Assessing Spiritual Growth? A Critique
After the Spiritual Formation Summit, I’ve been sitting with what we talked about and considering some of what we discussed. It was nice to be in a place with folks doing similar kind of work where we could discuss, relationally, what we think the weaknesses, limitations, and blindspots of the spiritual formation conversation has been. That alone would have made it worth the time.
But that wasn’t the only thing we did. We also heard some presentations. Two of the presentations were on assessing spiritual formation, and so I wanted to consider that here for a moment.
I immediately worry about how quickly we turn to things like metrics and assessment tools, and how easily it can be to assume that these sorts of things are value neutral. The assumption is that when we assess spiritual growth we are not doing theology. That assumption is false.
Rather, it is important to recall that much of the Protestant theological tradition would deny the ability to assess spiritual growth well, especially in the granular, and would emphasize even more our limitation in one’s ability to see it in themselves.
Narrowing our sights a bit to the Reformed spiritual tradition, keeping in mind that this is still quite broad, we are often reminded that we will be the last ones to see the growth in our lives. Spiritual formation is just the kind of thing that others recognize in you first, and it often takes a long time for a person to see what others see (it might even be the case that you will never “see” it, but come to know it anyway).
Furthermore, even the desire to “locate oneself” on a spectrum would have been seen as a bit troubling. It is not that it was impossible to do something like this, but what drives the desire to know this? This is where the danger resides.
The worry is that locating oneself on such a spectrum was an attempt to take one’s eyes off of Christ and look at themselves for stability. The worry is that this stems from a desire to live by one’s senses rather than living by faith.
If this impulse continued, and one focused on spiritually assessing themselves, the temptation would be to discover a series of external metrics that one could turn to as a mirror of one’s goodness. Rather than looking through the dark mirror of faith, the flesh longs for a mirror to see oneself in a more satisfying light.
But this continual assessing of one’s spiritual life was often seen as a sign of immaturity rather than the path to maturity. It was thought to be a narcissistic self-gazing that often shifted attention away from Christ to oneself.
Admittedly, I don’t think anyone would deny that we could find certain signs of spiritual growth. But as someone like Jonathan Edwards would remind us in his Religious Affections, discerning the work of the Spirit in one’s life proves quite difficult. There is a naivety, it seems to me, in our present conversation, and so in this post I just want to name what that is.
To move back up and beyond the Protestant spiritual tradition to the Western tradition as a whole (including both Roman Catholics and Protestants) we all have wanted to make a distinction between natural and supernatural virtue [for a recent interview I did on this topic with the folks at the London Lyceum, click here].
I also did an episode on my podcast about this, and you can listen to that on Apple Podcasts here, or on YouTube here.
Key to this distinction is the belief that you can develop habits (or do liturgies or spiritual disciplines) aimed at good things, and even at God, but do them in and from the flesh. You can seek to replace the Spirit with the flesh, as the Galatians did (Gal. 3:1-3), just as you can develop self-made religion through spiritual discipline (i.e., bodily asceticism) like the Colossians (Col. 2:23).
The reason the distinction between natural and supernatural formation matters is that if you assess growth you have to have some sort of protocol to address:
1. The fact that spiritual growth is not the same thing as natural virtue;
2. That the virtues of the flesh are not easily distinguished from virtues of the Spirit (especially at any given point of time); and
3. The metrics we use have to be discerned in the Spirit (Edwards’s Religious Affections is an obvious example of this).
The spiritual formation conversation, in its present iteration, has almost always given into the temptation to focus on spiritual disciplines, and tends to link those way too closely with our growth, such that there is a kind of causality between the two that makes God’s presence and action superfluous.
Everyone presupposes God’s action, of course, but it often just gets tacked on the end. In other words, many give an entire account of formation as if God’s action is irrelevant, and then just end by saying, “Of course, spiritual disciplines don’t form us, God has to work,” as if that expression magically fixes what has already been a Pelagian account of self-help.
So what is often suggested is that our supernatural growth works in the exact same way as natural growth, just with an extra power attached to it. God shows up and “kicks-in” at the right time so that actually grow.
We then assess this growth and these practices, and I worry all we end up assessing is self-made religion with no ability to deal with the flesh.
The problem with how spiritual growth assessments tend to work is that they fail to distinguish between natural and supernatural formation. I don’t think that this is impossible to do, but if there are any folks out there particularly interested in what this might look like, I made a call to psychologists to do this with gratitude specifically (i.e., how do we assess supernatural gratitude) that you can find here.