We’re called to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. Some of us gravitate toward the intellectual side and love God with our mind. Others go in the opposite direction toward feelings. But these should not be in opposition to each other. Rather, we’re whole persons called to love God with our whole being. Tom Schwanda helps us pursue this integrated approach to discipleship.

Books by Tom Schwanda:

The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality: The Age of Edwards, Newton, and Whitefield (Classics of Western Spirituality)

Soul Recreation: The Contemplative Mystical Piety of Puritanism 

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and my conversation partner today is Tom Schwanda, a professor emeritus of Christian formation and ministry at Wheaton College. He also teaches for Fuller Theological Seminary. He's written numerous articles, including several for our publication, Knowing & Doing, at the C.S. Lewis Institute. He written a great book called The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality: The Age of Edwards, Newton, and Whitefield. Tom Schwanda, welcome to Questions that Matter.

Thank you, Randy.

Experiencing God

Tom, you've also been a pastor for over 18 years at three different churches, so you've seen this process of spiritual growth and discipleship from a number of vantage points, and you tend to emphasize or zoom in on experiencing God or the experience of spiritual growth, which I think is kind of underappreciated or undervalued a lot. Can you tell us, when you think of that phrase, “experiencing God” or “experiencing spiritual growth,” what are some things that come to your mind?

I think one of the first things, Randy, is that evangelicals can often be pretty cognitive, and it's very important for us to be good thinkers. It's very important for us to know our theology. It's very important for us to study. But studying or just accumulating knowledge does not make a person a Christian, and it does not help one to grow in discipleship. So what we learn and know in our heads has to be integrated into our hearts e so that we know not just by saying, “Ah, that's an interesting piece of information,” but to say, “I've actually experienced it, and I know what it means to say Jesus is my Savior. Jesus is the good shepherd. Jesus is the one who walks with me and guides with me.” So the experience is what deepens it and helps a person to know it in a way that helps them to live their actual life.

Now, if I can turn it personally to you, how is this played out in your own life? Have you always had a vibrant experience or was there almost like a second conversion for you? How did you end up at this spot?

That's a great question. I was raised—my father was an engineer. I felt I had to be an engineer. I started out as an engineering student. I transferred. I majored in economics. I was so far left brain, analytical, cognitive, I was unhealthy. When I became a pastor, my wife was the minister of music. So I had all the cognitive, all the left brain, all the objective truth. But the more and more that I spoke with Grace and the more we planned worship together, I realized… think of a piece of music. There are words, but there's also the tune. And you can't have a song or a hymn if you don't combine the text with a tune. So I pretty soon began to recognize that the thinking is good, but you also have to have the affect. You have to have the emotions. And so that, I think, was the beginning of the journey for me, Randy, and along the way, there have been many other places and people and events that have reminded me and encouraged me to really grow in greater wholeness.

Now, I'm intrigued. You skipped an important piece here. You were an engineering student and an economics student, and then you said, “And then I became a pastor.” Something tells me there was a piece in between there. How did that happen?

Well, my senior year of college, I was a Christian. I wanted to become a Christian economist and work in Washington, to come and visit you people. And I felt God was calling me to integrate my faith with government finances, and I had my applications in for graduate school. I was planning to get a PhD in economics. But along the way, the woman who was in charge, she was the chair of the religion department where I went to college, Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She said, “I think you should go to seminary.” I said no. And she said, “No, I really think you should.” And she persisted for six months, and I'm not exaggerating. Six months! And she said finally, “I think you should at least try,” it was called the Rockefeller Fellowship. It was a trial year in seminary. And I said, “All right, I'll do it,” just to get her to stop bothering me.

And there were, I think, seven questions, but the two that I remember: What is the role and function of the pastor? What is the nature and purpose of the church? And as I wrestled with those questions, I said, “You know, I have misunderstood God. I should go to seminary.” I went to Gordon-Conwell and had such a wonderful, wonderful experience, and that was what really began the process of helping me to move out of the purely academic to the experiential dimension of faith.

Boy, I love that idea of providing people with a one-year taste of seminary to see if that's really where God is calling them, because I do know there's a bunch of people who go, and that's not really God's call for them, and they figure that out in the first year. And then there are others who don't make that move because it's too risky or too expensive or too much of an upheaval. But they could benefit from a trial year. But that's another whole topic.

Right.

So I'm intrigued, as an economist and an engineer, but you married a woman who's a pianist, a musician.

Yes. Her major in college was violin.

Ah, nice!

She has written and published music, organ music, choir music, hymns. In fact, she just finished writing a hymn that she's submitting to a Hymn Society Festival.

Well, so I'm sure that this is part of it, too, for you. So you're a pastor, you're preaching sermons, you're studying the text, kind of an intellectual thing, but you're also preparing worship services with your wife as the musician. And so you're looking at both head and heart.

By the way, maybe I've said this on other episodes of Questions That Matter. I'm just so intrigued with this quote, so I apologize to our listeners if you've heard me say this before, but when you were just saying about the words and the music needing to fit together—the lyricist, Yip Harburg, who was not a Christian, not a religious man at all, but he wrote the lyrics of all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz. So he wrote the lyrics for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and he thought deeply about lyrics and words and how they fit together. And he said, “Music helps you feel a feeling, and words help you think a thought, but a song that weaves the two together helps you feel a thought.” Isn't that a beautiful image? Isn't that great? And what better example of that than “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to feel the thought that there's some other world where we belong. We don't totally belong in this world. There's some other world.

And when I hear that song, and so many other pieces of music, or read C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and remember his quote, “If I have this desire that can't be met in this world, it must mean that I meant for another world.” Okay, so help us with, let's say some of us who are listening to this interview, we say, “Yeah, I'm the engineer. I’m the theologian. I read the Bible, I read these books. I learn facts. This is very good. I'm glad he said that the cognitive side is so important. But if I'm honest, I don't feel much or I don't experience much.” How can you help us in that, so that we love God with all of our being, especially all of our heart?

Yes. I think there are a number of things. Maybe the first would be to say, “Well, how do you typically experience God? What helps you to sense the presence of God?” We see that, throughout Scripture, not just in the Old Testament where there might be more the dramatic, where Moses has the burning bush, or Enoch is walking with God, or David, a man after God's own heart. But what helps that person? What helped me? And for me, one of the things that began to help me was the awareness of the Puritans, 17th century. Some people would even call them evangelical at that time. For the people, both the parishioners and the pastors, when they would preach. So this is a good illustration: They would say, “It doesn't do you any good to know all the doctrines of the atonement if you don't know in your heart that Jesus died for your sins.” Or, “It doesn't do any good to be able to explain that the Holy Spirit has come at Pentecost if you haven't sensed in some way in your own heart or mind how the Spirit can guide you.”

So I think one of the ways is just to say, how have you experienced God? Another is what we've been talking about. Are there certain pieces of music that tend to move you in a different way than simply reading something and wrestling with your mind? And I'm convinced, Randy, that the more we reflect on something, the more, if it's an intellectual thought, it can become more experienced within our heart, as well as reversing that. So if we start off with someone who says, “You know, I sing these songs, and I just am moved in my soul,” but I would like to say to that person that, if you reflect on that more, what does it mean to you? What are the implications of that? It deepens, and it becomes more of a cognitive thought as well. So it's not either/or, but it's integration. Does that make sense?

I think it does. I think so, but let me see if I can restate it. So if I'm learning and understanding a cognitive thought because I'm reading a passage of scripture or I'm reading a Christian book that sheds light on scripture, and it's, “Okay, I understand this. Yes, that makes sense,” you’re saying, “Well, why not pause and say, ‘Okay, so what would that feel like if I allowed it to seep past just my understanding to my feelings?’”

And then, on the other side of the equation, so to speak, is, “I'm experiencing something that feels good, delicious food or I see a beautiful sunset, or I'm in an art museum and I see a painting and I say, ‘Wow, I really like that!’ to pause and reflect and maybe say, ‘Okay, so where does God fit in this experience? What is it about God that enables me to experience the joy of this sunset?’” Am I following you?

Sure. Yeah. So what are the implications? How might God want to help me to see this or to experience it more fully?

Yeah. You wrote an article for Knowing & Doing. It's actually been a couple of years now already, but in there you wrote this: You said, “I realized that, instead of embracing my granddaughter, I imagine that God desires to hold me in the same way that I was holding her.” And I love that! I just love it! And so it's in the midst of this great, enjoyable experience of embracing a granddaughter, you then say, “And there's more.” So it's not either/or. It's all of the greatness of the granddaughter, and she's ticklish, and she likes to giggle, and this is just wonderful, and she likes it, but it's like, “Wait a minute! God used images in His word of a father holding a child.” I like… you said it was integrating. I almost want to push it in the direction of, not so much integrating, but seeing the integration that's already there, appreciating the integral nature of, “I'm God's child, and He has allowed me to hold a child or a grandchild,” and look at the symmetry and the connectedness there.

And you know what's so important about that, Randy, is that that was just a normal, everyday activity. It reminds me that, for us of the spiritual life, think of Moses and the burning bush. He wasn't at a Bible study. He wasn't at temple worship. He's out in the field, doing his work. He's laboring. And the reminder for me is that God is present as we go through our daily activities. In that case, I was simply playing with Haley and having a good time with her.

We at the C.S. Lewis Institute are wondering: What are you reading now? And what's on your summer reading list? We're hoping that you'll be inspired by true stories of faithful Christ followers, that you'll maybe travel back in history and around the globe, grow deeper in your own walk with Christ, and gain tools to understand and engage today's world. And toward that end, we've pulled together a recommended reading list for the summer, and I hope you'll check it out. You can see it at the cslewisinstitute.org. Here's the full address: cslewisinstitute.org/recommended_reading. Let me do that again. Cslewisinstitute.org/recommended_reading.

Well, I think part of the problem, though, I think some of us think, “The only way I can experience God would be in a burning bush kind of experience. So if I don't come across the burning bush that's burning but not burnt up, well, then it's just not happening.” And you're saying, “Oh, no, it's happening all over the place. It's happening in the non-burning-bush experiences, the ordinary, the simple interaction with people.” This is a great challenge for me because I tend to focus on the annoying things. So you're pushing me in the direction of: “God is in the midst of my driving my car.” Is that even possible in traffic, though? I mean, isn't traffic, like, totally the domain of demons? Never mind. I'm just kidding.

Well, let me just pick up on that, because this is something that I've learned over the years, and that is, “How can I pray my day?” I used to become very, very annoyed and frustrated in traffic or bad drivers or people that cut me off. On a good day, I say, “God, I pray for that person-

Because they're going to die soon if they keep driving like that!

They could die. But maybe there is an emergency. Maybe they're trying to get to the hospital. Maybe they're late for an important meeting or whatever else. And it certainly reduces my tension by trying to… because my anxiety is not going to move the traffic any.

You know, I know that that's true, but we have to stop talking about traffic. Anyway. So let's turn a little bit more toward the Puritans. You've mentioned the Puritans a number of times and you teach courses on Jonathan Edwards. And what is it that they got, that they understood or they experienced that is much more rare in our day and age?

They actually spoke of experimental piety. Now, we tend to use the word spirituality today, and we also tend to use the word experiential, but they called it experimental. In other words, they were clear that whatever they heard had to be lived out in their life. So to give you an example, one of the Puritans that I really, really enjoy. In fact, I did some major research on him. He wrote this book called Looking unto Jesus, and he looks at Jesus throughout His life, every dimension of time. And he first begins, and he preaches what does the Scripture say about Jesus as a child, as he's growing, during his years of ministry, during the Resurrection, during the Ascension, during the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost, during the Second Coming?

And then he turns around and he says, “Now how do we live this out?” And that is half of the book, so there's a sense of equal nature. He first says, “I will lay down the foundation,” and he uses that language. “I'll lay down the foundation,” and then, “How do we stir this up so we can actually live out the truth, to say, ‘Jesus has died for me. Jesus sends His Spirit to me. Jesus ascended. He's at the right hand of the Father praying for me.’” So there's again that integration, the head and the heart. Because, you see, one of the things that the early Puritans didn't face was the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was beginning, but it had not really affected them. So for them, there wasn't this division that later came, where we exalt the mind as being supreme and tend to think, “Well, emotions aren't important.” The Puritans were in a much healthier place spiritually than we are today.

Oh. See, now that's really important. And it's very important for me to remember. The Enlightenment really did create this split between head and heart. That was a new invention for them, or a revolution, but it was a very, very unhealthy one. And so the Puritans lived before that time. So we're still recovering from that. Or we still feel the need to repair a rift that never should have been created, whereas they were living in a time before that. That's very, very helpful. Yeah. So this book you're mentioning, Looking into Jesus?

Looking unto Jesus.

Unto. And who's that by?

Isaac Ambrose.

The Simplicity of the Vivid Christological Experience

Ah, okay. Well, we have to talk a little bit about Jonathan Edwards. You've written quite a bit about him, and you talk about him. Here's something you wrote in that article you did for us: You said, “While Edwards’ soul soared in delight and enjoyment of God, upon closer examination, we discover the initial simplicity of this vivid Christological experience.” Tell us about it. What is that simplicity that he grasped?

For Edwards, the awareness that Jesus Christ has died, but Jesus Christ is holy. Jesus Christ… because of His perfection, there's a sense of beauty. And for Edwards, there is always the reminder of the holiness of Jesus, the beauty of Jesus, the transcendence, but also there's eminence. So it's not that Jesus is so far ahead or so far beyond us that we can't experience Him in our heart. That was the wonderful thing, that for Edwards there was both the bigness of God but also the nearness of God. And so there's that… John Piper is someone who today has tried to recover the sense of the beauty and the holiness of Jesus, because that was so foundational. And for Edwards, it really continued to guide him in recognizing both his sin and God's grace and mercy and forgiveness.

You mentioned John Piper. I remember hearing him speak a number of years ago, and he took on the common view that many Christians have of it's an either/or. It's either, “I explore this intellectually,” or, “I experience this emotionally.” And he said that's a terrible dichotomy. It never should have been. And that the more he studies and understands and explores intellectually, the more it stimulates his emotions and feelings, and the more he feels God's presence or God's goodness, it sparks his thinking to explore and to think about passages in scripture. And for him, it's not an either/or. It's that, in a synergistic way, they are propelling both of them up and further. And I think that's just a really beautiful image to explore. So it’s never a case of, “Oh, you're thinking too much.” No, you're thinking and you're feeling and you're allowing both of those to stimulate the other. But help us a little bit with Jonathan Edwards, because I know a whole lot of people try to start reading him and find, “I just can't get into the guy.” Where do we begin? Because he's not easy. He's not easy to read.

No. No, Edwards is not an easy reader, and you probably want to start somewhere before Edwards. He was brilliant and often considered the most brilliant theologian philosopher in America, not just the 18th century, but ever. Just purely, purely brilliant. Edwards was reported to have spent 13 hours a day in his study. That's a long time.

It sounds wonderful to me!

He would take an hour, usually after his lunch, to go for a horseback ride, and that was his primary exercise, and so he'd be out in creation. But I think an easy way to get into Edwards is his personal narrative. It's his own experience, and it helps you to see him in all of his humility and all of his vulnerability and all of his hunger and thirsting after God. It's very short, it's only 13 pages, but it gives you a context for Edwards. After that, there are so many sermons that one could look at, and it depends a lot on a person's taste.

There is a new volume out on Jonathan Edwards. It's in the same series as The Emergence of Evangelical Spirituality, so it's in the Classics of Western Spirituality, and it has a nice cross section of some of his letters, some of his sermons, and just some of his treatises, so it gives you an overview with a nice introduction. And I think that might be a good way for people who are interested in reading Edwards to actually use that as a guide, because of the introduction, and then each section—there are, I think, five sections to the book, where the topics are arranged around that theme, that gives a further introduction.

Now, you said it might be good to read. Maybe I misunderstood, but I think you said to read before Edwards. Are there people to read before Edwards who would be easier, to kind of get you into that Puritan mindset?

Well, I would say that Edwards is not technically a Puritan, but if you want to go back and read Puritans, I would say someone like Isaac Ambrose or John Flave, F-L-A-V-E e or Thomas Watson. Those are three Puritans that are easier to enter into. If you want to have other people to read around Edward, so around the 18^th century, oh, boy, you could read some things from George Whitfield. They were both Calvinists. John Wesley would be the other side of the fence. He was a Wesleyan. But they're asking some of the same questions about being born again. Conversion was a huge issue in the 18th century. That's one of the things that established the evangelical movement, as we would call it today.

By the way, you mentioned about Edward’s sermons. I think those have been the best for me to get into the thinking of Jonathan Edwards. So I have a collection of his sermons. I've actually read several of them several times. Those have been the most helpful and connecting for me. So I recommend that to a lot of people.

Yes. There’s an older Jonathan Edwards reader that was done. I think Harry Stout might have been one of the editors to that, which was probably… I'm not even going to try to date it, but it was a number of decades ago, which is probably what you have.

Yeah, that sounds familiar. Yes.

This summer, we have renewed our commitment to prayer, and our hope is that you'll join us. There have been times in history when God has led His people to fall on their knees in prayer and to seek His path and power in a concerted way. We're always called to pray at all times, but there are seasons when the circumstances are such that more intense prayer, more times of fasting and prayer are needed. And at the C.S. Lewis Institute, we've prepared a number of resources. We have a collection of articles, videos, recommended books, all gathered in one place, and you can find them at cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer. Did you catch that?  Www.cslewisinstitute.org/season-of-prayer.

All right, but we should back up even further. We've done this whole thing in the wrong order. Let's go back to scripture, a higher authority than Jonathan Edwards.

Absolutely.

The Encouragement of Loving God

So where do we find in scripture the encouragement of this side of experience? Because I think some might bristle at this. They might say, “Wait a minute. This is sounding dangerous. Sounds like you're getting into emotions.” So where do we look in scripture? Where do we see in scripture this encouragement of loving God, not just intellectually, but with all of our whole being?

I would say the largest invitation would be the Psalms. We have 150 prayers. And what's interesting is, if we think of different genres of scripture, so if we think of the difference between a narrative or law or Old Testament history, you read things in different ways. So you don't read poetry the same way you read law. It doesn't work. So if you take your analytical way for reading law, which is important for that, and then you get to the Psalms, you notice… you talked before about image. The Psalms are filled with biblical images, with word pictures. You start off Psalm 1. You have a tree planted by streams of water. What’s the tree? The tree is trying to show that if we are meditating on the Scriptures, we're going to flourish, and we're going to be able to live in all seasons and all challenges. And when you read the Psalms, not only do you have the language of the heart, but you have the language of poetry.

One of the things about Hebrew poetry is what they call parallelism. The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? That's Psalm 27:1. And the first couplet sets out the theme, but the second one basically reinforces it. And you might say, “Well, why waste all the paper to say that twice?” Because that's poetry. And poetry has a different agenda and has a different way of speaking to us. And so you can't read the Psalms purely cognitive. You're going to miss it. You have to understand the power of images, and images, the interesting thing about images, is that they work into our soul.

They're like parables. Why did Jesus tell parables? Parables have a message that often comes after you ponder it and continue to ponder it, even after you've heard that message. So if we were listening to Jesus talk about the parable of the sower, and then we're walking away, “What was he talking about there? We're all farmers. How does this make sense?” And the more we think about it, we say, “Oh, yeah, there's four different categories of receptivity. And sometimes we're not very receptive at all, and sometimes we're good soil and the word takes root, and it grows and it just deepens and expands within our life and faith.”

So I would say the Psalms are the largest invitation, but I think you can see other places. Again, Jesus is not just teaching for information. He says, “Follow me.” Well, what does following mean? What is a disciple? A disciple certainly has to think, but a disciple has to act. The disciple has to make decisions about how to spend their time, their money, their resources, their talents. And so I think, even within the life of Christ, we see, “Why did Jesus cry? Why does He display all the range of human emotions? He's crossing the sea with the disciples, and He’s sleeping. Why is He sleeping? Well, it's nighttime, and He’s worked the whole day, and so He’s tired.” So I think that those give us a pretty good corpus for experiencing, for noticing that our heads are important, but the heart is also an important part of that as well.

Well, this is great. You have shed a lot of light and given us perspective about this and to help us pursue much more of a holistic, integrated approach to our spiritual growth and our discipleship. I was so grateful that you pointed to the Psalms. Yeah, they're poems. And by the way, we're told that they're to be sung. They're musical. They’re songs.

That's right.

And if you're only studying the Psalms, “Okay, what are the facts that they're teaching us?” Well, after a while, they become rather repetitious. Praise God. Give thanks for God. Lament. Praise God. Give thanks. Lament. I mean, why do we need 150 of them? Well, because they're to be sung, and they’re to be experienced. So much of the Scriptures have poems in them. The prophets preached in poetic style. I have always been intrigued with the fact that the Book of Job, which deals with the most painful and difficult topic of life, why does a good God allow evil and suffering? It's told in poetry far more than logical answers. In fact, if we look for logical answers, we're disappointed in that book. But if the book is designed and shaped in poetry to help us grow in our experience of empathy and to be able to feel deeply, then it's an amazingly powerful book. But now I'm stealing the conversation, and that's not the point of this podcast.

Revelation would be another example.

Very good.

The biblical imagery that's used in Revelation, a lot of it comes from the prophets. And so you can't read Revelation in a literal way. Well, that's one of the reasons why I think the church has embarrassed us many times by predicting dates. “This has to be 1844. Well, no, that wasn't right. We'll have another number.”

Revelation was a dream. What do we see in dreams? Dreams are often filled with images. And then the image, as you say of the Psalms, it has that poetic flavor to it.

Nice. Well, I think maybe the end of scripture there is a good place for us to end our conversation. Although there's so much more we can say. But let me give you the last word. What advice, maybe on an application level, would you want to give our listeners? What are some things you would tell them to help them grow in this aspect of experiencing God and experiencing spiritual growth?

I think I would begin with saying God loves you and God desires to grow in a relationship with you. And it's not so much that we have to find a way to reach up to God. We need to become aware of the ways that God is reaching down to us. I would then say, read the Bible, and I like to read it daily. I know some people have difficulty developing habits, but I think the more consistent we are, the more helpful it is. But as we read it, what does it mean? What does it say? How can we live it out?

Maybe I can give you this example: This is from Martin Luther. Martin Luther, his barber talked to him once. Peter the barber said, “How do I pray the Scripture?” And he says, “When I pray the Scripture, I weave four different strands, like four different pieces of ribbon together.” He says, “The first part is, what is the instruction of this passage? What does it teach me? The second is, where does it bring me to a place of thanksgiving and gratitude? The third is, oops, where do I need to confess something about this? And then the fourth is, how do I integrate it to live it out in my daily life?” Those four questions—it works best with a single line or a single theme, but you can do it with a larger chunk of scripture. Every day, when I pray the Psalms, I pick a favorite verse for that psalm or one that spoke to me for that day, and I go through those four different themes. What does it instruct me? How does it bring me to gratitude? What does it remind me that needs to be confessed? And how can I live it out in my life today?

I think that's a helpful tool that we could use even as we're going about our work, driving to work or going to the supermarket or changing a diaper. Well, that's a little dangerous. But going through other activities, again, we can do these things as we're going through a day, which I think gives us a deepening appreciation for again, God is with us in whatever we're doing. So I hope that makes sense. It might be a practical tool for those of us seeking to grow in Christ.

Great. That's great. Well, you've given us plenty to chew on. Thanks so very much. Tom Schwanda, it's great to have you on Questions That Matter. To our listeners, we hope that all of our resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute help you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Until next time, we keep looking to the Lord to have us grow and experience Him in every moment of the day.

We'd love to hear your feedback about this episode and really all of our episodes please. Send us any questions or responses to this episode at [email protected]. We hope to see you again on the next presentation of Questions That Matter.

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