Jean Khoury
Summary: Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17 contains more than a missionary strategy: it presents a genuine theology of history oriented towards an interior encounter with God. Beginning with the providential organisation of peoples and times, Paul arrives at the astonishing affirmation that all human existence unfolds within the divine life: “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” This article argues that this Pauline movement—from external history to interior transformation—identifies a fundamental tension in contemporary theology. Modern theology has developed an extraordinary historical and conceptual precision, but has largely failed to develop an equivalent precision regarding the interior operations of grace. Drawing on the great mystical tradition—Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, and the Carmelite inheritance—as well as on the methodological proposals of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the critique implicit in Karl Rahner’s dictum, this article calls for theology to become genuinely ‘theologal’: that is, ordered in its very method towards the living union with God to which revelation aims. Practical consequences are drawn for the formation of theologians, for spiritual direction, and for the future of theological education.
Introduction: The Areopagus and the Turn Inward
“So Paul stood before the whole Council of the Areopagus and made this speech:
‘Men of Athens, I have seen for myself how extremely scrupulous you are in all religious matters, because I noticed, as I strolled round admiring your sacred monuments, that you had an altar inscribed: To An Unknown God. Well, the God whom I proclaim is in fact the one whom you already worship without knowing it.
‘Since the God who made the world and everything in it is himself Lord of heaven and earth, he does not make his home in shrines made by human hands. Nor is he dependent on anything that human hands can do for him, since he can never be in need of anything; on the contrary, it is he who gives everything – including life and breath – to everyone. From one single stock he not only created the whole human race so that they could occupy the entire earth, but he decreed how long each nation should flourish and what the boundaries of its territory should be. And he did this so that all nations might seek the deity and, by feeling their way towards him, succeed in finding him. Yet in fact he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist, as indeed some of your own writers have said:
“We are all his children.”
‘Since we are the children of God, we have no excuse for thinking that the deity looks like anything in gold, silver or stone that has been carved and designed by a man.
‘God overlooked that sort of thing when men were ignorant, but now he is telling everyone everywhere that they must repent, because he has fixed a day when the whole world will be judged, and judged in righteousness, and he has appointed a man to be the judge. And God has publicly proved this by raising this man from the dead.’” (Acts 17:15-34)
Paul’s speech at the Areopagus, recorded in Acts 17:15–34, is often read as a masterpiece of missionary inculturation—an apostle speaking the language of his Athenian interlocutors in order to introduce the Gospel. This reading is not wrong, but it remains insufficient. What Paul actually offers at the Areopagus is a theology of history: a vision of human time and human geography as providentially ordered towards a single end, which is the living encounter of each person with the living God.
The central passage is decisive: “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:26–27). History, for Paul, is not a neutral succession of events. It is a vast divine pedagogy, oriented from within towards an encounter that transcends it. The movements of peoples, the boundaries of nations, the eras of civilisations—all of this is ordered towards a single interior goal: that man would seek God and, in seeking, find him near.
But Paul does not stop there. Having affirmed divine Providence in history, he moves to a still more radical claim: “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). With this phrase—borrowed from the Stoic poet Aratus, but radically reorientated—Paul passes from the plane of external history to the plane of interiority. The true locus of the encounter with God is no longer only history; it is the human person himself, subsisting at every moment within the divine life.
This transition—from external history to interior history, from chronological time to the time of transformation—is not a marginal observation. It identifies what I wish to argue is the fundamental problem of contemporary theology: a discipline that has developed immense historical and conceptual precision, but which has largely failed to develop an equivalent precision regarding the interior operations of grace. Contemporary theology often speaks of God without entering into the transformation wrought by God. It remains, in a word, theological rather than theologal.
This article unfolds in four movements. First, I examine the Pauline theology of history in Acts 17 and the transition it enacts from external to interior time. Second, I trace the great analogies in the Christian tradition for this same movement, above all in Teresa of Ávila and the mystical cartographers of the soul. Third, I identify the methodological crisis this exposes in contemporary theology. Fourth and finally, I draw practical consequences for how theology must change if it is to fulfil its own deepest calling.
I. From History to Interiority: A Pauline Theology of Time
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on Acts 17, observes that Paul is demonstrating how God “governs human affairs with wisdom.” He writes: “He has distributed the nations and fixed their limits so that they might have need of Him and seek Him” (Homilies on the Acts, 38). This patristic reading is instructive: history is not self-explanatory. It carries within it a purposiveness that points beyond itself.
The Greek verb that Paul uses for human seeking in this passage is psēlaphessian—“to feel about” or “to grope after.” It evokes a person searching in darkness, hands extended. Paul is not describing a confident philosophical ascent; he is describing the human condition as it actually is: oriented towards God, yet searching without full light. There is a realism here that is easily overlooked. Man carries within him a natural orientation towards God—what Augustine will call the restless heart—but this orientation does not automatically produce clarity or arrival. It produces seeking.
Yet immediately Paul adds the corrective: “though he is not far from any one of us.” The paradox is complete. God seems hidden; yet he is near. Man seeks him with difficulty; yet he is already enveloped by the divine presence. History is the space of this paradoxical tension.
Then comes the culminating phrase: “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” With these words, Paul effects a transition from the exterior plane of history to the interior plane of existence. God is no longer simply the providential director of peoples and eras; he is the very milieu within which each person exists and moves. History becomes the vestibule of an interiority.
This movement is not merely philosophical. Paul’s redeployment of a Stoic phrase within a Christological framework transforms its meaning entirely. For the Stoics, divine immanence was cosmological: the logos pervaded the material universe. For Paul, this proximity is relational and salvific: it is the proximity of a Father who desires to be found, who is “not far” from each person, and who has ordered all of human time towards the moment of encounter.
St. Augustine draws out the existential consequences of this passage with characteristic depth: “You were within me, and I was outside myself” (Confessions, X, 27). This is precisely the reversal that Paul’s speech inaugurates. Man first seeks in exteriority—in territories, events, powers, and civilisations. Then he discovers that the true continent is within. External history, faithfully traversed, becomes an interior journey.
II. The Cartographers of the Interior: Teresa of Ávila and the Tradition
It is no accident that the greatest cartographers of the interior life appeared in the sixteenth century, precisely when European civilisation was mapping the external world with unprecedented ambition. As Spanish explorers were charting new continents, Teresa of Ávila was charting a new continent within: the Interior Castle, with its seven mansions, its passages, its depths, and its luminous centre where God and the soul meet in transforming union.
Teresa’s great achievement was not mystical poetry but spiritual teaching. She describes with remarkable precision the successive stages by which the soul passes from its dispersed, extroverted condition into recollection, then into the prayer of quiet, then into union of will, and finally into the spiritual marriage. Each stage is characterised not simply by a different degree of prayer, but by a different configuration of the person’s relationship with God, with others, and with itself.
The Interior Castle represents a genuine change in the nature of time. In the outer mansions (I-III), the soul still lives primarily within chronological, external time: the time of activities, obligations, and anxieties. As it enters more deeply into the interior (IV mansions onward), it enters into what I would call interior time: the time of transformation, of divine passages, of the progressive indwelling of God. This is the time of which Paul speaks when he says “In him we live and move and have our being.”
John of the Cross deepens this cartography in a different register. His particular contribution is what might be called a microscopic description of grace: the precise description of the spiritual touches (toques) by which God acts upon the deepest centre of the soul; the analysis of the dark nights as purifications of the rational and appetitive faculties; the distinction between the action of the Spirit at the level of the spirit and its secondary reverberations in the soul and the body. Nowhere in the theological tradition is the interior action of God described with greater precision.
This precision is not incidental; it is the fruit of a different kind of knowing. John of the Cross did not develop his doctrine primarily by historical analysis or conceptual derivation. He developed it by contemplative penetration into his own experience and the experience of souls under his direction, illuminated by Scripture and the doctrinal tradition. His theology is, in the truest sense, a theology born of transformation and ordered to transformation.
Thérèse of Lisieux represents yet another register of interior cartography: not the systematic analysis of John of the Cross, but living love of Jesus. Her contribution was to map the interior life not through categories of mystical states but through the transformation of the will in charity—the “little way” as a path of total self-surrender that paradoxically leads to the deepest union with Christ. She embodies the teaching of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross in a unique way valid for all the souls, especially the “small” ones. She offers a genuine and purified (i.e. reduced to its necessary elements) implementation of the teaching and shows us in a practical, formative and lived way the interior dynamics of the spiritual doctrine that is rarely matched in academic theology.
What all these figures share is a conviction that the interior life has its own laws, its own stages, its own crises, and its own forms of knowledge. Interior time is not simply a more intense version of external time; it is structured differently, moves according to different principles, and produces a different kind of understanding.
Read Also: Mapping Spiritual Life (On St. Teresa of Avila)
III. The Methodological Crisis of Contemporary Theology
Contemporary theology has achieved extraordinary things. The ressourcement movement recovered the richness of patristic thought. Biblical scholarship has illuminated the historical context of revelation with unprecedented depth. Systematic theology has developed refined conceptual instruments for understanding the Trinitarian life, the Incarnation, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology. All of this is a genuine patrimony.
Yet a paradox arises. The same theology that has achieved such precision in its historical and conceptual dimensions often becomes vague precisely where precision matters most: in the concrete description of how the Spirit acts within the soul, how grace transforms the faculties, how the person moves from a merely intellectual faith to a faith inhabited by the Spirit. When it comes to the practical question of how a human being actually passes from one stage of the spiritual life to another, much contemporary theology can offer only generalities: “pray more,” “live the sacraments,” “love your neighbour.” These are true but macroscopic. They correspond to the magnifying glass when we need the electron microscope.
The source of this weakness is methodological. Modern theology has privileged three approaches: the historical, the conceptual, and the ethical. The historical approach traces the development of doctrine through time; the conceptual approach analyses the logical structure of theological claims; the ethical approach draws practical implications for human behaviour. All three are legitimate and necessary. But none of them is primarily and explicitly ordered towards the interior transformation of the person.
What is largely missing is a fourth approach: the transformational. This would be a theology that asks not only “What does this doctrine mean?” but “How does this truth concretely transform the soul under the action of the Spirit?” Not “What is the correct formulation of the theology of grace?” but “What are the precise mechanisms by which grace actually operates in the faculties?” Not “What is the theology of prayer?” but “How does a person move from vocal prayer to mental prayer to contemplative prayer, and what are the signs of each transition?”
The ressourcement theologians themselves were not entirely unaware of this problem. Henri de Lubac warned against a theology that had become pure erudition, insisting that “theology is not a speciality separate from the spiritual life.” Hans Urs von Balthasar called for “a theology on its knees”—a theology born of adoration and leading to interior transformation. But these were prophetic interventions rather than programmatic proposals. The methodological shift they called for was never systematically realised.
The paradox is most acute when we compare theology to other disciplines. In our era, we have developed instruments of extraordinary precision for the analysis of the material world: we can map the human genome, image brain activity at the millisecond level, design chips at the three-nanometre scale. Yet the spiritual life is still often presented using pre-modern pedagogical categories—not because the tradition lacks precision, but because academic theology has failed to appropriate and develop the precision that the mystical tradition actually possesses.
This is the deeper failure. The tradition does possess the electron microscope. John of the Cross has a microscopic phenomenology of grace. Teresa of Ávila has a detailed map of the interior journey. The Carmelite tradition has developed over centuries an extraordinary precision about the operations of the Spirit in the soul. But this tradition is often treated as spirituality—a secondary, devotional appendix to “real” theology—rather than as the interior fulfilment of theology itself.
The great patristic tradition knew no such separation. Evagrius Ponticus wrote: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.” For the Fathers, theology was inseparable from the transformation of the knower. One did not study God from outside; one was drawn into the knowledge of God through a process of purification and union that transformed the theologian himself. To recover this patristic vision is not to romanticise the past; it is to recover the internal logic of theology itself.
IV. The Word of God Practised as the Paradigm of Transformational Theology
The most fundamental demonstration that theology must be transformational is furnished by the very nature of the Word of God as it operates in the life of the believer. The Johannine tradition, to which we return constantly here as a touchstone, does not present the word of Christ primarily as a doctrinal deposit to be analysed but as a living reality to be received, kept, and enacted.
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn 14:23). This verse contains a complete theology of interior transformation. The word is not simply heard or understood; it is “kept”—which in Johannine vocabulary means interiorised, enacted, and lived from within. The fruit of this keeping is not simply ethical improvement; it is a divine indwelling. The Father and the Son “make their home” in the one who keeps the word. The word, when practised, opens into an interior space that becomes the dwelling place of God.
This is the paradigm of what a theologal theology must become: a theology that enters into the very dynamic it studies. Just as the believer who practises the word receives a deeper knowledge of Christ that no merely conceptual study can produce, so the theologian who allows the truth of revelation to transform him enters into an understanding that is inaccessible to purely external analysis. This is not a rejection of rigour; it is an elevation of rigour to a higher order.
St. Maximus the Confessor expresses this principle with characteristic depth: “The Word of God wills always and in all to accomplish the mystery of his incarnation.” The Incarnation is not only a past historical event; it is a current operation. Christ is always and everywhere seeking to be born again in the soul of the believer, to extend his own interior life into the interiority of each person. A theology that studies the Incarnation without opening itself to this current operation is studying only the external shell of revelation, not its living core.
V. Practical Consequences: What Must Change
1. The Integration of Spiritual Theology at the Heart of the Theological Curriculum
The most urgent practical consequence is the reintegration of spiritual theology at the centre of theological formation, not as a marginalised elective but as a constitutive methodological perspective. Every branch of theology—biblical, systematic, moral, pastoral—must be practised with a spiritual-theological horizon: the question not only of what is true but of how this truth operates transformatively in the life of the believer.
This does not mean that every theology class becomes a retreat. It means that the questions that spiritual theology asks—What are the stages of the interior life? How does grace transform the faculties? What are the signs of authentic spiritual development?—become recognised as genuinely theological questions, not merely devotional ones. The great mystical doctors—John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Thérèse of Lisieux, the Blessed Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant Jésus—must be read not only as spiritual writers but as precise theologians of the interior life.
See “Integral Theology”, here and more here.
2. The Development of a Practical Science of Transformation
Theology must develop what I would call a practical science of transformation: a systematic, rigorous, and detailed account of how grace operates in the human faculties, what the stages of the interior life look like in their concrete phenomenology, and what facilitates or impedes the action of the Spirit. This is not spiritual psychology in the sense of a psychology that has absorbed spiritual themes; it is a theological discipline in its own right.
Such a discipline would draw on the accumulated precision of the mystical tradition—the Sanjuanist doctrine of the spiritual touches and their ‘echoes’ through the faculties, the Teresian mapping of the mansions, the Ignatian discernment of spirits—and would develop this precision in dialogue with contemporary anthropology. Just as Blessed Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant Jésus sought to present Carmelite doctrine as a complete and practical spiritual theology for the modern Christian, so contemporary theology needs to undertake a similar synthesis at a higher level of systematic rigour.
3. The Recovery of the Transformational Reading of Scripture
Theology must recover the full dimension of Scripture as a living word that transforms those who practise it, not only an historical document to be contextualised. The ancient practice of Lectio Divina—understood not as pious reading but as a rigorous discipline of receiving the word at progressively deeper levels of interiority—is not a marginal devotional appendix to biblical scholarship. It is the form in which Scripture fulfils its own deepest intention.
Christ himself is the archetype of Lectio Divina: the Word made flesh who heard, received, meditated, prayed, and enacted the word of the Father unto death and resurrection. The believer who practises Lectio Divina in this sense is not merely reading a text; he is entering into a dynamic that assimilates him progressively to Christ. Biblical theology must develop the capacity to describe this process with the same precision that it brings to historical and literary analysis.
(On this point, see the articles at the end of the article.)
4. The Formation of the Theologian as a Transformational Practice
Formation for theology must itself become a transformational practice. It is not sufficient to transmit information about God; one must be formed in the knowledge of God—the knowledge that John calls eternal life: “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3). This knowledge is not propositional but participative; it grows through love, purification, and interior union.
This implies that theological institutions must take seriously the formation of the whole person: not only the intellect but the affective life, the will, the imagination, and the contemplative capacity. Spiritual direction, regular prayer, the sacramental life, and exposure to the great mystical texts must be understood as constitutive elements of theological formation, not optional supplements. The theologian who has not himself traversed the interior journey will always remain, in an essential sense, an external observer of the reality he studies.
Conclusion: Towards a Theology That Leads to God
Paul’s speech at the Areopagus ends with a mixed reception: some mocked, some said “We will hear you again,” and a few believed and were converted. The proclamation of a God who is not far, who has ordered all of history towards interior encounter, who is the very milieu of our existence—this is always received unevenly. But it remains the proclamation that is most urgently needed.
The great weakness of contemporary theology is not intellectual; it is not that theologians are insufficiently rigorous or insufficiently learned. The weakness is directional: theology has become adept at circling around its object without entering into it. It describes, analyses, contextualises, and debates the realities of divine revelation without consistently ordering these operations towards their final end, which is the interior union of the person with the living God.
The Pauline transition from external history to interior history is not merely an interesting exegetical observation. It is a methodological imperative. Just as God did not become incarnate merely to enter into history but to enter into us, so theology must not merely describe the history of revelation but enter into the transforming operation of revelation itself. The measure of theology is not only its conceptual precision or its historical erudition, but its capacity to lead the person into that interior country which Paul indicates when he says: “In him we live, and move, and have our being.”
St. Augustine knew that all of time—all the movements of history, all the seeking of peoples and individuals—aims ultimately at the same point: the rest of the heart in God. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, I, 1). Theology, if it is to be worthy of its name—not only logos about theos, but a word that leads to God—must become the science of this rest: its conditions, its stages, its crises, its transformations, and its consummation.
This is not the abolition of academic theology; it is its interior fulfilment. History, dogma, exegesis, and systematics remain indispensable—but as the vestibule of a knowledge that exceeds them. The electron microscope of spiritual theology, far from threatening the magnifying glass of academic analysis, reveals what the magnifying glass was always, obscurely, seeking to see.
The future of theology depends on whether it can recover this interior dimension—not as a secondary supplement to its task, but as the very orientation that gives theology its deepest meaning and purpose. For a theology that does not truly lead to God is, in the end, no theology at all. What is needed, therefore, is not a superficial reform, but a profound reconstruction of theology at its very core: its very definition must be reconsidered, its goal reoriented, its means purified, its newly developed contents articulated and integrated, and its methods deeply transformed.
Read Also:
– From the “Thinking Reed” to the Unconscious Self
– Theology and Spiritual Life (Video) (Text)
– Dogma and Spiritual Life: How Truth Transforms the Soul
– Lectio Divina & Theology (Handout and video)
– The Central Method of Integral Theology: Lectio Divina. (Video)
– Rethinking Theological Method and Theology
– Theology, Spiritual Theology, and the Question of Method
– In the Beginning Was the Word
– Moving From one Theology to the Other
– Reforming Theology (From “Duc in Altum”)
– Wisdom and Knowledge: Spiritual Formation and University Theology in the Christian Tradition
– The Method of Biblical Spiritual Theology
– Lectio Divina: From the Sources to the Living Source
– The Primary Task of Theology
– Restoring the Old Testament in the Liturgy: A Historic Return and a Prophetic Opportunity
– Beyond the Letter: Reclaiming a Holistic Approach to Biblical Formation
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…., Meeting With Representatives From The World Of Culture: Address Of His Holiness Benedict XVI
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