Problems of a Protestant Spirituality

Abstract

“Spiritual discipline degenerates into little more than ethics, which may mean private good behavior, such as not stealing, not lying overmuch, and so on. Or it may mean support for more communal, if rather more vaguely defined, good works, such as Christian stewardship—of which one might hazard the guess that Luther might have called it the Indulgence system of our century. In any event, the links between this activism and spiritual discipline are not thought out; instead, it is usually taken for granted that personal holiness—the aim of the classical discipline —will emerge as a kind of spiritual by-product. A whole case for trusting to one's spiritual luck seems to have grown up….”