By Eugene H. Peterson in Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Kevin J. Vanhoozer et al., eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 766–769.
Spirituality/Spiritual Formation
The biblical word translated “spirit” in English means wind or breath. It is frequently used in the biblical languages as a metaphor for the life-giving God breathing life into his creation and creatures. It is the Invisible that is behind and gives energy to the visible: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the Spirit [Wind]” (Jesus in John 3:8 NRSV). In the biblical revelation “Spirit” is the Third Person of the Trinity, God personally and creatively present and at work in his world. Three representative texts mark the contours of the formative work of Spirit in our world.
Genesis 1:1–3 (RSV): Creation by the Spirit accounts for everything there is, visible and invisible, “the heavens and the earth.” The Spirit takes noncreation, or anticreation, that which is “without form and void,” that which is without light (“darkness … upon the face of the deep”) and makes something of it, gives it form and content, and floods it with light.
Mark 1:9–11 (RSV): The same Spirit of God, so lavishly articulated in words that create everything that is, descends on Jesus as he comes up from the waters of baptism and is identified as God’s “beloved Son.” The baptism is a replay of the Genesis creation in the formation of salvation.
Acts 2:1–4 (RSV): After Jesus’ ascension, 120 of his followers wait to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit” (1:5 RSV), as he had instructed them. The continuity with God’s life-giving breath in the Genesis creation and the Markan baptism is evident but also augmented—the holy breathing becomes a holy wind, “the rush of a mighty wind” (2:2). It fills the room and then fills them. Then the sign of fire is added. For them, fire was altar fire, associated with the active presence of God. Here each person is an “altar” signed with a tongue of fire, God’s active presence. The breathing of Genesis creation and Jesus’ baptism swells into a wind; old altar fires multiply into personalized fires above each waiting man and woman, each now a sign of God alive, present, and active.
The three texts are a tripod, grounding every aspect of life—creation, salvation, community—in the living (breathing) God: God alive makes alive, God the Spirit empowers our spirits. God’s Spirit is not marginal to the main action, but isthe main action.
In discussing spirituality and spiritual formation, it is essential that God’s Spirit be understood as the root of the meaning of spirituality. “The Spirit is God’s way of being present” (Fee xxi). The human spirit exists in continuity with God’s Spirit but is not identical with it.
Spirituality
Spirituality was once used exclusively in religious contexts; it is now used indiscriminately by all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances and with all sorts of meanings. This once pristine word has been dragged into the rough-and-tumble dirt of marketplace and playground.
In contemporary usage, that which has to do with spirit, that is, spirituality, has lost virtually all connection with God’s Spirit. The term “spirituality” has become a net that, when thrown into the sea of contemporary culture, pulls in a vast quantity of spiritual fish, rivaling the resurrection catch of 153 “large fish” that John reports (21:11). Spirituality, de-Spirited, has become secularized into a major business for entrepreneurs and a recreational pastime for the bored. For others, whether many or few (it is hard to tell), it is still a serious and disciplined commitment to breathe deeply and live fully in and by God’s Holy Spirit.
The attempt to reclaim the word for exclusively Christian or other religious usage usually begins with a definition. But attempts to define “spirituality”—and they are many—are futile. The term has escaped the disciplines of the dictionary. The current usefulness of the term is not in its precision but rather in the way it names something indefinable yet quite recognizable—Transcendence vaguely intermingled with Intimacy. Transcendence: a sense that there is more, a sense that life extends far beyond me, beyond what I get paid, beyond what my spouse and children think of me, beyond my cholesterol count. And Intimacy: a sense that deep within me there is a core being inaccessible to the probes of psychologists or the examinations of physicians, the questions of the pollsters, and the strategies of the advertisers. “Spirituality,” though hardly precise, provides a catchall term that recognizes an organic linkage between this Beyond (transcendence) and Within (intimacy) that is part of everyone’s experience. As such, by throwing every intimation of Beyond and Within into one huge wicker basket, the term can still be useful.
The word “spirituality” is a relative latecomer to our dictionaries and only recently has hit the streets in common, everyday speech. Paul used the adjective “spiritual” (pneumatikos) to refer to actions or attitudes derived from the work of the Holy Spirit in all Christians, people of the Spirit. He never used it to refer to “the interior life of a believer” (Fee 28–32). It was only later, in the medieval church and primarily in the context of monasticism, that the word was used to name a way of life restricted to an elite class of Christians—monks and nuns vowed to celibacy, poverty, and obedience, who worked at a higher level than ordinary Christians. “Spiritual” Christians were viewed in contrast to the muddled lives of men and women who married, had babies, and got their hands dirty in fields and markets. In that context spirituality came to designate the study and practice of a perfect life before God, a specialized word having to do with only a small number of people and never a part of everyday life.
The word entered our everyday language more or less through the back door. A movement developed among Roman Catholics in seventeenth-century France with the then-radical notion that the monasteries had no corner on the Christian life well lived. They insisted that the ordinary Christian was quite as capable of living the Christian life as any monk or nun—and living it just as well. Archbishop Fenelon, Madam Guyon, and Miguel de Molinos, prominent voices in this movement, were silenced under the condemnation of “quietism.” The official church attempted to silence them, but it was too late; the cat was out of the bag. The term la spiritualité was used by the detractors as a term of derogation for laypeople who practiced their devotion too intensely—a snobbish dismissal of upstart Christians who did not know what they were doing, writing, thinking, and practicing. These were things best left in the hands of the church’s religious experts. But it was not long before the word lost its pejorative tone. Among Protestants, lay-oriented spiritual seriousness came to be expressed in Puritan “godliness,” Methodist “perfection,” and Lutheran “pietism.” Spirituality, a loose “net” word, is now used on the streets with general approval. Now anybody can be spiritual.
Interestingly, some are again using the term dismissively. Because there appears to be a widespread and faddish use of the term by men and women judged to be misguided, ignorant, and undisciplined, some critics and “experts” are once again taking a condescending stance toward spirituality in its popular forms.
Living and living well is at the heart of all serious spirituality. At this time in our history, spirituality seems to be the term of choice to refer to this vast and intricate web of “livingness.” It may not be the best word, but it is what we have. Its primary weakness is that in English it is an abstraction, even though the metaphor “breath” can be detected just beneath the surface. But the metaphor has been eroded into an abstraction so that “spirituality” frequently obscures the very thing it is intended to convey: God alive and active and present. The more the word is secularized, the less useful it is. Still, it does manage to convey a sense of living as opposed to dead. When we sense that the life has gone out of things and people, institutions and traditions, eventually, and sometimes this takes us a while, we notice the absence. We look for a file-drawer kind of word in which to store the insights and desires for just exactly what it is we are missing. “Spirituality” works about as well as anything for such filing purposes.
Spiritual Formation
The Christian community counters the vagueness associated with “spirituality” by addressing spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is not in the first place or for the most part what we do; it is what the Spirit of God does; it is the formation of life by the Spirit. God the Holy Spirit conceives and forms the life of Christ in us. Our spirits are formed by Spirit. Spirituality is never a subject that we can attend to as a thing-in-itself on our own, but requires formation by God’s Spirit, a complex and lifelong way of being. It is always an operation of God the Spirit in which our human lives are pulled into and made participants in the life of God, whether as lovers or rebels.
We give careful attention to spiritual formation because we have learned, from long experience, how easy it is to get interested in ideas of God and projects for God while at the same time losing interest in God alive, deadening our lives with the ideas and projects. It is the devil’s work to get us worked up in thinking and acting for God and then subtly detach us from a relational obedience and adoration, substituting our selves, our god-pretentious egos, in the place originally occupied by God.
Spiritual formation places Jesus at the center to keep us out of the center. Jesus keeps us attentive to the God-defined, God-revealed life that we are created to live. The amorphous limpness so often associated with spirituality is given skeleton, sinews, definition, and shape by Jesus. The Spirit that conceived Jesus in Mary’s womb (Luke 1:31, 35) will also conceive Jesus in us (Gal. 4:19). Jesus is the central and defining figure in spiritual formation.
By accepting Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God, the Christian church makes it impossible to make up our own customized variations of the spiritual life—not that we don’t try. But we can’t get around him or away from him: Jesus is the incarnation of God, God among and with us. This is the life, this Jesus life, the Spirit forms in us.
When we become more interested in ourselves than in the Spirit forming the life of Christ in us, we typically attempt to take over the work of formation, which always results in malformation. Three forms in which these “takeovers” often express themselves are in projects of self-improvement, the imposition of codes of conduct, and ventures into spiritual technology.
When spiritual formation is a project in self-improvement, the narratives and prayers of Scripture, and the guidance of theology, are replaced by the insights of psychology. Ideas and insights are begged, borrowed, and stolen indiscriminately, put to use as the person sees fit. Spiritual is all about my spirit and has nothing to do with Holy Spirit. Narcissus on his knees.
When spiritual formation is the imposition of a code of conduct, a respectable, moral life is cobbled together in order to become good without dealing personally with God. The Ten Commandments is the usual place to start, supplemented by Proverbs, salted by the Golden Rule and then capped off by the Beatitudes. Or something of that order. The Pharisee in stereotype.
When spiritual formation is a venture into spiritual technology, in a culture defined by information and technology, our spirits are formed unawares by impersonal knowing and efficient doing. In seeming innocence, we venture into a world of abstract principles, depersonalizing programs, and functionalized roles empty of Spirit. The devil in the desert.
The fundamental inadequacy of these ways of formation is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge) of something that we know next to nothing about. The moment that we take charge, “knowing good and evil,” we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people in trouble, too.
But if we are not to turn spiritual formation into a project that we take over and manage, what do we do? This question needs to be delayed for as long as possible. We hold back on the question because spiritual formation mostly involves paying attention and participating in who God is—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and what he does. If we get too interested too soon in what we do and are, we go off the rails badly. Still, we are part of it and need a term to designate the human side of spiritual formation, something that accurately names what we do, but does not make us the center of the subject.
The term of choice is “fear-of-the-Lord,” the stock biblical phrase for the way of life that is lived responsively and appropriately before God as he is and what he does as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Despite its prominence in the Bible, the term does not find wide use among Christians today. “Fear” apparently gets us off on the wrong foot. Grammarians help us regain our biblical stride by calling attention to the fact that fear-of-the-Lord is a “bound” phrase (syntagm). The four words in English (two in Hebrew) are bound together, making a single word. The bound word cannot be taken apart, analyzed, and then defined by adding up the meanings of the parts. But when biblical contexts provide the conditions for understanding the word, we find that it means something more like a way of life in which human feelings and behavior are fused with God’s being and revelation. There are upward of 138 occurrences of the term across a wide range of OT books (Waltke 17–33). God is active in the term; the human is active in the term. “Fear-of-the-Lord” is a new word in our vocabularies and a key to spiritual formation; it marks the way of life appropriate to our creation and salvation and blessing by God.
Question: So what is my part in spiritual formation?
Answer: “Fear the Lord, you his saints” (Ps. 34:9). Cultivate fear-of-the-Lord.
Fear-of-the-Lord is not studying about God but living in reverence before God; not specializing in “spiritual things” but attentively following Jesus where he leads; not merely maintaining moral standards, a subset of human behavior, but living the whole of life in prayerful conversation with God. Fear-of-the-Lord is the cultivation of everything we do as we are “breathing God.”
The primary way in which we cultivate fear-of-the-Lord is in prayer, worship, and obedience: personal prayer, corporate worship, and sacrificial obedience. We deliberately interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to God, place ourselves intentionally in Sacred Space, in Sacred Time, in the Holy Presence. We become silent and still in order to listen and respond to what and who is Other than us. This is spiritual formation. In actual practice we find that it can occur any place and any time. But prayer, worship, and obedience provide the base.
A world has been opened up to us by revelation; we find ourselves walking on holy ground and living in sacred time. The moment we realize this, we feel shy, cautious. We slow down, we look around, ears and eyes alert. Like lost children happening on a clearing in the woods, and finding elves and fairies singing and dancing in a circle around a prancing two-foot-high unicorn. We stop in awed silence to accommodate this wonderful but unguessed revelation. But for us it isn’t a unicorn; it is Sinai and Tabor and Golgotha.
See also Holy Spirit, Doctrine of the; Human Being, Doctrine of; Religion; Sanctification; Spiritual Sense
Bibliography
Augustine. Confessions, trans. A. Outler. Westminster, 1955; Bass, D., ed. Practicing Our Faith. Jossey-Bass, 1997; Berry, W. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979–1997. HarperCollins, 1998; Bonhoeffer, D. Life Together, trans. J. Doberstein. Harper & Bros., 1954; Borgmann, A. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. University of Chicago Press, 1984; Buechner, F. Now and Then. Harper & Row, 1983; Fee, G. God’s Empowering Presence. Hendrickson, 1994; Ford, D. The Shape of Living. Baker, 1997; Foster, R. Celebration of Discipline. HarperSanFrancisco, 1978; Hauerwas, S. A Community of Character. University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces. G. Bles, 1956; Miles, M. R. Practicing Christianity. Crossroad, 1990; Rad, G. von. Wisdom in Israel. Abingdon, 1972; Tugwell, S. Ways of Imperfection. Templegate, 1985; Waltke, B. “The Fear of the Lord.” Pages 17–33 in Alive to God, ed. J. I. Packer and L. Wilkenson. InterVarsity, 1996; Williams, R. Christian Spirituality. John Knox, 1979.
Eugene H. Peterson
