On Living Before Learning, an Insight from Rowan Williams, and What Practice Teaches

A Note from Me

When I first started following Jesus, the emphasis in my circles landed squarely on doctrine. Get those straight, and you were on your way to Christian maturity. That’s where the thrust was—learning the “right” things, information acquisition, getting answers for thorny issues.

I’m not against learning. I love to learn. Books and ideas have shaped me in deep ways.

But as I’ve read my way into the Christian tradition, I’ve come to see that living your faith—what’s known as spirituality—came before study.

In other words, living with Christ came before developing theological clarity. The early church lived first, then reflected. They prayed, forgave, ate together, cared for the poor—and out of that life, theology was born.

When we reverse the order, there’s a danger. Theology without spirituality can be wielded like a weapon. Right ideas can end up hurting people when they’re cut off from the living Christ.

But when theology grows out of our lives with Jesus, it takes on a different character. It becomes less about proving and more about guiding, less about winning arguments and more about shaping us in love.

That shift changed everything for me.

A Voice from the Christian Tradition

“No one in the earliest Christian communities thought in terms of a ‘theology’ developing alongside a ‘spirituality.’ What we see is an evolving practice (both communal and personal) that generated a variety of challenges to language, imagination and self-understanding. As has often been said, Christian doctrine took its distinctive shape only through reflection on the distinctiveness of how Christian women and men actually prayed.”

—Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul

A Question to Carry

What have you discovered about God through fasting, prayer, or almsgiving (giving to those in need)?

Until next week,

—Jon