groups today devote more time to sharing and fellowship than cultivating spiritual
maturity. One specific first step would be to follow Ambrose’s counsel to encourage
people to communicate their experiences to others “for the advancement of holiness,
must not deny such knowledge to the body; Christians must drive an open and free
trade, they must teach one another the mystery of godliness.”^231 Efforts in this
direction could reduce the inordinate amount of individualized and isolated
spirituality and encourage others to recognize that they are not the only ones who
have struggled or conversely have had unique spiritual experiences with God.
Recovering a contemplative piety and attitude is the fifth insight from
Ambrose. According to him contemplation is “soul recreation” and therefore, one of
the significant ways in which a person can enjoy God. Ambrose refutes Barth’s
criticism of the elite nature of contemplation by democratizing it for all people.
Chapter 4 presented Ambrose’s conviction that heavenly meditation was one of the
primary spiritual practices for cultivating one’s relationship with God. Looking Unto
Jesus confirms the obvious importance of this for Ambrose and perhaps its popularity
was due in part to people’s hunger to learn how to meditate on heaven. Additionally,
it is critical to recognize that the overall contemplative focus of Ambrose was
constructed upon the premise of looking or beholding Jesus, which captures a central
theme of contemplation. Clearly this desire for heaven was not an escape or
withdrawal from the many dangers the English nonconformists faced in the
seventeenth-century. Rather they were motivated by love and since they had entered
into spiritual marriage with Jesus they longed for the consummation of what they had
already tasted in part on earth. Therefore, the practice of looking unto Jesus or
(^231) Ambrose, Media (^) (1657), 339. (^)