1. For a sociological approach, consult Wuthnow, R., After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wuthnow identifies many facets of the now widespread perception that one needs to ‘work on’ spirituality in order to nurture a satisfactory religious life, drawing a helpful distinction between traditional spiritualities of ‘dwelling’ and contemporary spiritualities of ‘seeking’. Nonetheless, he uses the word ‘spirituality’ in many different and confusing ways. Sometimes spirituality means the inner motivation for religious observance. In other places, spirituality indicates intentional religious practices. Spirituality can also serve as a synonym for religious experience. The one feature that unifies these divergent senses of spirituality is an emphasis on intensity and potency. Something is ‘spiritual’ if it exerts strong influence over the person. In this paper, I hope to provide a definition of spirituality that brings this common feature to the fore.

2. Temple, W., Religious Experience and other Essays and Addresses (London: James Clarke & Co., 1958), pp. 57–63.Google Scholar

3. Temple, , Religious Experience, p. 58.Google Scholar

4. Temple, , Religious Experience, p. 58.Google Scholar

5. Temple's great work of apologetics, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1951)Google Scholar, was motivated by his pressing sense of the urgency of recognizing that ‘personality’ is the underlying power of all things. Not only is such a perspective necessary for properly inhabiting the Christian inheritance, it is also necessary for a cogent account of the natural world and human endeavor. In all things, ‘personality’ is the source of life.

6. Temple, , Religious Experience, p. 63.Google Scholar

7. The history of modern theology is best understood as the intellectual justification for and refinement of modern spirituality. Schleiermacher is not just seminal in this regard, he is exemplary. The pastoral basis for his great work of theology, The Christian Faith, is explicit and systematic. The phenomenology of the feeling of absolute dependence allows him to analyze first-order Christian language and practice in terms of the potency of Jesus' God-consciousness. Schleiermacher defines the feeling of absolute dependence as ‘the highest grade of human self-consciousness’ (Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith [trans. and ed. Mackintosh, H.R. and Steward, J.S.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928], section 5, p. 18)Google Scholar, and thus, Jesus is the power of life because he is the perfection of that highest grade. In other words, Jesus perfectly manifests the power of ‘personality’ we all seek in our lives. His God-consciousness is the object of our common spiritual ambition. Once we recognize this perfection in Jesus, we can see the life-giving features of traditional Christian teaching.

8. See, for example, Spong, J.S., Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).Google Scholar

9. See my reductio ad absurdum, ‘The Sin of Faith’, in Moore, P.C. (ed.), Can a Bishop Be Wrong? (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 1998), pp. 74–92.Google Scholar

10. See Moeller, L. ‘Baptism: Rite of Inclusion or Exclusion?’, in Marshall, P.V. and Northup, L.A. (eds.), Leaps and Boundaries: The Prayer Book in the 21st Century (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 1997), pp. 81–92.Google Scholar

11. Hebert, A.G., Liturgy and Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), p. 12.Google Scholar

12. J.H. Newman makes the following observation about the epistemic potency of Scripture: ‘As to the proof of the authority of Scripture, this has hitherto rested on the testimony borne it by the existing Church’ (Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1997], pp. 69–70)Google Scholar. The weaker the existing Church, the weaker the functional authority of Scripture: this is a formula that goes a long way to explaining Evangelical concerns that animated Newman's deepening concern for and eventual despair of the ecclesiastical reality of the Church of England.

13. For a remarkable and prescient insight into the internal debilitation of the churches in the modern era, see John Keble's digressive and suggestive analysis, ‘On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church’, Tracts for the Times, No. 89 (1840–1841)Google Scholar. For Keble, spiritual and ecclesiastical discipline, exegetical sensibility and the effective perspicuity of doctrine are bound together. The fathers, Keble writes, ‘were natives, and could speak the language idiomatically, without stopping to recollect the rules of grammar’ (p. 40 of the AMS Press, 1969 edition of Tracts for the Times, Vol. VI). To reject the habituating forms patristic ascetical discipline and spiritual exegesis paves the way for rejecting doctrine. When we no longer speak the language, grammar becomes the inconsequential domain of specialists and antiquarians.

14. I follow the translation of On First Principles by Butterworth, G.W. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973)Google Scholar. The citations are given by the traditional divisions of book, chapter and paragraph.

15. Origen's affirmation of the sole sufficiency of Scripture is echoed by Hans Urs von Balthasar. The ascent of the soul to vision of the divine consummates the inner longings of the human heart. However, this ascent never transcends the first-order language and practice of the church. Speaking of the central role of Scripture, Balthasar writes, ‘Contemplation's ladder, reaching up to heaven, begins with the word of scripture, and whatever rung we are on, we are never beyond this hearing of the word. In contemplation, just as we can never leave the Lord's humanity behind, neither can we get “beyond” the word in its human form' (Prayer [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986], p. 9).

16. For a rich and detailed account of the diverse functions of allegorical reading that formed the background of Origen's exegetical practice, see Dawson, D., Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).Google Scholar

17. For a very important explanation of the divine strategy of ‘hardening’ and ‘veiling’, see On First Principles, 3.1.1–24. The theme of this chapter is free will, and across remarkable twists and turns of argument and exegetical digression, Origen comes to the conclusion that the difficulties of faith, placed before us by God (‘he covered up the deeper mysteries of the faith in veiled speech’, commenting on Mk 4.11–12 in paragraph 17) serve to bring our labors of understanding and self-discipline to the consummating conclusion that the grace of God carries us to his glory. The divine physician gives us the medicine of confusion and difficulty so that we can recognize our dependence on his power.

18. Origen is easily misread as reframing Christianity in terms of Greek antitheses of time and eternity, spirit and matter. He does presuppose these antitheses, but over the course of his explanation of the divine plan of salvation, Origen argues that the weight and burden of time and matter are elements of divine grace. For we must be shaped and formed into new persons. Therefore, time is the gift of divine patience, and carnal life trains us for a life proper to his glory. Time and material life, like the carnal difficulties of Scripture, provide a purposeful darkness, a gracious travail.

19. For Radner's compelling account of the ‘death’ of the church in the wake of Christian divisions initiated by the Reformation see Radner, E., The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)Google Scholar. For a more accessible outline of his account, see the scriptural meditation, Radner, E., ‘The Cost of Communion: Israel and the Divided Church’, in Radner, E. and Reno, R.R. (eds.), Inhabiting Unity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 134–52.Google Scholar