The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life - Robert E. Webber
Robert Webber believes that the reason so much Christian spirituality is empty of power is that it is not thoroughly set within God’s story of redemption in Christ. In order to nurture and sustain a distinctly Christian spirituality, the church must recover God’s story as the source and context in which spirituality is grounded and lived. Webber summarizes the story of God as follows: It is the story of “how God created us to be in union with himself, how this unity was broken, and how Jesus, by God’s Spirit, brought us back into union with God by becoming one of us, by living to show us what true humanity looks like, by dying to destroy all that is death in the world, and by rising to lift us up into a new life in God” (14). At the heart of Webber’s story is the concept of “union with God.” This is a good place to start since union with God “is the most common description of spirituality throughout the entire history of the church” (18). For Webber, Christian spirituality is “God’s passionate embrace of us [and] our passionate embrace of God” (16). Webber’s shorthand for this is also the title of this book – The Divine Embrace. In the first half of the book Webber demonstrates how Christian spirituality has been distorted throughout history by a progressive distortion and/or loss of God’s story. In the second half, he proposes a path to recover God’s story as the basis and context for a distinctively Christian spirituality. For my extended summary, click HERE.