A while back now I gave a lecture to the students at South Wales Baptist College, Cardiff on the spiritual practice of discernment.
One of the things I said that seemed to challenge them at the time ...
(and it has been making me think about it ever since)
was an idea taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
but I am still working out if he (and I) were right
or were we wrong?
What is said was this:
At the core of discernment is Jesus Christ and so we must answer the question Who is Jesus Christ for us today?
How is Christ revealed and encountered and shared with the world in real life today?
In Ethics he says this:
In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and the reality of the world, but not in one without the other.
The reality of God disclose itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God.
The purpose of the Christian life is to participate in the reality of God and on Jesus Christ today and this participation must be such that I never experience the reality of God without the reality of the world of the reality of the worlds without the reality of God.
Spirituality and the process of discernment must be concrete.
After all we want to live in ways that glorify God
We want to know what this all looks like in real life
We want to know what it looks like in particular for us as an individual
For you, here as a college
Or for you somewhere else as a congregation.
God’s purposes needs to be particular to a person, a situation and a context
Unique to that time and place
As well as being in some continuity
with the general understandings of God we have gleaned from history and tradition.
So it must be a living word for a living world
Not a dead set of rules to be applied rigidly whatever and wherever.
And because it is living
It may not always be predictable.
Because it is living
it may make subtle distinction between what was said in the past.
It may call us to change!
There is, as the Baptist hymn book puts it
Yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s word.
If you want a God who offers you clarity and certainty in every situation, a set of rules to be applied whatever the scenario then you need not worry about listening or discernment
But then I fear that if that is you then Christ is not the one you want to follow
Because with Christ that is not what is on offer.
Christ calls us to be responsible human beings capable enough of discerning his word for today
Courageous enough to make decisions in the grey areas of life and carry it through.
Bonhoeffer found this time and time again as he probed the mind of Christ. As he prodded the heart of God he realised that the will of God cannot be defined in advance by means of general theological or ethical or spiritual principles
It’s not about a universal statement of good and bad. That is a lazy one size fits all discipleship …
But that tendency to think it terms of right or wrong, bad or good is not a helpful one when we are seeing to discern God’s purpose in our life.
Discernment isn’t about how can I be good
Or How can I do the right thing
It is concerned with ‘What is the will of God?’
Putting things into two conflicting spheres of good or bad
Wrong or right
Orthodox and heretic
Is exactly the voice of the serpent in the garden.
What does the serpent promise Adam and Eve?
You will be like God … knowing the difference between good and evil.
But it was never our calling to be like God
It was never our calling to know the difference between right and wrong
And to make judgements on it
That is for God and God alone
We are asked to be faithful to our relationship with God
To listen to the word that God speaks to us
To the Christ who reveals himself to us.
Our vocation as Christians is to discern the will of God
And we do that through being attentive to Christ
Christ who occupies within us that space which before conversion was occupied by our longing for the knowledge of good and evil.
For the redeemed in Christ we are called to give up that desire to know good from evil
For that is us behaving as if we were God
Naming those we deem to be aligned on any axis of evil
At that is idolatry of the first order
It is us playing God
And it’s what got humanity into such difficulty in the first place in the garden.
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