Saturday, July 16, 2011

A Process of Correlation

Christian spirituality is the integration of personal issues, denominational considerations, and attitudes to the World, Culture, and History.[1] God has given me a particular type of personality and a specific set of institutional factors. I have been shaped by all these “given” factors. Christian spirituality is the integrative work to put all these things as a unified whole so that I can keep on continuing to find out His will and respond to it in my life. Besides that, as a pastor, it’s my burden to help others integrate different pieces of fragmented information in them.
Alister McGrath writes:
Christian spirituality can be thought of as the attempt to bring into contact and correlate a set of theological beliefs on the one hand with a very specific set of personal and institutional factors on the other…The point is that it is this process of correlation which is of central importance within spirituality. Spirituality is not something that is deduced totally for theological presuppositions, nor is it something which is inferred totally from our experience. It arises from a creative and dynamic synthesis of faith and life, forged in the crucible of the desire to live out the Christian faith authentically, responsibly, effectively, and fully.[2]
Christian spirituality is a process of correlation: Christian experience and Christian theology are mingled together as one integrated expression.



[1] See Alister E. McGrath, Christian Spirituality: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 8-9.
[2] Ibid., p. 9.

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