Greg Peters - The Monkhood of All Believers: The Monastic Foundation of Christian Spirituality

V irginia Woolf once wrote that there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of ones head, and that one of the good offices that men and women can perform for one another is to describe that spot. There are, she suggests, things about us that we just cannot see for ourselves.

Suppose it is the same in the church. Suppose that there are things about each ecclesial body that it cannot see for itself. Suppose, then, that Lutherans can know themselves better when Roman Catholics describe them, that Copts can learn about themselves by listening to Methodists.

If that is the case, we ought not to be surprised to find a cradle Baptist seeing something in the history of monasticism that has often been overlooked. Though he is now an Anglican, Greg Peters retains the Protestant attention to personal devotion, centrality of the laity to the life of the church, and suspicion of any two-tiered account of holiness.

What Peters findsand here is where he will surely ruffle some feathersis that the church of Jesus Christ is composed exclusively of monks. By virtue of our baptism into the life of Christ, every believer is called to love God with an undivided heart, is called to an interior monasticism. All believers are monks. Further vows do not intensify this primary calling; they only specify its location. I Surrender All is a song for all believers, not just those behind the cloister wall.

This would be an easy argument to get wrong. Even if we grant the necessity of personal holiness, does not this obscure the witness of historic monasticism? It certainly might, but it might just as easily serve to highlight something often neglected: the common call to holiness in life together. As Peters points out, recognition of the common priesthood of all believers rarely leads to the elimination of church leaders; rather, it invites and empowers the laity to take responsibility for the work of the church. Similarly, universal monasticism need not signal the end of the cloister; it might instead awaken believers to the uncomfortable reality that monks and nuns are not surrogates, that even engineers and teachers are called by Christ to be entirely devoted to God. Peters himself insists that he is no iconoclast. In arguing that all Christians are monks, he does not suggest that we are in a postmonasticism moment. No, God continues to call women and men into monastic institutions, not least to exemplify the call that all Christians receive in baptism to be single-minded toward God.

Furthermoreand this is salient to Peterss argumenthis is not a particularly Protestant argument. The monastic life has always been about the interior singleness of heartrather than, say, celibacy, perpetual vows, or religious ordersand Peters argues (mostly from non-Protestant sources) that this best accounts for the diversity of expressions and self-understandings of monks. This is not merely a critical corrective, but an ecumenical theology of monasticism.

Matt Jenson

Biola University

. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), 90.

I have had the welcome opportunity of writing several books over the past few years, and I have come to learn something about the task of writing; or at least I have learned something about writing nonfiction, academic booksthey start and end with great enthusiasm, but there is the longue dure in the middle. During this season I have often wondered, what have I gotten myself into here? Or, why did I think this was a good idea when I first proposed the book? Or, more simply, will I ever finish? This has been my experience several times now, and I have come to realize that getting through this longue dure takes a large dose of good, old-fashioned self-discipline. But it also takes people, and the assistance they provide, which is sometimes obvious but more often less apparent than we realize. During the writing of this book I was assisted by a number of people, who were often just being themselves but who, in the long run, made this book possible.