed to be little more than a chemical phenomenon—hardly worth setting in the balance of authentic spirituality.
Puritanical
As I started out saying, the puritanical spirituality, like the mystical spirituality, is also introspective. But it differs on several counts. The Puritans, for one, were much more communal than individual. One person’s extraordinary experience was nothing if it did not somehow edify the whole body of Christ.
Unfortunately, mystical experiences don’t strike entire communities at the same time (except for Pentecost, which we will discuss on Pentecost). Whereas mystics tend to escape into the metaphysical, Puritans focus on bringing the metaphysical into flesh and blood practice. Information that is not incarnated in the congregation is pointless.
Mystics focus on communion with God and becoming one with His love. Puritans focus on living to please God and serving Him with every aspect of their lives.
Mystics focus on oneness of all things; Puritans focus on purity or righteousness in all things.
Mystics believe in special revelations—that divine insights come from extraordinary personal experiences. Puritans believe in sola scriptura—that the Bible alone is sufficient for all we need to know about God, and that further human insight and wisdom come not from wild experiences, but from hard work and diligence in seeking to live righteous, Christlike lives.
Like the mystics, Puritans believed in the benefits of intensive prayer, but all insights gained from direct apprehension of God were subject to the clear, written Word of God.
The Puritan life is one of intense effort to align oneself, one’s family, one’s village, and nation with the will of God as revealed in Scripture. Obedience is not a mystical union with Christ so much as a painstaking discipline. Puritans believed that our thoughts and behaviors truly matter. Union, for them, means a oneness of will that translates to a godly life.
Puritans can be thought of as minimalists. They wanted all the barnacles scraped off their religion so they could honor the true core of it. No Catholicism, no fancy liturgy, no popes, no bishops, and no bells, smells, fusses, or frills—just the basics.
Devotion involves removing all the things that distract us from total commitment. Whatever competes for the affections of your heart, whatever distracts you from loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—these are what you actively remove in order to secure your complete devotion.
There is some overlap here with piety—which we will talk about in a couple weeks—but whereas piety focuses on personal devotion, puritanism focuses on collective devotion. It is the devotion of the community that matters most—the righteousness of the society and nation—which is why English Puritans left Catholic/Anglican England and came to the new world in the hopes of establishing righteous and godly colonies. The righteous society would nurture and build righteous individuals.
The Puritan instinct lives in each of us, and we awaken our inner puritan any time we want to do some kind of spring cleaning for the soul. Clear out the clutter and get things right with God, but remember this is a corporate or collective application. The desire is to fix up the community or the whole society, not just one’s own house.
Puritan spirituality is very much alive today, but it is more apparent in its secular manifestations. The puritanical vegan seeks to remove all meat and animal products from her diet. If that were the end of it, she would be a pietist, but in that she wants no one else to eat meat and thinks you and I should be non-meat-eaters as well—that is puritan.
Environmentalism is coming to look like America’s present puritan spirituality. Its true believers have removed pollutants from their life—they recycle religiously, drive hybrids, and constantly measure the carbon footprints of themselves and others. Their puritanism comes with their expectation that you and I should be expected to do the same, by force of law, if necessary. They envision the government as the enforcer of their code, ridding society of its many sins and pollutants.
The upside of puritan spirituality is the instinct to live a righteous and godly life. The downside is their expectation that their particular code of righteousness ought to be applied to everyone.
We vote with a puritan spirituality, hoping to make America an even better place than it was in the prior four years. When we vote, we choose the trajectory we believe will make America great again, or more just, or more prosperous for all.
On the home level, puritan spirituality disdains excess. The stuff we have but neither like nor need can begin to smother the inner puritan. “Get Marie Kondo in here! Time for a spring cleaning for the whole family.” The puritan home spring cleans 24/7, and as a house puritan, I know I am happier with every box I donate to thrift, or every decent piece of furniture I surrender to Bridges to Home.
It may hurt a little at first, but removing the barnacles is necessary work that always feels better in the long run.
Summary
We carry both spiritualities within us. It is right and good that we should seek The Lord’s presence in every moment of every day. When we wake in the morning, we should seek Him in the beauty of day, seeing His love and handiwork in the sunlight slanting through the trees. We, too, are mystics capable of unity with HIs Spirit if we can simply pause, be quiet, and know that He is God. We also do well to simplify our lives in order to focus on what is crucial in our faith. Deep down, we desire to be totally committed in our faith, but the pressing burden of necessity keeps us bound up in the shallow waters of stuff and the trappings of excess. We need each other—we need to be a part of a community—and by hope and prayer we do become a people dedicated to the Lord.