Connor Grubbs’s Reviews > The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life > Status Update

“In the ancient church we enter God’s story in repentance, baptism, and the reception of the Spirit (Acts 2:38), whereas pietism emphasizes a conversion by faith that has no real place for the divine significance of the baptismal ritual. Baptism becomes my response instead of God’s sign of creative power expressed through water.”

“ancient spirituality focuses on the whole story of God, whereas pietism focuses on faith in the death and resurrection, reducing the story of God to less than its whole.“

“The confidence in spirituality is not my experience but my baptism into Christ, with the focus on Christ embracing me in his death and resurrection.“

“Louis Bouyer, the famed Catholic critic of the Reformation and subsequent Protestantism acknowledges the enormous debt we all owe to Protestant Christianity for its history of song.”

At least the Catholics like our hymns :)

“By replacing contemplation and participation with justification and sanctification, the Reformers set up what was to become a severe problem in the modern era—the separation of spirituality from a relational, lived theology to a spirituality rooted in a forensic justification that did not encourage the mystery of contemplation or participation but instead turned spirituality toward intellectual knowledge.“