Reforming Spirituality

Liberation and Subjection

The Reformation was an attempt to reform Christianity, back to its historical doctrinal positions and to the Scriptures itself.  The Reformers taught that contemporary Christianity as they experienced it in Western Europe had departed significantly from the early Church fathers and the Scriptures. 

An evidence of this is how often the Reformers cite the early Church fathers in their writing.  For example, in The Institutes of the Christian Religion Calvin cites and quotes Augustine most often amongst the fathers, but the work contains wide ranging references to ante-Nicene and post-Nicene theologians and church leaders. 

One of the reformulations of the Reformation had to do with how we understand the spiritual.  For many in pre-modern Europe the notion of spirit and spiritual was more informed by neo-platonic pagan conceptions than the Scriptures.
  It was understood as being immaterial, opposed to matter and physical reality.  It was a case of body versus spirit--a dualism which ran right through all reality.  God was a pure Spirit, without corporeal reality.  Man was a dualistic being, having both body and spirit.  The more he departed from the body, as it were, ascetically subduing it, the closer he came to resemble and reflect God Himself. 

Thus, even to this day, many Christians mistakenly think that anything which involves bodily and material activity cannot be rightly thought to be spiritual.  Eating food, for example, may be a necessary activity (one shared with all other sentient creatures) but it cannot be regarded as spiritual.  Spiritual activity is attending worship, praying, reading the Bible and so forth. 

One of the reformulations of the Reformation was to recover spirit and spiritual to mean "of the Holy Spirit", and being subject to God's Word and to acting out of faith and trust in God Himself. In this way, one's eating and drinking could and ought to be spiritual acts.  Here, for example, is Luther's re-formulation:

Everything that our bodies do, the external and the carnal, is an is called spiritual behaviour, if God's Word is added to it and it is done in faith.  There is therefore nothing which is so bodily, carnal, and external that it does not become spiritual when it is done in the Word of God and faith. [Taken from Luther's exposition of I Corinthians 7, cited by Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004 {1957}), p.70]

There are many Christians today who would find such truth radically liberating.  They would also find it to be profoundly challenging.  Every thought, word and deed must needs be sanctified and holy, and it must also be thoroughly engaged with the created world in which we live.  If there is no spiritual realm to escape to then the demands of spirituality encompass everything one is responsible to be and do in this world.  One cannot be spiritual without being engaged thoroughly in the material and the fleshly, the carnal and the bodily.