But despite the unrelenting witness of the Scriptures to the contrary, a surprising number of people are uncomfortable with this witness and try their best to spiritualize both creation and history: spiritualize the dirt and mosquitoes out of creation and then sign up for lessons in flower arranging: spiritualizing the accidents and train wrecks out of history by reducing them to dates in a textbook. To spiritualize in this sense involves the reinterpretation of life into something that is not comprised by cancerous growths, or difficult neighbors, or corrupt economics. It reduces the vast world of creation and the complex world of salvation to a few memorized Bible verses, a devotional book or two for inspiration, and a handful of truths or principles to keep us on the straight and narrow. By hook or crook, spiritualization insists on deconstructing a gospel way of life into a feeling or an idea or a project. Spiritualization succeeds when it sanitizes prayer into pious clichés and cordons Scripture off from the traffic….Spiritualizing the gospel means that we love God but not the world that "God so loved." (p.168)
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