Renewing Theology

How do we reestablish a living relationship between academic theology and the lives of Christians in the world outside the university gates? How do we reopen that vital circulation between the three elements that Friedrich von Hügel listed as integral to any living religion: the intellectual element, the historical-institutional element, and the “mystical-volitional” element, in which “religion is rather felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than analyzed, is action and power, rather than external fact or external verification.” Since the Enlightenment, theologians have tended to focus their energy on bringing the first two elements (intellectual and historical-institutional) into contact. Their worthy aim was to counter the growing suspicion that religion, particularly as communicated through historical traditions and lived out in concrete social institutions, simply cannot have an “intellectual element,” that at the end of the day irrationality or mere opinion rules the minds of believers. Without denying the importance of that challenge, the conviction that guides this book is that it must be met along with the second, and that means by tapping the “mystical-volitional” element of religion. The two tasks are not opposed, or even unconnected. Far from threatening to render faith even more “subjective” and “irrational,” an appeal to the experience of the divine, as articulated in spiritual and/or mystical traditions delineates an important locus from which to defend the cognitive integrity and relevance of religious faith.

Thus, this is a book on spirituality and theology. In modernity, it is the genre of spirituality that has largely taken over the task of proposing “an art of living.” Its separation from theology has been bemoaned for at least seventy years, and many contemporary theologians have continued to insist on the need to reintegrate spirituality into the practice and results of theology. Yet, it is not easy to see how this reintegration will happen, since the division is not just a terminological one that can be overcome at the whim of the academic wordsmith. Rather, as I argue below, the division between spirituality and theology flows from, reflects, and reinforces the social and cultural conditions of modernity. It cannot be overcome by theory alone, but by a new praxis, both of doing theology and of practicing spirituality, an ecclesial praxis that is both individual and social-political. As a propaedeutic to this more sweeping and challenging task, this book undertakes an analysis of how spiritual traditions can have, and indeed have had, an impact on the work of academic theology.

This task is more manageable. For one thing, we have at our disposal the fruits of over a century of sustained historical scholarship focused on Christianity’s spiritual traditions. We have critical editions and excellent secondary works that introduce those past masters who strove to lure men and women into theology as a radically transformative and deeply satisfying way of life. We can and should learn from them, for the works of the Spirit are at once life-givingly new, and yet also best perceived from the vantage of the long history of that Spirit’s presence in and to history.

It is in part this critical retrieval of spiritual traditions, along with the great interest in spirituality in both academy and surrounding culture today, that have made us so aware over the past several decades of the need to reestablish a living circulation between spirituality and academic theology. Yet the need both to reconfigure the practice and contents of academic theology, and also to reintegrate spirituality and academic theology have been felt for much longer, even if it was not named in these precise terms.