The Spirit And “Spiritual” Life
THE SPIRIT AND “SPIRITUAL” LIFE
But if what we have described above is how Paul basically understood “spirituality,” it needs to be added that for him such Spirituality was also continuously “spiritual” in the sense of the word more common to us, that is, in a life of prayer and devotion. And it is this aspect of life in the Spirit that gets short shrift in traditional Protestant theology, which tends to regard Paul basically as a thinker or a doer, rather than as a pray-er and a passionate lover of God.16
It is doubtful, of course, whether Paul would have easily recognized himself in our descriptions, nor would he have easily accommodated himself to our dichotomies. The gospel of Christ, which was the passion of his life, was not an abstraction to be thought about, but a reality to be proclaimed, experienced, and lived out, as one awaited its final consummation at the coming of our Lord. And it was to be lived out before God, and for one another.
Through Christ and the Spirit, God was now understood as a Father, and his people as brothers and sisters in the divine household, heirs of his glory because fellow-heirs with the eternal Son. Thus Paul’s primary metaphors for the church (family, temple, body) all evoke images of the most intimate kind of bonding between believers and their Lord and with one another. This is the “participation in the Spirit” (or “fellowship of the Spirit”) for which he prays in 2 Cor 13:13 and to which he appeals in Phil 2:1. When Paul could not be with a congregation in person, he understood himself to be present with them in the Spirit when they gathered together with the power and presence of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor 5:3-5; cf. Col 2:5) and read his letter.17
Such a bonding in the Spirit between the believer and his or her Lord and within the community led naturally to a life of continual prayer. Thus the apostle not only repeatedly prays for his brothers and sisters in Christ in his letters, but also regularly reports on such prayer, while frequently calling on his readers to pray for him and others as well. My interest in this dimension of Paul’s life in the Spirit, however, is not simply with the fact that he prayed continuously, but with the nature and form of that praying, because here, it seems to me, we get in touch with the real Paul in ways that conventional biblical theology seldom does, thereby missing a great deal.