Practicing Christianity: Critical Perspectives for an Embodied Spirituality by Margaret R. Miles (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 155 Practicing Christianity: Critical Perspectives for an Embodied Spirituality , hy MARGARET R. MILES. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988. Pp. 207. $19.95. Scholarly surveys of devotional literature and practices are in relatively short supply in the academy, where interest continues to focus on much more complex and finely nuanced theological issues. Margaret Miles, Bussey Professor of Historical Theology at Harvard Divinity School, is therefore to he commended for taking popular devotional traditions with great seriousness and producing a very scholarly and readable analysis of major themes and practices in the history of Christian devotion. The first section of her hook, a work filled with fascinating insights, discusses three principal metaphors and motifs in the history of devotional writing: the imitation of Christ, pilgrimage, and ascent. Part II covers common devotional practices: asceticism, worship and sacraments, service and prayer. Part III, entitled "Embodiment of Christian Life," deals with the way in which Christian, tradition has treated personal relationships, happiness, suffering and death. Describing herself as having been raised in a fundamentalist Baptist parsonage, Dr. Miles has herself been on a long "pilgrimage." She writes from the standpoint of contemporary revisionist theologians, informing her readers that hers is "an active and disobedient reading." Her stated purpose is to identify and scrutinize what is " unintended, accidental, or so thoroughly assumed that it appears ' natural ' within the text's argument" (p. x). This she does hy means of an acute intelligence --so acute that we might better substitute the word " clinical " for " critical " in the subtitle. Her approach is cool, methodical, and entirely predictable in its conclusions. Asking the question " What in our devotional traditions is retrievable for a nuclear world? " the answer she comes up with is: "not much." In fact, most of the accumulated wisdom about spiritual practice throughout the history of Christianity she labels downright dangerous, given her assessment of the conditions of the global village in the late twentieth century. Drawing on some of the most familiar sources in the history of spirituality-Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas a Kempis, Frances de Sales, John Bunyan, and others-Miles tackles each new topic by describing the motif or practice accurately and dispassionately. She assumes, probably correctly, that what she is describing will sound at least alien if not bizarre to many modern ears. Next, she applies what she terms a " hermeneutic of generosity " to the material, attempting to contex- 156 BOOK REVIEWS tualize it sufficiently so that the reader will come to see the otherwise odd practice as an understandable, perhaps even appropriate response to a given set of (usually deplorable) historical conditions. Thus, instead of being allowed simply to dismiss an ancient attitude out of hand, the reader is invited to a less parochial, more historically-informed , i.e. " generous " assessment. We are illumined and enlarged by this exercise. But her next step reveals the fist of mail concealed within the velvet glove. She now reminds the reader that we live in a very different time. Ours is a " nuclear " age, and the threats we face are unprecedented. The fate of the world as we know it now lies in human hands, and it follows that if one set of circumstances justified a particular response in previous times, the new and unimaginably dan· gerous circumstances we live in today calls for a different devotional response. As the times change, so must our practice of Christianity, which appears here as primarily a human response to historical conditions rather than as a divinely reliable cure for what ails us. Context is all. Until very recently in the history of the church, theologians have based their critiques of Christian practice on the extent to which this practice has conformed to biblical and traditional norms. Included in this standard has been a perspective on human nature that understands it to he fallen, on a universal scale, and therefore quite predictable in its propensity to sin whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself. The human propensity to sin and the divine propensity to love and forgive have been the non-negotiable " givens " in Christian tradition and practice, the standard by which all novelties, innovations and " contextualizations " have been judged. Christians...