But an important problem remains. Our tangible need and hunger for the spiritual disciplines do not by themselves make clear why we need them and how they fit into God’s creative and redemptive action upon and within human life. And above all, they do not show how the practice of the disciplines is to be integrated with the great truth recovered with Protestantism—that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works or merit. It is precisely obscurity and confusion here that led to the abuses of the disciplines history reveals and ultimately to today’s exclusion of them from the mainstream
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