People of the Spirit

April 15, 2009

2 Peter 2:17-22

There’s nothing to these people—they’re dried up fountains, storm-scattered clouds, headed for a black hole in hell. They are loudmouths, full of hot air, but still they’re dangerous. Men and women who have recently escaped from a deviant life are most susceptible to their brand of seduction. They promise these newcomers freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, for if they’re addicted to corruption—and they are—they’re enslaved. If they’ve escaped from the slum of sin by experiencing our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ, and then slid back into that same old life again, they’re worse than if they had never left. Better not to have started out on the straight road to God than to start out and then turn back, repudiating the experience and holy command. They prove the point of the proverbs, “A dog goes back to its own vomit,” and “A scrubbed-up pig heads for the mud.”

Every now and then, I read a book and become utterly enamored with it. When I was in seminary, there was at least one of those books amid my education studies written by a man named James Fowler. The book, entitled Stages of Faith, spoke to the developmental stages that a person can expect to experience or in some cases not experience as they traverse the years of life. The stages included “Infancy and Undifferentiated Faith” where we learn about trust and love but don’t have the ability to separate these from the threats of abandonment and so forth. As we grow, we progress to a stage between ages three and seven known as “Intuitive-Projective Faith.” This is where faith is fantasy like, where we learn through stories and by watching examples of others. Imagination runs free in this stage. The “Mythic-Literal Faith” develops in those late childhood years as the stories from earlier childhood years become our own. We understand them not as something someone else represents for us but as something we can know for ourselves—though our knowledge may be a bit stilted as we see things very literally. Reciprocity seems to be a key element in this stage. By puberty, we enter the “Synthetic-Conventional Faith” and many adults will arrest in this stage of development (this is where we find fundamentalists). Here faith has a conforming element to it as we are very focused on the expectations and judgments of significant others so that our authority is located outside of ourselves and likely in the traditional authority roles. If we are fortunate something will rocket us in our mid-twenties (a crisis of sorts) into “Individuative-Reflective Faith.” At this stage, the authority shifts internally and we begin to doubt and question EVERYTHING that we know or think we know. Most adults live at this stage. Somewhere in our 50’s, again if we are fortunate, there comes an integration of self as we reach “Conjunctive Faith” and here we begin to comprehend paradox. We are able to be a part of a faith group and yet detached from it. We understand God in the paradox—as changing and changeless. We understand the need to live in the paradox as working to trust and yet only finding trust through surrender. Finally, if we reach the likes of Ghandi, we reach Universalizing Faith. At this stage, we give ourselves to overcoming paradox through ascetic acts of faith. (Frankly, much less is known about this stage as so few people reach it.)

What does this have to do with Peter? These false teachers were not operating out of a sense of self awareness. They were not as in the conjunctive or universalizing faiths living out of the divine nature of Christ. But those Christians easily influenced as would be children, teenagers and those living in the synthetic-conventional faith, were falling hook line and sinker for the gospel as portrayed falsely. Peter wants these folks to see that there are three things to living out of the divine nature of Christ that we must observe. First, we must hold to our knowledge of Christ as a gift that comes from God. We don’t necessarily need others to tell us what is true about God. We should know it in our own hearts and that knowledge should bring us peace. Second, Christ is our vehicle away from the corruption of the world. If we commit ourselves to walking with Christ and living as closely to him as we are able, we will know a great peace and be much closer to the truth. Finally, it isn’t enough to have knowledge and to walk with Christ, we have to turn away from our own desires of the flesh. Turn away from sin. With those three things done, we’ll be on the fast track to the conjunctive faith at least. Peter wants these precious Christians to not fall prey to misguided faith.

This raises several questions for us: Do we live with knowledge of Christ? Do we walk in Christ’s way? Have we turned fully from sin? Are we able to lead others in the way of Christ as a result? Are we really participating in the divine nature of Christ? Ultimately if we want to be people of the Spirit, we must strive to live within the divine nature. So may we live! Amen.