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Two developments that occurred over the course of the nineteenth
century had a strong impact on Christian theology: the first was a
deepening of the implications of historical consciousness and the
second was the impact of science on Christian self-understanding.
Marx's sociology of knowledge symbolizes the first; Darwin's
analysis of evolution the second. These intellectual developments
gave rise to various forms of process philosophy and theology.
Within this context, a dialogue between Christian theology and
evolution has yielded dramatically new convictions and practices in
Christian spirituality, especially relative to ecology. For over
three decades Catherine Keller has been reflecting on the
intellectual and practical effects that an internalization of the
dynamic character of reality should have upon the practice of
Christian life. Her text illustrates the basic framework of dynamic
becoming that science demands, whether or not one is formally a
process thinker. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was an earlier figure
who was more zeroed in on the phenomenon of evolution which he
encountered in a distinct way as a Christian scientist trained in
geology and paleontology, as distinct from biology or genetics.
Evolution explicitly informs his spirituality. These two different
Christian writers, the one representing the imaginative framework
of being as process and becoming, the other focused on how
evolution affects intentional spiritual life, open new perspectives
on the spiritual character of people's active lives of work and
creativity in the world that science presents to us.
This volume considers two authors who represent different but
complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation.
The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an
American situation that arose out of the industrial revolution and
reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life in the east coast
of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of
the twentieth century. Although these two authors differ greatly,
they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that
occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They
shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their
Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just
social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation
generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor,
writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who
became an organizer. The strategic differences between them,
however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the
massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual
rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the
Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work
brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the
surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused
way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to
which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support
it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit
recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality, and
a radical acting out of that response in two distinctly different
ways.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) is a classic Christian author who
spearheaded the Reformation and whose witness has relevance for
life in the present-day world. Grace and Gratitude presents two
texts that represent his spirituality. Because Luther wrote so much
in so many different genres, the choice of only two texts provides
a limited taste of his spirituality. But they open up a specific,
central, and distinctive mark of his conception of the structure of
Christian life. The name of the theme, justification by grace
through faith, often spontaneously correlates with Luther's name
and his theology. The phrase points to a key theological doctrine
that centered his thinking; it lay so deeply ingrained in his
outlook that it sometimes explicitly but always tacitly shaped all
his early theological views and bestowed a distinctive character to
his ethics and spirituality. The two texts are chosen to illustrate
how the conviction represented by the phrase draws its authority
from scripture, especially Paul, and was discursively analyzed in
an early foundational work on Christian life, The Freedom of a
Christian. These texts do not represent all there is to say about
spirituality in Luther's thought by any means, and this part should
not be taken for the whole. But the coupling of these texts
penetrates deeply into what may be called Luther's Christian
spirituality of gratitude.
Western Monastic Spirituality presents three authors as
individuals, certainly, but also as textual informants who, like
road markers, represent a line of the development of a Western
monastic spiritual tradition. John Cassian (ca. 360-435) helped
bring the wisdom of northern Egyptian ascetical life of the late
fourth century to southern France in the early fifth century.
Caesarius of Arles (468/470-542), drawing on his own monastic
experience and Augustine's monastic rule, composed a rule for a
women's monastery in the city of Arles. Not many years later,
Benedict wrote the most influential rule in Western monasticism,
one that still regulates the lives of monks today all over the
world. These three texts, when looked at serially and together,
offer a theology of monastic spirituality, an example of a
relatively short but comprehensive early monastic rule, and a
present day Benedictine interpretation of how Benedict's monastic
spirituality can be summed up in a short present day digest of his
rule. Reflection on early Western monasticism retrieves some basic
Christian spiritual values that should inform life today outside
the monastery in a busy, secular culture.
If Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225, as is commonly thought, then he
died before reaching the age of fifty after producing the single
most influential systematic theology of the Western Christian
tradition. He did this with a formula: He internalized the thought
of Aristotle as it was being introduced into western Europe and
translated into Latin, and he in turn "translated" Christianity
into this Aristotelian language. One can use the principles of
hermeneutics outlined in Retrieving the Spiritual Teaching of Jesus
of this series to analyze what was going on as Aquinas went through
some of the basic doctrines of the Church in his Summa Theologiae.
He laid out their contents by answering an exhaustive series of
questions and responding to each of them in intricate detail. The
model for each question and answer was drawn directly from the
pattern of learning at the University of Paris. Although systematic
and abstract, it also enabled an extensive conversation with the
tradition of classical theologians and his own contemporaries. This
may seem quite distant from spiritual life on the ground, but the
method produced a clear understanding of the structure of spiritual
life in terms of its goal and the means of attaining it. Aquinas's
analysis of grace-how it enabled genuine Christian spirituality,
empowered the virtues, and led to eternal life-constitutes a
classic substructure of Western Christian spirituality that became
all the more distinctive when Reformation spiritualities offered
alternatives to it.
This volume brings together texts of the twelfth-century Hildegard
of Bingen and the early-thirteenth-century Francis of Assisi to
represent religious spirituality after the Gregorian Reform and
just prior to or simultaneous with the formation of universities in
Western Europe. In an extraordinary way, Hildegard embodies
monastic theology and spirituality and provides a contrast to the
new thing that would be created with the study of theology in the
new Aristotelian idiom of the universities. But equally in contrast
to the Benedictine Hildegard, the thirteenth century witnessed a
renewed enthusiasm for a more literal following of Christ in a life
of penitence and poverty. This is a life of dependence, not on a
superior and enclosed community but on the compassion of society at
large. Francis would join this movement on his own terms, attract a
following, and gradually formulate a spirituality that sent signals
of the need to reform individual lives and the institutions of the
Church. These two authors, then, are not joined here because of any
shared similarity but to help illustrate two quite different
spiritualities that animated the lively European twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
This volume presents the spirituality of John Calvin in three short
texts drawn from his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Many
consider Calvin the most influential thinker of the sixteenth
century. His ideas flowed from Geneva into northern Europe, to the
English-speaking lands of Britain, and through the Puritans to
North America. The prolific writings of Calvin across several
genres open up many aspects of Christian living, and each one
offers an entrée to his spirituality. On the supposition that
“spirituality” refers to the way people or groups lead their
lives in relation to ultimacy, three texts have been chosen to form
the axis for this interpretation of Calvin’s contribution. These
texts deal with his theological view of law, a definition of
sanctification, and a short treatise on the Christian life. The
portrait of Calvin’s spirituality that emerges from these texts
and the larger framework of his theology, his ecclesiology, and his
career as church leader and civic organizer can be summarized in
the following phrase: a practical spirituality of sanctification by
participation in society. One cannot find all of that in these
texts, but they establish a platform on which the pieces fall into
place. The story of his early life and formation, along with
several key ideas that characterize the man and his vision, will
help to draw a sharper, more distinctive picture of at least this
influential aspect of Calvin’s spirituality. It is one that bears
direct relevance, with appropriate adjustments, to life today.
This volume directs attention to the teaching of Jesus; it
introduces the question of how the imagination has to work in order
to retrieve the teaching of Jesus and apply it to actual life in
our day. Teachers and preachers are engaged in this work all the
time, but upon examination it involves a process that bears
reflection. We live in a world that is so different from the world
in which Jesus taught that many ask about its practicability
relative to our complex everyday lives. The volume turns to three
authors who work at this, have thought through present-day theory
of interpretation, and respond to basic questions that explain the
adjustments that allow us to apply Jesus’ teaching to our
dilemmas with interpretation that remain faithful to the content
that he proposed. Sandra Schneiders turns to modern hermeneutics,
the theory of interpretation, and explains what is going on in the
human mind that allows us to say that present-day interpretation,
while different from Jesus because our “worlds” are different,
corresponds to what Jesus communicated in the past relative to his
world. William Spohn pushes the same idea further to concrete
examples of how analogy, sameness and difference together, both
binds the imagination to Jesus and frees us to see new relevance
for Jesus’ actual teaching. And Lisa Sowle Cahill takes the
spirit of the other two into the social order to show how Jesus’
teaching has a real relevance for the highly complex societies in
which we live today. The logics of these three authors offer models
for what is going on in all of the Past Light on Present Life
volumes as they represent different historical periods and distinct
themes in Western Christian spirituality.
This volume directs attention to the teaching of Jesus; it
introduces the question of how the imagination has to work in order
to retrieve the teaching of Jesus and apply it to actual life in
our day. Teachers and preachers are engaged in this work all the
time, but upon examination it involves a process that bears
reflection. We live in a world that is so different from the world
in which Jesus taught that many ask about its practicability
relative to our complex everyday lives. The volume turns to three
authors who work at this, have thought through present-day theory
of interpretation, and respond to basic questions that explain the
adjustments that allow us to apply Jesus’s teaching to our
dilemmas with interpretation that remain faithful to the content
that He proposed. Sandra Schneiders turns to modern
hermeneutics—the theory of interpretation—and explains what is
going on in the human mind that allows us to say that present-day
interpretation, while different from that of Jesus because our
“worlds” are different, corresponds to what Jesus communicated
in the past relative to His world. William Spohn pushes the same
idea further to concrete examples of how analogy, sameness, and
difference together bind the imagination to Jesus and frees us to
see new relevance for Jesus’s actual teaching. And Lisa Sowle
Cahill takes the spirit of the other two into the social order to
show how Jesus’s teaching has a real relevance for the highly
complex societies in which we live today. The logics of these three
authors offer models for what is going on in all of the “Past
Light on Present Life” volumes as they represent different
historical periods and distinct themes in Western Christian
spirituality.
Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of
persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals
and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social,
political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach,
power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and
groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and
within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts.
Contributors to this volume extend this emphasis, drawing upon
their ethnographic research in Nepal to examine closely how selves,
identities, and experience are produced in dialogical relationships
through time in a multi-ethic nation-state and within a discourse
of nationalism. The diversity of peoples, recent political
transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an
especially rich locale to examine people's struggles to define and
position themselves. But the authors move beyond geographical
boundaries to more theoretical terrain to problematicize the ways
in which people recreate or contest certain identities and
positions. Various authors explore how people-positioned by gender,
ethnicity, and locale-use cultural genres to produce aspects of
identities and experiences; they examine how subjectivities,
agencies and cultural worlds co-develop and are shaped through
engagement with cultural forms; and they portray the appropriation
of multiple voices for self and group formation. As such, this
collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the
mutual constitution of selves and society.
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