The Pilgrim Heart

I purchased Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life this week on the basis of Scot McKnight's recommendation that I read on his blog. The author, Darryl Tippens, provost and professor of Early Modern literature at Pepperdine University, invites the reader to take a fresh look at spiritual disciplines so that we might more faithfully follow an embodied Jesus in the world in which we live.

One of the major misunderstandings in Christian spirituality is the "spiritualizing" of everything, and not taking seriously and integrating the created world, including our bodies, into this spirituality. He quotes C. S. Lewis to help make his point:

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man [or woman] to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unscriptural. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

I know the spirituality that I exhibited in my 20's and early 30's suffered from just this problem. Perhaps this is why I am finding Tippen's book so interesting and helpful.

The other important point that Tippen's makes in the introduction is that we as Christians must insure that our faith and spirituality is reproducible in the next generation. He writes,

In the quest to convey the right message, we may be abandoning the most basic--and most powerful--"tools" of faith transmission...no matter how well we might have "done church" a generation ago, it matters little if we don not continually recreate the kind of compelling culture that allowed the early church to thrive in persecution and that will ensure the propagation of communities of faith in our time as well (15-16).

I find interesting intersections with Eugene Peterson's book The Jesus Way, and hope they become visible as I blog through each of them.