Theology as a Spiritual Discipline

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Notes

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 171.

The language of interiority to depict the spiritual life sometimes conveys the misunderstanding that the experience of God has more to do with the subjectivity of the experiencing subject than the objectivity of God whom the subject encounters. Foster, however, rightly portrays the exploration of interiority in disciplines like prayer to be a means of transcending rather than reinforcing the projections of the narcissistic ego. The inner depths discovered through prayer are the depths of the Christ who dwells within us but are not identical to the individual subject.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1978), 7.

Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass, “Times of Yearning, Practices of Faith,” in Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 5.

For a clear and succinct explanation of the origin of the terms spiritual and spirituality, see Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and History, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995), 40–64.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1962), 1.

Merton, 1, 3.

Merton 1.

Guigo II, Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 68.

Guigo II, 73.

Guigo II, 72.

Guigo II, 80.

For another discussion of these implicitly liturgical features of theology, see the introduction to Karl Barth, Prayer, ed. Don E. Saliers and trans. Sara F. Terrien (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002).

Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, 161.

Barth, Prayer, xvii.

Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, 164.

Ibid., 166.

Ibid., 167.

Ibid., 167–68.

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Ian Curran

Ian Curran received his PhD from Emory University. He is a constructive and systematic theologian in the Wesleyan tradition with an interest in the study of Christian spirituality. Currently, he serves on the faculty of Young Harris College where he is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy.