The Contemplative Lutheran: Towards a Confessional Appropriation of the Christian Mystical Tradition

As a consequence of sola Scriptura, one of the things we as Lutherans identify with and stress is the Patristic tradition of theology. Being a “conservative Reformation” of the Western Catholic Church, our conception of catholicity includes the witness of the Fathers who have gone before us. For example, we can hardly read a page in the Book of Concord without encountering an affirmative reference to the Church Fathers. We read mention therein of Irenaeus, Basil, Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria, to name only a few. The Fathers of the Lutheran Church, from Luther and Melanchthon, to Chemnitz and Andreae, and further on to Gerhard, Quenstedt, and Calov, we see persistent and typically positive reference to the Fathers. Thus our theology is both preeminently Scriptural and eminently Patristic. 

As a corollary of Patristic Theology is Patristic piety. Now, this transformative piety centers on silence, stillness, and watchfulness, as standard or foundational to their life of personal prayer. In short, Patristic piety is contemplative. Church services themselves were contemplative. To speak in a physiological idiom, one key aspect of the Liturgy was to activate the parasympathetic nervous system response, which is to say it promoted a bright restfulness to the body and mind. It was not a sympathetic nervous system response-exciting ceremony, meaning it did not intend to stimulate the fight-flight response. In short, the entire Christian life of both communal and personal worship and piety was oriented towards contemplative states of being, i.e. of soul and body.

If we take the two parts of the Church’s liturgical worship, the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Sacrament, we see further evidence embedded in this structure that the Church’s worship is fundamentally meditative and contemplative. For example, firstly, listening to a sermon cannot be done effectively in a state of heightened sympathetic nervous system activation. People in the mood of fight or flight are impaired in the clarity of their consideration and absorption of what they hear. The sympathetic nervous system response specifically avoids digestion and assimilation of physical foods, and analogously the soul is similarly inhibited in its digestion and assimilation of the truths of the faith. The proper physiological state for listening is the parasympathetic, which is physiologically calm. 

Secondly, and regarding the second half of the Church’s corporate worship, the liturgy of the Sacrament is literally an act of eating and drinking. This eating and drinking is mystically set in the context of a ceremonial meal, a meal being paradigmatically a parasympathetic activity, i.e. one of resting and digesting. So here again we see that the aim of liturgy and ceremony is to foster a parasympathetic nervous system response so that the participant can most effectively receive and digest what the Lord gives in the giving of His Word and of His Body and Blood. A liturgy or ceremony that did not do this, but rather stimulated an excitement of the sympathetic nervous system response, would work against the very function of the Church’s worship to receive from God. 

The foregoing provides a strong critique of “non-liturgical” worship services that style themselves as “exciting” or are structured more like a pep rally. Constant innovation, loud noise, and a non-reflective atmosphere do not encourage the parasympathetic nervous system response, and so fail to foster or cultivate a disposition of reception and digestion. They may excite and stimulate, but this comes at the cost of an inability to internalize and assimilate. It becomes simply an item of memory, such as, “Oh, that was a great time!” But as a consistent method used over time, it does not penetrate the deeper layers of the soul that only states of bright calm can access. Thus transformation is hindered in non-contemplative liturgical environments. 

The Patristic approach towards the congregational way of singing included typically simple enough “chant” so that all could participate. This activity of singing, not incidentally, helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, with deeper breathing to support the air needed for singing, together with a lengthened exhale, increased oxygenation, and a diaphragmatic stimulation of the vagus nerve. All of these work together to establish an internal physio-psychological environment where people can be shifted out of the sympathetic nervous system response and into the parasympathetic nervous system response. Calmer states of being, then, enable deeper reflection and internalization of the theology being sung, thus enabling deeper theology to be present in the hymnody. 

Returning to the Patristic tradition, when we study the structure and rhythm of their patterns of worship, we see that generally their liturgical services were communal parasympathetic nervous system activities, ceremony being integrated in order to support and sustain this more prayerfully meditative environment. Their overall methodology thus was to cultivate environments of beauty and calm so that the bodies and minds of the faithful could maintain connection with the Word and with the Sacrament. 

As the foregoing applies especially to the corporate worship of the Church, the same principle applies to personal prayer. The Church Fathers, who gave us the theology that we affirm today, also stressed as essential to the Christian life, the cultivation of calmness and reflective attention. In the literature these are often called stillness (hesychia) and watchfulness (nepsis). Together with this is the practice of holy silence and the practice of the presence of God. These are considered staples of our renewal in Christ, for Christ being established at the right hand of God, and our lives being established there in and with Him by faith alone, our lives as Christians are to be characterized by such a heavenly disposition of freedom, love, joy, peace, and humility. Contemplation is then just the faithful cultivation of the attitude of sonship, being shaped by freedom to live the forgiven life, where we are able to rest in communion with the holy Trinity. What is being called the contemplative life is therefore not a reference to a cloistered way of being, but the art of living from the Gospel.

The Evangelical Reformation of Luther and the Confessional Lutheran churches stands on the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone. This doctrine frees contemplation from the natural tendency of man to try to approach God via a theology of glory. Contemplation is not rightly understood as a theology of glory, and the theology of the Cross helps to properly distinguish false contemplative methods from evangelical ones. For contemplation is rooted in the Word of the Gospel, that God comes to us. We are not ascending to God, although it ought not be simplistically maintained that all language of ascent is necessarily a theology of glory. Instead of ascending to God, much less the unknown, apophatic God. Christ has descended to us, and has sent His Spirit, God Himself, to indwell us. We are His temples, and therefore our evangelical contemplation cannot be framed as ascent but as reception, as rest, as communion. His life in us is what purges us and illuminates us and unites us. We are not striving to purge ourselves in order to make ourselves candidates for union. We begin with union, and union is what causes us to partake of God’s transforming energies. 

Now, because we begin with union and proceed by means of communion, this does not mean intimacy with God cannot increase. Far from it. Just as a husband and wife begin their marriage in union, their intimacy can grow indefinitely throughout their married life. It is the same with the Lord. We begin with His justification and adoption of us, His uniting Himself to us, and through this Gospel we grow deeper and deeper in our intimacy with the Lord. And so the holy silence we practice must be understood in this light, that Christ is already present in faith and that we are learning to listen into the heart of this silence. In this space of quiet and attention the Spirit calms our soul and heals the wounds caused by sin, and produces in us His fruit of love, joy, and peace. With this grace-born attitude worked into us by faith alone, we are enabled to walk in greater freedom of sonship so that we can glorify and enjoy the Lord more fully, and also so that we can serve our neighbor in a manner in harmony with the disposition of the Spirit. 

The contemplative life leads to love of the neighbor. For the contemplative life is not one of roses but one of suffering. Sin is the only true suffering, and so in contemplation our fallen tendency towards sin emerges as “junk,” i.e. the patterns of fallen attitudes and behaviors we carry with us from multiple sources, which must be healed by grace. The Gospel effects real healing. Contemplation, then, as a practice, is therefore a crucible of transformation, where the things the flesh holds onto are brought to our attention (watchfulness) so that we surrender these to the Lord. This process of healing often contains a lot of spiritual puss, and so as we are cleansed by the freedom given in the Gospel, we develop true self-knowledge, deeper awareness of the grace given in the Gospel, and become more available to love and serve our neighbor without projecting onto him our stored issues or subjecting him to our vices. 

Before concluding, it will be worthwhile to mention the relationship between prayer, meditation, and contemplation. The Western tradition of prayer and meditation has found in the rosary a very helpful school for Biblical meditation. Rejecting, of course, unscriptural meditations such as the Romanists invented on such things as Mary’s purported Assumption and Coronation, the basic idea of taking a Biblical “moment” (kairos), e.g. Christ hanging from the Cross, and praying a simple prayer (e.g. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) multiple times while holding this “moment” before one’s mind is completely sound. This combination of prayer and meditation is a veritable school of piety, and perhaps more than almost any other method helps to prepare the body and mind for contemplation. In fact, because of the reality and efficacy of divine communication, meditation on the Word of God is not simply a pious thought exercise, but an actual participation in the energies of the Word of God. 

(Of course, combined with a regular rhythm of daily personal prayer, the slow and deliberate simple chanting of the Psalms, Bible study, and devotional theological reading, the curriculum is basically full.) 

When one senses a restfulness arising in one’s spirit, it is good then to pause and thus to simply contemplate silently, sitting in the presence of God, listening to the holy silence. If distractions arise, release all tension and simply return quietly to one’s sense of restfulness in the presence of God, feeling and listening, feeling into the space and listening into the silence. Through repeated “practice,” contemplation becomes more and more part of one’s way of being. One works and serves from this spirit of peace and calm. Joy comes more easily and lasts longer, and love blossoms in the heart for God and for the neighbor. 

To conclude, study of the Church Fathers shows a unity between their theology and their piety, their corporate worship and their private worship. Essential to this was the practice of silence, stillness, and watchfulness, what we are here calling contemplation. We have seen how this is connected to physiology, and how even the liturgical, corporate worship of the Church is structured to facilitate a contemplative environment. Since we stand in solidarity with the Catholic and Lutheran Fathers in our corporate worship, having made sure to have purged out elements that were inconsistent with the doctrine of justification, we as Confessional Lutherans ought also to assess and inform our piety in light of the Patristic and Lutheran Fathers. The practice of silence, stillness, and watchfulness are particularly important in our day and age where no one slows down to rest in the Lord and digest His Word. We are addicted to restless disputation and theological speculation, if we bother to think about matters of faith at all. By returning to the practices of our Fathers, held and reformed where needed in light of the Gospel, ever maintaining vigilance regarding fidelity to our Confessions, we will be able not only better to communicate the Gospel in its purity, but also in its purifying power, so to maintain environments, both internal and external, that support the ever deepening personal and communal transformation that the Gospel works in us by faith.