A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality Part 2: The Measurement of the Spiritual Life

When I was a student minister in 1981 I officiated at my third wedding and had an epiphany. The couple had chosen “The Wedding Song” for a musical interlude while lighting a “unity” candle, which they did simultaneously from two distinct tapers that each had in hand. They did it almost at the exact point when the singer crooned, “And a man shall leave his mother and woman leave her home/They shall travel on to where the two shall meet as one.” They blew out the individual tapers and the single, unity candle burned alone.

I had been married three years and knew the misconception. Two don’t become one. The individuality, the separateness, the differentiation that makes two distinct human beings doesn’t evaporate when married. It doesn’t happen in any relationship born of vows and declarations of faithfulness. Or, to say it another way, when a religious covenant is formed the identities of the covenanted parties remain distinct. In my experience, when a covenant is formed, as it is in marriage or any declaration leading to a union of love, there actually are three entities. In a marriage, there is the woman, the man, and the married couple. The author of “The Wedding Song” should have written, “They shall travel on to where the two are transformed into three.” Or, as I say to couples now when we talk before the religious service commences, you are about to participate in a mathematical impossibility where one plus one equals three!

We have noted something that is grossly evident in our time, although it is part of previous eras as well: The way in which human beings today avoid a realistic view of human nature, forget or ignore our fallibility, declare they possess “God’s Truth” or know “God’s Will and Ways,” and then almost gleefully inflict untold horror on others who do not believe as they do. We have noted how this propensity towards idolatry, rampant in our time, can easily leave one in despair, spiritually beleaguered. Many liberal religionists have responded to this despair by renouncing religion, declaring God dead, and leaving behind religious language and the life of faith for philosophical pursuits. Is there or is there not a God?, a philosophical question, hounds the liberal religionist because today there is no evidence of a God being believed in that is worthy of human conviction. There is no Truth that doesn’t lead to someone who holds a competing Truth being killed. The liberal religionist has countered the rant that is religion today with a rant against religion. But, it’s still a rant.

A covenantal theology or relational spirituality offers something different.

If a religious covenant, when formed, continues the distinct existence of the two entities involved in the relationship, then it is a misconception to claim that the thoughts and beliefs of one are understood completely and held absolutely by the other. Or, as the poet wrote, “love’s function is to fabricate unknownness.” To “love God,” is to recognize first and foremost the distinction between God and me! And second, it is to declare that this relationship is a ‘third entity,” something that I participate in, but is greater than just my own self-interest.

How is it greater? In part, human self-interest is towards order, predictability, sameness, a conformity of one moment to the next and a familiarity that gives continuity to identity. Religions who claim God is Truth, and in the next declaration claim to know that Truth, reveal this inclination. “Jesus the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” is a bumper-sticker declaration of it. God, the Unmoved Mover, to be adored as absolute and complete in every way, is a more formal theological way to express a similar view. But what if one’s relationship with God involved being grasped by something entirely distinct from self-interest, and being “lured” towards a transformation out of the self’s security in its desire for order, predictability, sameness, and conformity and familarity, and towards something more. What if faith is about risking the self here and now? What if faith involves a lunge towards novelty, a newness of self and world? If God is Love, then what if being in covenant with God is a way of saying I am being called to expand the breadth and depth of my love for other human beings beyond what my self-interest deems comfortable and my culture affirms is proper and correct and practical? What if being in covenant with God means I am being held accountable individually for extending a larger sense of love to others than what self-interest would warrant; and that I am obligated to hold my society and myself accountable for extending justice beyond what is in the civic self-interest, and that societally that accountability is measured by how just and loving we are to the least among us?

In other words, in a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality the measurement of the spiritual life is in terms of transformation. Will you change? Will you risk becoming a "novelty" that you are not now? Are you transformed out of your current understandings, rooted as they are in self-interest, and towards a larger love and greater justice? Will you help your culture to change, to offer the novelty of affection towards those not now in its purview or embrace? Is your culture transformed out of its societal and culture self-interest, measured by a larger love and greater demand for justice for the least amongst us? For the disenfranchised and impoverished? A liberty and justice for ALL?

A covenant, a relationship, formed by love is measured by the way we consent to be transformed by affection, into greater affection.

Perceiving the spiritual life in covenantal ways, as a relationship between an individual and God, and the spiritual community as a group formed for a spiritual purpose by a religious agreement, a walk together, requires of the individual and the group a willingness to be “led in the ways of the Spirit” which transforms entities – individuals or groups – out of self-interested complacency and into the spiritually vibrancy of an ever-expanding love and an expectation of liberty and justice for all souls.

But if the measurement of the spiritual life, covenantally and relationally understood, is in terms of transformation, a liberation of one from one’s current myopia in self-interest, and towards something greater, then the life of faith becomes the ultimate risk. Not of losing the afterlife, but of changing oneself in this one. You lose yourself as conceived of in self-interest, to find yourself in a matrix of greater affection (which, of course, is also involved in self-interest, so the transformation is to go on again and again, never ending growth into affection!). Jesus called this greater love and this expectation of liberty and justice for all, the Kingdom of God, and in the same breadth he is reported to have declared that it is at hand. That land exists at this moment hidden in the forms of existence our eyes catch as they now see. To immigrate to this kingdom requires nothing as easy as physical relocation, but something far more difficult. A change of heart, mind, and soul!

We can step into that land and live inside of a covenant with God any time as long as we have breath; therefore, it can be called a covenant of grace. But this third entity, the covenant, when entered into by one will change one towards loving deeper and broader than before, and expecting and working towards liberty and justice for those society has forgotten and culture despises; therefore, it can be called a regenerating religious experience.

O God, if it be thy will that I should live through this day, through the evening, to breath again tomorrow, give my eyes to see thy ways, ears to hear thy call, a heart to receive thy love, a will to extend and declare that larger love to others, and a courage to be transformed in the larger likeness of your affection; that I might better walk a path with others towards thee.

A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality, Part 1: The Goal and Aim of the Life of Faith

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT finding the Truth? NOT finding the Truth that is God, nor discovering the One True Faith, nor finding the Truth and believing in that Truth and holding to that Truth against all other contenders? What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT about Truth at all, and faith is not about believing the Right Things in the Right Way?

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with this simple acknowledgement: As human beings we are so filled with self-interest and fallibility that we will mistake our own preferences for Truth, our own incomplete understandings for Truth, and we will ascribe our own distortions of the good, the right, and the true to God. It is what is so poignantly portrayed in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis. Human beings are fallible and finite. We cannot know God’s ways because they are God’s and not ours. God and man are not the same. We walk in a garden we did not create.

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with a realistic estimate of human nature, the nature that is shared by ALL who walk or have walked this earth? It is how the disciples are portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Centuries later we deride them as being dull-headed and slow when it came to seeing "the Truth," but maybe in reality we are all characters in this kind of story. To walk on this earth is to see through a glass darkly, unable to know what Truth is. Or, to say it another way, none has a “God’s eye view” of things. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with the spiritual declaration: “I do not understand Your ways, O God.”

Then, it would be impossible to declare that the life of faith is completely or even primarily about either searching for or discovering the Truth because, armed with a realistic estimate of human nature, we would have to admit we are not able to disentangle the Truth from the self-interested fallibilities we are susceptible to. The unwillingness to admit this is especially in evidence today when people will inflict untold horror on others in the name of Truth. Today the way religion motivates human beings to treat others leaves one in despair. How can the Truth that is God, when believed in, lead one at worst to murder others, and at best assume a posture of absolute certainty concerning whom God favors with salvation and condemns with damnation? Religion today eschews a realistic estimate of human nature and builds a Tower of Babel upon a foundation of human conceit. Can religion be rescued from its own arrogance and humanity from wallowing in its own hubris?

Not unless the goal and aim of the life of faith is conceived of in a different way. The goal and aim of the life of faith is not completely or primarily about Truth and believing the Right Way.

Jesus identified the Great Commandments as love to God and loving neighbor as self. Love is a kind of relationship, and a particular kind at that. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with considering the nature of relationships; relatedness, connection, ties, bonds, tethers, all those qualities that emanate from what unites us and links us and joins human beings to God and one other in the most ennobling and transformative ways? And reasoning from this, to conceive of a life which we are then called to enact faithfully. One might call this a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality.

The first observation might be this: In order to be in a relationship there needs to be two distinct entities. The same cannot be “related” to the same when they are synonymous. This ontological reality is referred to above in recounting our distinction from God as mythically embodied in the Garden of Eden creation story. Yet, it is the nature of relationships that by coming into a connection with one another each distinct entity influences the other. It’s like my father and me. We have a relationship because we are distinct. Yet, because we are related too, we share some things and have influenced each other; by blood, by shared experiences, by the way our life destinies involved obligation and consent, and even as he has been dead now for 15 years, transcends the grave (anyone who has had a loved one die knows the relationship does not end with physical absence and, in many ways, becomes even more intense!). This is one quality of Jesus’ use of the “Father” metaphor to refer to God; not as Lawgiver, or First Cause, or Repository of All Truth, all metaphors that have their uses. But, “Father” implies the distinctiveness of two entities that nevertheless have an intimate relatedness, a similarity of a kind characteristic of relationships. The two of us are different, yet related.

By virtue of our createdness, that we did not create ourselves, we are born into a relatedness with God that causes us to ask, “In what way do we resemble divinity?” We ask this in many forms. What is the right thing to do? What is the good life? What are my ultimate obligations to self and others? How do I live uprightly? We even ask, What is truth?, of course, and it is our asking of all of these that is evidence that we are seeking the way in which we resemble whatever it is that created us; the nature of what it is out of which we came. These are what might be called the “higher” questions, the “exalted” sentiments, the “loftiest” values, or most “elevated” ideals and principles. It is enough to say that we human beings are not only animals, but also possessing of a reasoning, imagining consciousness such that we ask questions that are transcendent, about something more.

We are creatures who seek to know how it is that we resemble our Creator. And the question of how humanity resembles divinity is echoed in the first creation story in Genesis, the compliment to the second, which declares human being to be made in the image of God. Image does not wipe away distinction. And an “image” is a lesser version of the real thing, which, to the undiscerning eye, can easily be mistaken for the thing reflected. But an image is "familiar" to the original. Being in part an image begs transcendence, and lures us towards thinking upon a relationship with God and how that relationship might rightfully shape our living. How can we, in broader and deeper ways, be shaped more and more like what we resemble?

And the curious thing is that in searching for our resemblance to our Creator, we find the way in which we are distinct as well. Freud was right in one way, that the religious search is the search for the Father, or the Mother, or the Parent Creator. But, to those who live the life of faith conceived of out of the idea of covenant, the aim is not explanation or reductionism so much as it is to discern right relationship. That is, becoming a human being who is in a right relationship with self, others, and God. Thus, the goal and aim of the life of faith emanates from this question: “How do I love God and neighbor as self?”