Współczesne ujęcia empirycznego charakteru teologii duchowości
Contemporary Views on the Empirical Nature of Spiritual Theology

Summary/Abstract: The article shows a contemporary reflection on spiritual theology. The field of spiritual theology became abstracted from the theological studies in the XXth century. The article explains its empirical nature, which consists in examining the spiritual experience of specific people – either directly through observation or indirectly through written texts. While analysing the chosen contemporary literature, the article presents different conceptions of possible theological examination of an experience. It also explains scientific methods which are applied by spiritual theologians (besides the traditional methods: deductive, descriptive, phenomenological). The article shows suggested new methods, evaluates them, and groups them in the following way: a) methods of learning through personal experience; b) methods of observation; c) methods of text exegesis – hermeneutic; d) methods representing merging principle. Such an analysis of a contemporary reflection on spiritual theology leads to the following conclusions: a) one can notice many attempts of searching for new, more thorough methods of examining the spiritual experience of people; b) spiritual theology is inspired in this point by many human sciences; c) the multitude of methods stress multidimensionality of human experience, a mystery of a person; d) while focusing on only one particular method, one is in danger of reductionism; e) there is a need for a method that would merge all the others – it seems that a personalistic method could serve this purpose.The personalistic system assumes that the hermeneutical key for understanding any experience is a mystery of a person.

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