PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

27 Oct PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit from three very different approaches. His current focus is the thought of post-modern theologian Mark I. Wallace. This blog is part of a weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

I find much in Wallace’s approach that lends itself to the mission and practice of being and doing church in a late-modern context. His treatment of scripture and tradition allows a rich interaction with their various rhetorical forms, images, and themes that can inform the movement, art, and language of worship. His rhetorical approach also values conversation, imagination, and complex meaning-making over declarations of metaphysical orthodoxy. Wallace’s approach to the tradition along with the assumption of a common source to the world’s religions provides “a multicultural vision of Christianity as a distinctive — but not absolute — worldview that draws its strength both from its time-honored scriptures and from its ongoing relationships with other religions and cultures.”  Wallace’s emphasis on performative truth and the wager of faith based in the tradition and read with self-awareness inspires an honest, creative, and devoted way forward for late-modern Christians.

One area where I wish Wallace had given more attention is to the Spirit’s presence to and interaction with the personal or interior life. In the final chapter of his book, “Fragments of the Spirit,” under the title “Prospects for Renewal,” Wallace proposes that “Wholeness and integrity are the watchwords for a life-centered theology adequate to the crises of our times,” and that such wholeness and holiness is to be lived out in both personal and communal healing and well-being. Even there, however, his emphasis is on practicing sound and healthy relations with others. He seems unwilling to imagine the work of the spirit as other than a modality of divine presence that only becomes actual or demonstrable in relationality between persons.  So, he provides a social or intersubjective model of the Spirit’s emancipating influence while avoiding the psychological or subjective aspect.

The subjective journey with its introspection and self-construction is inseparable from one’s journey with and within all the rest of reality, whether one views that reality as given or constructed. To focus only on the intersubjective aspect of human experience, however, is to offer an incomplete vision of liberation: “Only when we have removed the harm in ourselves do we become truly useful to others” (Sogyal Rimpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying).