Christian Spiritual Poetry – A Culture Cultivator

We are created in the image of God, and He blessedly shared selected characteristics of himself with humankind in the process. Among those characteristics is the special excitement reserved for the parent of a newly born child. This stanza from my spiritual poem titled “Best Things in Life” hints at this great pleasure:

Feelings of joy know no bounds,
As He plants His fields of gold,
To harvest meadows of children,
To watch grow, in stature bold.

As His gaze turns to Adam and Eve, I envisage God experiencing this excitement and it soon turning to an expectation of an exemplary life, built using the special tools He provided. These special tools included the earth, sun, oceans, and animals. Thus, began the first and only, newly created worldly culture, in which God fully invested in humankind as His ruling creation.

This newly created worldly culture is richly documented in the inspired word of God throughout the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. Much of that inspired word is expressed in poetic form as divine, or spiritual poetry. In an article by Ashleigh Elser, written in a review of the book On Biblical Poetry by F. W. Dobbs-Alsopp, she says, “Chapter 2 lends new conceptual clarity to the absence of meter in biblical poetry, construing this absence not as a deficiency, but as evidence of the Bible’s participation in a poetic tradition associated with the rhythms of modern writers like Walt Whitman – a tradition we would now call free verse.” This review suggests biblical readers should read in wonderment, not only as to God’s perlocutionary instruction but with joy of the beauty of lyrical, poetic expression in many biblical verses.

Jesus continued using this language genre in the New Testament parables, as did the Apostles in the synoptic gospels, all making ample use of imagery and metaphor in free verse style. In these many biblical stories that are widely read, studied, and interpreted, lies the root of the Christian worldview.

Christian Worldview

Having established spiritual poetry as an integral cultural text within the Bible, let’s consider the availability of the Bible across the world. In a study by the Bible Society of the United Kingdom, it estimates that 2.5 billion bibles were printed between 1816-1975 and another 2.5 billion from 1975-2007. By some current estimates, more than seven billion have been printed. Wycliffe Global Alliance takes a deeper dive estimating at least some scripture is available to 7.1 billion people in 3,589 languages.

With such worldwide availability of biblical verse via published Bibles, generously populated with spiritual poetry, we can reasonably conclude that spiritual poetry, as a cultural artifact has always been a cultivator of the Christian worldview wherever it is read.

In his book Culture Making – Recovering Our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch succinctly explains the definition of the “cultivator” concept where he writes, “From the beginning, creation requires cultivation, in the sense of paying attention to ordering and dividing what already exists into fruitful spaces” (106). He goes on to explain that God is the original cultivator after starting the process by distinguishing one thing from another. “God does not simply create randomly or willy-nilly, but according to a cultivated plan, with the keen attention of a horticulturist or zoologist to species and their proper place in the created order” (106). One can easily imagine God staring at his creation with the practiced eye of the artist while holding his palette in one hand and a dripping paint brush in the other. He nods affirmatively at the arrangement of colors, shades, and textures in their proper place and says, “… it is very good” (Gen 1:31).

According to Pew Research Center, God’s painting includes 2.4 billion Christians worldwide as of 2020, leaving approximately 5.6 billion people who are of another faith or no faith. That’s a big pool of fish for the rod and reel of the “great commission”.

The cultural influence of biblical verse is most clear within the Christian community. Jesus’s instruction, however, is to spread the gospel to all the nations of the world, formally stated in Matthew 28:16-20. So, here we stand like explorers behind binoculars, looking out toward scary regions just beyond the edges of the Christian worldview with orders to move in.

Taking It Beyond the Edges

To determine how we may take this leap, let’s examine our options. At one time, there were few navigable roads in the United States supporting travel across our great land. By 2016, that had changed according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That year there were 8.7 million lane miles of roads available for use in the U.S. While a substantial number, a wood-be traveler might ask, “What about those by train, navigable waterways, and jet planes?” The point is that traditional travel by-ways have grown by 2023, from the leather clothed pioneers on foot, walking forest paths, to highways, trains, jet planes and even outer space.

Analogous to the growth in options for physical travel, is the growth in distribution channels available to biblical, spiritual poetry to act as a culture cultivator. We have books to be sure, in substantial numbers as detailed above. But if we apply the analogy to scripture, the Bible as a book becomes the leather clothed pioneer of today’s communication highway. It then grows exponentially with the reach of the personal computer, the worldwide web, and the growing power of social media. And what might artificial intelligence bring to the effort one day? New highways for the distribution of scripture and the spiritual poetry it contains are incalculable.

As we process these new distribution avenues, ground zero is the church and the broader Christian community of academies, universities, missions, charities, revivals, and music as they all set about bringing in new members while layering on new Christian cultural texts. While the Bible is the obvious golden gate of the Christian caravan, can spiritual poetry as a distinct cultural artifact outside the Bible’s bosom remain effective?

Spiritual Poetry as a Separate and Distinct Cultural Artifact

How might scripture answer that question? 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” There is nothing in that verse that tells us biblical verse must be confined to the biblical body to be an effective tool of God. This biblical truth is well served by the plethora of physical and virtual forums where biblical verse is studied, conceptualized, and interpreted in its parts. These forums are effective cultural texts themselves showing how the literal word of antiquity can be applied to today’s human needs, desires, and problems.

Furthermore, those human needs are interlaced with feelings and emotions in search of an understanding and encouraging partner. In that regard, the heart and soul of spiritual poetry is nothing if not beautifully expressed poems, intended to relate the poet’s feelings and emotions to those of the reader. As a writer of spiritual poetry, I can tell you the best of my poetry comes from a place where God is resident, and they are written on a template provided by biblical verse.

At times spiritual poetry will reveal love, forgiveness, and the beauty of God’s universe. At other times, it will express relatable fears, disappointments, even desperation. This emotional vulnerability renders the poetry authentic and credible. Spiritual poetry, whether inside the Bible or outside of it as a separate non-biblical cultural text, must make this emotional connection to engage as a cultural cultivator. In that context, it is fully capable of functioning as a stand-alone cultural artifact.

How are we to know if good spiritual poetry is doing the cultivating of which I speak? The honest answer is that you and I may never know. Crouch tells us, “There is no such thing as instant culture” (127). Further, he adds, “developing cultural traditions rich enough to do justice to every season and ‘every matter under heaven’, is a project for ages, not generations, let alone single lifetimes” (127).

The critical task is to continue the biblical tradition of writing it and use the then current means of distribution to reach an integrated world of Christians and non-Christians. Spiritual poetry can thereby remain in use as a tool to cultivate a culture of resiliency underlying our hard-fought prosperity in a fallen world. God himself will do the rest.

Works Citied:

Elser, Ashleigh. “On Biblical Poetry by F. W Dobbs-Allsopp.” Religion & “literature. 51.1 (2019): 195–197. Web. (Liberty University Library)

Couch, Andy. “Culture Making-Recovering Our Creative Calling,” Copyright 2008, Published by Intervarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, Ill, 60515; world wide web: http://www.ivpress.com

Barker, Kenneth (General Editor), “NIV Study Bible”, Copyright 1985, Zondervan Bible Publishers, Grand Rapids, Mi.