In a recent article, Phoenix pastor Erik Coonce critiqued the idea of a rule of life, with particular attention paid to John Mark Comer’s articulation of the idea. Unfortunately, his article is an excellent example of why the Gospel-centered movement actually needs concepts like a rule of life as articulated by someone like Comer. As I said in a previous piece,
You need the gospel-centered movement to preserve the gospel and you need the spiritual formation movement to apply the gospel to your life. These camps should be building relationships and working together, not side-eyeing, jabbing, and ignoring each other.
This article is full of side-eyeing and jabbing, trying to discredit the use of a rule of life in favor of obeying God’s law in the Ten Commandments. It describes subscribing to a rule of life in terms such as a “hyper-focus on individuality,” “bespoke lifestyle,” “choose your own adventure,” “your best life,” and concludes by saying that “[obeying God’s law] commands the heart while [a rule of life] thinks only of the hands.”
This is a serious misreading of Comer and other spiritual formation literature. The framing of a rule of life, spiritual disciplines, and spiritual formation as an individualized bespoke journey for your best life that doesn’t care about the heart is as far from the reality of what spiritual formation is as I can imagine.
There are three ways we can substantiate and legitimize this approach to spiritual formation: with scripture, with tradition, and with spiritual formation literature. I’ll provide a sampling of all three and I believe all three present an entirely different vision of formation than what is argued by Coonce in his article.
The first place to turn is, of course, the Sermon on the Mount. Why? The Sermon is where Jesus exegetes the Ten Commandments and reenacts the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai as the New Moses. This is one of the reasons why it’s strange for Coonce to point to the Ten Commandments. Yes, they are God’s natural law, and yet we have Jesus giving us the fullness and fulfillment of the law in his own teachings.
In Matthew 5, right after Jesus said that he has come to fulfill the law, he gives examples of that fulfillment, namely his teachings on murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, justice, and love. Taking just the first two—murder and adultery—Jesus plainly restates the Law and then makes two moves: a move to the heart and a move to the hands, so to speak.
In both instances, he says that not murdering and not committing adultery are not enough. Because if there is hate and lust in the heart, then that person has committed murder and adultery in his heart already. After addressing the heart, Jesus says how to obey those commands. In the case of hate, reconcile with each other before you make your offering to God. In the case of adultery, cut off whatever is causing you to stumble.
Jesus makes a three-part move in every instance:
Command, then heart, then hands.
Or we could put it this way: What, then why, then how.
Does Coonce believe that someone merely needs to “set their will to obey to the tenth commandment” in order to obey it? Even Jesus’s teachings don’t assume that one can merely “set their will” to obey his commands but must actually have a means of obeying his commands.
You see the same thing in Paul’s writings. Paul consistently uses the words like “training,” “effort,” “discipline,” and “self-control,” to describe the Christian life.
I do not run like one who runs aimlessly or box like one beating the air. Instead, I discipline my body and bring it under strict control, so that after preaching to others, I myself will not be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:26-27)
Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12)
For the training of the body has limited benefit, but godliness is beneficial in every way, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. (1 Timothy 4:8)
There are many such examples. One of the signs that the Spirit is at work in someone’s life is that they exhibit self-control. Lately, I’ve wondered if there might be some benefit in certain situations to translate—or at least communicate—that word as “self-mastery.” Part of having the Spirit of God in you is the ability to have control and mastery over yourself and to not be mastered by your passions and ruled by sin.
The New Testament doesn’t leave us with a set of commandments that it expects us to obey through sheer willpower. It gives us commands and expects that we train ourselves to obey them. While it rarely prescribes specific ways of doing so, the gospel writers give us the narrative of Jesus’s life, and we can see how he obeyed the commandments. We are regularly called to imitate the lives of Jesus, Paul, and other godly people (1 Cor. 4:16, 1 Cor 11:1, 2 Thess. 3:7, 2 Thess 3:9, Heb. 13:7, 3 John 1:11). Therefore, we can learn how to train ourselves to obey God’s commands from the practices of Jesus, Paul, and other godly people. This is where the idea of spiritual disciplines comes from in the first place.
Church tradition also gives us the wisdom of a rule of life. Obviously, the entire monastic movement is centered around the idea of a community sharing a common rule of life—St. Benedict is the most famous of these. And yet you don’t just see this in the monastic life. This is obviously a small sampling of instances, but I find them helpful and instructive.
Augustine, in his Confessions, wrote,
I must plan my time and arrange my days for the good of my soul.
He even went so far as to say,
It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it. It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.
Augustine is acknowledging the complexity of our wills. Our willpower will only get us so far because our will is conflicted. Truth alone cannot lift our minds and wills to the heights of godliness; we need habit to do that. It is habit that weighs us down and it is our habits that we submit to the Spirit of God and ask to lift with his grace. We follow God not simply in our brains but in our conscious and unconscious habitual actions.
If there were as many different natures in us as there are conflicting wills, we should have a great many more natures than merely two.
So telling someone to simply “set their will to obey to the tenth commandment” is to tell them to do something that they cannot do on their own because our wills are simultaneously marred by sin and the flesh as well as redeemed and being renewed in the Spirit. We must submit to the Spirit and train our bodies to bring our will more into alignment with God’s commandments until we learn to obey them by nature.
Augustine is far from the only person to say something along these lines. Calvin, also quoted by Coonce, says the same thing:
"It is necessary to derive a plan for ordering our lives from the Scriptures.
Now, the law itself contains within it that new life by which the image of God is restored in us. Nevertheless, because our lethargy needs both many incentives and helps, it will be worthwhile to derive from various passages of Scripture a method for the composition of life so that those who have a heartfelt desire for repentance may not go astray in their pursuit of it."
Calvin notes exactly what Coonce does: the Law of Christ is what contains new life. And yet, Calvin acknowledges that we need “many incentives and helps… for the composition of life,” in order to follow God’s commands. He goes on to say,
Clearly, the life of a Christian should be ordered and organized in such a way that he supposes that throughout all of his life he is dealing with God. In that way, just as a Christian will submit all his deeds to God’s judgment and assessment, so he will reverently direct his complete mental attention to him.
And to the messy will of believers,
There is a world of vices hidden in the human soul. And you can find no other remedy than by denying yourself and giving up concern for yourself and in focusing your whole mind on pursuing those things that the Lord requires of you and to pursue them only because they are pleasing to him.
Calvin acknowledges exactly what Augustine said: our will is messy and full of hidden vices. We must turn our complete attention to God and deny ourselves in order to submit our will to God and obey his commands. To do this, we need many incentives and help to order and compose our lives so that we can obey God.
Finally, Henry Scougal also said as much in The Life of God in the Soul of Man.
We should exercise ourselves toward godliness. When we have begun to employ the powers that we have, the Spirit of God will surely move in us and elevate these acts of the heart beyond the level of being merely natural. He will transform them into something that is in essence divine. After frequently repeating such actions, we shall find ourselves even more inclined to perform them, and they will flow with even greater freedom and ease.
The point is this: The will to obey isn’t enough. We also need ways to obey. It’s widely recognized in tradition—both Catholic and Reformed!—that godliness and obedience to God’s commands is not the result of sheer willpower but through training in godliness through spiritual disciplines that orient our hearts to God and open us up to being transformed into the likeness of Christ by the Spirit over time.
Finally, let’s look at the literature on spiritual formation. Are they hocking a DIY spirituality under the guise of a Rule of Life?
There’s John Mark Comer himself in Practicing the Way,
Put simply, a Rule of Life is a plan to follow Jesus. To stay true to one’s commitment to apprentice under him… That’s what a Rule of Life is—a structure of behavior to support us “when love falters,” to anchor our lives in something deeper than our fleeting emotions and chaotic desires.
He even dedicates an entire section to making sure people understand that a Rule of Life is not a barometer of spiritual maturity, a form of merit, Christian virtue signaling, or a way to control God or our lives. Being anchored in “something deeper than our fleeting emotions and chaotic desires” is a far cry from “forging a rule from the fires of your desires,” as Coonce put it.
Any good teaching on a Rule of Life will not be “so optimized–so warp-speed–that it abandons the illiterate, the handicapped, the simple, and the swamped-in-service-of-others to their lives of ‘spiritual mediocrity.’” Just the opposite. It will require us to slow down, not be warp-speed. And it won’t leave behind anyone of any disadvantage because it recognizes that everyone has particular needs that require particular things that are different than others. It will help every individual with their particular ailments figure out what it means to follow Jesus as them, not as some vision of a generic believer.
Comer, famously, is highly influenced by Dallas Willard. Willard writes in The Great Omission,
Well-informed human effort is necessary, for spiritual formation is not a passive process. But Christ-likeness of the inner being is not merely a human attainment. It is, finally, a gift of grace. The resources for it are not human, but come from the interactive presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who place their confidence in Christ, as well as from the spiritual treasures stored in the body of Christ’s people upon the earth. Therefore it is not only formation of the spirit or inner being of the individual we have in mind, but also formation by the Spirit of God and by the spiritual riches of Christ’s continuing incarnation in his people, past and present—including, most prominently, the treasures of his written and spoken word.
There are too many quotes from Willard that could be used, but the idea is simply that Willard sees spiritual formation as an active process where someone receives the grace of the Holy Spirit to submit to Christ through grace-filled efforts in order to be transformed into Christlikeness, most prominently through the reading and hearing of scripture.
The purpose of crafting a Rule of Life specific to each individual is not for the sake of crafting a bespoke spirituality that fits someone’s preferences. It’s specifically to implement practices that counteract someone’s fleshly preferences in order to submit them to the Spirit to be conformed to Christlikeness. The specific practices don’t exist to craft “your best life now” but to starve your flesh of its sin and train it in godliness.
Consider this from M. Robert Mulholland in Invitation to a Journey,
Left to ourselves in the development of our spiritual practices, we will generally gravitate to those spiritual activities that nurture our preferred pattern of being and doing. The shadow side of our preference pattern will languish unattended and unnurtured.
The undernourished shadow side will, sooner or later, demand equal time. Not having any holistic spiritual patterns for its expression, it will usually manifest itself in unspiritual behaviors that are both antithetical to holistic spirituality and destructive to the spiritual activities of our preferred patterns.
This is the value of a healthy level of self-knowledge. Not to obsess over one’s personality type and unique individuality but to understand one’s own sinful proclivities and develop a plan for submitting it to the Spirit of God to be transformed for the obedience of Christ’s commands. A Rule of Life is simply an intentional, thoughtful plan to do that.
Any Christian who has a regular rhythm of prayer and scripture reading, attends church, sits under the preaching of the Word, takes the Lord’s Supper, is in community, tithes, and is generous in other ways has a Rule of Life even if they don’t see it as such. All a Rule of Life is doing is giving it a name so that it can be intentionally crafted to follow Jesus’s commands and put to death the particular sinful proclivities each person has.
So, let’s take Coonce’s example of obeying the Tenth Commandment:
“‘And you shall not covet your neighbor's wife. And you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.’
Dallas Willard would say that transformation requires us to have three things: Vision, Intention, and Means. This mirrors Jesus’s three-part move of command, heart, and hands. It also mirrors John Frame's tri-perspectivalism: normative, existential, and situational.
The Vision would be understanding the purpose of the commandment. What is the commandment and why did God command it? We need to know God’s law and meditate on it day and night. We need to trust God, believing that his commandments are for our good and flourishing. It’s for this reason that I loved Peter Leithart’s little book on The Ten Commandments. It is the perfect resource for this. It gives you a vision for the goodness of God’s law and the ways it leads us to life. The Sermon on the Mount is the pinnacle of this. It gives us the clearest vision of life in the Kingdom of God in the whole Bible.
After we have a vision, we need to set the Intentions of our heart to obey God’s command. This is where Coonce gets to in his article, but it’s also where he leaves us. We must make it our will to obey God. We set our minds and our hearts to not covet anything that is our neighbors. We know the commandment and understand it, and now we must actually intend to obey it. And yet, if all we have are intentions, we will be reliant upon our meager and conflicted willpower to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil. I don’t know what else to say other than “Good luck.”
This is why we need Means to obey. Let’s assume someone is already doing many of the normal spiritual disciplines such as prayer, scripture, church, etc when we look at Coonce’s example of limiting iPhone usage. He says,
Now consider another, who sets their will to minimize their iPhone usage and to delete social media accounts Monday through Thursday. It is hard to think of many advantages beyond the generic.
Beyond the generic? I heartily disagree. In fact, changing your iPhone usage might be one of the best ways to obey the specific command Coonce references: do not covet.
Consider Instagram. Coonce is highly discounting the power of social media’s distortion zone effect. Instagram is a covetousness cultivator by its very nature—it’s the entire business model. To say getting off of Instagram does nothing to help someone obey the Tenth Commandment is to not understand the power Instagram has over our minds and hearts and how difficult it is to be free from it when you spend hours a day scrolling. Deleting Instagram might be one of the best ways to root out the sin of covetousness in your life. Not because deleting it will end it on the spot, but because deleting Instagram will drain the well of the sin’s resources and help someone be free from constant temptation and become accustomed to not coveting. Over time, God’s grace reorients someone’s heart to be able to recognize covetousness and overcome it more and more.
Instagram might produce covetousness in one person but not another. These people will require different things for different proclivities. This is one example of perhaps hundreds that we could think of.
And yes, as Coonce writes, “the creator may decide that they have matured beyond their impulses and no longer require the rule!” This is good! God wants a transformed heart in the likeness of his character, not simple obedience to rules.
Which is why Coonce is right to end with Jesus’s teaching, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it.” A Rule of Life is exactly that: a plan for losing your life—one sinful desire, one godly action at a time—so you can find it in Christ. To let the life of Christ infiltrate every inch of the life of the Christian.
As Calvin said,
Let this, then, be the first step, that a person should withdraw from himself in order to apply all the resources of his nature to service to the Lord. By “service” I mean not only what is included in obedience to his word but the process by which a person’s mind, emptied of its own carnal understanding, is entirely redirected to the will of the Spirit of God.