Relational Spirituality

A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation

Todd W. Hall

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830899579
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

MIDWC Book AwardAs our society becomes more socially fragmented, many Christians feel disconnected and struggle to grow spiritually. Common models of spiritual transformation are proving inadequate to address "the sanctification gap." In recent decades, however, a new paradigm of human and spiritual development has been emerging from multiple fields. It's supported by a critical mass of evidence, all pointing to what psychologists Todd W. Hall and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall call a relational revolution.In Relational Spirituality, Hall and Hall present a definitive model of spiritual transformation based on a relational paradigm. At its heart is the truth that human beings are fundamentally relational—we develop, heal, and grow through relationships. While many sanctification models are fragmented, individualistic, and lack a clear process for change, the relational paradigm paints a coherent picture of both process and goal, supported by both ancient wisdom and cutting-edge research. Integrating insights from psychology and theology, this book lays out the basis for relational spiritual transformation and how it works practically in the context of relationships and community.Relational Spirituality draws together themes such as trinitarian theology, historical and biblical perspectives on the imago Dei, relational knowledge, attachment patterns, and interpersonal neurobiology into a broad synthesis that will stimulate further dialogue across a variety of fields. Highlighting key characteristics of spiritual communities that foster transformation, Hall and Hall equip spiritual leaders and practitioners to more effectively facilitate spiritual growth for themselves and those they serve.Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

Theology and Spirituality

Their Fundamental Unity and Historical Split

WHY IS IT NECESSARY to reclaim relationality? We live in a world in which we take for granted distinctions between reason and experience, fact and value, theology and spirituality. We have a hard time imagining these polarities meeting in some meaningful way and have difficulty envisioning what a more unified outlook would entail. Yet it is also important to recognize that our current polarized vision of how we obtain truth, grow, and flourish has not always existed. The relational spirituality paradigm proposed in this book is actually a return to relationality—specifically, the grounding of all of our knowing in our relationship with God. What did this look like in the early church? We see important foundations for a relational spirituality paradigm in the holistic notion of theology, or theologia, in the early church.

Many of the great theologians prior to the thirteenth century viewed the intellectual exploration of the Christian faith and of the world God created as inseparable from a personal relationship with God and the practical outworking of one’s faith and ministry. Sustained intellectual contemplation of the life of faith and thinking about the world in light of one’s faith and Scripture went hand in hand with the development of one’s heart, character, and love for God. There was a seamless connection between knowing about God and knowing God. Likewise, there was a close link between studying God’s creation, including human nature and development, and living the Christian life. In fact, until the thirteenth century, theology (theologia) was foundationally a deeply experiential way of knowing. There were not distinct terms, such as spirituality, referring to experiential or even mystical knowledge of God on the one hand, and theology, representing academic, conceptual knowledge of God on the other hand.

Practical or experiential knowledge was viewed as the foundational way of knowing for theology and the Christian life. Early theologians certainly engaged in intellectual reflection, but this was viewed as intrinsically connected to prayer, loving God, and loving one’s neighbor. Theology included conceptual analysis, but it was always more than this—analysis was never the central goal of theologia. Intellectual reflection was not pursued for its own sake; rather, it was pursued for the primary purpose of experiential knowledge of God, which is to say, growth in one’s capacity to love God and others. The early church fathers’ attempts to understand the relation of the soul to God and progress in the Christian life were the central organizing principles of their theology.

Likewise, mystical theology for the patristic fathers was not, generally speaking, a separate area of explicit, conceptual knowledge, or a special experience for the elite. Rather, it related to the breadth of the Christian life and incorporated both explicit and experiential knowledge of God. The word mysticism did not identify a distinct mode of spiritual knowledge or experience for the patristic fathers. However, the adjective mystikos, on which the word mysticism is based, was used frequently (for example, in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, author of Mystical Theology).1 The noun mysterion means, most simply, a “secret,” and so the adjective mystikos essentially means “simple or hidden.” The word represented the notion of the secret life available in Christ, because the depth of the gospel has unending implications for our lives.

It was also used in intimate connection with the sacraments and the Eucharist, and thus was a communal experience. It did not refer to an ecstatic experience with a focus on an individual’s experience of rapture, and it was not disconnected from doctrine. Rather, the mystikos life in Christ was precisely the working out of doctrine in the lived experience of Christians—a working out that went hand in hand with the gradual working out of the major doctrinal formulations during the first five centuries of Christianity. We may suggest, then, that the ecclesial, sacramental, and doctrinal were all seamlessly woven together in the mystical dimension for the Fathers. Andrew Louth put it this way: “‘Mysticism,’ in this sense, is not esoteric but exemplary, not some kind of flight from the bodily but deeply embedded (not to say: embodied), not about special ‘experiences’ of God but about a radical opening of ourselves to God.”2

In part two, we will connect this experiential knowledge with the contemporary scientific concept of “implicit relational knowledge.” Modern science elaborates on this way of knowing as essentially relational, which sheds light on the church fathers’ approach, as well as elaborates on it. We need to recapture this focus in our contemporary context and bring the insights of the early notion of theologia into conversation with new understandings of relational knowledge.

The unity that existed in the early centuries of Christianity of what we now call theology, spirituality (including mysticism) eventually fractured. We now turn our attention to the main objective of this chapter, examining the development of a split between theology and spirituality and between two ways of knowing. In the remainder of the chapter, we trace the split from the harmonious coexistence of faith and reason in the early church fathers, through the development of scholastic theology in the Middle Ages, to the solidification of the split in the Enlightenment. We close by describing the implications of this split for contemporary evangelicalism, and particularly for our understanding and pursuit of spiritual development.

The Early Church Fathers: Faith and Reason in Harmony

When Christianity emerged in the centuries-old Roman Empire, early Christian scholars were faced with the question of what to do with the secular learning inherited from pagan Greek sources, most notably Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Two conflicting attitudes developed. One tradition sought to protect Christianity by disengaging from the intellectual traditions of the pagan society out of which the Roman Empire was birthed. The classic expression of this tradition was articulated by Tertullian (ca. 150–ca. 225) when he wrote:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? . . . Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith we desire no further belief.3

A second tradition proposed that pagan thought foreshadowed Christianity, and therefore, could provide insight to Christian scholars. This line of thought, which can be traced back to Philo,4 held that Christians should take what is of value from pagan thought and use it for their own purposes, just as God instructed Moses to plunder the wealth of the Egyptians (Exodus 3:22; 11:2; 12:35).5 This approach is thus sometimes referred to as “spoiling the Egyptians.” A second rationale for seeking wisdom from secular philosophers was to use their own ideas as an apologetic against them. Christians, then, came to adopt the fundamental view of philosophy and science as “handmaids to theology.”

This tradition is exemplified by Clement in early antiquity and Augustine in late antiquity. In responding to his objectors who argued that God had replaced philosophy (based on reason) with faith, Clement argued that the Greek poets and philosophers prepared the way for the gospel. Through natural reason, God guided philosophers toward truth, even if indirectly. According to Clement, “Jewish law and Greek philosophy have been two rivers, at whose confluence Christianity sprung forth, like a new source, powerful enough to carry, along with its own waters, those of its two feeders.”6 Thus, the handmaiden tradition developed the ambition to grasp all truth that is accessible to humans. The search for truth through pagan learning and reason, however, was kept in check. Clement urged Christians to use secular learning without mistaking it for true Christian wisdom for which philosophy prepares us. While the gospel is sufficient for salvation, and encompasses a direct relationship with God, philosophy and reason can help lead people to Christ and help them understand the meaning of their Christian faith after accepting it. The significance of Clement lies in this deep articulation of the harmonious relationship between philosophy/reason and the Christian faith.

Augustine’s conviction was that secular knowledge should not be sought as an end in itself.7 The goal in plundering pagan philosophy is the search for Christian wisdom. Only studies that serve this purpose should be pursued. Reason, for Augustine and many of his followers, was not to follow logical arguments beyond the confines of revealed doctrine. When it came to theology and the spiritual life, which were highly intertwined for Augustine and the church fathers, the purpose of reason was to shed light on the truth of doctrine and deepen one’s relationship and experiential knowledge of God. This stance of the handmaiden tradition assumed that one accepted faith prior to striving to understand it more deeply. For Augustine, to truly understand reason and logic, one must have a deep faith and relationship with God. This is reflected in the well-known phrase “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). Faith, then, is primary in some sense and involves knowing God through direct relationship, and not merely through logic or reason.

What we see in this approach during this era is that faith and reason (including secular philosophy) were viewed as operating in harmony with one another. Reason and logic were applied to doctrine in order to bolster one’s faith. Moreover, faith involved a direct relationship with God and a relational/experiential way of knowing, which was distinct from reason and assumed to be valid. The validity of this experiential way of knowing tied to faith gradually eroded as reason and explicit knowledge came to take center stage. This split began in the transition to the Middle Ages.

The Transition to the Middle Ages: The Foundations of the Split Between Faith and Reason

In the transition to the Middle Ages, Boethius, who has been referred to as the “Last of the Romans, first of the scholastics,”8 reinforced and extended Augustine’s approach to reason in relation to faith. As the Roman Empire fell, and the Goths of Theodoric’s kingdom rose to power, the new Nordic-Germanic nations sought to master and assimilate the massive body of accumulated knowledge they came across, including patristic theology and the wisdom of classical antiquity. This required that the entire knowledge base be translated and systematized. The man who took on this task of selection and translation was Boethius (480–525).9 In doing this, he compiled the most significant contribution to the history of reason in the early Middle Ages: the literature known as the old logic (logica vetus).

In considering the enormous undertaking and accomplishments of Boethius, it is not difficult to understand why he is considered one of the founders of the Middle Ages.10 More important for our considerations, however, is that he is considered the first scholastic. Although scholasticism did not emerge as the primary method of thought in medieval universities until centuries later, Boethius started something altogether new that was to have major implications for the tension between two ways of knowing: faith (fides) and reason (ratio).

What, then, was new? Boethius extended Augustine’s approach of applying Aristotelian logic to theological issues. In his introduction to the tractate on the Trinity, Boethius probed the oneness of God. In so doing, he declared his intention to explain the doctrine of the Trinity “only so far as the insight of man’s reason is allowed to climb the height of heavenly knowledge.”11 Thus, his goal was to make the trinitarian nature of God understandable to the rational mind using solely rational means. While a rational understanding of belief was assumed in prior times, the novelty of Boethius’s approach was his overt emphasis on reason. The last sentence of Boethius’s letter on the Trinity, addressed to Pope John I, shows this emphasis: “As far as you are able, join faith to reason.”12 It was more than just this explicit emphasis on reason that was new, however. It was also Boethius’s method, the way in which he carried out this principle of rational examination, that was extraordinarily new.13 His tractates did not include a single Bible quotation, despite the fact that they deal entirely with theological subjects. He used only logic and mathematics as his models. Henry Chadwick notes that Boethius

taught the Latin West, above all else, the method of axiomatization, that is, of analyzing an argument and making explicit the fundamental presuppositions and definitions on which its cogency rests. He taught his successors how to state truths in terms of first principles and then to trace how particular conclusions follow therefrom. The West learnt from him demonstrative method.14

While this logical and extrabiblical approach is a thread of scholasticism, a central characteristic of scholasticism that emerged from Boethius is the explicit principle of joining faith and reason. As we can see throughout history, this is a most difficult endeavor. However, some of the leading thinkers of the scholastic era, such as Thomas Aquinas, attempted to coordinate knowledge of revealed truth through faith, on the one hand, and knowledge through reason on the other hand. Josef Pieper notes that they succeeded in balancing the tensions between faith and reason for a brief moment in the period referred to as “high scholasticism” that came to a close at the end of the thirteenth century.15

We have, then, a curious and complex situation. On the one hand, we have a principle that seeks to bring together faith and reason. On the other, we have the seeds of a line of thinking that led to a focus on reason and rationalism—to an approach to knowledge of God that...