Forerunners of today's dawning Age of the Spirit

An Age of the Spirit
The Sacred in the Secular?

"What does the future hold for religion, and for Christianity in particular? At the beginning of the new millennium three qualities mark the world's spiritual profile, all tracing trajectories that will reach into the coming decades. The first is the unanticipated resurgence of religion in both public and private life around the globe. The second is that fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying. But the third and most important, though often unnoticed, is a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.

The resurgence of religion was not foreseen. On the contrary, not many decades ago thoughtful writers were confidently predicting its imminent demise. Science, literacy, and more education would soon dispel the miasma of superstition and obscurantism. Religion would either disappear completely or survive in family rituals, quaint folk festivals, and exotic references in literature, art, and music. Religion, we were assured, would certainly never again sway politics or shape culture. But the soothsayers were wrong. Instead of disappearing, religion—for good or ill—is now exhibiting new vitality all around the world and making its weight widely felt in the corridors of power...

The nearly two thousand years of Christian history can be divided into three uneven periods. The first might be called the"Age of Faith.”It began with Jesus and his immediate disciples when a buoyant faith propelled the movement he initiated. During this first period of both explosive growth and brutal persecution, their sharing in the living Spirit of Christ united Christians with each other, and"faith"meant hope and assurance in the dawning of a new era of freedom, healing, and compassion that Jesus had demonstrated. To be a Christian meant to live in his Spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work that he had begun.

The second period in Christian history can be called the"Age of Belief.”Its seeds appeared within a few short decades of the birth of Christianity when church leaders began formulating orientation programs for new recruits who had not known Jesus or his disciples personally. Emphasis on belief began to grow when these primitive instruction kits thickened into catechisms, replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him. Thus, even during that early Age of Faith the tension between faith and belief was already foreshadowed. Then, during the closing years of the third century, something more ominous occurred. An elite class—soon to become a clerical caste—began to take shape, and ecclesial specialists distilled the various teaching manuals into lists of beliefs. Still, however, these varied widely from place to place, and as the fourth century began there was still no single creed. The scattered congregations were united by a common Spirit. A wide range of different theologies thrived. The turning point came when Emperor Constantine the Great (d. 387 CE) made his adroit decision to commandeer Christianity to bolster his ambitions for the empire. He decreed that the formerly outlawed new religion of the Galilean should now be legal, but he continued to reverence the sun god Helios alongside Jesus.

Constantine also imposed a muscular leadership over the churches, appointing and dismissing bishops, paying salaries, funding buildings, and distributing largesse. He and not the pope was the real head of the church. Whatever his motives, Constantine's policies and those of his successors, especially Emperor Theodosius (347—95 CE), crowned Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The emperors undoubtedly hoped this strategy would shore up their crumbling dominion, from which the old gods seemed to have fled. The tactic, however, did not save the empire from collapse. But for Christianity it proved to be a disaster: its enthronement actually degraded it. From an energetic movement of faith it coagulated into a phalanx of required beliefs, thereby laying the foundation for every succeeding Christian fundamentalism for centuries to come.

The ancient corporate merger triggered a titanic makeover. The empire became"Christian," and Christianity became imperial. Thousands of people scurried to join a church they had previously despised, but now bore the emperor's seal of approval. Bishops assumed quasi- imperial powers and began living like imperial elites. During the ensuing"Constantinian era," Christianity, at least in its official version, froze into a system of mandatory precepts that were codified into creeds and strictly monitored by a powerful hierarchy and imperial decrees. Heresy became treason, and treason became heresy.

The year 385 CE marked a particularly grim turning point. A synod of bishops condemned a man named Priscillian of Avila for heresy, and by order of the emperor Maximus he and six of his followers were beheaded in Treves. Christian fundamentalism had claimed its first victim. Today Priscillian's alleged theological errors hardly seem to warrant the death penalty. He urged his followers to avoid meat and wine, advocated the careful study of scripture, and allowed for what we would now recognize as"charismatic"praise. He believed that various writings that had been excluded from the biblical canon, although not"Inspired," could nevertheless serve as useful guides to life. Still, Priscillian holds an important distinction. He was the first Christian to be executed by his fellow Christians for his religious views. But he was by no means the last. One historian estimates that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine, Christian imperial authorities put twenty-five thousand to death for their lack of creedal correctness.

The Constantinian era had begun in earnest. It was the epoch in which imperial Christianity came to dominate the cultural and political domains of Europe, and it endured throughout the medieval centuries, a time of both bane and blessing. It gave birth to both Chartres Cathedral and the Spanish Inquisition, both St. Francis of Assisi and Torquemada, both Dante's Divine Comedy and Boniface VIII's papal bull Unam Sanctam, which asserted the pope's authority over the temporal as well as the spiritual realm. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation did much to alter the underlying foundations of the Age of Belief, and the European expansion around the planet extended its sway over palm and pine. This middle era, the Age of Belief, was the one that prompted writer and historian Hilaire Belloc (1870—1953) to coin the phrase," The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith.”

The Age of Belief lasted roughly fifteen hundred years, ebbing in fits and starts with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the secularization of Europe, and the anticolonial upheavals of the twentieth century. It was already comatose when the European Union chiseled the epitaph on its tombstone in 2005 by declining to mention the word"Christian"In its constitution.

Still, to think of this long middle era as nothing but a dark age is misleading. As we have seen, throughout those fifteen centuries Christian movements and personalities continued to live by faith and according to the Spirit. The vast majority of people were illiterate and, even if they heard the priests intoning creeds in the churches, did not understand the Latin. Confidence in Christ was their primary orientation, and hope for his Kingdom their motivating drive. Most people accepted the official belief codes of the church, albeit without much thought. Many simply ignored them while they thrived on the pageantry, the festivals, and the stories of the saints. Lollards, Hussites, and later thinkers like Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548—1600) and many others explicitly rejected some of the church's dogmas. The medieval period, after all, was rife with what the officials called heresy and schism. The Age of Belief was also, for significant numbers of people, a spiritually vital"Age of faith"As well. Now we stand on the threshold of a new chapter in the Christian story. Despite dire forecasts of its decline, Christianity is growing faster than it ever has before, but mainly outside the West and in movements that accent spiritual experience, discipleship, and hope; pay scant attention to creeds; and flourish without hierarchies. We are now witnessing the beginning of a"post- Constantinian era.”Christians on five continents are shaking off the residues of the second phase (the Age of Belief) and negotiating a bumpy transition into a fresh era for which a name has not yet been coined.

I would like to suggest we call it the"Age of the Spirit.”The term is not without its problems. It was first coined in the thirteenth century when a Calabrian monk and mystic named Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132—1202) began propounding an inventive doctrine of the Trinity. He taught that history, having passed through the ages of the Father (the Old Testament) and the Son (the Church), was about to enter an Age of the Spirit. In this new dispensation, Joachim declared, people would live in direct contact with God, so there would be little need for religious hierarchies. Universal love would reign, and infidels would unite with Christians. Joachim died a pious Catholic, but some of his followers pressed his arguments farther, declaring that the new age had already dawned and there was no further need for priests or sacraments. They also contended that this would be the last age and that the world would soon end. They even began setting dates. But the hierarchy did not look with favor on the prospect of a church without hierarchies. And the world continued to exist. Finally, some sixty years after Joachim's death, the church under Pope Alexander IV pronounced his ideas heretical.

Joachim of Fiore, and especially his followers, obviously got carried away, and scheduling the end of the world is always a risky proposition. Nonetheless, his idea of an Age of the Spirit, or something like it, has always fascinated people. There is an irrepressible visionary or utopian streak in almost everyone. In any case, I hope the new stage of Christianity we now seem to be entering is not the final one (there may be many, many more), but I still prefer to think of it as an"Age of the Spirit"for a number of reasons.

First, for centuries Christians have claimed that the Holy Spirit is just as divine as the other members of the Trinity. But, in reality, the Spirit has most often been ignored or else feared as too unpredictable. It"blows where it will," as the Gospel of John (3:8) says, and is therefore too mercurial to contain. But some of the liveliest Christian movements in the world today are precisely ones that celebrate this volatile expression of the divine. The Spirit's inherent resistance to ecclesial fetters still vexes the prelates. But it also inspires Christians in what used to be called the"third world," but is now termed the"global South"by those living there, to discern the presence of God in other religions. As women come into leadership positions in Christianity, many prefer"Spirit"As their preferred way of speaking of the divine. By far the fastest growth in Christianity, especially among the deprived and destitute, is occurring among people like Pentecostals, who stress a direct experience of the Spirit. It is almost as though the Spirit, muted and muffled for centuries, is breaking its silence and staging a delayed"return of the repressed.”

Second, increasing numbers of people who might once have described themselves as"religious," but who want to distance themselves from the institutional or doctrinal demarcations of conventional religion, now refer to themselves as"spiritual.”They often say," I am a spiritual person, but I am not religious.”But what does this mean? Often church leaders and theologians wince at the vagueness of the term"spirituality," which is burdened with a long history of ambiguity and controversy. within the early Christian orbit people spoke of Jesus and then of themselves as being"filled with the Spirit.”As decades passed," spirituality"came to mean the subjective aspect of faith in distinction to the objective teachings. It described a way of life rather than a doctrinal structure. Later, in the Roman Catholic sphere," spirituality"characterized the different manners in which those in religious orders practiced their faith. One could speak, for example, of a distinctly"Ignatian spirituality," as followed by the Jesuits, or of a"Carmelite" or"Franciscan"spirituality.

But the term"spiritual"Also turned controversial at times, especially during the medieval period, when movements like those inspired by Joachim arose that accentuated the immediate experience of God or the Spirit without the necessity of the sacraments or the hierarchy. Some of them even vented explicit protests against the institutional church. Many, like the Beguines, were inspired by women. Some were led by clergy. Meister Eckhart (1260—1327), a Dominican priest, for example, taught that the soul is a spark of God that is to be nourished until the person attains full communion with the divine and is filled with love. He did not condemn churchly observances, but thought they were only of limited value. Shortly after his death Pope John XXII, who was pontiff from 1316 to 1334, declared his ideas heretical.

That did not, however, kill the ideas. Eckhart's student John Tauler (ca. 1300—1361), also a Dominican, took the next step and openly denounced reliance on external ceremonies. The"Spiritual Franciscans," who appeared shortly after the death of St. Francis, taught, as he did, that the Spirit could be found in nature, in"brother sun"And"sister moon," but they also preached against the wealth and power of the institutional church. Most were excommunicated, and some were burned at the stake. Centuries later Simone Weil found the institutional church more of an obstacle than a help in her spiritual quest. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881—1955), the most farsighted Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, envisioned the entire sweep of cosmic history as a process of"spiritualization.”And the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906—45) wrote wistfully from a Gestapo cell of what he called a future"religionless Christianity," liberated from its dogmatic tethers. All of these figures were, in different ways, forerunners of today's dawning Age of the Spirit.”

The Future of Faith
Harvey Cox, pages 1-11,
HarperOne (September 8, 2009)