RECENT discussions of religious trends in this country have spoken of a marked growth in what has been described as “spirituality” or “mysticism” in opposition to the credal Christianity and traditional patterns of worship of the historical churches. The new movements — characteristic perhaps of a postmodern age — are individualistic and inchoate, offering various kinds of meditation, and focused on subjective experience and self- development. Christianity and the churches are, by contrast, represented as dogmatic and authoritarian and sometimes repressive, whether in Catholic or Evangelical biblicist terms.

Christianity, like the Jewish faith out of which it sprang, and also like the later Islam, understands itself as a revealed religion. At its heart is God’s self-disclosure in the history of a particular people which culminates in the single human life of Jesus of Nazareth in which God identifies himself completely with us, taking our nature upon him, coming down in his suffering and death to the lowest part of our human need.

To be a Christian is to find in the life and teaching of Jesus the clue to our human life. But it is not simply a teaching to be followed; the Easter victory of the Resurrection flows out in what is no less than a new creation, energised by the life-giving Spirit in the church and in the world.

“The secret is this,” wrote St Paul, “Christ in you the hope of glory.” Christianity is about grace, about a divine life, which redeems, renews and transfigures our human life. For this reason, if for no other, Christianity is true mysticism. We do not have to look to the esoteric inventions of “New Age” or the techniques of meditation in Eastern religions, though there may be things to learn here, to find something which Christianity lacks. It is already there at the heart of Christian faith and life in the language we find in St John and St Paul about “Christ in us”, and about our life “in Christ”. The Orthodox churches rightly insist that all theology is mystical theology, because it is about our engagement with the mystery of the love of God in Christ, in our creation and redemption and in being transformed into his likeness. It is this reality to which the Church witnesses and which is at the heart of its life.

The Christian mystical tradition is not a specialised interest for the select few but is the very core of Christian life. Contemporary charismatic and renewal movements have an important role in recalling churches preoccupied with institutional concerns to that central reality — though they could often profit from a greater historical awareness of Christian mysticism.

The English religious tradition includes many outstanding witnesses to this reality — in the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing; Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and the poet-priest Thomas Traherne in the 17th century; the Wesleys in the 18th century; John Keble and Edward Pusey in the 19th; and Evelyn Underhill, who wrote so profoundly on the Christian mystical tradition in the 20th century. There are many more.

A famous epigram says that the trouble with mysticism was that it began in mist and ended in schism. That was a recognition of the danger that subjective religious experience, if it is not anchored in what God has done in Christ, can easily divide and destroy the common life of Christians in the body of Christ.

Christian mysticism and Christian spirituality are not about giving rein to our feelings or our individualist concerns, which can so easily degenerate into sentimentality. On the contrary, they are about allowing our lives to be questioned, changed, transformed and challenged by the love of God made visible in Christ so that we may grow up in all things into him.

As William Law put it in the 18th century, “a Christ not in us is a Christ not ours”. As we live that out, we may well discover that spiritual growth is about a stripping-down in what can sometimes seem to be darkness and the absence of God, as our inadequate images of God are transcended by the overwhelming reality of the Divine Love. This is greater than anything we can imagine or feel or express in our limited human concepts, but it is that for which, as those made in the image of God, we were created.

Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe