노동과 기독교 영성－기독교 영성의 영역확대를 위한 연구

Abstract

The researches on Christian spirituality that have been continued since the middle of 20th century achieved the accurate formulation regarding spirituality’s unique features and types through the reinterpretation of various literatures and the rediscovery of many figures. This achievement helps spirituality come back to the foundational role of Christian theology beyond its previous limitation overwhelmed by scientific rationalism and reason-centered tradition. Spirituality that accomplished the functional reorientation as the ground of theology could be incorporated to various themes in relation to the church and became an object of expectation as one of the strongest alternative plans for the future church. Even though there are still lots of confusions about spirituality due to misunderstanding and prejudice, many Christians strive to produce detailed conceptual improvement, dynamic practical strategies, and training process based on the ground, contents, ultimate goal, and ideal direction of Christian spirituality. However, the studies of spirituality that have been primarily performed by the scholars revealed a problem of limiting the research object only in religious orders, priests and theologians who had special awareness of calling. Although such methodology contributed to discover the core values for the formulation of Christian spirituality, it excluded the majority of Christians out of research target due to its feature of concentrating on small privileged group. Th research method without any interrelation to the lives of the ordinary Christians limited the horizon of spirituality studies in the realm of abstract and expert languages and concepts which caused the lack of the possibility for spirituality’s application in everyone’s daily life. Furthermore, within the rapidly changing context of the contemporary society, the understanding of spirituality only by scholars whose experiences are not wide enough produces a malfunction that spirituality becomes an exclusive medium for self-protection of scholars and that pseudo-spirituality or heresy is quickly spreading over the ordinary Christians. This study is to begin from the intention of changing the above limitation by attempting to underscore the lives of Christians. This has dual meanings that the studies of foundation and conceptual summarization on spirituality so far should be moved onto concrete activities and that the practice of spirituality cannot be limited in a specialized group’s training methodology. To get to such goals, this study will use the organic methodology interconnecting spirituality with the ‘labor’ or ‘work’ as the medium. In other words, by analyzing both the aspect of spirituality and diverse perspectives based on Christian theology regarding human work itself, the fact that there is no barrier for all Christians in embracing of spirituality into their own lives beyond the boundary of the scholars’ group will be uncovered. And through the investigation about sociological meanings with job selection and salary structure, the function of social critique by spirituality will be described for the necessary enlargement of spirituality’s research area in the contemporary society. Spirituality is the topic which regained the people’s attention to establish integral intention for the mutuality between the church and society as whole and to renew a understanding of theology as an inactive academic subject. This study will be performed under the objective that the expectation on the spirituality will be connected to practical alternatives, thus, it will be stimulating for the improvement of other theological works.