I like double entendres and so it was the clever title of a recent collection of essays on Christian spirituality that first caught my eye—Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality. The play on "paying attention to the Spirit" and "thinking critically about the Spirit" is not just clever, though. It goes to the heart of one of the central issues involved in the study of spirituality, namely, that such study is self-implicating. Studying spirituality disturbs the typical subject–object relation often presumed in studying something formally. I put on my white lab coat and under controlled conditions I look at object x under my microscope. I probe it in various ways and make observations on what it does. That is perhaps what some of us think is the normal way of studying things. My cousin is a scientist who does spinal cord research, and he used to work directly across the street from me at the University of British Columbia. I remember thinking about how different his job was from mine when I saw a Post-It note on his bulletin board that simply said "Rats" with a phone number written underneath—the equivalent of 1-800-GET-RATS, I suppose. But I teach spiritual theology at a graduate school of Christian studies. So who are my "lab rats"?

As it happens, most scientists these days, especially physicists looking at the very small and the very big, acknowledge that they are implicated in their own research, a part of the system they study. How much more so when we are studying Christian spirituality. The paradigm of the neutral observer in the white coat looking at the lab rat falls apart quickly. And the sooner the better, I say.

That's why I think the title of this book is so clever: Minding the Spirit. There are echoes here of a deep Christian tradition of religious epistemology, the doctrine of double knowledge that we find all but universally in the history of Christianity from Augustine's Soliloquies to Anselm's Proslogion to the opening words of John Calvin's Institutes. "Let me know myself, let me know thee," prays Augustine. Anselm implicates himself when he says, "I believe so that I might understand." True wisdom consists in "the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves," writes Calvin.

For all these writers, lex orandi (the law of prayer) is integral to lex credendi (the law of belief). Repeatedly, the Christian who seeks to know the mind of the Spirit is told that such "minding" will require self-knowledge and active participation. As the 5th-century monastic founder John Cassian said, spiritual knowledge is "not something to be possessed by humanistic lore and worldly erudition." It is gained only by "purity of heart and through the illumination of the Holy Spirit." Or, as St. Paul wrote, it is a matter of "spiritual things discerned spiritually" (1 Cor. 2: 13).

This raises many questions. How is the study of spirituality not therefore pure fideism? How can such an enterprise be properly public? Minding the Spirit, edited by Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows, is a collection of 25 essays, originally written for the periodical of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. Dominated by contributions from Catholic writers, it nevertheless provides a good cross-section of the sort of thinking about spirituality scholars have been doing over the past decade or so. Some of the essays are methodological; others explore the theme of self-implication. Some cover the traditional ground of history and theology, while still others correlate spirituality to themes such as healing and beauty.

These articles do not proceed constructively to build a spiritual theology from direct engagement with biblical exposition in the way that Christian spiritual writers have done in the past and that Eugene Peterson is doing in his new five-volume "conversation" in spiritual theology. So in that sense Minding the Spirit is a second-order discourse: a study of the study of Christian spirituality. The scope of the book is nevertheless wide in the range of subjects it treats. And it has breadth in the manner in which these subjects are approached.

Taken as a whole, the book is very self-conscious. It is keenly aware of itself as an academic conversation about spirituality in the late (or post-) modern period, and in several essays and editorial introductions the writers try to locate this conversation both within history and within the sociology of the academy and the life of the churches. Aware that an interdisciplinary interest in spirituality is growing, a few of the authors speculate that a new discipline is emerging within the academy altogether, much as psychology and sociology emerged as bona fide disciplines at the turn of the last century. If this is so, they ask, what is the particular object of study for this discipline? What are its methods? And what constitute its sources? And perhaps most perplexing of all, How do you teach it?

Many of us have sensed the rise of "spirituality" as a subject of popular and scholarly interest, and even as a way of thinking about other subjects: "the spirituality of work" or "the spirituality of family" or "the spirituality of ______" (fill in the blank). But where did this interest come from, and what are its implications?

The year 1978 can serve as a provisional benchmark. The Classics of Western Spirituality commenced publication that year and now includes over a hundred volumes. (I phoned the publisher, Paulist Press, to ask exactly how many books were included in the series now, and the person on the other end of the phone said they stopped keeping track after a hundred.) This was also the year in which Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline was published, a book that sold more than 1.5 million copies in the next two decades and was translated into 14 languages. I teach at Regent College in Vancouver, and 1978 was also the year that our founding principal Jim Houston began his transition from teaching broadly in interdisciplinary studies to teaching formally in the area of Christian spirituality. As far as I know, Regent College was the first evangelical Protestant institution to list spiritual theology as a concentration within its curriculum. It would be hard now to imagine a theological college anywhere that did not include spirituality or spiritual theology as an explicit subject in its list of course offerings.

Okay, I confess that the year 1978 is a mental convenience. We are not going to be able to pinpoint the rise of spirituality as a research subject with any like this kind of precision. Our contemporary interest in spirituality is a phenomenon written in letters almost too large to read. As some of the writers in Minding the Spirit have shown, the genealogy of the word spirituality and the history of the study of spirituality take us back several centuries at least. Associated with the condemned Quietist movement in 17th-century France, the terms "spirituality" and "spiritual theology" were marginal even in Roman Catholic theology until the 20th century.

After a long hiatus these terms revived significantly in academic usage among a number of continental Catholic theologians during the first half of the last century. Spirituality was front and center in a disciplined discourse about the spiritual life fostered especially by French-speaking theologians, including for example the neo-Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964). A disciplined investigation of the spiritual life continued among the later ressourcement theologians, such as Jean Daniélou (1905-74), Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), Louis Bouyer (1913-2004) and others who helped stimulate the patristic revival and the spirit of renewal that culminated in Vatican II. For all the differences among these writers, there was a profoundly theological center to their reflection upon spirituality. Nothing about this discussion of spirituality was vague or fuzzy. As Balthasar was fond of saying, the word of God is always precise, crystalline, and exact. For both the neo-scholastics and the nouvelle théologie school who reacted against them, the study of spirituality was a central concern and a key to overcoming the pathological truncation of theology in the modern era.

The result was an unprecedented level of theological and historical scholarship related to Christian spirituality. In Bernard McGinn's first essay in Minding the Spirit, he notes such key landmarks in the first half of the 20th century as the publication of Pierre Pourrat's four-volume La spiritualité catholique (1918-28), which appeared a little later in English translation as Christian Spirituality, and the appearance in 1932 of the first volume of the monumental Dictionnaire de spiritualité, which would eventually reach 17 volumes (not yet translated into English, alas). A chair in the history of spirituality was also established at the Institût Catholique in Paris in 1943. And other examples could be added to illustrate the virtual renaissance in the study of spirituality in France during these years.

"Spirituality" as a significant term of art in English academic usage appears to have taken off roughly in the last half of the 20th century. For example, McGinn cites a survey of the Catholic Periodical Index that reported only 11 uses of the term in the titles of articles between 1922 and 1964, but some 146 uses between 1965 and 1976. A landmark for English speakers would have to be the appearance of the three volumes of specialist academic essays on Christian spirituality within the 25-volume series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, the first of which was published in 1985.

Some years ago the German linguist Uwe Poerksen published a small book entitled Plastic Words, and the English translation was reprinted in paperback in 2004. He coined the term to describe a class of widely used words that connote much but denote little. If you throw a stone into a pond, the original splash is denotation: the designation of a thing. The waves that expand outward in circles are connotations: waves of feelings, associations, and valuations that the thing evokes. "Plastic words seem to be composed only of the ring-link connotations … . The stone and the first wave have disappeared."

Poerksen claimed that this class of words is the linguistic equivalent of little plastic Lego blocks, combinable and interchangeable in innumerable ways. (You can have a "developmental strategy" or, if you like, a "strategic development.") Poerksen was concerned chiefly with technical words that originate in the sciences (in the German sense of all disciplined enquiry) and then gain popular currency in the media, politics, and everyday usage. Shorn of the precision they had in technical discourse, such words become plastic. Even though the speaker lacks the power of definition, the words retain a powerful aura of expertise and an illusion of insight. If a politician announces a "strategic development" or we are told that a lecture will be given on the topic of "sexuality," then we cannot help but imagine a panel of experts or a collection of scientific studies existing somewhere in the background, conferring authority. This is surely not just a significant event being reported, or a talk about sex. The stone and the first wave have disappeared.

I suspect that the word "spirituality" has many of the characteristics of plastic words that Poerksen lists in the appendix at the end of his book. Try out this apothegm from Poerksen the next time you hear someone use the word spirituality: "The speaker lacks the power of definition; the words do not acquire meaning or nuance from their context." Do you come away with a more precise and nuanced sense of the word, as compared with someone simply speaking about, say, prayer?

Again, on plastic words: "Their connotation is positive," and they "deliver the illusion of insight." Is anyone against spirituality? Don't we just need more of it? How about this: "Their many-sided generality brings about consensus." Can you imagine anyone voting against measures to promote spirituality?

And perhaps my favorite rule for helping to ferret out plastic words: "The words cannot be made clearer by tone of voice, pantomime, or gesture, and cannot be replaced by these." Pity the poor soul who is given the word "spirituality" in a game of charades.

Remember, Poerksen argues that science "or some other higher sphere" picks up a word from the vernacular and employs it in a rigorous way. Along the way, these words pick up the semblance of generally applicable truths. Then these words wander back, duly canonized, into the vernacular, where they become "dominant myths" and overshadow our everyday lives.

I think Poerksen's category of "plastic words" applies to the word "spirituality" if it applies anywhere. Here is a word that has a long history in Latin and the European vernaculars and that "acquired meaning and nuance" from its context in late medieval devotion, in the 17th-century debates about mysticism, and then in the revived scholarly study of ascetical and mystical theology in France in the first half of the 20th century and in the English-speaking countries a little later.

With this rising interest, the stage was set for the migration of "spirituality" back into the vernacular and its eventual popularization as a plastic word. As Poerksen says of such plastic words, "Their scientifically authorized objectivity and universality make the older words of the vernacular appear ideological." And thus older words such as "piety" or "devotion" are lost in pools of sentiment now in favor of the bracing clarity and freshness of "spirituality."

One further characteristic of plastic words, according to Poerksen: They display the logical law of inverse proportionality of extension and intention: the broader the application, the smaller the content; the larger the claim, the more reduced the substance. Here too it seems that the word "spirituality" qualifies. Guilty on all counts as charged.

Given this state of affairs, it is all the more important to "mind the spirit," and the time is ripe for careful thinking about the study of Christian spirituality. I am grateful for books such as Minding the Spirit that move us toward precision in our conversations about spirituality—that look for the original stone that made the first splash in the pond.

Another such recent book is the New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake. It is genuinely "new" and not merely an update of the Dictionary of Christian Spirituality edited by the late Gordon Wakefield in 1983. As Sheldrake says in his introduction, "The most significant development in the intervening years has been the growth of spirituality as a major academic discipline with its own methodology." Indeed, the dictionary looks to me to be about twice the length of the Wakefield edition, and that notwithstanding the new editor's decision to leave out biographical entries altogether. (So don't throw out your copy of Wakefield just yet.) The dictionary has also been enlarged in scope (geographical and thematic) and by the addition of thirteen survey essays at the front of the volume. These essays address questions of method, and the relationship of spirituality to other fields—"spirituality and history," "spirituality and theology," "spirituality and science," and so on.

Sandra Schneiders, who also writes two of the methodological essays in Minding the Spirit, has the first essay in the dictionary, "Christian Spirituality: Definition, Methods and Types." She nicely summarizes the debate over method of the past ten years or so, and identifies three approaches to the study of Christian spirituality: historical, theological, and anthropological.

The historical or contextual approach to the study of spirituality is perhaps most easily situated in the modern academy. In the movement of historians toward social history and 'thick description' and the history of mentalité, it has been natural for spiritual themes to emerge as subjects of historical investigation. Into this category I would place, for example, Bernard McGinn's multivolume study The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (1991–), the fourth volume of which appeared in 2005.

The theological approach, on the other hand, has more typically been characteristic of the denominational seminary or publishing house where there is an explicit concern to evaluate spiritual experience according to theological norms and to contribute to the formation of Christian women and men in the application of faith to life. Here I would locate Eugene Peterson's important book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (2005). Or, to take a modern classic, there is Hans Urs von Balthasar's dense little book, Prayer, originally written in German in 1955 but translated into English and still in print.

The anthropological approach, which Schneiders herself advocates, identifies Christian spirituality as a subset of the broader field of spirituality which is neither Christian by definition nor necessarily even religious. Christian spiritual experience is here one particular form of a universal human capacity for the spiritual quest, patient of study as such. Because of the task of re-interpretation, Schneiders also calls this approach hermeneutical. She sees this method as most appropriate to graduate research or work within a religious studies department.

Ruth Frankenberg is a cultural studies scholar who exemplifies this approach in her Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology (2004), which is based upon fifty interviews with subjects from a wide range of spiritual communities: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Twelve Step, Bahai, Diamond Heart, Wicca, and syncretist or extra-institutional. Frankenberg's conclusions about the sort of language, social constructions, and knowledge observed in her interviewees leads her in the end to the sort of universal categories ("living spirit" and "living practice," "spontaneity" and "cultivation") used in Schneiders' characterization of anthropological approaches.

As a heuristic description of ways that Christian spirituality has been approached and studied, this taxonomy of method (historical, theological, anthropological) is helpful. But I think it nevertheless obscures some fundamental questions. For example, as a historian I know that my act of selection, arrangement, highlighting, and describing my sources is still an act of interpretation—even when I am most rigorously and faithfully seeking to reconstruct the past. The syntax of my narrative (beginning, middle and end; situation, crisis, new situation) itself argues for meaning in the story and necessarily closes off other interpretations. The history of Christian spirituality is also therefore hermeneutical and it is necessarily shaped by theological conviction.

This is true also of the anthropological approach—the study of Christian spirituality from below, as it were. To begin with a super-essential category of universal human spirituality, which is refracted in particular ways within specific contexts, is to begin with a theological conviction. In his essay in Minding the Spirit, Matthew Ashley writes, "Definitions of spirituality use terms like self-transcendence, ultimate value and meaning, which seem theologically and spiritually neutral at first blush… . but it is important to note that these terms are themselves part of an intellectual (often overtly theological) tradition that takes its inspiration from one spirituality: Christian Neoplatonism in general, more specifically, the Eckhartian tradition." Convictions about the human capacity for the spiritual quest have a genealogy, and these beliefs ought to be explicitly grounded and openly debated, rather than occluded as methodological assumptions.

The writers of the essays in Minding the Spirit and The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality are aware of these issues, and they debate them. In fact, when I had one of my seminars read several of the essays last term, the students were very engaged. One insightful student exclaimed, "It's like the wild west out there!" meaning, I think, that the study of spirituality is a new frontier without much law and order yet, and it is exciting even just to watch the gun fights.

Some studies of Christian spirituality merge the categories of history, theology, and hermeneutics in a sophisticated way. For example, Rowan Williams offers a profoundly theological reading of the Christian spiritual tradition from the New Testament through John of the Cross and Luther in his book The Wound of Knowledge (rev. ed., 2003). His approach is not the straightforward didactic manner of a textbook history. Rather, he sustains a dialectical method that is central to his argument. The Christian spiritual tradition does not so much supply data for us to observe and judge, he says, as it shows us how the data of our faith judges us: "The greatness of the great Christian saints lies in their readiness to be questioned, judged, stripped naked and left speechless by that which lies at the centre of their faith."

This implies a different sort of knowing than simply knowing facts about history or concepts about theology. Says Williams, "If spirituality can be given any coherent meaning, perhaps it is to be understood in terms of this task: each believer making his or her own that engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith which is so evident in the classical documents of Christian belief." Once again, we are back to spiritual theology as a self-implicating enterprise. This sort of sensitive historical approach to the study of Christian spirituality demands that we see Christianity as a lived faith. Knowledge here requires participation and not just observation.

At least since William James wrote his Varieties of Religious Experience at the beginning of the last century, there have been attempts to understand religious experience in terms not of theology but of theories of the person (psychology), society (sociology), and culture (anthropology). I welcome the insight into human nature gleaned from such investigation, since all truth is God's truth. Yet I want to begin at a different place, and to engage in a public discussion of Christian spirituality without prescinding in any way from my confession of Christ as Lord. This must be my principled commitment, even when the presenting questions are not explicitly theological.

To separate the study of Christian spirituality from Christology in a purely anthropological way, seems to me, at minimum, to engage in a different sort of discourse with a different sort of ecclesia. I think it remains important for Christian spirituality to be studied first and foremost within the context of Christological confession, ecclesial participation, Scriptural authority and classical credo. Such study would still be interdisciplinary and public, rooted in theology and history, and focused on experience, but confessional commitment would not need to be smuggled in as contraband. This is, I think, true to the sort of living faith we witness in the classical writings of the tradition.

To return to Uwe Poerksen's analysis of "plastic words," I think there is a danger that in the current popularity of the word "spirituality" and in its increasingly plastic character, the original Christological center to spirituality could disappear beneath the waves, like the stone thrown into the pond, so that what is left are only the ripples of connotation. Or again, there is a danger that we will operate consciously or unconsciously with a super-essential category of "spirituality" that is somehow more basic and constitutive to human nature than this or that particular expression of it, Christian or otherwise.

The critical mode of reflection upon Christian spirituality must be unique, since the sources we work with assume participation. One can stand outside of prayer and study it, but then that really is a different discourse. I am more interested in the sort of discourse where one studies prayer, even in a fully interdisciplinary way, but without ceasing to pray. Evagrius of Pontus said that the theologian is the one who truly prays, and the one who truly prays is a theologian. This does not resolve all the questions of method in the study of Christian spirituality, but this certainly is "minding the Spirit."

Bruce Hindmarsh is James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author most recently of The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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