In my quest for a holistic way of understanding Christian spiritual formation, I have found a couple of resourses that have help me thing more deeply about the "how" of Christian Spiritual formation.
The first is biblical. The Shema, it seems to me, offers a prism through which to express our devotion to God as well as potentials outlets of that devotion. I develop this more fully in my DMin thesis, Developing a Holistic Spiritual Formation Course at Western Christian College, in which I sought to develop a model for teaching spiritual formation to college students. Here, allow me to cut to the chase, and say that the Shema in its fullest form calls for believers to love the Lord with all of their heart, soul, mind and body. These categories, it seems to me, offers us a beginning point to envision a holistic praxis since spiritual formation calls for committment from each of these domains of our humanity. Thus, there is room in Christian spiritual formation to experience and express our encounter with God through our emotions, our deepest self, our intellect, and our bodies (or said another way, by the way we feel, who we are are, what we think and what we do). In short, we are not far from a taxonomy for doing Christian spiritual formation. Thus, any holistic Christian spiritual formation would have to engage all four of the domains to fulfill the intent of the Shema.
The second is historical and will require some effort to master but it is worth it. We start with the historical observations of Urban Holmes who was seeking to categorize practices of Christian spiritual formation as they had occured in the the history of Christianity. (The following is adapted from my DMin thesis).
In A History of Christian Spirituality (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2002), Holmes develops a model comprehensive enough to account for practices of spiritual formation within the whole of the Christian tradition. Holmes’s model uses two scales, or continuums, to capture practices of Christian spiritual formation. One scale charts God’s involvement, the other human engagement.
The first scale, the horizontal continuum, measures God’s role in Christian spiritual transformation. This continuum, then, holds the tension between what Holmes calls the apophatic and the kataphatic poles. These poles are based on how God has (or has not) revealed himself. On one end, God is mysterious (apophatic), yet, on the other, he has made himself knowable (kataphatic).
The second scale, the vertical continuum, charts human engagement. This scale holds in tension the speculative (intellectual) and the affective (emotional) poles, which capture how humans experience the revelation of God. The process of Christian spiritual formation in this model involves both head and heart.
Accordingly, Holmes observes, Christian spiritual formation must attend to all these poles: the intellectual, the emotional, the apophatic (mystery of God), and the kataphatic (God revealed). In Holmes’s model, the speculative (intellectual) and the affective form the y-axis while the apophatic and the kataphatic form the x-axis.
Figure 1. Circle of Sensibility (See Holmes Spiritual Model attached as a file)
This model allows areas between the poles: apophatic/speculative, speculative/kataphatic, kataphatic/affective, and affective/apophatic. These quadrants, while all necessary to a holistic model of spiritual formation, are prone to historic excesses (for example, encratism, rationalism, quietism, and pietism). Practices that fall into Holmes’s “circle of sensibility” do not fall into these excesses.
Allen H. Sager (Gospel-Centered Spirituality [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1990]) , as well as others, has further refined this model, and Kenneth Boa in Conformed to His Image: Biblical and Practical Approaches to Spiritual Formation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) presents a convenient synthesis in his model.
Boa concurs with Holmes and Sager that the vertical line, or continuum, represents a person’s relationship with God and ranges from the emotional to the intellectual extremes. The horizontal line represents an individual’s (or group’s) preferred way of apprehending the transcendent, or pursuing the spiritual life.
The kataphatic pole refers to the via affirmativa, or the “way of affirmation,” denoting what God has revealed. This pole, according to Boa, is more at home in the West and affirms “the knowledge of God through general and special revelation.”
On the other hand, the apophatic pole, the via negativa, stresses that humans cannot fully know God. This perspective, more at home in the Orthodox tradition, emphasizes that God is transcendent and will ever remain a mystery. Between the poles, where possible extremes can develop, the model creates four quadrants where “actions” of spiritual formation occur (see figure 2 below).
Figure 2. Types of Christian Spirituality (See Boa's Model as attached file)
These four quandrants (see Boa's chart) can be lined up with the four domains of the Shema. I will develop that in my next post.
