Scheduled Spirituality: Compartmentalized Christianity
An Epiphany on a Mountain and Disenchantment in an Auditorium
After getting into my truck, I set my Canon 5D Mark II in the passenger's seat. The camera had recently been equipped with a brand new prime lens that I was itching to test out. After stopping at my favorite coffee shop I started the long bumpy drive up Rampart Range within the Colorado mountains. My windows were rolled down allowing the cool fresh air to waft through my truck. Along the way, I made constant pit stops both because I had just consumed a 24 ounce iced coffee, and since I wanted to capture the staggering view with my new camera equipment. I would get out of the truck, walk to the edge of the steep mountain trail, take a deep breath as I soaked in the sight, put the camera's viewfinder to my eye, hesitate, and then snap a picture. Yet each time I did this, I was left discouraged. The image on my screen was so vastly different than the one that lay before me.I attempted this same process pit stop after pit stop, and each time I got increasingly frustrated. Finally exacerbated, I sat in the back of my truck reconsidering my recent expensive lens purchase. I thought to myself that it was impossible for me to capture such a beautiful view on my camera. I wanted people to enjoy this for themselves yet it seemed that the only way they could do so was by actually standing where I was standing.In that moment a question came to mind. "Had I done the same thing I am frustrated about right now to God." I had settled for a cheap representation of the beauty instead of actually coming to the source of it. Just like the camera couldn't capture the essence of the mountain range, so too did my confining box of interactions with God limit the wholistic relationship I claimed.This summer memory made more of an impact when mixed with an experience I had sitting in a chapel at the Moody Bible Institue a few months later. It was Day of Prayer: a day set aside, with classes canceled and mandatory attendance required, to pray for the city, the school, and the world. Students were required to fob into the chapel session in the morning, spend a few hours in prayer, had a bit of free time, and then would go back to chapel for another few hours. I sat in discontented frustration. And a phrase came to my mind: scheduled spirituality. While I support the idea of a dedicated time of prayer it was very superficial at best.Students would show up to be spiritual only because it was required. They would snap into a posture of worship and intercession only to leap back into normal life as soon as the final amen was pronounced. In the time between prayer services, it was completely forgotten that a few moments earlier everyone had hands raised and "hearts open". This was a separated spirituality. It was a scheduled spirituality. Just like when the clock strikes the end of class and a swarm of students performs a mass exodus upon the room, pulling out their phone and entering a new state of mind, the nature of separated or scheduled spirituality inspires a division between modes of life.
A Theology of Divine Interaction:
The hands on the clock whirl around in a never-ending dejavu of tedious motion. They usher in a new moment, a new memory, and a new motive. The book of Ecclesiastes explains that all of life is meaningless. Its author, Solomon, found that nothing could satisfy his thirst for fulfillment. Humanity is in a continual search for meaning but will find itself empty-handed without God.
“What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity into man's heart...” (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11).
God is an eternal being, He had no beginning and will have no end. To God, time has no dominion. And as God created humanity in his own image, they too became eternal beings. Yet the difference for them is that they had a beginning. Each human was brought into existence at a certain point in history, and from that moment onward they would dwell within reality. Humans are eternal beings caught up in a timeline of change. They have a dualistic nature of living within the constraints of a day and time, yet have an eternal essence that will never cease to exist. Humans are temporal only inasmuch as they change with the time as it trudges forward. But as Hebrews 13:14 explains, “...This world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come.” Time is a temporal construct and only functions in the earthly present. God placed within His creation eternality which battles against the transient perspective so often wielded as people interact with their world.Interacting with God is a complex adventure. Yet God in knowing this has given people several points of reference by which they can learn to connect with Him. In Joshua 1:8, God commands Israel to not only keep the commandments He had given them but also to meditate on it day and night. It was never to leave their lips. Their words were to be that of those who had gone before them as God interacted with them. Their thoughts were to dwell on the history, commands, and presence of the Lord.
This idea of being in the presence of the Lord is the longing that David expressed as he wrote Psalm 27. His only desire in life was to be with God and to dwell with him. He seemed to grasp the concept simply by his relationship with God, which was later described in the book of Colossians “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:7). Existence is held together by God who created it. It becomes possible to know God through interacting with the world he created and abiding in his presence as he continues to interact with the world. During the formation of the Church Paul, told the people of Athens that God had given humanity the life they were living and the breath they were breathing. He had placed each person in a point in history within a certain context so that they might seek Him, and in seeking him they might find Him. He also promised that God would not be far from anyone and that it was by him that people “live and move and have their being” (Acts 17:27). God created people to interact with him. He allows them to seek him and find him through their seeking.While delivering his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave an example prayer of how to approach God. They would come before God both as their King and as their affectionate Father. It was by their understanding of his nature that they could interact with God. Because of Jesus’ saving actions to destroy the separation established by sin, the veil between humanity and God was eliminated and man could approach God at all times and all places without a barrier. However, this has been distorted by the compartmentalization of Christianity, where our faith is schedule and separated from other aspects of our lives. This often takes the form of a five-minute devotional lifestyle. In a compartmentalized culture, the invention of the clock has so impacted the way we live, think, and interact that God’s integral role in society has been diminished. This is seen when a dedicated time to God becomes religious instead of relational. It occurs when people view it as their only time with God. A compartmentalized mentality views God as scheduled which leads to separation. There was born the idea of “Time with God” as if there is time without God. God and interactions with him became not much more than a box checked in daily life. This stands in contrast to the truth that a real relationship with God consists of learning more about the nature and will of our Father through each and every experience we face.
The destructive worldview of compartmentalized spirituality has manifested itself in devotional times, the very time which was dedicated to devoting oneself to God became a separate part of existence. This is a complex issue. Dedicating oneself to God can be a good thing, yet too often it creates a mentality of “I will do my morning devotional with God and then am done with him for the day.” The same mentality can be seen when people only worship God on Sunday while at church and then forget about Him for the other 6.5 days of the week. Yet this is more obvious of a contradiction. The compartmentalized time paradox of a set aside time for God is more subtle in its error. The innate design of a 5 minute devotional is to be short, efficient, and for the most part, engineered to take all the struggle out of learning from God.However, this is a wrong view of how to learn and interact. It isn’t enough to simply look to other people's thoughts and interactions with God to satisfy one’s own needs. Instead of developing our own theology, Christians are consuming predigested short and efficient thoughts from other theologians about God. Information transfer is vastly different than a true relationship and devotion to God. It is no wonder that people feel disconnected from God. They were created to abide in him, yet have been lead to simply consume confined aspects of what he has revealed.
The History of The Clock:
While people have been trying to measure time for thousands of years it took up greatest influence by Benedictine monks in the 12th and 13th century (Postman 14). It was invented to provide a more precise regulation of the activities and routines within the monastery. It was a device for the advancement of ritual devotion. By the 14th century, the clock’s impact within the walls of a monastery moved into the towns, cities, and villages. The clock would ring to mark canonical hours by which monks, merchants, and workman would synchronize their interactions and measure their tasks. “The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Timekeeping turned into time serving, time accounting, and time rationing. As this took place, eternity ceases gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions” (Mumford 14). People began to interact with their world in a new way because of the new framework by which they viewed life. “Mechanical abstraction and rigidity permeated the whole structure of being. Abstract time became a new milieu, a new framework of existence.” Today the human being is dissociated from the essence of life; instead of living time, he is split up and parceled out by it” (Mumford 330). Society became consumers and controllers of time. Humans no longer went to bed when the sun went down and it became too dark to see. People created wicks, chimneys, lamps, gas lamps, and later electric lights by which they could use all the hours of the day. “Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments. Abstract time became the new medium of existence” (Mumford 17). Within this structure, the monks in the monastery came to the perspective that scheduling and regulating their spirituality was what earned them worth before God. The clock became the dictator of their piety.
This transition was greatly due to the literate nature of the monastery. The monks were educated men who copied manuscripts and read daily. This literacy created a visual people. The clock could only affect a visual people who could picture enclosed and pictorial space to be divided, and filled. Literacy which reinforced the concepts of the clock allowed men to view time as abstract and a tangible movement through space” (McLuhan 207). Time was seen through the invention and worldview of a mechanical clock. Just as the hands of the clock move forward or the pictures on a page of a book are turned to lead to another story. Only after this visual implication did time start commanding a person’s life. The clock decided when it was time to eat, sleep or ‘spend’ moments with God. The clock was the invention that truly turned society into a “Prose machine” (Mcluhan 209) which sped people through life at a stark and dizzying pace. When time could be divided and thus scheduled it led to a culture of efficiency and technique of best practices. This is the same efficiency and best practices the monks were implementing when they were trying to earn salvation. Martin Luther felt the destructive nature of trying to reach God by best practice, motivating him to start much of his famous reformation. While living as a monk, Luther was under constant stress that he hadn’t confessed enough or fulfilled enough penances. The monastery where he lived had incredibly strict and rigid rules. He was tormented by the uncertainty of his techniques being good enough to get him into heaven. It wasn’t until he truly invested in understanding God through the Bible that he wrote his 95 Theses calling the church to re-examine their doctrine.
Religion and Technique
This emergence of a culture of technique led to a compartmentalization of one’s mind and time. Compartmentalization meant that every moment was set in order for a particular time and place. With time as vision and the clock the tool by which to inspect reality, clocks created valuing the measurable and schedulable above that which is not. Just as the printing press created for Martin Luther’s Germany the cultural value of “a place for everything and everything in its place,” the clock produce for John Calvin and his theological followers the value of “a moment for everything and something for every moment.” Calvin believed timeliness was a virtue. Ironically, during an age when people whose occupations were seen as inspiring idolatry, such as a jeweler, Calvin was a staunch advocate for the clockmaker. The portable clock inspired piousness. Under Calvin, there was no time left for idleness or amusement. Punctuality and ordering one’s life around the motion of the clock was seen as a spiritual virtue. For Calvin, there was no wasted time because all would have to give an account for their time on Judgment Day (Romans 14:13). In his mind, all good Christians would have a proper account for every moment of their daily life. He created a life of nonstop religious activity and church services. Calvin even created a fine for people who missed a church service in 1541. Before Calvin, the value of a minute had been generally disregarded, but after his influence, it took on the utmost importance.
Calvin brought theology into timekeeping and scheduling. In his perspective, if you can’t measure and schedule your spirituality, then you’re not being spiritual. If time is one of the most important commodities to keep track of, the clock is one of the most important manuals by which to live life. Those following God became worshipers of habits and rituals. They were missing God and true interactions with him in the process. Instead of receiving the grace of Christ, people were enslaved under the unforgiving master of a mechanical clock.People became worshipers of their achievable and measurable actions instead of God. The clock had inspired a culture of religious technique. Due to a compartmentalization of time, and the scheduling of measurable aspects of life, scheduling spirituality became the underlying principle of western Christianity. A few hundred years later, Christians would ask each other questions such as, “Have you spent time with God today?” Yet this presupposes that there is such a thing as time without God. Compartmentalizing our view of God and how to live became the mantra of a technically driven culture. People began thinking of God as some ingredient that they add to their lives to make it taste good instead of him being life itself.
Unintended Sacred/ Secular Splits
“It seems to me, then, that the sacred is relative to three aspects of human life: time, space, and society. Finding ourselves in an incoherent, menacing, and incomprehensible space, we set up coordination points. Thanks to the sacred, we define or maintain order in the world. We fix limits and directions. We can establish a framework within which all activity takes place, or fix a center, an ompalos, to which we orient everything. As concerns time, there are sacred times that give meaning to time. All days are not alike. In these two cases, the sacred establishes differences that enable us to give order to life” (Ellul 51).
Time became divided into a sacred sphere of Sunday morning church services and 5-minute devotions and a secular sphere of everything mundane. The problem arises when all of life is not the Lord's. Yet the Bible is clear that God is Lord of all of life, not just explicitly religious life. “The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him,” declares Psalm 24:1. Colossians 3:17 says, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” To drive home the point that all activities are opportunities to interact with God, Paul in another letter to a Church commands, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
The world is not divided into sacred and secular portions. All is spiritual for all is an opportunity to interact with and praise God.
“There are in it no particularly sacred times or places, precisely because God is absolutely the Wholly Other and nothing in the world comes close to him or can be the bearer of value, meaning, energy, or even order. The only new energy that Christianity recognizes is the potential presence of God by the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit, too, is incomprehensible, inaccessible, and unexploitable” (Ellul 60).
Any vision of the world as sacred or secular is immediately divisive. It sets boundaries for what is good and what is bad, what is extraordinary and what is mundane. Yet with Jesus, all life is transformed from meaningless to meaningful. “There is not a single inch of the whole terrain of our human existence over which Christ...does not exclaim, 'Mine!'” (Kuyper 488) Time is a human construct which has no bounds in the eternal existence, but is an understandable measure of movement or change in the temporary state of the earth.
The Current Compartmentalized Conundrum
The current state of compartmentalized and scheduled spirituality is bleak. If most people are being honest, they look at their day as a list of activities: wake up, make coffee, make the bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, do devotional, drive to work, etc, and then repeat. Because of the clock, people don’t go to sleep when they are tired, they go to sleep when it is time to sleep. People don’t eat when they are hungry, they eat when it is time to eat. And now people don’t interact with God because that is how they are made, they interact with God because it is time to interact with God. At the hands of the clock, a culture of technique arose which offered the alluring promise of control. While technique or measurements are not inherently bad, they are very biased. The only things which are seen as valuable are things which are measurable, yet most meaning, relationship, and spirituality is not measurable. Technique is blind to all that it cannot measure. It creates a lie that there is nothing beyond the veil of observable metrics. Yet a lot of life including spirituality is a complex movement through life, not just seconds, minutes, and routines. God and a person’s relationship with him cannot be measured by ticks, chapters, or any metric of human understanding. “Technique is a means of apprehending reality, of acting on the world...technique, moreover, creates a bond between men. All those who follow the same technique are bound together in a tacit fraternity and all of them take the same attitude toward reality” (Ellul 131). The cult of technique is not enough to meet the needs of a complex world.
“With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of these human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost against the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited.” (Ellul 426).
Interaction with God isn’t just information transfer which can be monitored and measured (Kraft 21-22). God leads his followers to a discovery of himself and the truths of his world. It isn’t enough to live on predigested messages which are served on a short, concise, and efficient platter. Five-minute devotions are just that. They are not inherently evil, but the message about reality they convey is. The medium is the message. It isn't a problem of the amount of time being spent. A 30 minute or even hour long devotional would still inspire the same message: that set aside blocks of time are the way to interact with God. God acts and speaks into his follower's lives and then gives them space to struggle with what it means. This allows for the discovery of meaning and thusly the greater impact because it truly belongs to each person who encounters it. God raises questions instead of simply giving answers which cannot come without pursuit or relationship. The process of learning from God cannot be met in contemporary educational techniques, which just look for a right or wrong answer in teaching for the test. God’s teaching involves truly tasting and seeing that the Lord is God and his ways are the only ways that truly work. God’s teaching is about devotion and relationship to the Person, not the answers.
We tend to believe that only through the autonomy of techniques (and machinery) can we achieve our goals...When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first—the method or the institution—then it is difficult to change the institution or even imagine alternative methods for achieving its purposes (Postman 142 -143).
Devotion to rituals became the end in itself. Habits of faith are not bad, they are a good tool to bring about dedication. Yet meaning has to be restored to the process of the constant search for God through a daily pursuit of God. The outworking of faith in Christianity is not something to do or complete, it is who Christians are- in identity and relationship. When most people answer the question, “How is your relationship with God,” they often look to time and what in their life is measurable or tangible. Christians look to rituals, habits, or techniques to order their lives and thusly make them feel safe. This need for safety is a genuine need, yet it is met wrongly through human efforts to control their life and spirituality. The clock or the controlling of time is unconsciously seen as a perfect tool for trying to control our identity as believers. Humans live within 4 dimensions but only can control 3 of them. The 4th, time, is usurped in a human effort to become their own god. Christians like to follow completable and measurable tasks: spend five minutes in the word, read 3 chapters a day, pray for 7 minutes, etc. People find their identity in what it means to follow God in controls, measurements, and boxes checked. Spirituality has become tainted; people compartmentalize time with God and time without God.
Better Alternatives
Morning devotionals are not the problem. In fact, they are a great way to turn a Christian's attention to God first thing in the morning. Humans were made to thrive in the presence of the Lord. Christians dependent on God are most prepared for the daily life they engage. David proclaims in Psalms 42, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.” This is a great picture of what it looks like too long for God. He is the Living Water from whom life flows. CS Lewis explains in the Weight of Glory that our problem as Christians is not that we desire too much in life and that God cannot meet our needs, instead, it is that we desire far too little. We settle for a cheap knockoff instead of the genuine artifact. We are too easily pleased. Living in a relationship with God is seen through the continual desire for more and more of God, never settling with the status quo.The problem arises when Christians stop their interaction with God after the morning devotional or seek it only as a means to get religion right. And sadly these are a common reality. The purpose of this examination into the theology of divine interaction and the history of how it has been perverted has been to simply help Christians reevaluate the motives behind their daily habits, the biases taught by the clock, technique, and devotionals, as well as the true reason behind those things which we do.Christians must learn to see those things which they often miss, and hear God speaking into their life in all situations. Too often they only open their eyes and ears during a blocked off or detatched portion of the day which is their "God time." The question often comes down to, "Do we actually believe in the God of the details?" Theology would argue yes, but our lives would argue no. Christians must develop an organ of connection, not a technique of learning. God has created a world which is to be experienced through a symphony of senses. He intimately teaches his children through the details of their everyday experiences. He trains them in how to think, he shows them how to love. God reveals himself more fully to people as they come to recognize him in the world before their senses.One of the most dangerous things for an enemy who likes to distract is a child who is always with their Father. 1 Thesolonians 5:17 speaks about the concept of praying without ceasing. This suggests a posture of meditation, recognizing the unceasing presence of the Lord.
The alternative to the endless pursuit of technique and scheduled spirituality is the daily pursuit of God. The monk's closeness to God was erroneously defined by their devotion to ritual schedule. Luther understood that right practices couldn’t bring him into right relationship. Calvin believed that the religious life was that life which was most closely ordered by the clock. Christians must learn how to develop a receptiveness to the presence of God in every interaction, learning from Him and about Him through every aspect of their life, not just “scheduled spiritual time” with him (Tozer Chapter 5). Christians must overcome the hindrance of internally subdividing life into sacred and secular spheres, instead of seeing all life as belonging to God. Overcoming a culture of technique, as influenced by the clock, is possible through the pursuit of God as a relational being, not as attainable through compartmentalized Christian scheduling.
"You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him"- A.W. Tozer
This paper has turned into a meditative ritual and interactive exercise in developing an organ of connection to the Most High.
Works Sited:
Ellul, Jacques, and John Wilkinson. The Technological Society: Vintage Books, 2011.Kuyper, Abraham. "Sphere Sovereignty." Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader . By James D.Lewis, Richard. “How Different Cultures Understand Time.” Business Insider, Business Insider,1 June 2014, www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Sphere Books, 1973.Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harvest, 1963.Nichols, Stephen J. Martin Luther: a Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P & R Pub., 2002.Postman, Neil. Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage Books, 1993.