Theology of Spirituality? The Postmodern Spirituality and the Study of the Feasibility of Deriving a Belief System

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

Assistant professor of Islamic Sciences and Culture Academy

Abstract

“Spirituality” is a general name for any sort of going beyond or overcoming limitations in “everyday life”. Today in the Anglo-American world, the term, “spirituality”, is used mostly for the sort of going beyond everyday life which is free from religious requirements. Such an approach can be adopted both by believers and unbelievers. It is just an approach to finding meaning, and locating the point of becoming, in the being. This paper seeks to identify the features of this new approach and discuss the question whether a theological system can be found for such a spirituality. Is there a specific intellectual structure to the modern spirituality? And can such a structure be characterized as a theological system, distinguishable from other such systems? Drawing upon extant theories concerning the nature of the modern spirituality, the paper seeks to, first, identify the features of this spirituality, and then illustrate intellectual backgrounds out of which it appeared and analyze the most central conviction of modern spiritualists, that is, the dynamics of beliefs and avoidance of obedience. I claim that implications of such convictions and their consequences rules out the possibility of the formation of a certain, coherent theological system for modern spiritualism and the feasibility of personalized readings of the religion. In other words, the theology of modern spirituality is at odds with systematicity, and although it involves rather common beliefs, it does not consider a coherent belief system to be desirable.

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References

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