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Eugene H. Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: Conversations in Spiritual Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. xii+368 pp. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0802828752.
"Everything depends," writes a Walker Percy character, "on a close cooperation between business and love."6 I teach communication, a field of study that often promises advice on how to hold together money-making and interpersonal engagement. Master these technologies, navigate these marketing skills, negotiate these disciplinary terms, and all that is richly cooperative in the good term communication will be yours.
But this cooperation may not finally be so manageable as Percy's character (or my discipline) implies. After all, mastering technology can diminish our sense of place and time. Marketing proficiency can honor control and efficiency to the exclusion of other important qualities. Acquiring disciplinary competency can, in the very act of certifying you as a communication expert, alienate you from other practitioners and scholars. These three themes - aliveness to the creation, readiness to embrace history, and the cultivation of generous community - are the central concerns of Eugene Peterson's book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. His subtitle, A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, suggests a complicated interdependence, not between business and love but between knowing God and living life. Separate out either the theology or the spirituality, he explains, and what is left is something rigid or something airy. The two words need each other, for we know how easy it is to let our study of God (theology) get separated from the way we live; we also know how easy it is to let our desires to live whole and satisfying lives (spiritual lives) get disconnected from who God actually is and the ways he works among us (5).
At this point, the responsible reviewer would launch into a summary of the main themes of the work, making sure to describe those positions or schools of thought that the book is taking to task and, perhaps, offering a generous-spirited criticism or two. But Peterson's book includes this cautionary note to the responsible reviewer: "Spiritual theology is not one more area of theology that takes its place on the shelf alongside the academic disciplines of systematic, biblical, practical, and historical theology" (6). Christ Plays invites consideration, then, not as a...