Maybe this is the reason for the quotes on spiritual formation, but it seems that we have now a very rich set of information on how nurture of young humans is a spiritual formation – of course that is no guarantee of its quality.

Often Christians ignore infancy and childhood as a place of spiritual formation because we don’t consider our bodies or the bodies of others to be spiritual instruments or because we want to believe in an “age of responsibility” and thus in an “age of unresponsibility.”

And, I’d agree completely about what looked like a largely self-driven approach to Christian formation. I not only wouldn’t agree with that picture, but I don’t think it’s adequate to most of the Greek Fathers either.

I’m looking forward to the rest of your series on this. Good choice of topics!

The language of ‘spontaneity,’ as you probably already know, is from Kant, and is used as a technical gloss for freedom, which is an extremely indeterminate concept.

Freedom is problematic concept for Christian theology in general, as surely God wants to create free creatures; but just how ‘free’ are they? This unhelpful question has dominated Western Chrisendom for centuries.

As for issues of spiritual formation, spontaneity, and theological anthropology, all of these could be better served, in my opinion, by attention to the fact that humans are animals that are born way too early by mammalian standards (the unusually short gestation period coupled with a long dependency upon family) and need a great deal of attention before they even reach a place where ‘spiritual formation’ might be an issue.