What humans could not attain because they could not raise themselves to God, God attained by descending to humans. . . . There can be no such thing as spirituality without God initiating relationship with human persons, a relationship that is traced back to the momentous event we celebrate as Christmas—God with us. But there...Read More
Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you...Read More
God has taken the initiate to unite us and the world to himself and calls on us to see and live our life out of this vision of reality. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 45.Read More
The spiritual life is lived in the passionate choice to will God’s will in all our living. The exercise of Jesus’s will to always do the will of the Father is the key to our participation in God. Like Jesus, we participate in God by submitting our will to do the purposes of God perfectly...Read More
In the incarnation God lifted humanity into union with himself in Jesus. The union humanity once had with God, lost in Adam, is now restored. God has restored union with humanity through his own two hands. God, the incarnate Word, united with our humanity by the Spirit, reverses the human condition through his death and...Read More
In Jesus Christ all God’s purposes for humanity and creation are fulfilled. Therefore God, being made man, not only unites us to God but reveals how humans are to live in this world. In this way God both gifts us in spiritual union with himself (spirituality) and models how we are to live (the spiritual...Read More
The spiritual conflict of this world is not between the spirit and physical flesh. Instead, this world’s spiritual conflict is a life lived under God’s reign versus life lived in rebellion against God’s purposes for creation. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 34.Read More
Spirituality is a lived theology. . . . Christian convictions about God and God’s truth are not mere philosophical abstractions. Theology is actually meant to be lived wisdom. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 32.Read More
God has come to us in Jesus so that we may come to God through Jesus. That is Christian spirituality. And living in that union, that divine embrace, that is the spiritual life. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 23.Read More
I call for a spirituality that is not a mere search for a transcendent experience but a spirituality that is rooted in the unique story of God. I ask you not to subscribe to the relativism that all paths lead to God but to a countercultural affirmation that God, the Creator of the universe, has...Read More
Christian spirituality is the experience of God living in us and the challenge of our living in God. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 22.Read More
To participate in God’s story is to live a transformed life, a life that brings glimpses of the ultimate transformation of all creation. . . . Jesus, the incarnate Word, is the only man who “got it right.” In Jesus God shows us what humanity should look like, for he reversed the disobedience of the...Read More
When we . . . upon hearing the story desire to participate in God, we are no longer preoccupied with self, the welfare of self, the indulgence of self, and the preservation of self. Instead the focus is on God’s purposes for our life and the life of the world. . . . To worship...Read More
