John H. Coe (editor) - Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2019 by Kyle C. Strobel and John H. Coe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges, and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The following are reproduced by permission of the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care: To Gaze on the Beauty of the Lord: The Evangelical Resistance and Retrieval of Contemplation by Tom Schwanda; In Your Light They Shall See Light: A Theological Prolegomena for Contemplation by Kyle Strobel; Contemplation and Contemplative Prayer by James C. Wilhoit; Is Thoughtless Prayer Really Christian? A Biblical/Evangelical Response to Evagrius of Pontus by Evan B. Howard; and The Controversy Over Contemplation and Contemplative Prayer: A Historical, Theological, and Biblical Resolution by John Coe.

Permission has been granted by both Hans Boersma and Eerdmans Publishing Company to republish an essay from his book The Beatific Vision: Christocentricity in the Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 2018), published here as The Beatific Vision: Contemplating Christ as the Future Present.

. An earlier version was published in the Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple
Interior design: Daniel van Loon
Images: Ravens, Wallington, John (Contemporary Artist) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-7368-5 (digital)

ISBN 978-0-8308-5230-7 (print)

This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

TO OUR STUDENTS AT THE
INSTITUTE FOR SPIRITUAL FORMATION.

Your questions, struggles, and longings for God
have moved us to deeper reflection, prayer, and contemplation.

THERE HAS BEEN A GROWING INTEREST in spiritual formation over the past several decades. The spiritual formation discussion has never become a unified movement, nor does it entail a singular set of beliefs, regardless of what some critics might claim. Rather, it would be more accurate to claim that a conversation has arisen concerning what a distinctively evangelical view of the Christian life might entail. This has led to many different focal points, from spiritual disciplines to the spiritual tradition, from sanctification to piety, to an explicit excavation of evangelicalisms own spiritual history. At its best, the spiritual formation conversation seeks to attend deeply to Scripture, the spiritual and theological traditions broadly, and the Protestant tradition more narrowly, to provide a robustly spiritual theology for the sake of faithfulness in the church today. At its worst, the spiritual formation conversation has often failed to take theology seriously, focusing simply on disciplines or spiritual practices that it fails to understand or that dont make sense according to the theological imperatives of Protestantism.

This volume seeks to play to the best of the spiritual formation conversation, not by providing the final word on the topic of contemplation, but by helping to generate the right sort of conversation. Contemplation has always been a central topic of Christian spirituality broadly and Protestant spirituality more specifically. Furthermore, contemplation has often been assumed as a key aspect of spiritual formation, but it hasnt really been assessed to the degree necessary in our own contemporary discussions. Instead of providing a single view, arguing for a theoretical and practical approach to contemplation and/or contemplative prayer (more on this term later), the goal of this volume is to bring together authors across the Protestant spectrum whose essays will prod and guide the reader to think and attend more deeply to the contemplative dimension of the Christian faith. While the contributors of this volume may differ on various matters, such as the nature and validity of contemplative prayer, and forms of it like centering prayer, as well as what it entails to read the spiritual tradition in a distinctively