Two developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on Christian theology. The first was a deepening of the implications of historical consciousness, and the ...second was the impact of science on Christian self-understanding. Marx’s sociology of knowledge symbolizes the first; Darwin’s analysis of evolution symbolizes the second. These intellectual developments gave rise to various forms of process philosophy and theology. Within this context, a dialogue between Christian theology and evolution has yielded dramatically new convictions and practices in Christian spirituality, especially relative to ecology. For more than three decades Catherine Keller has been reflecting on the intellectual and practical effects that an internalization of the dynamic character of reality should have upon the practice of Christian life. Her text illustrates the basic framework of dynamic becoming that science demands, whether or not one is formally a process thinker. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an earlier figure who was more zeroed in on the phenomenon of evolution, which he encountered in a distinct way as a Christian scientist trained in geology and paleontology, as distinct from biology or genetics. Evolution explicitly informs his spirituality. These two different Christian writers, the one representing the imaginative framework of being as process and becoming, the other focused on how evolution affects intentional spiritual life, open new perspectives on the spiritual character of people’s active lives of work and creativity in the world that science presents to us.
Scholars and practitioners alike celebrate the Apostle Paul as an exemplar of Christian mission. But few emphasize how the ministry and practices of the biblical author developed amid incredible ...intrareligious conflict and relational wreckage. Embroiled in tension over doctrinal and ritual changes, plagued by vitriolic attacks on his character, and caught up in a web of splintered relationships, Paul offers contemporary people of faith a lesson on unity in diversity for mission in an age of hybridity. Embracing the “terrible and troubled” experience of Paul enables us to bring into relief a transformative hermeneutical strategy for negotiating new forms of religious life and multiplicity in belonging. This article will show how competing cultural and religious codes shaped the Apostle’s symbolic universe, causing violence, tension, conflict, and rejection, before reconciling in an ethic of love in hybridity. After making a case for the reclamation of the troubled textual Pauline experience over an idealized picture of early Christian mission, I will argue for the critical importance of Paul’s Damascus Road experience by narratively resituating it from typological “conversion” story to mystical encounter with the Holy Other that catalyzed a new religious imagination for cultivating a revolutionary egalitarian, inclusive pattern of religious life. Then, I will use Paul’s narrative from Galatians and his treatment of holiness in 1 Corinthians to show how ruptures in the Apostle’s journey led him through fractures and failures into spiritual maturity. By welcoming the gendered, classed, and cultic other into fellowship, Paul also found his quintessential theological insights: the new creation and life in the Spirit. Paul’s response to the invitation of the risen Jesus and his record of the missional life that followed offers missiology a way through monocultural approaches and theological exclusivism into a constructive spirituality that unifies radically different factions into one holy, hybrid body.
This volume considers two authors who represent different but complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation. The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an ...American situation that arose out of the Industrial Revolution and reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life on the East Coast of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although these two authors differ greatly, they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor, writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who became an organizer. The strategic differences between them, however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality and a radical acting-out of that response in two distinctly different ways.
Two developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on Christian theology. The first was a deepening of the implications of historical consciousness, and the ...second was the impact of science on Christian self-understanding. Marx's sociology of knowledge symbolizes the first; Darwin's analysis of evolution symbolizes the second. These intellectual developments gave rise to various forms of process philosophy and theology. Within this context, a dialogue between Christian theology and evolution has yielded dramatically new convictions and practices in Christian spirituality, especially relative to ecology. For more than three decades Catherine Keller has been reflecting on the intellectual and practical effects that an internalization of the dynamic character of reality should have upon the practice of Christian life. Her text illustrates the basic framework of dynamic becoming that science demands, whether or not one is formally a process thinker. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an earlier figure who was more zeroed in on the phenomenon of evolution, which he encountered in a distinct way as a Christian scientist trained in geology and paleontology, as distinct from biology or genetics. Evolution explicitly informs his spirituality. These two different Christian writers, the one representing the imaginative framework of being as process and becoming, the other focused on how evolution affects intentional spiritual life, open new perspectives on the spiritual character of people's active lives of work and creativity in the world that science presents to us.
If Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 as it is commonly thought, then he died before reaching the age of fifty after producing the single-most influential systematic theology of the Western Christian ...tradition. He did this with a formula: he internalized the thought of Aristotle as it was being introduced into Western Europe and translated into Latin, and he in turn translated Christianity into this Aristotelian language. One can use the principles of hermeneutics outlined in Retrieving the Spiritual Teaching of Jesus of this series to analyze what was going on as Aquinas went through some of the basic doctrines of the church in his Summa Theologiae. He laid out their contents by answering an exhaustive series of questions and responding to each of them in intricate detail. The model for each question and answer was drawn directly from the pattern of learning at the University of Paris. Although systematic and abstract, it also enabled an extensive conversation with the tradition of classical theologians and his own contemporaries. This may seem quite distant from spiritual life on the ground, but the method produced a clear understanding of the structure of spiritual life in terms of its goal and the means of attaining it. Aquinas's analysis of grace, how it enabled genuine Christian spirituality, empowered the virtues, and led to eternal life, constitutes a classic substructure of Western Christian spirituality that became all the more distinctive when Reformation spiritualities offered alternatives to it.
Western Monastic Spirituality presents three authors as individuals, certainly, but also as textual informants who, like road markers, represent a line of the development of a Western monastic ...spiritual tradition. John Cassian (ca. 360-435) helped bring the wisdom of northern Egyptian ascetical life of the late fourth century to southern France in the early fifth century. Caesarius of Arles (468/470-542), drawing on his own monastic experience and Augustine's monastic rule, composed a rule for a women's monastery in the city of Arles. Not many years later, Benedict wrote the most influential rule in Western monasticism, one that still regulates the lives of monks today all over the world. These three texts, when looked at serially and together, offer a theology of monastic spirituality, an example of a relatively short but comprehensive early monastic rule, and a present-day Benedictine interpretation of how Benedict's monastic spirituality can be summed up in a short present-day digest of his rule. Reflection on early Western monasticism retrieves some basic Christian spiritual values that should inform life today outside the monastery in a busy, secular culture.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) is a classic Christian author who spearheaded the Reformation and whose witness has relevance for life in the present-day world. Grace and Gratitude presents two texts that ...represent his spirituality. Because Luther wrote so much in so many different genres, the choice of only two texts provides a limited taste of his spirituality. But they open up a specific, central, and distinctive mark of his conception of the structure of Christian life. The name of the theme, justification by grace through faith, often spontaneously correlates with Luther's name and his theology. The phrase points to a key theological doctrine that centered his thinking; it lay so deeply ingrained in his outlook that it sometimes explicitly but always tacitly shaped all his early theological views and bestowed a distinctive character to his ethics and spirituality. The two texts are chosen to illustrate how the conviction represented by the phrase draws its authority from scripture, especially Paul, and was discursively analyzed in an early foundational work on Christian life, The Freedom of a Christian. These texts do not represent all there is to say about spirituality in Luther's thought by any means, and this part should not be taken for the whole. But the coupling of these texts penetrates deeply into what may be called Luther's Christian spirituality of gratitude.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) is a classic Christian author who
spearheaded the Reformation and whose witness has relevance for
life in the present-day world. Grace and Gratitude
presents two texts that ...represent his spirituality. Because Luther
wrote so much in so many different genres, the choice of only two
texts provides a limited taste of his spirituality. But they open
up a specific, central, and distinctive mark of his conception of
the structure of Christian life. The name of the theme,
justification by grace through faith, often spontaneously
correlates with Luther's name and his theology. The phrase points
to a key theological doctrine that centered his thinking; it lay so
deeply ingrained in his outlook that it sometimes explicitly but
always tacitly shaped all his early theological views and bestowed
a distinctive character to his ethics and spirituality. The two
texts are chosen to illustrate how the conviction represented by
the phrase draws its authority from scripture, especially Paul, and
was discursively analyzed in an early foundational work on
Christian life, The Freedom of a Christian. These texts do not
represent all there is to say about spirituality in Luther's
thought by any means, and this part should not be taken for the
whole. But the coupling of these texts penetrates deeply into what
may be called Luther's Christian spirituality of gratitude.
Western Monastic Spirituality presents three authors as
individuals, certainly, but also as textual informants who, like
road markers, represent a line of the development of a Western
monastic ...spiritual tradition. John Cassian (ca. 360-435) helped
bring the wisdom of northern Egyptian ascetical life of the late
fourth century to southern France in the early fifth century.
Caesarius of Arles (468/470-542), drawing on his own monastic
experience and Augustine's monastic rule, composed a rule for a
women's monastery in the city of Arles. Not many years later,
Benedict wrote the most influential rule in Western monasticism,
one that still regulates the lives of monks today all over the
world. These three texts, when looked at serially and together,
offer a theology of monastic spirituality, an example of a
relatively short but comprehensive early monastic rule, and a
present-day Benedictine interpretation of how Benedict's monastic
spirituality can be summed up in a short present-day digest of his
rule. Reflection on early Western monasticism retrieves some basic
Christian spiritual values that should inform life today outside
the monastery in a busy, secular culture.
