Desire for God and the Things of God: The Relationships between Christian Spirituality and Morality
Ebook
Overview
For many Christians, spirituality and ethics are in separate mental and experiential compartments. Spirituality may be understood as an inner experience, while ethics is focused on decisions or positions on issues. Both of these views reduce spirituality and morality in Christian faith and practice, and ignore the centrality of desire for God and the things of God as key focal points for spiritual and moral formation. These aspects of Christian formation must be located in their scriptural and theological contexts in order to understand more fully what God desires for human life. This focus on desire provides content and context to Christian spirituality and morality. We are drawn outward to focus on God and the good of others while we learn to embody virtues, such as compassion, courage, self-control, gratitude, humility, and hope. Practices are crucial ways by which we learn to incarnate our ultimate desire of love for God and for what God desires in the pursuit of justice and goodness for all creation. In so doing, practices enable us to more fully integrate spiritual and moral growth in the processes of our desire for God and the things of God.
"This is a welcome and overdue proposal for a moral Christian
spirituality and a spiritually-rooted and energized Christian
social engagement. With winsome wisdom, the author illuminates the
reciprocating links between authentic experience of God and its
embodiment (and further development) in active moral life. Properly
ordered desire, she reveals, is the glue that re-bonds these
too-often-divorced dimensions back together in a Christ-like
wholeness. Protestants especially need this book!"
--Glen G. Scorgie
Professor of Theology and Ethics
Bethel University
"In this thoroughly documented new book, Wyndy Corbin Reuschling
argues that the reordering of desires, for which Christian
discipleship aims, depends upon overcoming a huge gap commonly
thought to separate private spirituality from social ethics.
Through close reading of three pairs of historical Christian
practices, Corbin Reuschling winsomely shows that in Christian
thought, spirituality and morality have always been two sides of
one coin. What this coin buys for the reader is a highly practical
and hope-filled account of both a Christian spiritual formation
that is communally incarnated and a Christian social ethics that
actually deepens one's personal relationship with God."
--Brad J. Kallenberg
Professor of Theology
University of Dayton
"In a post-Christian society, secularization has created a decisive
separation between spirituality and Christian virtues and has
reinforced individualistic expressions of faith that lead people
'to go through the motions' without transformation. Desire for
God and the Things of God provides an excellent response to
these and other fragmented situations by offering practical
alternatives grounded in community- and character-forming practices
that reflect an integral expression of the Christian faith and by
challenging us to reconsider the implications of Christian living
and spirituality."
--Hugo Magallanes
Associate Professor of Christianity and Cultures
Perkins School of Theology
Product Details
- Title : Desire for God and the Things of God: The Relationships between Christian Spirituality and Morality
- Author: Reuschling, Wyndy Corbin
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Publication Date: 2012
- ISBN: 9781621894490
Wyndy Corbin Reuschling is Professor of Ethics and Theology at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio. She is author of Reviving Evangelical Ethics: The Promises and Pitfalls of Classic Models of Morality (2008) and coauthor of Becoming Whole and Holy: An Integrative Conversation about Christian Formation (2010).