Wednesday, May 18, 2005
‘Christ Plays’ pp. 1-9
At staff meeting yesterday we began our study of Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson, in preparation for his presentation at Symposium ‘06.
John Witvliet began by drawing attention to Peterson’s opening comment on page 1 about his theme of “spiritual theology”: “It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.”
Seminary students Rachel and Rebecca affirmed the importance of not separating the “study of God” from “the way we live,” but synthesizing “systematic theology” and “lived theology.”
Howie called attention to a salient sentence on page 1: “The end of all Christian belief and obedience, witness and teaching, marriage and family, leisure and work life, preaching and pastoral work is the living of everything we know about God: life, life, and more life.”
John identified some people’s concern with the term “spiritual theology” as a possible redundancy, since all theology should be spiritual--even if, in practice, it has been depersonalized and functionalized. So we looked at Peterson’s elaboration on the term on page 5:
The two terms, “spiritual” and “theology,” keep good company with one another. “Theology is the attention that we give to God, the effort we give to knowing God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. “Spiritual” is the insistence that everything that God reveals of himself and his works is capable of being lived by ordinary men and women in their homes and workplaces. “Spiritual keeps “theology” from degenerating into merely thinking and talking and writing about God at a distance. “Theology” keeps “spiritual” from becoming merely thinking and talking and writing about the feelings and thoughts on has about God. The two words need each other, for we know how easy it is for us to let our study of God (theology) get separated from the way we live; we also know how easy it is to let our desires to live whole and satisfying lives (spiritual lives) get disconnected from who God actually is and the ways he works among us.
Kathy noted the language of worship at the top of page 6:
Spiritual theology is the attention we give to lived theology--prayed and
lived, for if it is not prayed sooner or later it will not be lived, from the
inside out and in continuity with the Lord of life. ... It is the thoughful and
obedient cultivation of life as worship on our knees before God the Father, of
life as sacrifice on our feet following God the Son, and of life as loved
embracing and being embraced by the community of God the Spirit.
John followed up on this by drawing our attention to the book’s table of contents. The three core sections--creation, history and community--are tied to Jesus birth, death, and resurrection, respectively. Each section identifies a threat (gnosticism, moralism, sectarianism), each explores two grounding texts, and each concludes with essays on “cultivating fear-of-the-Lord.” John noted the worship vocabulary in this concluding sections: Sabbath and Wonder, Eucharist and Hospitality, Baptism and Love.
“This is not a book about worship, but worship completely permeates the thinking and the writing,” John said.
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