Thoughts on Sabbath: Contentment

One of the greatest achievements in life is being content to be God's. This is the unburdened story everyone longs for. It cannot be grabbed or bought, but simply hoped and trusted.

Bringing Together Theology and Spiritual Formation

A goal of [the early Church’s method for interpretation of the Bible]—and one can debate about how successful these efforts were—was to read a passage of Scripture not merely in isolation, but against the backdrop of the entire biblical drama, from Genesis to Revelation. . . . Furthermore, there was a strong belief that not only did the entire story of Scripture hang together, but each part also had abiding relevance for the contemporary Church, bringing edification, challenge, and direction. . . .Christian practices were always seen as growing out of these readings, since the biblical horizon, rather than their own, was meant to shape their lives and expectations. (Chan, A Spiritual Theology)

These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! (1 Cor. 10:11-12)

The connection between theology and formation is tied to how we read the Bible. The ancient method of having several readings of the same passage shows historically the Christian approach to the Bible needs to be holistic as well as focused, and livable as well as understandable. The de-emphasis and even loss of the holistic and livable way of interpreting the Bible has, in turn, threatened to make Christian spiritual formation focused to the point of being compartmentalized and easily understood without being part of normal human life.
In an effort to keep the Bible out of the hands of critics and scientists, Christians adopt the idea that human life is divided into pieces. The “spiritual life” is higher and greater and beyond normal mortal existence. While there may be some truth to this, what has happened is that the “spiritual life” is now somehow unrelated to normal life. We have “protected” the spiritual life, but made it less accessible and even irrelevant to normal human existence. Our faith is no longer intimately tied to our theology and our knowledge, but is just something we sincerely believe and treasure. We have held it above the rabble and noise and danger of politics, biblical criticism, and scientific analysis, but have succeeded in taking it away from the people and the areas that need to wrestle and question it to gain greater understanding. Spiritual formation has to fight from being held above and beyond the normal human life of politics, scientism, and biblical criticism by entering into theological discussion that will inform people living normal human lives among these entities.
  Since theology and spiritual formation are inescapably linked, theology must be brought into normal human existence and not held above and beyond it. One way to bring theology “down” is to read the Bible holistically. We must embrace the “storied” nature of the Bible, looking for narrative and its key feature as we seek to read it. In the midst of the story, we must learn how to drink deeply in elements of story like poetry, metaphor, plot, characterization, protagonists/antagonists, and context. These are more than a packaging to a “spiritual” truth. We must realize that within the telling of the story there is as much truth as in the principles that support and drive the story. In the gospels, for instance, it is not only the content and accomplishments of Jesus’s ministry that need our attention, but the manner and way that he went about ministering to people.

     Another way to bring theology into human life is to read the Bible as if the people in it were people like you or me. They must not be isolated by the historical understanding or their context, but must be translated by that historical understanding. Moses, Paul, Mary, and even Jesus to some degree must become the kind of people that we can relate to and grow into. What they thought and felt must become possible for us to think and feel. What they did must become something we can do. How they related to each other must become how we can relate. This involves careful analysis and increased understanding of their life and times, but also involves a great deal of imagination and pondering to really see them as people like us and not just mythical characters locked up in a book. Lectio divina and Ignatian meditation on the Bible can be effective methods to open up the imagination and make the Bible livable as well as understandable. We learn to really see the people we read about and really think and feel what they thought and felt through a Spirit-guided openness to the text that brings together analysis of the text and synthesis into normal human life.