What is Spiritual Theology?
Seeking to hold together spirituality and theology.
“The goal, the highest good of the human creature, is that knowledge of God and prayer to God converge."1
What is spiritual theology? What might it mean to care about spiritual theology? Perhaps even more challenging, what might it mean to consider oneself a spiritual theologian?
Spiritual theology brings together two words, placing them side by side, that they might inform each other. The late Eugene Peterson once noted that spiritual theology brings together two pursuits that in recent centuries have often been torn apart. He said that spiritual theology “represents the attention that the church community gives to keeping what we think about God (theology) in organic connection with the way we live with God (spirituality).”2
Why is spiritual theology necessary? There is a sense in which the Church has been doing spiritual theology from antiquity. But why is spiritual theology needed now? Peterson pointed to the twin movements of rationalism and romanticism. James KA Smith gives us a vivid image for rationalism, the notion that what it means to be human is to merely be “brains on a stick.”3 It presupposes that what matters for human life is our left-brained analysis to observe objective facts. The Reformed tradition, which has worked very hard in good and important ways to seek to know and understand the truth, has also been susceptible to being subtly influenced by rationalism. This is satisfaction in merely knowing about God, getting the truth right.
And yet, our Western culture has likewise experienced a visceral reaction to rationalism that has been called romanticism. The romantics emphasized “spontaneous feeling and individual freedom.”4 What matters for human life is the expression of our feelings and desires. Peterson wrote that we were made by God to desire both intimacy and transcendence, but neither longing will ever be fulfilled through right-thinking alone. However much it may be ignored or suppressed, spiritualities in some form will always reemerge. And yet:
“a culture as thoroughly secularized as ours can hardly be expected to come up with its own medicine… the scriptural revelation is not only authoritative for what we believe about God and the way we behave with each other, but also for shaping and maturing our souls, our being, in response to God.”5
We need good and true theology. We need Holy Spirit-filled spirituality in the midst of our real lives. We need spiritual theology.
Kyle Strobel has written that "the spiritual theologian is one who always begins with good theoretical work in scripture and theology. But this is not enough. Rather, we need both practical and existential content to expound the theoretical.”6
To set out to be a spiritual theologian is like setting out to to be as wise and loving as Jesus. Who could ever measure up? Gratefully, the one seeking to be a spiritual theologian can take solace that the foundation of faithful spiritual theology is that Jesus has already measured up for us, and that his Spirit lives in those who trust in him.
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Eugene H. Peterson et al., Subversive Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 59.
Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 4.
IVP Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion
Peterson, Subversive, 35-37.