The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

Exegesis and Spirituality 181
namely rock drawings, 33 to define that human reality with
any precision is a task we must by now accept cannot be
accomplished conclusively. 34 Though we can gain a
substantive understanding of the dimensions of human
spirituality in general and of Christian spirituality in
particular, any attempt at capturing in words some
definitive sense of those aspects, or of the whole, ends in
futility. 35
In the to and fro of both public/popular and theological/
intellectual debate on the relationship between exegesis and
33
Cf. Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?
34
C. J. S. Lombaard, “Spirituality: Sense and Gist. On Meaning, God and
Being,” in The Spirit That Empowers: Perspectives on Spirituality (ed. P. G. R.
de Villiers, C. Kourie, and C. J. S. Lombaard; Acta Theologica Supplementum
11; Bloemfontein: University of the Free State Press, 2008), 94–107; cf. C.
Kourie, “What Is Christian Spirituality?” in Christian Spirituality in South
Africa (ed. C. Kourie and L. Kretzschmar; Pietermaritzburg: Cluster
Publications, 2000), 9–33; K. Waaijman, “Toward a Phenomenological
Definition of Spirituality,” Studies in Spirituality 3 (1993): 5–57; D. J. Smit,
“Kan Spiritualiteit Beskryf Word?” Ned. Geref. Teologiese Tydskrif 30 , no. 1
(1989): 83–94.
35
Lombaard’s table tries to give some structure to the different more common
usages of the term “spirituality” (see C. J. S. Lombaard, “The Old Testament in
Christian Spirituality: Perspectives on the Undervaluation of the Old Testament
in Christian Spirituality,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 59, no. 2
[2003]: 450). As a definition-in-brief, that of Schneiders (in “Biblical
Foundations of Spirituality,” 2) serves well: “The fundamental meaning of
‘Christian spirituality’ is the lived religious experience of believers as they
attempt, over time, to integrate their life within the framework of the ultimate
values of Christianity, namely, a developing relationship to the Trinitarian God
of Jesus Christ within the community called Church in service to the Reign of
God in the world.”; cf. also Bowe, Biblical Foundations of Spirituality, 10–20.
However, the emphases of modernism and post-modernism on individualism
and their a- or anti-institutional impulses draw the emphasis on church in a
definition such as this into question; cf. Zimmerling, Evangelische Spiritualität,
133–38.