What is Spirituality? Part 2: Heaven and Earth Converge
Spirituality means “Life in God’s Spirit” rather than a vague and ethereal sense of “religiousness” or “inner attunement.” From briefly looking at the role of the Holy Spirit in the Bible (see part 1 – Christian Spirituality is Not Spiritual), we see that the Holy Spirit, rather than being in contrast to the physical and material world, plays a vital role in the creation, preservation and restoration of the visible, public, physical, material, bodily, social, and experiential existence of life on planet earth. If Christian spirituality is “Life in God’s Spirit,” then it is not spiritual in the sense that it pulls us away from engaging with the concrete realities of life into a focus on the immaterial and invisible. Christian spirituality rather draws us deeper into a passionate engagement with life, celebrating its joys, mourning its sorrows and pouring ourselves out in love to see its God-gifted purpose restored and flourishing into full flower.
Perhaps a seemingly strange verse to continue our discussion is Ephesians 1:10. Here Paul, at a climactic moment in his broad and sweeping oration of God’s purposes, declares that in Christ, God has publicly displayed “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things under one head in him, the things in heaven and the things on earth.” The entire drama of blessing, calling, adoption, redemption, forgiveness, grace and mystery are summarized as a unification, a reconciliation, even a restoration of the entire cosmos in Christ. The scope of which Paul speaks should not be missed. He mentions not merely individuals being reconciled to God, but rather how a fracturing in the entire created order is being mended and set right in and through Christ. Indeed, for the creation has groaned since its bondage to decay began (cf. Rom. 8:19ff), when its pristine state had been infested by thorns and thistles, its ground soaked with the blood of human violence and its fate imprisoned under the futility of inevitable death. The entire creation’s alienation from God, which had allowed such havoc to run free and spread throughout all its members, is being undone in and through Christ. Heaven and Earth are being united as one. Rather than us escaping the woes of earth to the bliss of heaven, the glory and radiance of the divine life and will as perfectly expressed in heaven will come to earth in a transformation of untold proportions. Heaven and Earth will converge and the fulness of God’s desire and intention for life on planet earth will come to a wondrous fruition. This plan has been set on public display in Christ and has begun its implementation, yet awaits its final fulfillment at the consummation of the age.
Paul continues in verse thirteen and fourteen to call the Holy Spirit, “the downpayment of our inheritance.” The Holy Spirit is thus a “partial payment,” so to speak, in advance of the full inheritance. One day God will fully and finally complete the restoration of the entire cosmos he began in Christ. In the meantime however, the Holy Spirit is the “down-payment” of such, the living personal presence of the restoration of all things. As people in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit, we embody the convergence of Heaven and Earth and the restoration of all things which will be fully consummated when our Lord returns. Here we arrive at a central feature of Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality, that is, “life in God’s Spirit,” means that we (individually, but more so as a community of the faithful) become the place where even now, in advance of its consummation, Heaven and Earth intersect. The renewal of earth’s life is now manifested in the community of God’s people. We are the instrument through which creation’s plight is even now beginning to be undone. So when we speak of “spirituality,” and specifically so, “cultivating one’s spirituality,” this means not so much a private subjective exercise, but rather, engaging in the process by which we expunge the hatred, violence and apathy perpetuating our common plight and become a community in and through which the intersection of Heaven and Earth becomes increasingly expressed, through which the spring time of New Creation bursts into flower. The practices of “spirituality” are those through which even now God is making “all things new” and creating us as a people through whom He renews the face of the earth.
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« What is Spirituality? Part 1 – Christian Spirituality is Not Spiritual
