Can you measure spiritual progress?

Yoshi Matsumoto recently shared on Substack Notes how asking about "measuring spiritual progress" will get you laughed at by many Christians. As someone who has grown up in the Christian church, I think that Yoshi's absolutely right, and I think that it's a damn shame.

Matsumoto pushes back against this unexamined intuition, insisting that we can determine whether we are being re-shaped by the discipleship process by asking some simple questions, such as "How easily are you made jealous" or "how much resentment comes up when you are asked to give or to share?" Another commenter added that one can examine themselves for whether they are regularly exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), an approach I also wholeheartedly agree with.

This way of thinking about discipleship as actually entailing progress does not necessarily comport with the attitudes and paradigms which prevail amongst most Western Christians today. The contemporary Christian's walk with Christ has become so personal and ineffable that many Christians now fervently resist any attempt to assess whether one has indeed made any progress in their sanctification or not. That judgment is usually left to God on the Final Day.

I suspect that this resistance to the idea of "spiritual progress" comes from at least three distinct sources. While each of these three sources deserve their own in-depth exploration, I can't provide an exhaustive treatment of all three in this piece. I'm aiming instead to provide enough of a sketch to stimulate your own thinking.

(1) Contemporary culture's aversion to the idea of standards or excellence

(2) Jesus' teachings focuses heavily on repentance and starting at square one

(3) Christianity serves as a counter-discourse against magic

1 - An aversion to excellence

Our culture today exhibits an allergic reaction to anything approximating a standard of excellence, meaning that many are unwilling to claim what a person, process, or institution ought to look like when it's working well or improving. No vision of an ideal or of health can be advanced without it being immediately ripped to shreds by the crowd through a mixture of what-ifs and invectives.

Many today instead push values like diversity, equity, and inclusion which are purely empty ideals – diversity for what? Equitable at what cost? Inclusive of whom? And, of course, all to what end? By themselves, these values remain open and indeterminate, and thus cannot articulate any positive vision of what a person or group might be working to actualize. They serve merely as an empty container for either an unarticulated vision or a reversion to the most common denominator.

The idea of spiritual progress transgresses our society's norm against talking about norms. It does so by daring to suggest a definite vision of what one looks like when they are ascendant or flourishing. Such proposals today are attacked with an unrivaled ferocity by those who claim that the very existence of a norm is oppressive to those who do not conform to it or that the possibility of marginal exceptions invalidates the norm entirely.

This popular form of reasoning causes a downward spiral in which no course of action can be proposed because no course of action is perfect. Thus, most people have unconsciously adapted themselves to this discourse by accepting the idea that norms are generally oppressive and not to be lent much, if any, credence. Naturally, this makes it nearly impossible to talk about how one might assess the spiritual progress of one's self or of others, and thus each person finds themselves unmoored in an ambiguous experience of being vaguely spiritual.

2 - Repentance and starting over

The very idea of discipleship – to be a disciple of another person – includes the notion of spiritual progress. However, Jesus' teachings do seem to approach this idea from angles which appear to be in tension with one another. While Jesus tells parables which suggest that one can be more righteous than another, and thus more deserving of a reward from God, he also emphasizes throughout his teachings the importance of a repentance which starts over again.

Another way to say this might be that Jesus encourages us to always have a beginner's mind when it comes to growing in grace. Rather than assume that we've arrived, discipleship entails a daily practice of self-examination, constant admission of our need for mercy, and a self-perspective which neither focuses on the faults of others nor minimizes our own.

We might think especially of the story of the publican and the Pharisee in which Jesus praises the publican as righteous precisely because the man beats his own breast in grief and acknowledges just how far he falls short of God's standards of righteousness – he realizes his need for grace, and petitions God earnestly for it. However, in the story, it's precisely the one who praises himself for his "spiritual progress," the Pharisee, who Christ condemns.

We struggle to get a handle on Jesus' teaching here because it feels like two things are going on simultaneously – we must actually model Jesus by doing what he says ("if you love me, you will keep my commandments"), but we are also supposed to continually renew our own consciousness of our desperate need before God for mercy and forgiveness. We're constantly "back at square one," so to speak.

I try to reconcile these perspectives by reading certain aspects of Jesus' teaching as a critical response to the predominant ideas within the Jewish community of the day, and so I see the words and events of his ministry as demonstrating a paradigm which contrasts with the Pharisees in particular.

The Pharisees had seen that Judaism was a religion of law, and therefore they had set about mastering that law through the creation of their own rules and fine distinctions. They then practiced this law which was simultaneously more rigorous than God required, but which also had revealing blind spots, and consequently judged others who did not live up to this set of rules.

Jesus' critique of the Pharisees reveals how they have attempted to instrumentalize their relationship to God by rendering just the right inputs so they can get their desired outputs. This makes it such that Jesus' teachings have a strong emphasis on constantly admitting our own weakness in order to "start afresh" each day from a standpoint of acknowledging our need for God's help.

Perhaps then we're dealing with two shifts in perspective in which the internal experience of discipleship requires a daily cultivation of beginner's mind where we renew our cry for God's grace, but that this practice is precisely what leads to long term transformation which will reliably appear on a long enough time scale. Never resting the finality of these changes, we understand that they ultimately flow from God's patient work in us, and yet we nonetheless enjoy the benefits of becoming more loving, more patient, and more truthful people.

3 - Christianity against magic

Because Jesus invites us into a religion which is a relationship of familial love with God, Christianity represents an advance over paganism and magic which would instrumentalize our relationship to the divine by reducing it to a set of techniques for acquiring what we want through appeasement or coercion. Unlike in paganism, the Christian's relation with God cannot be reduced to a formula, and thus does not correspond in a scientific way to any set of inputs or outputs.

Religion in general and Christianity in particular serves as a counter-discourse to science today, for I believe that science serves as the modern incarnation of magic – magic sees the universe as composed of forces and intelligences which can be persuaded or manipulated through the use of certain techniques founded on fundamental universal principles. The magus and the scientist thus share the same spirit, of thrusting human desire into the unknown structures of the universe in order to master the elements and take hold of what they want.

Judaism originated this critique of the pagan orientation which sees gods and spirits as beings for giving you what you want because you've engaged in certain rituals or magic formulas. However, Christianity takes up and radicalizes this Jewish critique of pagan magic by introducing a God who becomes incarnate for the sake of love, and who ultimately even undergoes death on a cross to end the demand for blood sacrifices once and for all. As Hegel draws out for us, Christianity proclaims that God is also a subject like us, divided and open, not an impersonal force to be controlled or a tyrant in need for ritual appeasement.

This emphasis we find in Christianity on a relationship with God which cannot be instrumentalized creates obstacles to thinking about an idea of "spiritual progress." If it's precisely a relationship with God, then we certainly can't think about spiritual growth as something which is attained once and for all, almost like we're leveling up in a video game. The Christian view of the human as struggling against the flesh always entails the possibility of radical regress into evil, and thus every advance contains within itself the seeds of its own undoing.

In closing

How then should we begin to think about "spiritual progress?"

I propose that we continue to lean into the discipleship analogy and its relation aspects. Instead of approaching progress like gaining new powers from leveling up, we should re-frame our thinking to see it more like deepening and strengthening a relationship with another person. Relationships can be up or down from day to day, and thus are never finally achieved in an ultimate sense, but we all intuitively understand what it's like to have a better or worse relationship with someone.

Where we should part company with the contemporary understanding of "relationship, not religion" though comes when we realize how being in that relationship with God promises to transform us as people too. Both St. Paul and Aristotle understand this about friendships – we become like our friends. So, what happens if we become friends of God? Might we then daily be transformed to be more and more like Him? And if we are not becoming more like Him, what does that say about our friendship with Him?

Here we have a starting point, I think. Pick up our cross and walk daily. If you walk long enough, you will find that you've gotten somewhere. Perhaps you will even find yourself surrounded by those who have walked that path before, and who were changed by the journey just as you were. In the end, you will all be like the one who walked that road before anyone else ever did, and indeed, was the first one to cut that path in the wasteland.

My paternity leave will be coming to an end next week, so I'll be returning to full time work soon. I'm proud that I was able to publish a piece a week on top of everything else I had to do (hopefully you didn't miss last week's post over at my Substack). Thanks for reading along and supporting my work!

Some exciting things have been happening at Samsara Diagnostics, including an appearance on TheoryUnderground's livestream this week, as well as the publication of an anthology to which I had the joy of contributing. Also, we will be launching a reading group on Jakob Böhme, a Lutheran mystic who was influential on Hegel. Join us in Samsara Study Groups to learn more!