Show me your spiritual practice, not just an intellectual theology

Aunt Bessie was one of the best human beings I’ve ever known.

She was kind and loving. She had a gentle spirit. I can’t remember her ever saying anything negative about anyone, even if the person deserved it. She was always eager to help those in need. She wasn’t wealthy, but she gave sacrificially to her church and to other ministries.

But Aunt Bessie knew little about theology. She didn’t have much education. She prayed constantly for other people — including for my sisters and me — and she read her Bible all the time. In a private conversation at her house while I was still in college, though — just a few years before she died — she admitted to me that she struggled to understand the language of the King James Bible.

That lack of intellectual understanding of scripture troubled her, she said, but she just knew she loved God and trusted in Jesus with her whole heart. She wanted to be the best person she knew how to be and live as she thought God wanted.

Now let me tell you about someone entirely different.

This man is a full-time pastor. He holds a doctorate from a Southern Baptist seminary. His undergraduate degree is from a Baptist college. He’s pastored half a dozen churches and worked for an agency of the SBC. He’s currently employed as the pastor of a Baptist church.

By every external measure, he should be a paragon of virtue.

What most people don’t know, though, is that two of the churches that employed him — the biggest two — both quietly fired him for cheating on his wife. After his long-suffering wife left him after the second cheating scandal, he kept dating his affair partner. They eventually married.

Behind closed doors, he’s full of anger and hatred for other people. He’s extremely selfish and has made sure that his churches have spent lavishly on things that he personally wanted. When planning his moves, he’s always considering how his choices would look in the light of denominational politics. He’s great at playing the political game. He’s also an excellent preacher with a lot of style, but he might as well be an actor performing lines from a play.

In the eyes of our society — even our religious culture — my Aunt Bessie was a nobody. And this pastor is an accomplished and relatively important “somebody.”

I’ve been thinking this week about how we have our priorities backwards when we look at people around us. Aunt Bessie and this unloving pastor were the best examples I could think of — for both ends of the spectrum.

The conservative Baptist church culture in which I grew up valued correct systematic theology and appearance more than it valued obeying Jesus. I’m not going to get deeply into my theories about how this developed, but I’ll just say that the intellectual vanguard of the church was challenged by the rationality of the modern age.

Instead of accepting that not everything about our spiritual or religious experience can be proven, that culture started developing rigid theological rules. Instead of simply admitting that we couldn’t prove God and couldn’t prove the Bible was literally true, that culture invented a strict and rational theology that was internally consistent — but which lost sight of God.

When I was young, I was puzzled about why preachers were more inclined to give me exposition about the theology they derived from the apostle Paul, but they seemed far less interested in talking about how we could obey Jesus’ commands to love others.

They would mention the teachings of Jesus every now and then, but Jesus was mostly just the sacrificial substitute who died for my sins. It was almost as though his actual teachings — as expressed in the gospels — were mostly irrelevant.

I’m thinking about all of this right now because I’ve been thinking about how a person’s actual spiritual practice — the things he actually does, the things he lives out — can be incredibly meaningful and life-changing.

It’s forced me to look — once again — at the uncomfortable fact that much of my religious culture has been interested in intellectual correctness of theology, not in the lived experience of loving others and experiencing God.

My thinking is taking place in the context of my Christian background — and specifically my Southern Baptist background — but this can apply to whatever religious tradition you’ve come from.

If you adopt an intellectual version of something — but you don’t live the spiritual substance — you’re not going to make a difference in the lives of those around you. What’s worse, you’re going to live a spiritually bankrupt life in which you go through the motions of professing whatever you’ve been told is right — but you will not have the spiritual encounters that can change your heart.

I don’t have any interest here in telling you what you ought to believe or which theology you ought to follow. I’m just urging you to find a spiritual practice that allows you to transcend yourself and your ego — something that will help you to encounter this loving spirit who I know as God and that will help you to love other people in ways that will enrich life on this planet.

When it comes to theology, I know far more than my Aunt Bessie did. I can tell you exactly what theological positions we “ought to take” on the important issues. I can give you nuanced arguments about scripture and theology.

But my intellectual understanding still doesn’t give me a heart as kind or as loving as Aunt Bessie was. I figure she’s had plenty of time for God to fill her in on all the things she didn’t understand. And I sincerely believe she’s in heaven waiting for me to join her one day.

I don’t want to throw away the intellect when it comes to theology or spiritual practice, but I’ve slowly learned that if we don’t have our hearts and minds truly transformed — not just educated — what we have is going to be empty.

When Aunt Bessie was still alive and I was studying so much theology, I felt sorry for her about her lack of understanding. With the benefit of wisdom and experience, I see that it was myself who I should have felt sorry for.

It’s taken me many years, but I’ve slowly learned that my Aunt Bessie’s loving heart and passion for pursuing God was far more important than the intellectual knowledge that I was so proud of myself for having.

I was a fool for a long time — a proud and arrogant man. I hope that I can one day be at least half as good a person as Aunt Bessie was.