Discipleship & pietism

As a young man, I was won over by the call to discipleship, as a wind of renewal seemed to blow through the church.  Discipleship, understood as a radical commitment to following Christ and making him not only Savior but also Lord of our lives, IS a compelling idea.  It still resonates with me today.  After all, if God did indeed reveal himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, it only stands to reason that conforming our lives to his example and teachings is a call we should heed.  It also stands to reason that all other endeavors pale in comparison, as far as their capacity to make demands upon us, whether it be pleasure, success or work.

Over time, I observed a few things.  First, discipleship is demanding.  It is not a solitary project, because it takes likeminded brothers and sisters calling each other higher, encouraging each other, inspiring one another.

Second, discipleship is rewarding.  When a group strives to follow “in His steps”, life is exciting in so many ways.  You get to see your own life and the lives of others change.  Life makes more sense.

These are positive things.  But I also noticed a less positive development.  Discipleship gradually came to mean pietism, or a radical commitment to abstaining from sin and to living a personal, moral lifestyle.  William Stringellow described the problem well in his book “Free in Obedience”, in speaking of

“… those sects which teach that the practice of the Christian life chiefly consists of absention from smoking, drinking and dancing; those which make a fetish about customs of diet and dress; those which regard attendance in churchly rites and ceremonies magically or mechanistically…”

 Each church might define discipleship in its own way, but all too often the focus becomes individual and institutional, instead of communal and missional.  A “true” disciple is soon understood as one who… shares his faith regularly… confesses his sins… doesn’t watch pornography… doesn’t smoke… attends every weekly activity of the church… tithes… participates in a small group… reads his Bible daily, etc…  This sort of lifestyle and personal commitment becomes synonymous with being a disciple of Jesus.

I think it helps to understand how this came about if one considers what the revival of “discipleship” was reacting to.  In his book “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers“, Christian Smith introduces a term that describes the prevalent religion found in contemporary evangelical and Protestan Christianity.  He calls modern Christian religiousness “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”, characterized by the following core tenets (which, of course, are not so much spelled out as implicit in those who hold to them):

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

As I see it, the discipleship movement, at least of the variety that I’ve known, basically adopted a similar view, but reacted to the implicit “cheap” understanding of grace by re-emphasizing radical obedience.  Its revised version, in which God is viewed as less of a pushover and man as morally responsible for appropriate devotion, might go something like this:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, by being followers of Jesus.
3. The central goal of life is to live the life of a disciple, because that life works.
4. God is there to resolve man’s problems, largely conditioned on the quality of man’s discipleship.
5. Disciples, and only disciples, go to heaven when they die.

To be sure, preaching a discipleship characterized by radical obedience is more faithful to the New Testament witness.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is when discipleship is reduced to and understood primarily as radical morality.

Hauerwas & Willimon (“Where Resident Aliens Live”) are helpful here:

“One of the marks of the church’s extraordinary accommodation in our time is that Christians now believe that we have no enemy. Indeed, the presumption is that if there were an enemy, it would probably be our passions. That is why contemporary Christians erroneously focus so much on sex, because they think that lacking any external threat, the threat must come from within, and that ususally has to do with sexual desires. So the church struggles to help us to control our passions, which we mistakenly assume are internal because we now have no external threat to our well-being. Of course, our inner war becomes externalized because we Christians think that we are so screwed up sexually due to the world’s being so screwed up sexually… If only we were in charge of the world!”

The problem, then, is that by understanding our personal morality as the chief objective of discipleship, we miss the greater picture.  In truth, that aspect of discipleship (i.e., imitating Christ in his purity and righteousness) is a necessary means to the greater end of witnessing to his Kingdom.  I’ll quote Hauerwas & Willimon again:

“…the apocalyptic imagery of the New Testament… helps us understand that the threat of the church is not just war, hunger, and injustice to the poor. All of these evils are identified by the New Testament as adversaries, bue they are not the enemy. These are merely the miseries that are brought to us by the nations and empires that derive their authority form promising to do good for us if we will behave as cooperative citizens. It is the church’s task to expose the pretensions of those nations and empires as the enemy… We certainly agree that sexual questions are important for the church, but they are important as part of the discipline necessary for the church to be an army capable of confronting nations and empires. Sex is used in a capitalist economy as anesthesia and tranquilizer, so it is not without its dangers. The danger is that we fail to understand how the enemy uses sex to capture us.”

When we see personal morality or pietism as the center of discipleship, at least three things happen:

(a) We become overly preoccupied with sin, or rather not sinning.  Our  repentance becomes what Stringfellow describes “as an act of recrimination by which a man indulges in judging and pushing himself” and as “some form of restitution as if what has been done could be undone or as if there could be a return to the situation prior to the sin.”  He goes on to explain that both recrimination and restitution become forms of self-justification which allow us to allay God’s judgment and earn his forgiveness.  As such, they hinder our ability to be witnesses to His grace.

(b) Our understanding of community grows distorted, either by triumphalism ( by which our radical discipleship is viewed as the sign that we are truly God’s people) or by harsh disciplinary practices.  The man who wrote one of the best known books on discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (“The Cost of Discipleship”), felt strongly that the basis for Christian fellowship was not our own piety, but instead only Jesus Christ and the “alien righteousness” (i.e., not native to ourselves) that we have through him.  I’ll quote him, from his book “Life Together”:

“Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ…By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He will not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream… The existence of any Christian life together depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community… In other words, life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, an order, a society, a collegium pietatis, but rather where it understands itself as being part of the one, holy catholic, Christian Church.”

(c) We lose our center.  We forget that our own discipleship is not the message.  Nor is it the end, which is what the Pharisees thought when they believed that radical obedience to the Law was the sum of God’s will.  Nor is it reducible to an entrance requirement into heaven.

Jesus did indeed say things like “unless you… you cannot be my disciple” and “unless you… you will not enter the kingdom”.  But I would maintain that these are not to be understood as entrance requirements per se or definitions of/demands for personal morality.  They are meant to explain the kingdom.

For instance, when the NT calls us not to lust, it’s not so much because lust offends God in and of itself and therefore will keep us out of heaven.  Instead, think of it this way.  How on earth is a man consumed by lust ever going to love the woman whose broken life has led her to prostitution the way Jesus did?  Will he not be unprepared?  Will he be able to see her as more than an object?  How will we keep faith with our neighbors, if we secretly covet our neighbors’ spouses?  Will this not destroy any community we are meant to have, according to a kingdom vision?  We will be unprepared for kingdom living, for bearing witness to God’s inbreaking kingdom.

Likewise, the man given to greed is not so much an object of wrath as if he simply needed to turn away from a bad thing.  Instead, how can he live out God’s generosity in the here-and-now towards the poor if he loves money?  How can he live with the prophetic fearlessness of Jesus if his security is in his bank account?  How can we collectively unmask the oppressive institutions and powers when we are sold to them because of our complicity in greed?

In sum, the call to radical discipleship still moves me and resonates for me.  But my understanding has evolved over time.  I now envision discipleship uncoupled from pietism.  You don’t have to be a biblicist or a moralist to be a radical disciple.  Discipleship, though, cannot be uncoupled from the Kingdom.  It is best understood in the context of spiritual formation.  The Church practices discipleship because in doing so it forms a people that is ready to do the work of the kingdom, to bear witness to God’s kingdom and His grace.  That kingdom does not stand or fall on the quality of our “discipleship”.  Nor does the quality of our discipleship qualify us for or disqualify us from God’s grace, in the end.  But the man or woman who has been inspired by Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom will most certainly grasp the imperative and the cost of discipleship, submitting to its formation offered in “the one, holy, catholic, Christian Church”.