So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
Introduction
Recovering the Seven Paths of Christian Devotion
ACROSS TIME AND THROUGHOUT HISTORY, God’s love has touched countless people. Often these encounters awaken a spiritual longing in us and we begin to seek this love more fully and to have it always present in our lives. No matter which approach or path we take, God’s presence experienced in fleeting moments creates a longing for God’s continual presence that never ends. But history reveals that our desire for this love is seldom fully satisfied.
And why does this longing seem so dormant today? In a word, distraction. In his Confessions Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” You see, although we need God, we at first do not desire him. We desire all sorts of other things—those necessary for life, to be sure, but also things we simply find attractive. And so it is only as God touches us with his love that we come to understand the nature of life in a new and profound way.
As with many things, our capacity to receive and respond to God’s love needs to be developed. For example, even though we have the capacity to read and write, it takes a great deal of effort and assistance to cultivate that ability. Some people never learn to read and write because they never have the opportunity to learn. Likewise, there are countless millions who have the capacity to receive and respond to God’s love but lack the proper opportunity to do so.
One key problem we face today is the fact that the cultural environment in Western civilization has become increasingly hostile to Christian faith. Our colleges and research institutions have set religion aside as a worn-out and irrelevant view of the world. When people experience a desire for God, the cultural environment does not encourage any consideration of God, let alone give that desire room to develop.
Searching for a Center of Value
As we move deeper into the new millennium, there is considerable speculation about what the rest of it will bring. Perhaps we will discover how the mind, brain and person are connected; maybe we will uncover the scientific explanation of the origin of life; or, and here is the greatest hope, we may even discover and agree on the ultimate goals to which we humans should commit our lives.
All of this speculation is filled with the hope that somehow we will rediscover a center of value that will provide the meaning, purpose and direction we so desperately need. At its heart, the search for a center of value reveals a growing desperation in Western civilization, and indeed the entire world.
Today there is a growing awareness, reflected in an important body of literature, that we have destroyed the main centers of meaning and value to such an extent that we are left with few resources to cultivate and sustain our common life. At the same time a significant chorus of writers is seeking to recover the rich spiritual resources that once guided us morally, sustained us spiritually and satisfied our deep longing for God. At the core of all these works is a concern with the process of spiritual formation.
Christian spiritual formation is a God-ordained process that shapes our entire person so that we take on the character and being of Christ himself. When we are open and responsive to this process, our outer life becomes an expression of this inner formation. Spiritual formation is concerned with the hidden dimension of every human life, the space God has given us to become the person we choose to be.
From this hidden space we make choices that utilize the resources of understanding, emotion and will available to us. It is here that we exercise our conscience before God and initiate relationships with our neighbors. It is in this hidden space that we are shaped, that our character is formed, and it is here where God encounters us and we choose to follow him.
How can this happen? How can we be shaped in such a way that our life becomes an expression of the spirit of Christ himself? We simply enter into a life with God, a conversational and redemptive relationship in which our own life becomes open to the influence of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit initiates life within us and guides us in a never-ending process of being formed into the likeness of Christ.
Many spiritual practices support this process: public and private worship, study, prayer, reading and memorizing Scripture, reflecting on God’s activity in nature and history, and service to others. Other spiritual disciplines such as the practices of solitude, silence and fasting also facilitate spiritual formation. But these activities can also misfire and become burdensome, killing the very life we seek. All spiritual disciplines require care to produce growth and progress.
Properly employed, however, these disciplines help us attain increasing levels of spiritual maturity so that we respond to our life circumstances with the mind of Christ. Every one of us must work out this formation in a way that works best for us, but we make great headway when we draw on the wisdom of the paths others have pioneered.
Why This Book?
This book is written with two main purposes. The first is to explain the seven primary paths to God that have developed throughout Christian history. In brief they include:
The individual writers have been selected because of the way their witness to Christ has endured over time and guided people through the ages. These paths are described in detail in the following chapters.
The second purpose is much more personal: we want you to awaken and grow in your knowledge, understanding and commitment to God and to wrestle with the depth and riches these writers present. Contemporary books on spirituality tend toward one of two extremes: either they present the spiritual life in an analytic and detached way, or they portray it as a narrow range of distinct emotional experiences that are impossible to replicate. Both extremes fail to connect with the source of life. It is our goal to help you find the inexhaustible source of this life with God and to participate in its reality.
By presenting seven distinct paths, we are standing against the contemporary tendency to compress the wide variety of spiritual writings into an oversimplified, single orientation, a tendency from which the Christian faith has suffered greatly. In contrast, we stress that there are at least seven major paths to our life with God, all of them mediated by the person and work of Jesus Christ. No single path is the Christian path to the exclusion of the others.
At certain points one path may be especially helpful to us. Over the course of time, however, it is likely that we will experience all of them. This is as it should be. We are created to enter into life with God in multiple ways. As we continue the ongoing journey, over time we become formed into the image and likeness of Christ.
Each chapter describes a particular path embodied by certain classic spiritual writers who illuminate our understanding of the Christian life. No single approach is sufficient for every person because we differ in our needs, experiences, problems, temperament and place in life. We also draw from more than one approach throughout our own journey. For example, when we’re thinking through Christianity’s intellectual credibility, it is most important that we pursue the right ordering of our love for God and the recovery of knowledge of God lost in the Fall. But at other times, such as when we have had powerful encounters with God, we need to consider the right ordering of our experiences of God. Even though we might prefer one path over others, throughout the course of our life all seven become useful and relevant.
The title Longing for God alludes to Augustine’s famous teaching that because we have been made to find fullness of life in God, all our activities in life, even our sinful ones, result from our longing for God. The paths in this book serve to orient us toward God so that we may satisfy this unquenchable longing rather than have it frustrated by inadequate or perverse sources.
So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
Many of us do not see a pattern to our life or understand the purpose behind our individual experiences. We walk most of our lives in the dark, without attaining nearly as much understanding as we would like, even when we do occasionally catch a glimpse of God’s grand design. But we also have a privilege many in earlier times did not enjoy. We have the stories of the colorful personalities from the Old and New Testaments, including the story of Jesus himself. We know the stories of the great saints who lived throughout the two thousand years of Christian history. As the book of Hebrews records it, “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), an allusion to the cloud that led the people of Israel through the wilderness as a manifestation of the presence of God.
In this way we can move forward in our lives as a people of God, trusting that even though we do not always see why things happen or feel God’s hand guiding and caring for us, we can still live by the promise of this future fulfillment. In studying the great biblical personalities, we, as God’s children, develop a similar confidence in our own life with God.
In every age, great Christian saints have cultivated their life with God using the writings of Scripture, the theological reflections of others, the capacities of human reason, the cultural resources of the day and the spiritual disciplines. Through their reflections, the great saints witness to the work of the Holy Spirit and, when we study them, guide our spiritual life as well.
And so, above all, we hope that this book will captivate the hearts and minds of a new generation of believers. In doing so, we trust that it will enable this generation to seek and find “the life which is life indeed” (1 Tim 6:19 RSV).