1. What is spiritual theology?

Eugene Peterson: Spiritual theology is lived theology, or theology lived. It is the truth that is articulated in theology and bible, but then lived, embodied in the ordinary life of baptized Christians. For a long time in the western church — well over a thousand years — there was no separation between theology and spirituality. They were the same thing. But then a separation developed between the monasteries and the universities — the monasteries took charge of the living/praying and the universities took charge of the thinking/theology. (The separation was not nearly as radical in eastern orthodoxy.) We've been trying to get them on speaking terms with each other ever since.

2. Describe the “Americanization of spirituality.”

Eugene Peterson: Spirituality commodified into a technique or means for serving the American creed of “pursuit of happiness.” Spirituality functionalized to helping me meet my self-determined goals. It is a spirituality in which the ego pushes the Trinity to the sidelines and takes over center stage. Spirituality as a program that I and a few well-organized others can use to accomplish whatever cause or goal we agree upon — even when (especially when!) the goal is religious. It is spirituality used as an adjective to describe my life instead of the working of the Spirit in my life.

3. What is the difference between what you are trying to do with spirituality and the kind of spirituality prevalent in mainstream culture?

Eugene Peterson: I am trying to recover a respect for the life of the Spirit that is revealed in Jesus and the Scriptures in contrast to a life that is defined by consumption and achievement, competition and psychological profiling. I am trying to develop an imagination that is immersed in the operations of the Trinity so that I will not be constantly seduced into thinking that spirituality is a way of managing my own life and the lives of others, my life with me in charge with an occasional assist from the Spirit. I am trying to practice a way of language that is personal, particular, relational, a language of poetry and parable and metaphor, a language that welcomes mystery and counters the bullying, propagandizing, sloganeering, cliched and abstracted use of language that dominates our schools, our workplaces, our media, and, sadly, our churches.

4. Why is it easier to talk about what Christians believe or what they do than how they live?

Eugene Peterson: We can talk about a belief, formulated as an idea or doctrine, without participating in it. We can talk about an action, a behavior, objectively without engaging in it. But the actual way we live cannot be objectified or intellectualized — we are what we live. The only adequate language is the language of prayer and of love, the supremely relational languages. They require our soul participation. We can lie or pose when we pray and love, but usually not convincingly. It is a lot easier to stick with ideas or behavior when we talk — and, as a matter of fact, we can usually get along pretty well, at least in this culture, without risking the suffering and misunderstanding involved in using the language of prayer and love.

5. Many of your twenty-eight books are written for pastors. Why?

Eugene Peterson: When I became a pastor I didn't know how to be a pastor. I sensed that it was a very complex life in which I was dealing not only with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but with precious souls in a congregation. But when I looked around me it seemed that far too many American pastors had adopted the language of the market and of the entrepreneur (depersonalizing “souls” into consumers or causes) and had hired sociologists and psychologists as their teachers (dismissing the theologians and artists from their faculties). They were adapting the pastoral vocation to serve the criteria of success as defined by the American culture. I wanted to recover, for myself, the biblical/theological conditions in which I could be a pastor with integrity — and being a writer, writing was a way of discovering and articulating what I was groping after. I wrote those books first of all for myself, trying to understand and live out in my congregation what I sensed my pastor-predecessors have been doing for 2000 years. In the process I developed a sense of urgency and responsibility for recovering an understanding of the pastoral vocation for my pastor brothers and sisters.

6. What in your background prepared you for the preaching, teaching, and writing you have done?

Eugene Peterson: Growing up in a small town and small church in which everything was local and personal and everything biblical was assumed to be livable. I was fortunate to grow up in conditions in which there was a high degree of congruence between what was believed and what was lived. It was also a story-telling culture and so I acquired a taste for narrative and metaphor — a conversational, relational, and poetic language. Schooling, as such, wasn't as formative as I would have expected — although graduate school in semitic languages was critical in providing an academic foundation for my work in Scripture. Marriage and children provided stable and congenial conditions for living out the detailed implications of the Christian life on the ground. And then I had thirty years of pastoral work in one modest-sized congregation in which I was given the freedom to learn and develop a pastoral vocation. Pastor is the term that permates virtually everything that I have done and become both personally and vocationally and that congregation was the setting in which it all matured.

7. Which writers do you count as your companions through the years?

Eugene Peterson: Theologians: Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Austin Farrer.
Novelists: Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Wallace Stegner, Herman Melville
Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson
Others: Friedrich von Hügel, Wendell Berry, John Henry Newman, Alexander Whyte