Reconnecting Spirituality and Knowledge

Mark D. Filiatreau

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology by Eugene Peterson. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. 368 pages, including back matter.

“There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But ‘to whom shall we go?’” —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

It is a commonplace that Christian spirituality is not what it used to be. Then again, it never was—just read Paul’s letters to Corinth for a reminder. Nevertheless, each age has its particular challenges. The besetting problem for Christians in the industrialized West has long been a valorization of propositional knowledge and restless activity at the expense of other movements of the soul such as imagination, love, silence, and desire. Indeed, this privileging of the acquisition of knowledge is at the expense of “knowing” itself, as the word is meant in the Bible. Such an emphasis is a key to why the integrity and power that so radically changed the Roman Empire has long been missing—and it is the Evangelical wing of the church in North America that I’m talking about.

Attempts at a remedy for the situation have long been under way. The hungry explorers that make up the “emergent church” are one such; the popularity of such writers as John Eldredge is another. Nonetheless, most of us are yet captives to a culture that not only minimizes but cannot even detect spiritual reality, and we are often captive without realizing it. As Leanne Payne poignantly expresses it in The Healing Presence, “we can no longer experience God, only our thoughts and feelings about God.”

This is where spiritual theology comes in. Eugene Peterson defines spiritual theology as “the attention we give to lived theology.” Lived—not just known and accepted. Spiritual theology seeks a way of life in which God can be known, known as you know your best friend or spouse, and where a “personal relationship” with Him is not just a cliché. As a term “spiritual theology” is a relative newcomer, but that is because it reflects relatively recent attempts in academia to bridge the divide between theological knowledge and spiritual practice that has troubled the Western church since at least the twelfth century.

Eugene Peterson’s calling, as a pastor for thirty years as well as a writer, seems to have been to try to reunite spirituality and theology and thereby bring the life of the Trinity into the everyday world of timesheets and diapers. He is perhaps best known for The Message, his translation and paraphrase of the Bible into simple and vigorous language. But he has also written twenty-eight other well-received books that have done much to renew spirituality among lay and clergy. Most of them have heretofore been structured as reflections on books of the Bible. But the publication of Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places is momentous because Peterson for the first time has presented a comprehensive, even somewhat systematic, spiritual theology. It is the first of a projected five-book series on spiritual theology. (The second, Eat This Book, will be reviewed here in the future.) He is off to a great start, for this one is a generous masterpiece.

Explaining spiritual theology

In the book’s introduction Peterson says that theology and spirituality need each other. Without theology, spirituality becomes an undefined narcissistic journey where, as Leanne Payne says about Jungian spirituality, “your own heart becomes your Bible.” Without spirituality, theology becomes dry as sawdust and tends to Pharisaism. Peterson grounds spiritual theology in a telos that includes both the future and the present:

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. If we don’t know where we are going, any road will get us there. But if we have a destination—in this case a life lived to the glory of God—there is a well-marked way, the Jesus-revealed Way. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to the details of living life on this way. 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.

Peterson has in his sights the abstracted, dehumanizing, and “de-divinizing” modern way of doing things that has so influenced the Western church. It is now the typical approach to use technique and control to engineer products and get the “results” we want. But such approaches, Peterson argues forcefully throughout the book, are diametrically opposed to authentic Christian living. For the authentic Christian life is sharing in the very personal life of the Trinity, the ongoing passionate love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this book you will not find “Six Easy Steps for Successful Christian Living” nor the blueprint for a new Christian movement.

Jesus Christ claims to be “the way, the truth, and the life,” but, Peterson says, humanity often settles for “the truth” alone, which gets abstracted and intellectual; or it settles for “the way,” and gets obsessed with behavior and social morality. Peterson seeks to return our attention and practice to the more difficult life. It’s a matter of bringing the Christian gospel to bear in the snarly, uncompromising particularity of this very day between waking and sleeping.

Clearing and building

Peterson sets out his spiritual theology in a tripartite structure based on the model of the Trinity itself. Each part describes a dimension of life where Christ “plays”—that is, where he dwells and where we find him and grow into him. (The title comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Peterson helpfully explicates, and “plays” has the double sense of playing on an instrument.) These dimensions are creation, history, and community.

But first Peterson devotes a chapter to “Clearing the Playing Field.” He intends the chapter to help “harness” the “wild spiritual energies” around us today that are unguided by God’s revelation in scripture. Peterson unclutters the cultural junk surrounding spirituality and sets the foundation for the argument to follow. This includes a brief treatment of three key scriptures that outline God’s creative work as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and provide something of an overture to the rest of the book. This section is full of invaluable antidotes to many of today’s common misunderstandings of God and his ways.

One of the antidotes is Peterson’s clarification of “spirituality.” A history of the words “spiritual” and “spirituality” would coincide with the history of Christianity itself, so I daresay it is helpful to read Peterson’s one-page summary. The word translated as “spiritual” seems to have been created by Paul in the New Testament; there and long after it referred to nothing other than the Holy Spirit, and the “spiritual” person was one in whom the Spirit of God dwelt and expressed himself. Today, however, the “abstracted vagueness of the word easily serves as a convenient cover for idolatry . . . reducing God to a concept or object that we can use for our benefit . . .” Drawing from John 3 and 4 and other biblical passages, Peterson dispenses with common misunderstandings: “Spirituality is not immaterial as opposed to material; not interior as opposed to exterior; not invisible as opposed to visible. . . . What it properly conveys is living as opposed to dead.” Likewise,

Spirituality is not a body of secret lore,

Spirituality has nothing to do with aptitude or temperament,

Spirituality is not primarily about you or me; it is not about personal power or enrichment. It is about God.

This is one of the book’s themes: The Christian life is not about us but about God. God really is working every day (John 5:17) and it is our duty, not to cook up schemes on our own, but to find out what God has already got going and get in on it.

The exposition of the three dimensions where Christ “plays” makes up the rest of the book. Each of these three sections has the same elements, lending, if not exactly a system, a clear ordering structure. (See the table below.)

After introducing the section, Peterson reflects on a part of Christ’s life (birth, death, resurrection). Then he turns to a related threat to our living the Christian life. For example, the threat to living the Christian life in the context of creation is gnosticism. Gnosticism here is the belief that the “spiritual” life is essentially incorporeal and superior to the material world of bodies and matter. It is a pernicious and often unrecognized belief system into which both church and culture regularly relapse. I have read many accounts of gnosticism but nowhere have I seen such a compact and applicable summary as Peterson’s, as he describes how gnosticism remains perennially, seductively attractive to people at the same time it creates elites and inhibits love.

In each section, the threat is followed by a scholarly yet imaginatively rich exposition of grounding scriptures; these make up the main mass of the book. Each section then concludes with a description of the means for cultivating “Fear-of-the-Lord.”

	I. Christ Plays in Creation	II. Christ Plays in History	III. Christ Plays in Community
Jesus’ life	Birth	Death	Resurrection
Threat	Gnosticism	Moralism	Sectarianism
Old Testament Grounding Text	Genesis 1–2	Exodus	Deuteronomy
New Testament Grounding Text	John	Mark	Luke/Acts
Means of cultivating “Fear- of-the-Lord.”	Sabbath and Wonder	Eucharist and Hospitality	Baptism and Love

Fear-of-the-Lord

Cultivating “Fear-of-the-Lord” is what Peterson describes as the most important action for the Christian life. It is no insight that “Fear-of-the-Lord” in any sense is not something discussed, much less cultivated, by our society. Neither will it be found in a seeker-sensitive church’s marketing approach or a typical church’s liturgy. “The word ‘fear’ seems to get us off on the wrong foot,” Peterson dryly notes. But the oft-used Hebrew phrase that Peterson translates with hyphens is a “bound phrase,” two Hebrew words bound together to create something that is different from the sum of their parts. It does not mean being in fear of God or his wrath. Not easily translated, “it means something more like a way of life in which human feelings and behavior are fused with God’s being and revelation.” Peterson’s description of this culturally subversive state of being is worth quoting more fully:

The primary way in which we cultivate fear-of-the-Lord is in prayer and worship—personal prayer and corporate worship. We deliberately interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to God, place ourselves intentionally in sacred space, in sacred time, in the holy presence—and wait. We become silent and still in order to listen and respond to what is Other than us. Once we get the hang of this we find that this can occur any place and any time. But prayer and worship provide the base . . .

This has long been one of the church’s ways for knowing God himself, not just our thoughts and feelings about God.

Programs vs. Persons

The “Cultivating Fear-of-the-Lord” topics make up the closest thing to the “how-to manual” that some readers may be hoping for. But performing such Christian acts as hospitality and Eucharist without the mysterious element of Fear-of-the-Lord is exactly what the book argues against.

Fear-of-the-Lord makes us uncomfortable because “we don’t like being in the dark, not knowing what to do,” Peterson says. When we do get around to answering the question “What do we do to live the Christian life?” we often choose a path that avoids “prayerful involvement with God in the presence of God” by substituting a “code of conduct.”

For the same reasons Christian church life has largely devolved into the promotion of certain beliefs and behaviors, ideas and programs. These tendencies, however, have at best an uneasy relation to the New Testament’s commandment to love. But “whoever heard of a class on love?” Peterson asks. “And whoever heard of a love program? And the reason is that love cannot be reduced to what can be taught in a classroom or what can be formulated in a program.”

What is dangerous is not ideas but the academic mind that abstracts both things and people from particular relationships into concepts. And what is dangerous is not programs but the programmatic mind that routinely sets aside the personal in order to more efficiently achieve an impersonal cause. These are not only dangerous but sacrilegious, for it is precisely relational particularities and personal intimacies that are at the center of our God-given, Holy-Spirit formed identities as the beloved who are commanded to love.

We serve a very personal God who has made us in his image; to treat each other as anything less is akin to blasphemy. Our powers of technique and control—which appear to have improved life on earth so much—don’t belong here.

A Desert Island Book

Much of the material I have summarized or quoted from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places has been cultural critique. I focus on those areas because I think they will interest this site’s readers. But taken alone they misrepresent the book. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places is very much about solutions, not criticism. The main mass of the book, Peterson’s expositions of the Christian scriptures, seek to enlighten us about the glorious story God already has underway and how we are to be parts of it.

The weaknesses of the book are few and mostly miniscule. I wish, however, that in his section on the threat of sectarianism Peterson did make some acknowledgement that there could be a good reason for a worshipping community to divide, such as rank heresy or unrestrained immorality. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Episcopalian at a time when my church is discerning whether to leave its denomination.

Elsewhere Peterson makes a case that many friends of this site will find challenging. He argues that attempting to spread the faith or help the church by influencing a society’s leaders has no biblical or historical precedent and caters to a worldly mentality. “Jesus and the Jesus community know that the conditions in which the gospel makes its way in the World have little to do with influence and wealth and power.” I agree, and yet leaders have as much need as anyone else to know God’s grace. If an initiative is focused primarily on what a leader can provide beyond himself, granted it has succumbed to a worldly utilitarianism and is not operating in Jesus’ way. It may be that a leader can benefit the kingdom of God (one could argue that the conversion of Rome’s and other pagan nations’ leaders leaves an ambivalent record regarding true spirituality), but determining that is up to God, not us.

If you are going to have only a few books of Christian spirituality or spiritual theology on your shelf, this should be one of them. It is firmly grounded in the biblical texts, unpacking the scriptures in such an enlightening way that it provides an “a-ha” moment on almost every page. The book goes a long way toward unifying theology and spirituality, in both its form and its content, and thus does much to heal some of the divisions of this age and recover what has been lost.

But making Christ and not ourselves the center, cultivating Fear-of-the-Lord, is not a matter of innovative gimmicks. It is simply the ancient, traditional, and universal practices of the church, such as Sabbath, Eucharist, and baptism, and the down-homey practices of wonder, hospitality, and love. But Peterson’s persuasiveness and descriptive power fill these areas with new life; certainly they have already changed my habits. And the book does its work with the kind of virile, creative, and direct language that we might expect from the translator of The Message.

Introducing the book Peterson states, “I don’t have anything new to say; Christians already know all the basics simply by being alive and baptized.” But he says he does hope to get his readers “in on a little more of it,” a little more of the Christian life. He succeeds. I can only hope we will choose to participate and not just read.  

Mark D. Filiatreau, who has been a researcher for several Trinity Forum curricula, is finishing a masters in spiritual theology at Regent College. He and his family live in Fairfax, Virginia.

Reviews, Character and Ethics, Faiths and Worldviews, Thu 30 Nov 2006