Balthasar and the "Spirit-filled" Church vs. "Institutional" Church

  This Pentecost weekend, I invite you to consider one of the great dialectics set before Christians of all stripes today: the subjective experience of "Church" and the objective reality of the same "Church".  It often comes out something like this:

"I am spiritual but not religious."

If there were not something true about the observation--that it is better to be 'spiritual' than 'religious'--people would think this is a crazy position to hold.  But obviously there is something here that speaks to people's experience.  Many people feel subjectively 'right' and 'justifified' in their own spiritual pursuits, but have no use for the formalities of religion.  But what is meant by this phrase, "spiritual but not religious"?

   Without attempting to completely drain the deep meaning of the expression, to be "spiritual", I think, represents a person's focus on the other-worldly... the things of faith, which while perhaps reasonable are not contained within reason.  "Spiritual" people are particularly in touch with themselves as beloved children of God, who are being lead in an intimate and personal way by divine grace to realize their giftedness and take responsibility in the world to proclaim the Christian Gospel.  Similarly, being "religious" is to be a conformist, a rule-follower (from where we get the word 'religion' whose root means 'measure' or 'ruler'), and sometimes is understood as one who is an "unenlightened-adherent-to-something-that-they-don't-really-understand-but-this-is-something-we-did-back-when-I-was-a-child".  'Religion', unlike 'spirituality', tends to provide assurance of one's destiny hereafter based on an objective, external set of standards, which can encourage and inspire continued growth and striving for godliness.
   People can be driven to one extreme or another--an extreme spirituality or extreme religiosity--by a negative "Church" experience in their lives.  Lots of people from my generation who continue to practice their faith, I think, have a tendency to turn to a very formal religiosity expressed by very proper liturgical practice and catechetical exactness when they find that the faith they have been raised with is not suitable to their adult questions and experiences... sometimes this is expressed as anger against "butterflies and rainbows" taught in their Catholic school or CCD during the 80's which never grew up.  But a similar pendulum swing can be observed from the generation before, where young people recited the Baltimore Catechism and chanted in Latin, having no idea what they were doing by time they reached their adult Catholic life... prompting them to turn away from "religion" and embrace the a more open "spiritual" expression of their faith that made a 'difference' for them (the "Spirit" of Vatican II, anyone?).  While these extremes are a very gross caricature of the situation in the Church today, I think one can see the temptation to radicalize and absolutize towards one direction or another.

   Religion is a necessary aspect of the Church in this age (that is, since the Ascension of our Lord, the Decent of the Spirit, and in the remaining time awaiting the Final Coming).  Not only does it provide identity and continuity in the expression of the faith, the rules and institutions of Christian religion have one more very important property: they are a sacramental, incarnational sign of God's desire for humanity and humanity's desire for God.  The Church is the visible sign of God's continuing presence and his desire to unite all humanity around his altar on earth as a foretaste of the union we hope to share in heaven.  As Paul would famously observe (1 Cor 12: 12-14), the Church is the Body of Christ, its many members building up the whole with Christ himself as the head.  Bodies necessarily have a design and, thus, 'rules'.  Bodies necessarily conform to a form, a plan... a code we recognize in the very DNA of the human body.  When a piece of the body grows on its own (cancer?) or separates itself (decapitation?) or does not contribute to the integral wholeness of the body (flu, illness?), the entire body is negatively affected.  Therefore, as members of the Body, we do have an obligation to cooperate with one another and with God's plan and will, that the entire body and and all its members might be healthy.

    What does it mean then, to be 'spiritual' without being 'religious'?  If we deny the incarnational reality of being part of the Church, we are lead to a certain kind of Christian proto-heresy: gnosticism.  Gnostics lean toward denying the union of body and spirit... that the Spirit world is 'true' and that the human body is superfluous... perhaps even a 'shell' that is happily left behind in order to transcend this world.  Rules belonging to our physical existence are seen as unimportant and 'passing' when only the soul matters.  The human soul is absolutized in importance, ignoring or refusing the necessity of the salvation and redemption of the body.  If the soul alone were all that remain after death, this would position would make sense, but Christians believe human person is a composite of soul and body.  Christ rose, not as a ghost or dismbodied spirit, but as a human person, glorifying the human form and giving us a vision of what we shall become.  When the body is chastised and disciplined, it necessarily impacts and tempers the soul for its future destiny in heaven (along with the body).  We fast during Lent, we obey the Christian sexual ethic, we venerate the saints and martyrs, we participate in the Sacred Liturgy precisely because it is through the body and through the sacraments that God reaches and molds our souls and makes us ready to take our place in the restored creation.  Sure, God could redeem the world through extraordinary means, but without the body we remain in the confusion of subjectivism... was that God talking to me or my own dreams and desires, or a strange reaction to those funny mushrooms I ate last night?   To reveal himself most perfectly in the Church and to preserve the dignity of our own free will to choose out of love, God humbles himself by taking a body--his human body when he walked this earth, his mystical body which we see in the Church--that we might encounter and accept him with some objective certainty.

   When the 'religious' aspect of the Church is jettisoned, a certain gnosticism necessarily takes its place.  That's why the DaVinci Code movie was such a hit.  It unmoored faith from rules and conventions of 'religiousity', added a controversial, speculative zinger about the nature of Christ's humanity which is denied by the 'instutional' Church of history, theologians, and 'orthodox' believers, and bingo!  Box-office gold!

   Gnosticised Christianity degrades into a body-soul dualism in the human person that leads to a fundamental lack respect and understanding of creation, the human form, suffering, and death.  Morality is reduced to a certain self-reflective pragmatic asceticism; suffering and death has no redemptive value, except as a woe to be avoided.  (Might these attitudes lead to theories of predestination and moral responsibility common to Calvinism and its Catholic counterpart, Jansenism?)  Gnosticism spiritualizes and trivializes the Incarnation of the Lord, removing objective certainty from the salvation of the Cross.  It often places the drama of salvation squarely on the shoulders of the struggling believer... are you able to find and do you believe in the right set of doctrines which will reveal a perfect truth?

   Conversely, to reject "spirituality" in favor or religious 'certainty', is to leave oneself open to a rigid, unyielding faith that is at the core of Jesus criticism of his age.  Religious people were characterized as whitewashed tombs whose insides were corrupt; they were a brood of vipers; they placed heavy burdens (in the name of religion) and did nothing to assist those who were being oppressed; they widened their phylacteries, took the best places at meals, and were honored by the title "teacher". If this is all that religion is, just a social convention that is often wrapped up with the influence and exercise of power, then I want nothing of it either.

   And so, I suppose that what we are shooting for is a via media, a middle road, where we are open to the subjective experience of the Spirit, while staying faithful to the disciplining spirit of 'religion'.  Maybe a better image is to have religion and spirituality in a healthy tension with each other.  Here's what my buddy, Hans Urs von Balthasar, brings to the table:

 

We can say that the Holy Spirit always lives in the Church as objective as well as subjective Spirit: as institution or rule, or disciplina, and as inspiration and loving obedience to the Father in the spirit of adoption... Certainly, "when Christ our life appears, you will also appear with him in glory" (Col 3: 3-4).  And then the institutional aspect of the Church will disappear in the same way as it did for the risen Lord and take on the aspect of the adoption of God's children.  For then we will no longer need to learn obedience but will have it by instinct and as part of our freedom, and the Spirit will tower over us objectively only in his divine original meaning -- as witness and igniter of love.  ...Neither aspect can be renounced but must be continually fitted to the other in mutual harmony.  There are sides of the external discipline that must be revived, perhaps even restored, by an inner inspiration.  But there is also much in the same external form that would be sufficiently living and vital to free up true inner inspiration if one only had the desire to see it as the Holy Spirit presents it, undistorted by the optical lenses through which one normally sees externals.

- Explorations IV, Spirit and Institution (Ignatius Press) 239-241.

   Optical lenses?  I think he's talking the 'lenses' we put before our eyes to understand the world... the lenses of politics and sociology (among others).  If we see the Church as simply one human organization among many, then to heck with it.  Religion is no more than polite coercion.  If the Church is nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky 'feeling', then to heck with it.  Mere spirituality has no power to save.  If we only had the eyes to see as the Holy Spirit truly presents the Church-- a harmony of rules, inspiration, freedom, deliverance, certainty, growth, humility, obedience, unity, and divine intimacy--would we not have a greater appreciation for both 'sides' of the 'religion' vs. 'spirit' debate?  Would we not welcome the challenge to discern wisely and embrace lovingly the things of God revealed in spirit and in truth?

  Come Holy Spirit!  Fill the Church with an uncompromised revelation of your love, expressed in the Church and expressed in the intimacy of our hearts, that we may be formed and redeemed, body and soul, in joyful anticipation of the Kingdom with is to come!