Spirituality suffers from particular limits that corporate religion escapes. That is the thesis to be expounded and tested here. In doing so I shall draw upon a recent essay by Rowan Williams (2012).
Religion is commonly seen as being at odds with personal liberty (autonomy). As such it is perceived to be in tension with what is perhaps the most widely upheld ethical value in contemporary Western society: personal freedom to choose for oneself. The trouble with religion is it asks one to subscribe to corporately held views that concern implausible beliefs, dubious ethics, and claims to an exclusive truthfulness that thereby render the convictions of others as untruthful and illegitimate. It thus fails to respect either one’s own or the others’ freedom to choose for oneself. Spirituality, on the other hand, escapes this vice. Spirituality both resources personal integrity and more easily links to every-day experience with the ‘sacred’. It is thus spirituality, which is grounded in what might be counted sacred to every human being, rather than religion which is fit for the contemporary pluralist and global society (Williams, 2012, p.85f).
In the context described above, Christianity loses its value as metanarrative, to become but one source from which one can create one’s own chosen identity. While the questions of religion remain (against the general prediction of the secularisation thesis), in the search for significance beyond the measurable people now desire to find and choose their own way (Ibid., pp.86f).
Yet over against shared religious commitment, a spiritual sense suffers from a number of deficiencies. Precisely because spirituality tends to be a private, individual mater, it is not, unlike religion, able to model forms of community that can challenge the public structures of society, or the operating policies of a university. In fact spirituality can serve the interests of the status quo. Thus instead of challenging unjust structures, it can become a new form of ‘opiate for the people’ (Marx); it can become just another commodity to be obtained to cope with the contingencies of life as they are. Finally language of the spiritual can be simply a way of valorising what is already experienced, instead of offering an alternative perspective that might re-order one’s values. Accordingly, spirituality might be embraced to make one a more effective business person (Ibid., p.89); whereas a religious perspective might challenge the ultimate purpose of the business.
These deficiencies outlined above have a common theological root. Talking about God is more than a sense of the sacred, it is to speak of an initiating agent that is independent of anything in the world, which is not just the source of life in general, but has “put at my disposal the life that is its own” (Ibid., p.90). To describe this initiating activity the language of love and the personal are the best we have, but they are used in full awareness of their inability to grasp that after which they strain. In this way, despite the common view, religion is not simply an offering of pre-packaged truth.
“To discover who I am I need to discover the relation in which I stand to an active, prior Other, to a transcendent creator; I don’t first sort out who I am and then seek for resources to sustain that identity.” (Ibid., p.91.)
Religion is not, therefore, a matter of “corporate adherence to a set of doctrines and polices”, but rather “a fresh configuring of the whole of experienced reality – a new set of human relations, a new horizon for what human beings are capable of, a new understanding of the material world and its capacities.” (Ibid., p.92) (See What is the Kingdom of God?)
Christianity provides just such a new horizon. And within its purview one needs to be somewhat wary about the pervasive view that assumes a constant, yet undefined, notion of ‘common humanity’ set against the variable of ‘religion/spirituality’ . What it means to be human is a question that remains open and contestable, particularly in a western capitalist context where being human is in danger of being reduced to essentially consumer desire and power. Christology suggests there is no abstract notion of humanity separable from a framework of belief that can both describe and defend human dignity in relation to God. Perhaps then it is religion rather than spirituality than can fully defend the human.
No thoughts yet on “The limits of the spiritual”