Can I Evaluate Someone's Spirituality?
Part 1 of a series on thinking about what it means to be spiritual in Christ and how we can do that together.
A question about Christian spirituality.
I recently found myself catching up with an old acquaintance, someone I went to college with what feels like a lifetime ago. We’ve always enjoyed conversing I think, and I find that whenever I talk with this person I am pushed to articulate my thinking clearly even as I feel the barrier between us grow taller and thicker, like a dense hedge transitioning into a brick wall. To say the least, we generally don’t relate in a way that feels “eye to eye.” We were discussing this person’s work filling in to serve a church in crisis, one where they had gone through tragedy after tragedy, transition after transition. This small, rural church was wrestling with what it meant to “be the church,” and they were reliant on this person to, in a sense, “do church” for them. My acquaintance delivered the Sunday sermon with regularity and helped them get some ordering principles in place. Reasonable enough.
Yet, as this community came into clearer focus through this person’s descriptions, I felt a gnawing sense of unease. The community – the individuals and the group made up of them – seemed ambivalent about matters of God, preferring a service delivered rather than participation in something bigger. I asked some questions, trying to draw out a sense of coherence that wouldn’t quite come. I felt drawn to a question that is found in Acts 19:
While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Then he said, “Into what, then, were you baptized?” They answered, “Into John’s baptism.”
“Do you think they have the Spirit?” I asked after a short pause. The reply was straightforward: “I try not to evaluate anyone’s spirituality.”
The problem of evaluation
As the conversation continued over the following hour, we circled again and again to the question of evaluation. I stayed curious, and there was a sense of resignation in the refrain: this person would not evaluate anyone’s spirituality because that was not their job – it was to give the sacraments, teach the Bible, and help them be a church (which had much to do with their organizational bylaws). This person’s role was not to make a judgment about what was going on in the community or in any individuals’ lives. But the problem is that in order to act, we must evaluate.
In his book Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor notes that we realize our agency – our ability to affect change in the world around us – within the context of what he calls “strong evaluations.” Our spiritual intuitions “involve discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged.”1 We come in with frameworks for understanding how something ought to be, and these frameworks can be either explicit or tacit, sitting under the surface of our conscious awareness. As Craig Calhoun notes, any one of us only has the ability to act within this kind of evaluation: to act is itself an evaluation about what is good and what is not.2
In acting, my acquaintance was working within a set of discrete and complex frameworks that informed what it means to “act rightly” within the context of this little church. These frameworks created decision matrices about what matters and what doesn’t, and even inform this person’s stance that evaluating spirituality is wrong.
In his book Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology, and Social Practice, theologian Philip Sheldrake makes the case that at the intersection of belief and action lies a necessary evaluation: “The particularity of Christian spirituality means that we cannot separate it from how we articulate Christian belief.”3 Spirituality must speak to the central human concerns of human meaning, the kind of existential questions that animate Christian belief. Without this real-life, imminent meaning, Christian spirituality can become a dangerous entanglement of tacit cultural frameworks (those darn strong evaluations, again). Likewise, when an expression of Christian spirituality becomes unmoored from its foundation and acts without commitment to historical realities, it is at risk of losing its coherence and its sense of belonging within what might be called “Christian.”4
Why is this important? Every act and every moment is pregnant with theological possibility. Theology itself, I think, is really a question: what is the God-logic of what is happening in front of me? To practice theology (theo- God + logia - logic/rationality) is to participate in a strong evaluation, to assume that there is a set of criteria that can help us see clearly what God might be up to in a given circumstance. Spirituality, as it is lived out, is itself an evaluation, a holistic way of marking what is important and what isn’t.
It is, I think, impossible not to evaluate spirituality.
We just don’t like to talk about it.
Why do we shrink back from evaluation?
Evaluation is a word that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and I would imagine it might for you too. It conjures images of standardized testing and brutal, ink-stained papers that help us know (1) we didn’t get it right and (2) someone else probably did. Evaluation almost inevitably leads to a sense of self-consciousness, leaving us more aware than before of how different we could be or, in the case you were a talented student, how much better you might be than others. Whether you find your memories on the high or low side of evaluation, it probably wouldn’t take long to understand why it might not always be great to evaluate.
Jesus seems to agree:
Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
In his longest recorded public teaching, Jesus makes it clear that evaluating others carries the risk of creating what I want to call an evaluation game. As we evaluate others and act on those evaluations, we create an interpersonal standard by which we are inviting evaluation. Am I monitoring and micromanaging the tone and attitude of my loved ones, watching vigilantly for instances of sass or exasperation in order to “help them grow”? I will need to prepare to walk on eggshells myself, held to the same standard as those around me detect asymmetry between my actions and my evaluations.
Right evaluation starts with and leads to mercy.
Jesus commends the listeners (that’s us, folks) not to judge…or at least not to judge others first. Look carefully at the passage: if we are to avoid being mask-wearing hypocrites, we need to apply evaluations to ourselves first and act on them so that we can see rightly to act on behalf of others. As he concludes this saying, Jesus assumes that one who is able to see because they have removed the log from their own eye will be able to “see clearly” to help their neighbor.
In John 7:24, Jesus says that we are to “not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” Throughout John, Jesus frames himself as a “nonjudgmental judge,” one who is about to “judge with right judgment,” but chooses mercy instead. He did not come to judge, but to save (John 12:47).
There’s a tension here that’s important, and one that we can’t ignore. The implication of Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 7 seems to be that we need to apply our evaluations to ourselves in action, that is, to live our evaluations first before ever applying them to our neighbors. What’s more, this evaluation, as it’s lived in and through us, gives us eyes that can see clearly for the sake of others.
Jesus himself is the judge, but he judges with the right criteria and right seeing and chooses mercy. It’s as if, in the course of using his strong evaluations, Jesus is able to ‘cut to the quick’ and see his neighbors with God’s eyes, and in doing so sees who they are and what they need.
And they don’t need critique, although Jesus was pretty critical of religious leaders. The sick need a doctor, not an executioner (Mark 2:17).
Can we evaluate spirituality?
Thinking back over that conversation, I think my acquaintance is right and wrong. They are right in that we ought to restrain our impulses to correct, fix, or convict others based on our uneducated understandings of their life with God. However, I think this person is also missing something important: as you or I grow into a deeper and more full life with God, we begin to see people through a lens of mercy, and our evaluations (which happen no matter what) become about helping others be more whole in God’s kingdom. In this transformation – which is slow, gradual, and not linear – we become able to resist turning people into objects that can be manipulated and see them as whole persons to whom God came and in whom God delights.
That is to say: we can’t not evaluate spirituality.
The question is: can we see clearly enough to evaluate rightly?
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4.
Craig Calhoun, “Taylor, Charles (1931–),” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/taylor-charles-1931/v-1/sections/strong-evaluation-and-the-self.
Philip F. Sheldrake, Explorations in Spirituality: History, Theology, and Social Practice (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2010), v.
Sheldrake, Explorations in Spirituality, 3.
I’m going out for my evening walk now. Perhaps I will come back to this article again and have more insight as to what other comments I might make.
Your commentary was very good. We’re sure and order to judge rightly, we must judge the way Jesus would judge. His motive in judging the show how “superior”we are. Or is our motive to condemn where is our motive to restore how did Jesus judge the woman caught in adultery? All of these self-righteous Pharisees would have stoned her to death. But Jesus put it all into perspective when he said to them all you who are without sin me the first to throw the stone and they all walked away because they knew they were guilty themselves, but then he said to the woman you are forgiven. but don’t keep Sinning otherwise something worse may happen to you. There’s another thought here too, that we must consider. What are we judging, the person and their inner motives or are we judging their actions? We must certainly judge actions. which we can see in evaluate is this a good or bad action but since we cannot see inside a person, only God can then only he has the qualifications to judge the inner self of any person.