Smoking to the Glory of God?

I had hoped to begin an introductory post today to what will be a regular series by me under the title 'ecclesia res publica'.  However swine flu has been working its way through my household, and instead I offer this post, that I have drafted in contribution to another blog series.

Christine Sine sent me an invitation to write (alongside so many other wonderful writers) in response to a question she posed about Spiritual practices.  If I can summarize Christine’s question (no doubt very badly), and premise for the series, she asked why do most people experience God outside church in the world, whilst Christians see only prayer, bible study, and going to church as spiritual practices, for knowing and experiencing the death and resurrection of Jesus?

It was a good question for me, in that it bothered me and got me thinking.  In particular, how tragic it is if the bible, church and prayer become self referencing static mediators of the gospel, with no connection to the real world.  But also, how equally tragic and a measure of gospel paucity, if spiritual practices, are about experiences of God in the world, with no framing by the canonical-linguistic grammar of the gospel, prayer, and Christian community.  Both are as bad as each other, or perhaps at least lead to a question, what are the nature of spiritual practices, and how are they connected to the world, and church, and scripture?

Otherwise without some understanding of that, it’s easy to accept the opening premise at face value as fact, and in response as a Christian to reach for what I do in the world as ‘a spiritual practice’. That is to respond by listing what I do in the world, outside of the bible , prayer, and church, as where I meet God.  It’s to locate spiritual practices on those terms, and that’s something I’m uncomfortable with.  Just as I am uncomfortable with collapsing ‘spiritual practices’ into bible study, prayer and going to church.

I can easily reach for how having turned 40 years old this year, I became a cliche, and I decided to get a motor bike.  I can describe how the training process in the UK, with four separate tests and requisite training, have been forming me as a biker.  How I for the first time have a hobby away from my work, and the pressures of Church community.  How a ride through the english pastoral countryside, clears my mind, connects me to creation, and how close to God I feel compared to going to Church.  And if I were to imagine that Christians who see spiritual practices as solely the domain of prayer, bible and going to church, were to ask me, how can you ride a motorbike as a spiritual practice, my reply might be like that of Charles Spurgeon, when asked how could he smoke cigars?  That I do it to the glory of God.

But I misrepresent Spurgeon, and do him a disservice, as do many Christians, when we use his most wonderful aphorism, as a thin veneer, to baptise everything we do as a ‘spiritual practice’.  For if I justify all I do as being done to the glory of God, everything is a spiritual discipline, perhaps apart from going to Church, prayer and the bible.

So how might we begin to respond to this separation of ‘spiritual practices’ from church community, the bible and prayer?  How did we arrive at this separation, and how might we begin to frame this theologically, to understand the nature of ‘spiritual practices’ and how they form us as human beings before God?

One reading of St Augustine¹, would provide an understanding of the human condition, in which we have not fallen from God, but we have fallen from ourselves, into ourselves.  For Augustine, humanity has not fallen out of perfection, but rather out of Creation, into the condition of privation, isolation, and withdrawal.  Sin is not a fall from God, but the fall from ourselves, otherwise we could not exist as human beings.  While our response to this condition is further retreat, into isolation from others, and forming life around ourselves, redemption is the move back into Creation and presence with God and others.  While Augustine is often critiqued as being world denying, he can be seen as providing just the opposite, with a theology of engagement with the world.

As I read him, Augustine is not world-denying but world-affirming, and it is not that we have too little; it is that we are overwhelmed by the plenitude of Creation, we end up loving love itself, desiring desire, and become lost to ourselves, isolated from God and each other.  Augustine does not want us to love the world more, but rather change how we love it.  As evidenced in his own life and ministry and teaching, we see Augustine encouraging Christians to move deeper into the world and its affairs.  

For Augustine, the Christian life in response to this problem, and human condition, was one of ascesis, of re-training our desire and longings with, towards their proper orientation, and ends, that enable us to participate in the redemption of creation, by Jesus.  Within this crude summary of Augustine, we might see that ‘spiritual practices’ are those things that are located within this ascesis, that which leads to re-training and re-directing of our desire towards their god redeemed ends.

Or in response to my own question posed at the start of this post, I might see that prayer, church, and the bible that does not form us in engagement in the world, is as bad a process of ascesis as spiritual practices that move us too deeply into the world and become disconnected from the church, prayer and the bible.

I can ride my motorbike as a spiritual practice and meet Jesus.  I can offer God my motorbike riding within his re-training me from someone within a fallen self identity as a workaholic, into someone who can find his identity in the sheer indulgence of the enjoyment riding through God’s creation.  Or it can become an ecclesiology for one, having more in common with the problem of my isolation from God and others, and idol of my own making that forms me around my own isolated desires and disconnection from others.  A substitute for real ‘spiritual practice’, justified around my own fallen desires and ends, rather than those learned and practiced within the community of God’s people.

Everything can be a ‘spiritual practice’, but not everything is a ‘spiritual practice’.  It is the ends, the means, and the formation that takes place within our activities that determines what is ‘spiritual’.  Charles Spurgeon new this well I think, which is why when Christians questioned his smoking to the Glory of God’, his reply in a letter to the Telegraph Newspaper was:

 ‘"The expression 'smoking to the glory of God,' standing alone, has an ill sound, and I do not justify it; but in the sense in which I employed it, I still stand to it. No Christian should do anything in which he cannot glorify God—and this may be done, according to Scripture, in eating and drinking and the common actions of life.

 

When I have found intense pain relieved, a weary brain soothed, and calm, refreshing sleep obtained by a cigar, I have felt grateful to God and have blessed His name; this is what I meant, and by no means did I use sacred words triflingly. If through smoking I had wasted an hour of my time—if I had stinted my gifts to the poor—if I had rendered my mind less vigorous—I trust I should see my fault and turn from it; but he who charges me with these things shall have no answer but my forgiveness.” (http://www.spurgeon.org/misc/cigars.htm)

^{1 For example see, Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist : Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.}

________. Theopolitical Imagination. London ; New York: T & T Clark, 2002.

Gregory, Eric

nd the Order of Love : An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things : Theology as Church Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.

Mathewes, Charles T. A Theology of Public Life Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Miller, Vincent Jude. Consuming Religion : Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2003.

O'Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order : An Outline for Evangelical Ethics. 2nd ed. ed. Leicester: Apollas, 1994.

________. The Desire of the Nations : Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1999 [printing]), 1999.

Schweiker, William, and Charles T. Mathewes. Having : Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004.

Wannenwetsch, Bernd. Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Comments

[Rick Herder]

I like the issues raised in this post, and though the argument would be roughly the same had Spurgeon been writing of chewing gum or fly fishing I appreciate the way the cigar example forces us to think outside the church box. I smoke cigars occasionally and as I was reading this, I found myself reflecting on how, from time to time, a cigar has helped me to find the pace for a writing project or to unlock a text I had been puzzling over. There is something about the slow rhythm of the experience that is good for reflective activities. And I have fond memories of meandering, life-affirming conversations with friends where the topics dance slowly between and among politics, children, epistemology, and the Gospels; and laughter mixes with cigar smoke.
I count both of these experiences - the private work and the conversations with family and friends - as worship experiences, though not in the same class as Sunday morning worship. In saying this, I understand I risk looking shallow and hypocritical in some contexts. This is one of the reasons, I rarely mention cigars around some church friends. For some dear souls a cigar would be a metonym for backsliding, a sure sign of spiritual debauchery or, worse, heterodox politics or theology. And this is where I have to be careful lest I become cranky with Christians. I say this because in my experience we can easily get caught up in protecting the limits of our Christian identities by making public claims about Bible reading, prayer, etc. while being entirely feckless in actual practice. When we allow our interior spiritual praxis to slide in this way, we leave ourselves wide open for a hermeneutics of suspicion. Or, to use de Certeau's metaphor, we make easy targets for critics who would cut us out of the field and turn us over to see those things we have either lied about or suppressed.
I do not advocate the smoking of cigars, and we can only bring Spurgeon's example into the present by occluding what we now know can be substantial risks to health. Nonetheless, I find the metaphor useful because it forces me to question the limits of what does or does not count as legitimate spiritual askesis. Foucault, for all his pessimism and philandering, is useful here in that he asks us to consider what counts as enlightenment in a post-enlightenment era. His answer is askesis. And although in writing this he seems intent on overturning the early Christian practice of askesis, I'm not sure he succeeds, maybe because he seems to share Nietzsche’s view of the church as a Potemkin village (some days I would concur). Nevertheless, I think we can appropriate something valuable from the "limit attitude" Foucault advocates. To whit: why not interrogate the limits of what counts as spiritual practice? Should we repent when we are more concerned with Sunday morning exteriors than with searching spiritual reflection? Someday I may have to stop with the cigars, but I am not in a hurry. I find they go well with Bible studies and in fellowship they break the "surface tension" of public Christian identities and thereby either attract or repel. If the cigar smoke does not send them running, we are probably in for good conversation that moves beyond facades. I'm thinking Spurgeon might fit right in. Whatever his flaws, he does not strike me as a "white washed tomb."

[Jason Clark]

Hi Rick, one thing you said, 'To whit: why not interrogate the limits of what counts as spiritual practice?'. I couldn't agree more, and that was the main thought for this post.

To reduce all spiritual practice to prayer/bible study, or to collapse into the opposite, where all is spiritual practice is to fail to explore how they form us and to what ends (telos) and what soteriology underlies them.

Warmly, Jason

[Rick Herder]

Thanks, Jason,
I'm new here, but will try to stay in touch as I can. There are not many places where these sorts of conversations are possible.
The post was timely. I've been reflecting of late on John 8 & 9 where Jesus contrasts the religious facade of the temple authorities with the spiritual integrity of a (once blind) beggar.
Take care.
Rick

[Jason Clark]

Looking forward to more interactions with you :-)

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