Seeking the Moravian Way Pt.1: Embracing Mystery & the Fight against Certainty

If you call yourself a Moravian I am sure you are familiar with the inquisitive look that you often get when you tell people that fact and it is more than likely going to be followed by the question "What is a Moravian?" If they happen to even know that word at all than usually the response you get is "Oh you are the cookie people!" To which I cannot deny the fact that Moravians hold claim to some delicious treats.

The question "what is a Moravian?" tends to have deeper resonance when you ask it in the context of the spiritual landscape of today's world. Church participation continues to drop and more people call themselves "spiritual but not religious" than ever before. This shift in American religion can cause us in the church to ask some healthy questions and perhaps the best question we can ask ourselves is the same one that is most often asked of us "What is a Moravian?"

When I turn back to our history to attempt to answer that question I don't come back with a doctrinal answer. There is not one theological issue that separates us Moravians. What I come back with is a unique approach faith and spirituality. When I look at our uniqueness it is not the what of faith that is different for us but rather the how we hold our faith. Or to put it another way how we live our faith is just as important to the content of our faith.

One of the key aspects of this Moravian Way is an embrace of mystery and being ok with uncertainty. The writings of many early Moravian speak of the mystery of faith. They are not bound to the certainty of dogmatic and religious formulations but are ok with the mystery of God. These early Moravian speak of the Trinity as a family, Father God, Brother Christ, and Mother Spirit instead of debating the metaphysics of the incarnation they spoke of entering the Wounds of Christ as a way of God inhabiting all of human experience.

We Moravians like many Christians have not embraced these mystical elements of our heritage and for many years we have downplayed that aspect of our tradition because for much of the 20th century faith was equated with believing something with a high degree of certainty. In defining faith this way it became an intellectual exercise as opposed to something that required our whole being in community wither others. Instead of focusing on how we lived in the world faith became only believing a certain checklist of things.

When many Moravians described their experience of faith they did not seem particularly concerned about a checklist of beliefs but much more concerned about how the mysterious Christ shaped how they lived in the world.

So why is this important? Christians in our country today are facing a crisis of identity. We are living in a more post-Christian society each day. Churches are shrinking at a rapid pace and people seem less interested in religion. And those things scare a lot of people especially people in churches.

But here is the really interesting thing even though people may be abandoning religion their aren't abandoning spirituality. Pew Research tell us 44% of the spiritual but not religious say they pray daily and 92% say they believe in God. Perhaps there is still a spiritual need to be filled but many of religious communities aren't meeting that need.

The Moravian Way of faith might speak to this spiritual hunger. If we look back into our own history we will find that Zinzendorf, one of the most influential Moravian leaders, didn't have any interested in starting a new denomination or religion. He was interested in promoting a particular way of living out faith. A way that embraced embraced mystery, made a meaningful impact on the world, and was centered on the person of Christ. So maybe we should give thought to how this Moravian Way might find expression in a nonreligious way.

Zinzendorf and the early Moravians where less concerned with the certainty of faith and much more interested in the mystery of faith. We live in a world today where we divided ourselves with our certainties and absolutes. It can be certainty on politics, certainty on religion, or certainty on if the new Star Wars movie was any good. Whatever it may be we divide and categorize each other because we have failed to cultivate mystery, uncertainty, and unknowing in our lives.

Maybe if we turn back to our Moravian Way of faith we can focus less on preserving our institutions and our certainties and may we instead embrace the mysteries of our faith in Christ.

This is part one of a four part series on Seeking the Moravian Way where I will explore what it means to be a Moravian today in a nonreligious way. I hope you will follow along. If you want to posts emailed directly to you when they come out click HERE.