Glimpsing Glory: Theology, Worship and Spirituality
Studying theology sustains our sense of wonder. It creates in us a desire to explore and understand things better, partly by intimating how much more there is to discover. An experience of wonder ‘momentarily suspends habitual ways of looking at the world and instead lures people into new and creative engagement with their surroundings.’ It makes us receptive to rethinking and reimagining the life of faith.
Of course, we don’t experience this sense of wonder on our own; others help us to share in their experience and, thus, enrich ours. Michael Mayne (1929–2006), a former dean of Westminster Abbey in London, is one of many to note the importance of individuals such as theologians and poets in helping us to expand our sense of wonder. He encourages his readers to ‘listen with your full attention to those who, as it were, touch your sleeve and invite you to see what the landscape and the journey look like to them. And most especially those who have a reverend and infectious wonder.’
Mayne’s advice is to be taken seriously. I remember my sense of delight, a year after I first began to study theology, in reading some words by Karl Barth in which he described the intellectual excitement of being a theologian. Eberhard Busch’s biography of Barth had just appeared in English translation and provided an account of a lecture Barth gave in Paris in April 1934, setting out his vision of theology:
Of all disciplines, theology is the fairest, the one that moves the head and heart most fully, the one that comes closest to human reality, the one that gives the clearest perspective on the truth which every discipline seeks. It is a landscape like of those of Umbria and Tuscany with views which are distant and yet clear.
Like any good theologian, Barth acted as a signpost pointing to what he had discovered in the hope that others might find it as well. Barth ‘touched my sleeve’ and showed me what the theological landscape and journey looked like, and felt like, to him. I shared, and still share, his sense of wonder at the intellectual and imaginative scope of theology, expressed in his hope that the theologian’s work should be wholly governed by a ‘logic of wonder’.
Barth’s image of theology as a rich landscape helps us to grasp that investigating its many features expands our vision of the world. In his The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), Henry Miller, too, offers a lyrical account of how exploring the wild landscape of Greece on the eve of the Second World War challenged his ‘false, restricted life’ and opened up a new appreciation of the world and his place within it: ‘The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.’ That’s what happened to me as I explored the landscape of my new faith, hanging out with fellow travellers from the past and present and absorbing their wisdom.
Theology engages our minds, hearts and imaginations. It helps us to make sense of our world and our lives. It engages with the great questions of human happiness and wellbeing and it allows us to see reality in a new way. Theology is about stepping into an overarching narrative and finding our place within this grand story – not one that we have invented but one we have discovered along with others before us, who can enrich our own vision from their experience and reflections.
Wonder creates a gateway into a multilayered understanding of our world, causing us to look at it with sustained attention as we realize it possesses greater depth than we realized. Many know the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends their understanding and hints at something beyond the horizons of their knowledge. Philosophy, religion and science can all be traced back to an experience of wonder that opened our minds and hearts to explore new territories and ask fresh questions.
I know scientists who believe that their calling came from an overwhelming experience of awe in the solemn stillness of a night sky or a sense of astonishment at the diversity of life forms in the oceans. Something similar happened to me back in the early 1960s. Over a period of several nights, I had looked through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter slowly rotating around the giant planet. I had seen the fuzzy patches of light that I knew were distant galaxies far beyond our own. And I wanted to know more, to go deeper into the fabric of this astonishing universe into which I found myself thrown. So I decided that I would become a scientist.
Studying Albert Einstein during my first year as a chemistry undergraduate opened my eyes to the remarkable ability of quantum theory to make sense of our world. Einstein spoke of a sense of ‘rapturous amazement’ at being able to identify the laws of nature that governed the cosmos. Yet Einstein was also clear that we could never fully perceive the immensity of our universe. What little we can observe points to a far greater unseen reality that lies beyond our capacity to grasp and hold.
Einstein highlights the point we noted earlier: that a sense of wonder at the universe often leads to a desire to study it and appreciate it in greater depth. It is as if this sense of wonder or amazement expands our minds, making us receptive to more profound ways of understanding things. Psychologists such as Dacher Keltner (b. 1962) tell us that the experience of awe or wonder is good for us. It directs our attention away from our own preoccupations, it helps us to realize that we are part of something greater than ourselves and it makes us more generous towards others. A sense of wonder opens us up to new intellectual possibilities as we realize the limiting effect of mere theories.
The same goes for theology. I know theologians whose intellectual journeys were triggered by a sense of wonder, evoked by worship, which seemed to point to a greater reality than they had yet encountered. Grasping the beauty of God, or the intellectual richness of Christianity, makes us want to understand God and the Christian faith better. A primal desire for God sets off a cascade of related longings, including a yearning to understand more about God. It’s a great motivation for the study of theology!
Back in the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury coined a phrase that expresses this point neatly: ‘fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding)’. The nature of faith is such that it wants to go deeper and understand what is believed. Knowing God leads to a desire to know more about God, to expand our vision of God both intellectually and imaginatively. We want, to use a phrase from C. S. Lewis, to go ‘further up and further in’ to the Christian landscape.
Yet the link between wonder and theology is more complex than this suggests. It is certainly true that many find an experience of religious wonder to be intellectually transformative, in that it calls into question the adequacy of existing ways of thinking. An expanded vision of reality can thus arise. Yet this same expanded vision of reality can help sustain a sense of wonder over time, partly by helping us to understand it and recapture its significance. T. S. Eliot is one of many to point out that we can have an experience but fail to see its meaning. Theology gives us a framework to understand the meaning of what we experience. C. S. Lewis, for example, interprets the human experience of yearning for fulfilment as our intuitive realization of the basic human need for God, who alone can satisfy our deepest desires.
In his reflections on the ‘Brave New World’ of modern Western culture, Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) suggested that human beings have an ‘almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ Maybe that’s why the spiritual writer Thomas Merton (1915–68) tells us that we need to refocus, to find out how we can liberate ourselves from captivity to the world around us through a ‘quieting and ordering’ so that God can ‘find us’ and ‘take possession of us’. We are indebted to the French spiritual philosopher Simone Weil for one of the most insightful discussions of the proper cultivation of attentiveness towards God.
Weil’s best-known work is Attente de Dieu (1950), traditionally translated into English as ‘Waiting for God’. The French original, however, is better translated as ‘Attentiveness towards God’. Weil’s concern is about becoming receptive and open to the truth: ‘Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.’ It is a readiness to receive, an anticipation of the advent of truth, a sense of expectation of encounter with something worthwhile and potentially enriching and transformative.
Weil’s discussion of attentiveness, however, is not primarily practical. It’s not as if she intended to provide a list of helpful tips for self-improvement. For Weil, attentiveness must be recognized as a moral, even theological, obligation. Attentiveness towards God is a recognition of our emptiness and our inability to be self-sufficient. We look towards God with a sense of hope and anticipation because God is both the enabler and the goal of our quest for meaning and truth.
Let’s turn from what might seem to be abstract theological reflection to a direct engagement with the beauty of nature informed by a theological lens: the doctrine of creation. It’s long been recognized that creation is a pointer to the Creator, a visible and tangible expression of the nature of God. The seventh-century Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662) was well aware of this interplay between theology and the contemplation of nature:
So the soul flees toward the intellectual contemplation of nature, as to the inside of a Church and to a place of peaceful sanctuary . . . And there it learns to recognize the essential meanings of things as if through the readings from Holy Scripture.
The medieval theologian Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–74) followed in the tradition of Francis of Assisi by regarding the created order as ‘as a means of self-revelation so that, like a mirror of God or a divine footprint, it might lead us to love and praise our Creator.’ It is usual for Christians to become attentive to the vastness and intricacy of the natural world in the belief and expectation that it might help us to grasp at least something of the beauty and glory of God.
The patient, respectful and disciplined attentiveness towards nature commended by Bonaventure is neatly expressed by Henry Miller: ‘The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.’ The English poet Thomas Traherne (1636–74) offers us perhaps one of the finest examples of a theologically attentive reading of the natural world. Traherne anticipates Miller’s attentiveness to its intricacy yet makes explicit theological connections that go far beyond a surface reading of natural diversity and complexity:
You never Enjoy the World aright, till you see how a Sand exhibiteth the Wisdom and Power of God: And Prize in evry thing the Service which they do you, by Manifesting His Glory and Goodness to your Soul, far more than the Visible Beauty on their Surface, or the Material Services, they can do your Body.
As Traherne and other theologically informed poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins point out, it is not enough to appreciate the beauty of nature or the benefits that the natural world can provide for human comfort and survival; we need to go beyond and beneath a surface reading of nature and study it as a set of signs pointing to God and illuminating the human situation. Theology provides us with a key for interpreting those signs.
Michael Mayne is particularly interesting on this. He wrote of his sense of wonder in the presence of nature while spending a month living amidst the stunning landscape of the Swiss Alps:
My subject is wonder, and my starting point is so obvious it often escapes us. It is me, sitting at a table looking out on the world. It is the fact that I exist, that there is anything at all. It is the givenness that astonishes: the fact that the mountains, the larch tree, the gentian, the jay, exist, and that someone called me is here to observe them.
Mayne’s reflections on the astonishing reality of individual human existence models a theologically informed attentiveness to the natural world that allows us to discern its details and depths. When properly used, theology renders the natural world transparent to the divine and thus allows us to see what really matters in life.
The way that we see something also determines how we value it. Theology gives us a lens to view the natural world not as an object for exploitation but as God’s creation, which has been entrusted to us for safekeeping. Once the natural order is perceived in this way, we realize the ethical imperative of caring for the creation not simply to ensure the future of humanity but also because we are responsible for it.
Earlier in this chapter, I explored the importance of wonder and awe in human life, drawing on the work of the psychologist Dacher Keltner. In identifying what he calls the ‘elicitors’ of awe, Keltner pointed to evidence that this could include an experience of God, a grand vista, and ‘the breadth and scope of a grand theory’. As I discovered for myself, the conceptual capaciousness of such a ‘grand theory’ or ‘big picture’ draws us in to explore it and holds us once we have embraced it.
We need to experience this sense of wonder at the scope of Christian theology. I learned it through reading Barth. There are others who can help us – such as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy L. Sayers. When lecturing on theology at Oxford, I often reflected on Christ’s summary of the first commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ (Mark 12.30). Every faculty we possess is caught up in the process of loving God and being transformed by this encounter and experience. This transformation extends to the human mind (Rom. 12.2) as its vision is enlarged by grace to accommodate more of the vast reality of God.
Like many teenagers growing up in the late 1960s, I found myself attracted, as I mentioned earlier, to the intellectual vision of Marxism. There were several reasons for this. For a start, it placed me – or so I thought back then – on the right side of history. It set out a series of social and political goals that I admired then. But Marxism was not a smorgasbord of disconnected ideas; it offered a coherent world view that integrated these ideas within a grander vision of the world. Once you stepped inside this big picture, its specific values and goals followed naturally.
The Marxist thinker I came to admire most – and still read today – was the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who made a distinction between those who were drawn to Marxism because of its social and political agendas and those who were attracted to it on account of its intellectual appeal. For Gramsci, there was a danger that Marxism would lose touch with intellectuals and simply become a political movement defined by allegiance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
For Gramsci, Marxist beliefs and values are grounded in and sustained by the Marxist ‘grand theory’ or big picture. Many embrace this vision of reality because they find it intellectually compelling and imaginatively exciting. I have experienced the magnetism of its appeal myself! Perhaps more importantly, I now know many others who have been drawn to Christianity for the same reason. One of the roles of theology is to articulate the Christian grand theory so that its luminous intellectual and imaginative vision can be seen and appreciated. Theology aims to help us to love God with all our minds.
Yet Gramsci makes a further point that is important theologically: the category of ‘intellectuals’ extends far beyond the academy. Gramsci points to individuals who were embedded in the wider social fabric who could grasp and interpret Marxist ideas and apply them to their political and social situations. Politicians, journalists, trade unionists and peasants all played an important intellectual role in reshaping public thinking along Marxist lines and in interpreting and applying ideas to wider society. These ‘organic intellectuals’, to use Gramsci’s term, were rooted in culture, capable of grasping the Marxist vision and applying it to their local situations.
Many early Christian writers were ‘organic theologians’, to adapt Gramsci’s term, in that they could see how the Christian gospel was to be interpreted and applied to their congregations. They wrote and reflected from within the community of faith – not from above it and certainly not from outside it. The rise of universities may have created a new style of academic theology, yet this development does not in any way detract from the importance of the ‘organic theology’ that was characteristic of this early period in Christian history. In fact, it continues to this day and remains important and influential, even if it is not widely known by this name.
Parish clergy function as organic theologians through their preaching, helping to sustain a sense of identity and significance within their congregations. So do popular Christian writers, such as G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers and Marilynne Robinson, who are able to interpret Christian ideas and express them in the language of their communities of readers. The many Christian websites and blogs devoted to theological questions also fall into this category. ‘Organic theologians’ can articulate the importance of theology in sustaining Christian identity and confidence within their communities in the face of alternative cultural narratives.
Gramsci’s view of ‘organic intellectuals’ in no way detracts from the importance of theology; rather, it increases its reach and encourages local implementations and translations. Nor does it set up a tension between ‘academic’ and ‘organic’ theologians; instead, it recognizes their different spheres of operations and the different skills these require. In my view, ‘organic theologians’ hold the key to the future of the Christian community in many parts of the world. They need to be encouraged and resourced by their academic colleagues. Without them, Christianity may well be reduced to bland, generic pastoral and spiritual practices that lack the resilience and depth that is so clearly needed to confront the uncertainties of the future.
We need intellectuals, whether academic or ‘organic’, to exercise a prophetic role within the Church and our wider culture by naming what is wrong and what needs to be done. In the dying years of the Weimar Republic, the sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that a new type of person had emerged ‘whose special task is to provide an interpretation of the world’, and to ‘play the part of watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night’. For Mannheim, that is what intellectuals were meant to be and do: offer a prophetic interpretation and critique of our world from the perspective of what he called ‘a certain “world-postulate”’. And some of these prophetic intellectuals have been Christians, such as W. H. Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose deep immersion in the Christian theological tradition enabled them to see the world as it really was and demand its reform and renewal.
The term ‘mystery’ is widely used to refer to something that cannot be fully grasped by human reason. Albert Einstein insisted that a sense of ‘the mysterious’ was the source of all true art and science, just as an ‘experience of mysteriousness’ lay at the heart of religion. ‘What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can only grasp imperfectly.’ This ‘inability of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe’, Einstein argued, meant that we cannot hope to provide a full account of the vast and complex cosmic reality. The quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg (1901–76), similarly, insisted that scientific thinking ‘always hovers over a bottomless depth’ and had to come to terms with the ‘impenetrable darkness that lies behind the ideas language is able to express.’
Theologians also use the term ‘mystery’, understanding this to refer not to something that is irrational but to something that lies tantalizingly beyond the reach of what human reason can fully grasp. In the end, our minds just aren’t big enough to cope with the conceptual vastness of God so brilliantly expressed in the theological notion of ‘glory’. God simply overwhelms our mental capacities.
The Franciscan theologian Thomas Weinandy (b. 1946) uses a nice turn of phrase: ‘Because God, who can never be fully comprehended, lies at the heart of all theological enquiry, theology by its nature is not a problem solving enterprise but rather a mystery discerning enterprise.’ The danger is that we try to reduce everything to what the human mind can cope with instead of trying to expand our intellectual vision to take in these larger realities despite the mental discomfort they may cause.
In one sense, theology aims to preserve the mystery of God not by shutting down discussion about God but, rather, through recognizing that discussion can never hope to do intellectual justice to the glory of God. The temptation is either to focus on what we can grasp and hope that the rest is unimportant or to reduce this grand vision to what our minds can accommodate. Since both these strategies distort, disfigure and mislead, theology is forced to occupy the middle ground between them and learn to live with this tension. Theology thus tries to make rational sense of mystery while realizing that a mystery cannot be fully rationalized!
This dilemma has long been recognized in Christian theology. Hilary of Poitiers (c.310–c.367) – a bishop who is widely considered to be one of the two most important Latin-speaking theologians of the fourth century (the other being Ambrose of Milan (c.339–397)) – noted that ‘we must place the poor resources of our language under strain to express thoughts that are too great for words.’ As Thomas Aquinas discovered, our words simply break under the strain of trying to describe the glory and majesty of God.
On 6 December 1273, Aquinas abruptly stopped writing his massive Summa Theologiae (‘The Totality of Theology’). His secretary, Reginald of Piperno, was puzzled and asked for an explanation. Aquinas replied that he had been overwhelmed by a vision of God that simply could not be conceptualized: ‘Everything that I have written seems like chaff (palea) to me compared to those things that I have seen and that have been revealed to me.’ His theological writings were not wrong; he was simply silenced by his realization that they were totally incapable of doing justice to God.
Christian theology does not see the concept of mystery as a problem. Why not? Because the concept of mystery points to the imaginative vastness and spiritual inexhaustibility of God. There is always more to appreciate about God. That’s why the best theology leads naturally into prayer and worship as we catch a glimpse of the glory of this God, perhaps sharing something of Aquinas’s sense of being overwhelmed by a glory that so vastly exceeds our capacity to express it in words.
One of the theologians I have come to respect most in recent years is the Czech writer Tomáš Halík (b. 1948), who established himself as a winsome and gracious theological voice following the collapse of communism throughout eastern Europe, particularly the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Prague during 1989. Halík had been active in underground Catholic circles throughout the period of Marxist rule and played a significant role in giving theological direction to the Czech church in the post-revolutionary world.
In Halík’s view, both secular culture and many within the Church have been deluded by quick intellectual fixes and false certainties. He sees faith not as a cast-iron set of certainties but as ‘a journey, a way of seeking, a way into the depths of meaning’. The Christian God is a ‘pilgrim God’, who cannot be captured with conceptual precision by our intellectual systems and traditions but, rather, is to be discovered as a living, meaning-creating presence as we journey through uncertainty. This leads Halík to emphasize that faith is what draws us into ‘the Mystery that is called God.’
Halík is critical of the overconfident assertions made by atheists, religious fundamentalists and enthusiasts of a superficial and facile faith. All, he suggests, ‘run roughshod over the mystery we call God’.A mystery is inexhaustible, something that no single theological generation can fully grasp even if they can pass on to us their hard-won insights. It is by journeying with God through an unknown and bewildering landscape that we break free from past limiting notions of God or the gospel, which have led us to enclose the living God within the confines of our concepts and traditions.
Halík notes that many of the great theological and spiritual writers of the past found themselves facing uncertainty and change as an old order seemed to be giving way to an indeterminate and unpredictable future in which the trusted certainties of the past might no longer be valid. What kept them going, Halík suggests, is a deep intuitive belief that God would prove able to meet the challenges of this new situation. That, he suggests, is why the ‘first and last sentence of any theology’ should be ‘God is mystery’.
To sum up, then, faith is not assent to a limited rational account of God but, rather, involves a commitment to a journey of exploration in which the immensity and inexhaustibility of God are experienced and uncovered along the road as we find ourselves facing new situations and challenges. The task of theology is to uncover how the disclosure of this inexhaustible mystery in the Bible, and the long history of Christian reflection on the biblical text, may help us to engage with new questions and cope with new situations. Precisely because God is inexhaustible, no one individual theologian or even generation of theologians can hope to fully grasp the wonder of God. There is always more to discover and experience.
Critics of theology often point to the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of theological gibberish that the Church could well do without. Who can take such logical and mathematical nonsense seriously? It’s just a speculative complexity imposed upon the simple language of the New Testament. Not only is it incomprehensible, it doesn’t do anything other than cause Christians intellectual embarrassment. Why not limit ourselves to the simple vocabulary of the New Testament?
Disconcertingly, the ‘simple’ language about God that we find in the New Testament turns out, on closer inspection, to be rather more complicated than it seems. The New Testament epistles show an entanglement between the identity and functions of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit. Theological reflection did not create this complexity; rather, it aims to preserve it and express it as reliably as possible – even if, as Hilary of Poitiers points out, this involves going beyond the vocabulary of the New Testament. For Hilary, to fully understand what we believe and to defend this against misunderstanding, we need ‘to speak about God by going beyond what God determined beforehand’. While the Trinitarian language of the Church is not explicitly present in the New Testament, Christians found it necessary to develop this in order to express and hold together its rich implicit account of the nature and activity of God.
It is widely agreed that the revival of theological confidence in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is mainly due to two twentieth-century theologians: the Swiss Protestant Karl Barth and the German Catholic Karl Rahner. Barth, for example, insists that the doctrine is the Christian Church’s legitimate and necessary attempt to ‘translate and exegete’ the New Testament in order to set out this rich and glorious vision of the identity and character of the Christian God.
Yet the simple fact is that most Christians see the doctrine of the Trinity negatively, as a rational problem, rather than positively, as a vision of God. Clergy, when called to preach on the Trinity, suddenly become amateur physicists with a fascination for the ‘triple point’ of water: the temperature and pressure at which its three potential forms – ice, liquid water and steam – can coexist. What conceivable relevance has this for understanding why Christians have seen the Trinity as central to their thinking about God? (None at all – except that it shows there are examples of ‘three in one’ in the natural world too.) Christians can hardly grow in their faith if their preachers feed them this facile nonsense. Rather, the task of preachers is to set out the glorious vision of who God is and what God does, which is expressed and enfolded by the doctrine of the Trinity, so that their congregations can grasp this vision.
Let’s keep considering the relevance of this complex doctrine. For one thing, it safeguards the distinctively Christian vision of God from being confused with, or reduced to, its intellectually and imaginatively deficient rivals, such as Deism, which portrays God as an absentee creator who has no further interest in or concern for creation – a cosmic clockmaker, who has created the world, wound it up and then left it to function unattended.
Emil Brunner, a Swiss Protestant theologian who had a somewhat complicated relationship with Karl Barth, argues that the doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a ‘defensive doctrine (Schutzlehre)’, designed to safeguard the Christian vision of God from reduction to its pagan or idealist counterparts. It is not something that ought itself to be preached but, rather, offers a framework within which authentic Christian preaching can take place.
A similar point was made by Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1952–97), an American Catholic theologian based at the University of Notre Dame, who based her account of the Trinity on the work of Karl Rahner. For LaCugna, all learning about the mystery of God is actually a matter of unlearning, of leaving behind preconceived ideas and predetermined ideas of God that we have absorbed from our intellectual and cultural contexts, in order that we may grasp God properly, both intellectually and relationally. The doctrine of the Trinity is the specifically Christian way of speaking about God, which ‘summarizes what it means to participate in the life of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit’.
LaCugna then makes the point that so many preachers fail to draw out, namely the spiritual benefits that this doctrine brings:
The purpose of the doctrine of the Trinity is not to diagnose why God is the way God is, but to remind us to ‘taste and see the goodness of God’ revealed in creation, Christ, and communion with one another in the Spirit.
For LaCugna, the doctrine has both an objective and subjective payload. It enables us to grasp the glory of God and experience God’s goodness in and through a relationship with God. Augustine of Hippo made a similar point: ‘Nothing can exceed the fulness of our happiness, which is to enjoy God the Trinity in whose image we are created.’
Another expression of this vision of the Trinitarian God is found in the Lorica, the hymn often known as ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ traditionally ascribed to Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. I feel a special affinity with this approach, as I was baptized at the cathedral built beside Patrick’s grave in Downpatrick (the Gaelic name Dún Pádraig means ‘Patrick’s stronghold’). In the hymn, Patrick surveys the work of God in creation and redemption, affirming that the ‘strong name’ of this God can be relied upon to enfold and protect the believer.
The poem evokes a sense of wonder at the vastness of nature and the fine details of Christ’s work of redemption, before claiming the power of this God in the midst of the perils and uncertainties of life. The Trinity names the ‘strong God’, who can be trusted in times of danger and doubt. For Patrick, the Trinity is not to be seen as a specious piece of theological speculation but as an attempt to express the fullness of God’s nature and being, particularly the impact this compelling vision of God has on the challenges of life.
These lines of thought clearly point towards a link between theology, worship and prayer, which needs further exploration.
Intellectual historians often express concern about the fragmentation of human knowledge disintegrating into specialist realms. For instance, what Isaac Newton knew simply as ‘natural philosophy’ has broken down into physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and a myriad of other disconnected scientific disciplines, each of which has become so specialized that there is little dialogue or collaboration between them.
Many feel that this has also happened to theology. In terms of today’s academic disciplines, Augustine of Hippo was an apologist, a practical theologian, a philosopher of religion, a systematic theologian and a New Testament scholar. But Augustine saw himself simply as a theologian, seamlessly weaving together the many elements of his vision of loving God with all his mind.
Theology and spirituality are now widely regarded as separate disciplines and practices yet, for most Christian writers down the ages, theology and spirituality might be helpfully distinguished, but certainly not meaningfully separated. Christian theologians have always believed theology and spirituality incapable of being separated without a violation of their integrity. For example, Puritanism was a movement in England and North America that recognized an integral and seamless connection between doctrine and piety, and it offers a framework for those wishing to make similar connections today.
The Princeton theologian Ellen Charry argues that modernity tends to think of ‘truth’ as the acquisition of information enabling us to control our world rather than a quest for authenticity and personal transformation: ‘Knowing the truth no longer implied loving it, wanting it, and being transformed by it, because the truth no longer brings the knower to God but to use information to subdue nature.’ Theology, according to Charry, enfolds a vision of truth as a luminous and overwhelming vision of God that shapes spiritual practice – the disciplines and habits that help Christians to live out the values and norms of their faith. This experience of the glory of God brings perspective to our lives, helping us to abandon the conceit that we are at the centre of things.
More recent theological discussion of this point has drawn on Pierre Hadot’s claim that classic Greek philosophy was not so much about discovering right ways of thinking but, rather, developing an appropriate ‘way of life (manière de vivre.)’ This, Hadot (1922–2010) suggested, would be based on a set of practices that reinforced such an understanding of nature and the good life. Philosophy thus aims to help the process of personal formation that is required to live out such a mode of thinking. As we noted previously, early Christianity was seen by some observers as a ‘philosophy’ not in the sense of an abstract set of ideas but, rather, as a way of achieving wisdom and authenticity. A disciplined contemplation of the world leads to the development of practices and disciplines that foster human wellbeing.
This point is brought out by the Cambridge theologian Sarah Coakley (b. 1951), who notes the importance of developing theologically informed spiritual disciplines (Greek: askēsis). These disciplines or practices both embody theological principles and help us to achieve their application in life. Coakley, for example, notes how ‘silent prayer’ involves a renunciation of the notion of being in control of things, leading to a reinterpretation of the notion of ‘vulnerability’ and a de-centering of the self and its desires through the hope of a mystical union with God:
The ‘paradox of power and vulnerability’ is, I believe, uniquely focused in this act of silent waiting on the divine in prayer. This is because we can only be properly ‘empowered’ here if we cease to set the agenda, if we ‘make space’ for God to be God.
Coakley and others make it clear that there is a natural and essential link between theology and spirituality – between the two enterprises that the evangelical theologian J. I. Packer termed ‘knowing about God’ and ‘knowing God’, or what Lewis referred to as ‘intellectual assent’ and ‘imaginative enjoyment.’ These two practices may be distinguished. They cannot, however, be separated.
Why is this important? Because it reinforces a central theme of this short book: namely, that theology and the life of faith are inseparable. Theology enfolds and informs the Christian life, establishing its foundation and its goal, while reassuring us that God does not leave us on our own as we try to become better people, but accompanies and refreshes us as we journey.