Theology and Spirituality
As many of you know, I’ve submitted a book manuscript recently for the sequel to Where Prayer Becomes Real. At the heart of that book is the belief that prayer is not a place to be good, but is a place to be honest.
The sequel to that book is going to be called When God Seems Absent. This book reveals the ways we think we are drawing near to God when we are, in fact, only managing and manipulating him. This book is a call to a deeper way, one where we embrace the Gospel all the way down for life with God.
I’ve been writing these books against the backdrop of a larger project, one that actually serves to frame my overarching vision of spiritual formation. This project is on the doctrine of sanctification, and how a biblically-rich and theologically-robust account of sanctification orders our life to God [my volume on sanctification, written with my friend Kent Eilers, will appear in the Soteriology and Doxology series with Baker Academic in 2026 (Lord willing).
As a part of that project I have been thinking about the relationship of theology and spirituality. It was this question that eventually led me to do my PhD in theology (I originally planned on doing something in New Testament or Biblical Theology). Along the way, I was able to connect and interact a lot with a small group of theologians who were particularly animated by the vision of a truly spiritual theology.
One of those theologians was Mark McIntosh, who wrote about the danger of a theology that becomes divorced from spirituality:
“Put as bluntly as possible, theology without spirituality becomes ever more methodologically refined but unable to know or speak of the very mysteries at the heart of Christianity, and spirituality without theology becomes rootless, easily hijacked by individualistic consumerism…In other words, when a culture has grown used to the divorce between theology and spirituality, between doctrine and prayer, then the mutually critical function of the two breaks down. Neither is in sufficient dialogue with the other to keep it honest. And after a long period of such separation it becomes increasingly difficult to see what it missing in so much of the pale pretenders that pass fairly often of theology and spirituality today.”
Simeon Zahl, more recently, makes a similar critique, pointing out how often theologians pontificate about life with God without any actual accountability about the truth-value of those claims. It turns out that it is easier to talk abstractly about the Christian life, growth, and a life of sanctification than it is to actually articulate meaningfully why the Christian life is the way that it is.
At the heart of my publishing is the desire to provide an account of life with God that makes sense of the actual experience of the Christian. This means that a book on prayer has to do more than offer theories of prayer, or even practical advice about prayer (although they should do both). A faithful book on prayer needs to be able to explain why your mind wanders when you pray, or why prayer feels the way it does. Without this, we end up theorizing abstractly, saying impressing sounding things without any grounding in reality.
Too often our theologians have decided that the lived reality of life with God is somehow outside the bounds of what a theologian addresses. Theologians too quickly serve academic guilds rather than serving the church as she is struggles to follow her Lord.
McIntosh’s critique, however, goes beyond theologians, but also addresses how dangerous a theologically-illiterate spirituality is to the church. There are severe implications for a spirituality that is unmoored from theology. Too often spiritual formation is a “pale pretender” of what a spiritual theology can articulate and shepherd folks into. When we accept these shadow versions of theology and spirituality we end up serving either the academy instead of the church, or a reductive individualism that ends up leading away from the church. Both are false, and both our faulty.
My hope is that my more academic work on sanctification (aimed at seminary classrooms, and yet still introductory) can serve as an overarching framework within which my more popular-level spiritual formation books spell out. I would appreciate your prayers as I continue to develop this in service of the church.