Desire for God and the Things of God: The Relationships Between Christian Spirituality and Morality

Synopsis: 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. Endorsement: 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 ones 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 Author Biography: 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).