Theology as Autobiography: The Centrality of Confession Relationship and Prayer to the Life of Faith

Autobiographical writings on faith frequently come from the lives of ordinary persons whose struggles with faith are often lived at the margins of the church academy and society. Yet these voices have the potential to reshape the ways in which each of these fields function. To find out what it means to stand before God with all of ones humanity on display is to engage in not only the act of confession but to demonstrate a bold theological reflection that needs to be more explicitly understood. By turning to spiritual autobiographies as theological source texts we learn to place our emphasis where it matters most on the people whose lives of faith move us deeply and cause us to re-examine our own lives in light of their witness. Moving through a range of ancient early modern and contemporary spiritual writers in order to demonstrate a profound connection that unites them all this book portrays how a critical self-examination of ones most personal internal fractures (our poverty as it were) is the only way to develop a life of faith--the dual meaning of the word confession which expresses both a revealing of ones sins or brokenness and the articulation of what one believes.