The beginning of the contemporary discussion of spiritual formation began with a simple realization: At some point we stopped talking about discipline. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline was a call to recover a lost conversation about spiritual practices, what we used to call means of grace (for more on the evangelical spiritual tradition on the means of grace, see my book Formed for the Glory of God).

But spiritual formation is not ultimately about doing spiritual practices. Our problem in the Christian faith is never simply doing more. We have to understand the nature, processes, and directives of spiritual growth. In the program where I teach, this is what we call spiritual theology, because we are not merely considering generic human growth, but growth in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

In the early years of the spiritual formation conversation, this first wave of work was mainly pointing out what we had forgotten. That was important work. But simultaneously, in other places in the academy, folks were working hard to recover virtue ethics. This discussion mainly focused on natural virtue formation (often called acquired virtue), which ignored how the Western Christian tradition rejected this as an adequate theory of spiritual growth.

What ended up happening, therefore, is that while our culture became obsessed with life hacks and the cultivation of habit formation, it was assumed that this was all that spiritual practices were.

Notice the even larger problem. It can be easy to teach, or to publish a book, on “spiritual formation” that only attends to activities we should be doing. Rather than focusing on wisdom, and the lived-reality of navigating God’s presence, we can just focus on habit formation. Very subtly, and often implicitly, our gaze is removed from Christ, and now we’re once again looking into the mirror of the self to generate a life.

Unlike the early days of this iteration of the spiritual formation conversation, we are more fully inundated with cultural movements of self-help, life-optimization, and an increasingly therapeutic ideal that replaces death and resurrection as the primary categories of spiritual formation. This is not a minor problem.

As a task of wisdom, spiritual formation should always be spiritual theology, which means we should be attending deeply to what the broader tradition, and our own narrow traditions, had to say about such things. We are not the first to ask these questions, and yet too often we employ practices of the tradition without asking deeper questions about their theological rational.

But along with the academic side of spiritual theology, the task of spiritual theology requires a life of honest wrestling with God, both personally and corporately. Spiritual theology is not a discipline in service to an academic guild, but is in service to the church. In this sense, spiritual theology is always pastoral theology, just as all pastoral theology has to be spiritual theology.

Pastoral theology can never be self-help, pragmatic life-hacks, or cultivating corporate identity and mission. Pastoral theology, as a truly spiritual and theological enterprise, must be learning to shepherd souls in the presence of the Lord. This requires wisdom, and not mere historical and doctrinal knowledge.

To borrow older terminology, spiritual theology is not a mere speculative discipline, but is a practical and experiential one. This is a theology that requires a life. This is a theology that cannot be abstracted away from the lived reality of life in the presence of God.

If you are interested in the task of spiritual theology, check out the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology where I teach.