Christian Spirituality

Gordon Mursell

Description

There is a growing interest today in the context and history of Christian spirituality. In this book a team of expert authors from the East and West present a full and fascinating picture of humanity's desire for the divine across the centuries. Highlighting the contribution of significant figures through history, authors explore the ways in which Christians - from the earliest times onwards - have sought to express and live out the deepest truth of their faith. The Bible and the life of Jesus Christ are the starting point for the story. The reader is then guided through the development of spirituality, starting an exploration of the significance of the early church 'fathers', and culminating in a survey of the explosion of expressions of Christian divinity across the world in the twentieth century. Interspersed with boxed features that provide more detail on key individuals and groups, and timelines that put events into their chronological contexts, Christian Spirituality is an ideal overview for scholars and interested readers alike.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 21 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912552351
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

General Editor
Rt Revd Gordon Mursell
Former Bishop of Stafford, and Former Dean, Birmingham Cathedral
Contributors
Revd Canon Richard A. Burridge
Professor and Former Dean of King s College, London
Revd Liz Carmichael
Emeritus Research Fellow in Theology, St John s College, Oxford
Revd Douglas J. Dales
Former Chaplain and Head of Religious Studies, Marlborough College, UK
David H. Farmer
Former Reader in History, University of Reading
Stephen R. Graham
Senior director of programs and services, Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada
Revd Sergei Hackel
Former Reader in Russian Studies, University of Sussex
Revd Bradley P. Holt
Professor of Religion Emeritus, Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN, and Former lecturer, Theological College of Northern Nigeria
Revd John A. McGuckin
Professor of Early Church History, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Byzantine Christian Studies, Columbia University, New York City
Revd Herman J. Selderhuis
Professor of Church History and Church Law, Theological University in Apeldoorn, Netherlands

This edition copyright 2020 Lion Hudson IP Limited
The right of Gordon Mursell, Richard A. Burridge, Liz Carmichael, Douglas J. Dales, David H. Farmer, Stephen R. Graham, Sergei Hackel, Bradley Holt, John A. McGuckin and Herman J. Selderhuis to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by
Lion Hudson Limited
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Business Park
Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com
ISBN 978 1 9125 5234 4
e-ISBN 978 1 9125 5235 1
First hardback edition 2001
Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations are the authors own translations.
Cover image JTGrafix/stockphoto.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CONTENTS
Prologue: Christian Spirituality
Introduction: Jesus and the Origins of Christian Spirituality
Richard A. Burridge
1. The Early Church Fathers (1st to 6th centuries)
John A. McGuckin
2. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Spirituality (4th to 10th centuries)
Douglas J. Dales
3. Saints and Mystics of the Medieval West (11th to 16th centuries)
David H. Farmer
4. The Eastern Christian Tradition (4th to 18th centuries)
John A. McGuckin
5. The Russian Spirit (10th to 19th centuries)
Sergei Hackel
6. The Protestant Tradition in Europe (16th to 19th centuries)
Herman J. Selderhuis
7. Catholic Saints and Reformers (16th to 19th centuries)
Liz Carmichael
8. The Anglican Spirit (16th to 19th centuries)
Gordon Mursell
9. The Protestant Tradition in America (17th to 19th centuries)
Stephen R. Graham
10. Spiritualities of the Twentieth Century
Bradley P. Holt
Epilogue: A Spirituality for a New Millennium
Further Reading
Endnotes
Index
PROLOGUE: CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY
What is spirituality ? The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, whose primary meaning is breath . In this sense it is something physical but invisible: the air we breathe, the odours we smell. But spiritus had an important secondary meaning even in classical times: inspiration (a word that literally means breathing in ), perhaps of a poet or a god. So Cicero could speak of people with a Sicilian spirit , and Livy of being touched by the divine spirit (spiritu divino tactus). The word spirit , then, came to denote those invisible but real qualities which shape the life of a person or community - such as love, courage, peace or truth - and a person s or community s own spirit is their inner identity, or soul, the sum of those invisible but real forces which make them who they are.
The link between breath and spirit , between the physical and the incorporeal, is crucial for understanding one of the two great traditions which helped to shape Christian spirituality . This is the Hebrew tradition, supremely manifested in the Bible. The Hebrew word ruach, like the Latin spiritus, means both breath and spirit . So when, in the opening verses of scripture, the writer of Genesis speaks of a wind from God that swept over the face of the waters , the word translated wind could as easily be translated spirit . And that is precisely the point. Hebrew knows no absolute distinction between the physical, material world, and a wholly separate spiritual world. The two are inextricably linked. The wind, or spirit, of God works together with the word of God: God speaks ( Let there be light ), and what God says comes to be, is given breath, comes alive. So spirituality , in the Hebrew tradition of scripture, is that process by which God seeks continually to work upon, or address, the raw unstable chaos of our lives and experience, and of our world, drawing forth meaning, identity, order and purpose.
This fundamental notion of what is spiritual is further developed in the New Testament, and especially in the letters of the apostle Paul. His famous distinction between flesh and spirit can easily be misunderstood as implying an absolute separation of the physical from the spiritual. But Paul is a Jew; and his thought is rooted in Jewish ideas. By flesh he does not mean what is physical: he means all of life (including religion) seen in a narrowly materialist, this-worldly, me-centred perspective. And by spirit he again means all of life (including physical life) seen in the perspective of our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. So spirituality comes to mean something more than simply God s continuing work of creation, though it certainly includes that: it denotes all that is involved in living according to the spirit - a free dependence on grace, a longing for what Paul calls the fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace and others - see Galatians 5:22), and above all the experience of God the Holy Spirit at work within us, turning our groans and longings into prayer (Romans 8:26), and slowly transforming us into the unique people God created us to be. This is how Paul puts it:
Now the Lord is the spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord, as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)
All of us , notice - not just our religious or spiritual parts. Paul believed the body too was to be raised at the resurrection and would live for ever in heaven. And he even goes so far as to say that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:21), in the final consummation of what was begun by the wind or spirit of God sweeping over the waters of chaos.
This is the bedrock of Christian spirituality. But there is another ancient tradition which also exerted a profound influence on how that spirituality developed: the Greek tradition, which found supreme expression in the thought of Plato. Where the Hebrew tradition sought to hold the physical and the spiritual together, Plato wanted to separate them. For him, broadly speaking, what is good is spiritual (invisible, incorporeal, immortal), while what is bad is physical , not only because it does not last but also because it draws us downwards, so to speak, and makes us earthbound. For him, each human person consisted of a physical body and an invisible soul: the body is transient and ultimately worthless, while the soul is immortal - it came from an invisible spiritual world and will return to it when we die.
The influence of Platonism on Christianity was enormous, and not only in the early centuries of the church s life. It encouraged many Christians to regard spirituality as essentially world-denying, the practice (often called asceticism) of disciplines designed to repress or redirect physical drives and longings and to experience, as far as was possible in this world, the life of the Spirit. But there was a positive aspect to Platonism too: his emphasis on the beauty, the sheer attractiveness, of the divine or spiritual world encouraged Christians (such as Augustine of Hippo) to see that world as the fulfilment of all our deepest desires, and thus to give Christian spirituality a dynamism and energy that it might otherwise have lost.
Broadly speaking, then, the Hebrew tradition gave spirituality its stress on integration: read Leviticus 19, and you will find a luminous and comprehensive vision of holiness as embracing every aspect of individual and corporate life, from the breeding of cattle to the worship of God. The Greek tradition gave spirituality its stress on desire, an insistent longing not only, or even primarily, to leave this world for the next one, but to experience and manifest the next one in the midst of this one, until the whole of creation is transformed and made new. The two together gave, and still give, the Christian spiritual tradition an astonishing vitality and inventiveness, enabling those who make it their own to see life not as a pre-determined routine, or even simply as a journey, but as something at once attractive and challenging: an adventure.
Gordon Mursell
INTRODUCTION
JESUS AND THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY
Richard Burridge
Timeline
?18th c. Abraham and the early patriarchs
?1300-1250 Moses and the exodus
1000 BC
1000 David conquers Jerusalem
c. ?960 Solomon builds the temple
933 The nation divides into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah
722 The fall of Samaria
621 Reforms of King Josiah
612 Assyrian empire defeated by the Babylonians
587 Nebuchadnezzar captures Jerusalem and destroys the temple;