Spiritual formation may be popular, but it’s not new.
Trevin Wax recently noted that church-attending college students are pursuing spiritual formation with new interest. What stands out is their commitment to Christ’s lordship and their reworking of personal habits and spiritual disciplines. Authors like Justin Whitmel Earley and John Mark Comer now reach wide audiences, guiding their readers to renew traditional practices of Christian spirituality.
Kyle Strobel is also encouraged that a new generation is “awakening to the very questions that helped start this conversation 45 years ago.” Strobel serves as a professor in the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology. He argues, “What is needed today is not merely a discussion of practices, but a real spiritual theology fueled by a distinctively Protestant and evangelical vision of the Christian life.”
Enter J. I. Packer. I’d argue that theological institutions and their students can find the Protestant and evangelical vision they need by looking back to truths about Christian spirituality Packer emphasized in 1989.
Packer’s Spiritual Emphasis
That year, Packer was appointed Sangwoo Youtong Chee professor of theology at Regent College. In his introductory lecture, he argued any study of theology is, and indeed should be, educational work in spirituality. He explained that he felt at home in his new position because Regent emphasized spirituality and was committed to the idea that no theology should ever be taught to enrich the head while impoverishing the heart.
No theology should ever be taught to enrich the head while impoverishing the heart.
Packer rejected a merely scientific approach to theological study, arguing that cool and clinical detachment when studying doctrine was intolerable. He instead proposed a marriage in which systematic theology would be taught as an element of a student’s spirituality and spirituality taught as an expression of systematic theology. He believed systematic theology should be a devotional discipline, a means of relating to God. Packer aptly said, “Given the marriage, both our theologizing and our devotional explorations will become systematic spirituality, exercises in (allow me to say it) knowing God, and we shall all be the richer as a result.”
Packer’s view was long-held and deeply personal. While a student at Oxford in the 1940s, he encountered Keswick theology, an approach to Christianity often captured by the phrase “victorious living” or the slogan “let go and let God.” The central teaching of this theology was surrender to Christ, trusting entirely in his ability to defeat sin and produce spiritual fruit. Active obedience was seen as mere legalism and dangerous to spirituality. Should believers not experience life to its fullest, or should they struggle with sin, they were said to lack “total surrender” to Christ. Packer was acutely disturbed by this teaching. He couldn’t achieve “total surrender” and still battled sin.
Where did Packer turn? He discovered the English Puritans, chiefly John Owen, and found spiritual relief. As his biographer Alister McGrath summarized, “Here was a writer who spoke to Packer’s condition, and offered a realistic solution to his concerns. . . . The discovery of Owen must be regarded as a turning point in Packer’s Christian life.”
Packer’s Distinctive Approach
Because Packer’s concern for theological clarity on sanctification and spirituality began early in his education, he later aimed his own students toward the study of spirituality in their theological study as well.
1. He argued against a specialized separation of theology and spirituality.
In “An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality” (1990), he noted that the material of systematic theology couldn’t be detached from trusting, loving, and glorifying God:
As commonly practiced, [the theological method] separates the questions of truth from those of discipleship; it proceeds as if doctrinal study would only be muddied by introducing devotional concerns; it drives a wedge between theology and doxology, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between knowing true notions about God and knowing the true God himself, between one’s thinking and one’s worshipping. Done this way, theology induces spiritual pride and produces spiritual sleep (physical sleep, too, sometimes). Thus, the noblest study in the world gets cheapened. I cannot applaud this.
If God’s truth is to be embraced and believed by theology teachers and their students, Packer says it must first affect them—their worship, their obedience, and their service. Their Christian lives cannot be separated from their Christian thoughts.
2. He tasked Christian educators with ‘officiating’ the marriage of spirituality and theology.
Packer didn’t just propose a marriage between systematic theology and spirituality; he wanted an explicit exchange of vows and mutual commitments. And in his essay “Evangelical Foundations for Spirituality” (1991), Packer laid the responsibility for officiating this union at the feet of theological educators. He claimed, “In practice, it is only when individual instructors labor . . . to bring the three fields of concern [ethics, spirituality, and theology] together in their own teaching that the disjunction is ever nowadays overcome.”
Individual instructors, then, have a twofold responsibility. First, they should engage their material with their spiritual devotion and practice of piety in full view of their students. Second, educators should imagine their role in students’ lives as essentially pastoral. Packer encouraged them to instruct their students with disciple-making intentionality.
Packer’s Courageous Vision for Theological Education
Even if an administration and faculty can agree on spiritual formation’s necessity, building a structure that fosters that formation is still complex. How can Christian educational institutions put this mission into practice today?
First, there must be a foundational agreement on the integration of faith and learning. Simply put, Christian education must first be Christian. Second, theological learning in Christian institutions should foster the student body’s spirituality, not as a mere departmental add-on but as the aim of the entire educational enterprise.
Adopting Packer’s pastoral vision for theological education takes exceptional courage. He writes,
Academics who have got their feet on the ladder and want to climb professionally (and there is nothing wrong with such a purpose) must publish in approved journals and with approved publishers, be seen and if possible, heard at conferences of learned societies, and join in the ongoing debates among their peers. In such circumstances [it] is the easiest thing in the world to forget one’s churchly identity and responsibilities and simply think along with generally accepted opinion, concerning oneself only with keeping in the swim.
Though self-centered skepticism often invades Christian academics, the theologian-pastor, in Packer’s view, was called to a pastoral pedagogy, a devotional delivery of theological knowledge. For example, when one of my Bible college professors discussed Scripture’s authority and necessity, he quoted 1 Peter 2:2–3 and immediately questioned us on our appetite for the Scriptures. He pleaded with us, saying, “Newborns wake up hungry and must be fed. When you can’t sleep, what do you long for? If you don’t have an insatiable desire for the Scriptures, ask God to give you such a disposition.” Suddenly, our discussion of systematic theology became intensely focused on spirituality.
Is the Tide Turning?
It’s encouraging that spiritual formation is trending in Christian circles. I agree with Strobel that the conversation is essential because “while every Christian should believe in the work of the Spirit to form us increasingly into Jesus’s likeness, few have articulated that vision for the church, or even for themselves.” But I often wonder what Packer would say if he were alive today. This is a movement and an emphasis he’d surely applaud, though not unquestioningly.
He would, I believe, suggest definite doctrinal fences to guard modern students from the error of mysticism. I also think he’d urge new-spirituality proponents to read the English Puritans like he did.
Educators should imagine their role in students’ lives as essentially pastoral.
Finally, I’m convinced he’d encourage theological schools not to neglect character formation. Often, seminaries and Bible colleges engage convictions and competencies well. They’re good at educating students to be confessional and doctrinally committed to either a denominational or evangelical creed. Schools also excel at training their students in ministry skills. Preachers are taught to preach well, and linguists are taught to translate texts efficiently and effectively, as they should be. But the students’ character can be lost in these educational emphases.
I once asked a graduate-level preaching class about how Bible colleges and seminaries could invest in their character, and the near-universal response was something like this: “That’s the job of the local church, not the school.” Packer would disagree. He’d certainly affirm that Christocentric character formation is the job of the local church, but he’d further argue that theological institutions cannot neglect it in their curriculum and pedagogy. This doesn’t mean professors should plan to tack on a point of spirituality to every lecture. This means professors should see every lecture as spiritual, not because this is popular but because it’s best.