As I mentioned in the previous post, Eugene Peterson is coming to speak at RTS this week. A good friend of mine is picking him up from the airport tomorrow morning, and Peterson will be delivering two lectures tomorrow and then another two on Thursday. It promises to be very good. The overarching theme for his lectures is that prayer must be at the very root of the Church's life, and he will be taking us through Ephesians to explore that.

Peterson has a five-book series on what he calls spiritual theology, and when I came across the term the other day I was not quite sure what he meant by it. But it did not take long to find a definition—within the first few pages of the introduction to the first book in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Peterson writes this:

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. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to living what we know and believe about God. It is the thoughtful 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 love embracing and being embraced by the community of God the Spirit.

Spiritual theology is not one more area of theology that takes its place on the shelf alongside the academic disciplines of systematic, biblical, practical, and historical theology; rather, it represents the conviction that all theology, no exceptions, has to do with the living God who creates us as living creatures to live to his glory. It is the development of awareness and discernments that are as alert and responsive in the workplace as in the sanctuary, as active while changing diapers in a nursery as while meditating in a grove of aspens, as necessary when reading a newspaper editorial as when exegeting a sentence written in Hebrew.

Some may want to simplify things by keeping the spiritual and throwing out the theology. Others will be content to continue with the theology as usual and forget the spiritual. But the fact is that we live only because God lives and that we live well only in continuity with the way God makes, saves, and blesses us. Spirituality begins in theology (the revelation and understanding of God) and is guided by it. And theology is never truly itself apart from being expressed in the bodies of men and women to whom God gives life and whom God then intends to live a full salvation life (spirituality).

The former president of RTS Orlando, Frank James, once said to our church history class, "Doctrine means nothing if it is not followed by doxology." The point, of course, is that there cannot be a disconnect between what we believe and how we live, something Peterson would wholeheartedly affirm. In the end, then, we are talking about nothing less than recognizing the Lordship of Christ over all of life. Our beliefs and convictions, insofar as they are faithful to God's revelation, are to bring about holistic transformation of our hearts and minds such that we begin to live in a manner that reflects a complete devotion and allegiance to our sovereign God.

If that is what spiritual theology is all about, count me in.