Spiritual and Religious: Explorations for Seekers by Roger Haight (review)

The conjunction in the book’s title is telling. With the word “and,” Haight forcefully resists separating spirituality from religion, and forms his founding thesis. He sees religion as something that comes into being as a response to spirituality and argues that spiritualties require the institutional forms of religion to carry them forward. Even as spirituality and religion necessitate one another, Haight maintains that spirituality is primary. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters either works to justify this claim or to build implications from it. The effect is something like a condensed systematic theology, which holds spirituality as the centerpiece for addressing a broad range of key theological issues for the twenty-first century (creation, suffering, providence, Christology, ecclesiology, religious pluralism, soteriology, missiology, trinity, ethics, and lived practice).

Haight defines spirituality broadly in a Tillichian key as the “encompassing logic of how people live their lives with implicit or explicit reference to ultimate reality” (58). Christian faith—which is at heart a spiritual practice—patterns itself on the encompassing logic of how Jesus of Nazareth lived in reference to ultimate reality, whom he called Father. Jesus reveals God by revealing a way of life—a life that “counters sin by self-sacrificing love” and “leads to resurrection” (79). If Christians prioritize spiritual practice, if they follow Jesus’ way of being, then their attention will be oriented primarily to what sustained Jesus as his ultimate reality. Christian spirituality, then, is theocentric rather than Christocentric. Jesus’ place in the Christian faith is not minimized because he becomes the ultimate sign pointing to God. Since theology flows from spirituality, Haight argues that Christian doctrines and norms should be reconstructed to accord with the theocentrism expressed by Jesus’ life and ministry, allowing theology to respond fruitfully to the needs of our contemporary context. The implications are manifold: Christians can hold with integrity a “noncompetitive view of religions” and value the riches of other faith traditions. They can invest in and deepen secular, liberation spiritualties. They can find coherence between Christian theology and evolutionary biology. The seemingly discordant strands of our pluralistic world can be woven together by prioritizing and privileging spirituality.

Haight’s move toward reconciliation among diverse epistemologies and value-systems reflects a fundamental value of the Catholic intellectual tradition, namely that because truth is one, all knowledge can be integrated. The difference for Haight is that truth is not so much unitary as it is unifying. Christians—those who orient themselves to ultimate truth in the manner Jesus did—are called to discover and create unity, rather than to inscribe boundaries for it. Haight is hopeful that this will lead to renewal in the church, and his hope is contagious. If there is a limitation to the book, it is only that ideas worthy of a systematic theology are also worthy of more development, more space to grow. This seems to be a cost that Haight calculated worth paying: By writing a collection of digestible essays, Haight’s ideas—like the power and responsibility to renew the church—are put into the hands of the many rather than the specialized few.