The Role of Practice in the Study of Christian Spirituality

"'Right (communal) doing' seems in some sense a precondition for right understanding," claims Miroslav Volf. ² This statement raises a number of intriguing questions about what constitutes real understanding and how we arrive at it, questions that have particular significance for those engaged in scholarly reflection upon spiritual experience. Some of the questions are epistemological: What does it mean to know? Are there different "knowings" for theory and practice? Or might they be figure and ground of the same reality? What particular kind of knowing constitutes "scholarship?" Other questions have to do with perspective: What is the nature of the perspective taken by the scholar vis-à-vis the object of study and between the scholar and the scholar's audience? Where, in fact, is scholarship best pursued? And still other questions are of a pastoral character: How can one come to understand the other, be it the other in the pastor's study or in the neighborhood, the socioeconomic, racial, ethnic and gendered other, the ecumenical or interfaith other, even the non-human other?

In this essay, I would like to reflect on Volf's first phrase, "right communal doing," and ask what it might look like in a particular case: that of the academic study of Christian spirituality. I propose that a particular kind of doing that I shall call "practice," when employed by the scholar in the study of spirituality, is not merely something useful, but is a constitutive dimension of the discipline. Because of this, spirituality offers a useful and necessary perspective to other theological disciplines. Furthermore, when used in conjunction with appropriate scholarly methods, "practice" advances the content of the study itself.

To construct this argument, I will proceed in three interlocking steps: First, by examining the recent history and development of another young discipline, pastoral theology, ³ I will note some comparisons and contrasts between this discipline and the academic study of spirituality. Second, I will address one of the commitments shared by both disciplines, namely, to "experience." Finally, using the notion of "experience" as the launching point, I will propose a constructive suggestion for the academic study of spirituality concerning "practice."

Pastoral Theology and Spirituality

In their report, "Teaching Christian Spirituality in Seminaries Today," ⁴ Arthur Holder and Lisa Dahill noted that theology and history dominate the degrees of specialization among those teaching the introductory course in Christian spirituality (together, fifty percent of their sample). They wondered: "Given the preponderance of historians and theologians among those who teach introductory courses in Christian Spirituality, it is not surprising that these courses tend to stress history and theology, with very little attention to social scientific or aesthetic or practical theological or even biblical perspectives." What would happen if we were to pay attention to the insights and methodologies of these other disciplines?

My graduate study occurred in the program in Religion and Personality at Vanderbilt, and its discipline was the young and fluid one called pastoral theology. In reflecting on my own history, it occurred to me that the vicissitudes in the development of pastoral theology as an academic discipline offer interesting similarities and contrasts to the development of our discipline. This reflection has also led me to a claim based on an aspect of the academic study of spirituality, namely, its intrinsic relationship to that notoriously slippery concept, "experience."

Pastoral theology traces its formation to such psychologists of religion as William James, G. Stanley Hall and James Leuba in the early years of the twentieth century, Anton Boisen and Russell Dicks in the 1920s and 1930s and to such systematizers as Seward Hiltner, Carroll Wise, Paul Johnson, Daniel Day Williams, Wayne Oates, and Howard Clinebell in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. ⁵ These scholar-practitioners employed various biblical, theological, philosophical and psychological systems to ground their work. In the late 1970s, as I began my study, pastoral theology as an academic discipline was...