Biblical Spirituality

Dr. Don Whitney teaches biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He has a biblical spirituality web site describing his work.

In a seminar on biblical spirituality, Dr. Whitney presented several spiritual disciplines that believers in Christ can practice. These disciplines are not ends in themselves, but means to an end: to become more like Christ and to have fellowship with Christ. It is not my intent on this page to duplicate Dr. Whitney's material, which you can find in full in his books and on his web site. I shall give an outline and proceed to my thoughts on his topics in general and in specific.

There are two kinds of spiritual disciplines: personal and corporate. Right away, this takes us back to the ancient problem of the one and the many. Both kinds of discipline are important.

Here are the spiritual disciplines that Dr. Whitney described in his conference:

  1. Bible study and meditation on Scripture
  2. Prayer
  3. Fasting
  4. Silence and solitude
  5. Journaling
  6. Learning

This wiki and my blog will be my beginnings of the discipline of journaling.

Praying through Scripture

The approach to prayer that Dr. Whitney advocates is praying through Scripture. The idea is to pick a passage of Scripture, such as a psalm, and let each phrase guide your thoughts in prayer. Read a phrase, meditate on it, let it suggest a prayer thought to you, and pray about it. The benefits are:

  1. It keeps your prayer from being boring
  2. It helps you pray using inspired words
  3. It helps you remember the passage because you have focused on it deeply

Dr. Whitney states that this practice is biblical because there are examples of it in the New Testament. He cites Mark 15:34, giving Jesus' quotation of Psalm 22:1 on the cross, and Acts 4:23-31, where the praying believers quote Psalm 2:1-2. These seem to me to be examples of quotation of Scripture in prayer rather than of praying through the Scripture in the same sense that Dr. Whitney describes.

Interestingly, the book Ancient-Future Faith speaks of the basis of spirituality being participation in the victory of Christ over evil, rather than in Biblically-based practices.

I have started a Bible reading program to try to sort out my struggles about the concept of the atonement.

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