Abstract
This book is a major contribution to Christian pneumatology written with lucidity, passion and wide learning. At its heart is a concern to re-establish the place of experience, emotion and embodiment in theology. Motivating the author is, first, a sense of the gap between often abstract theological discourse and the felt life experience of everyday Christian life; second, a desire to correct misunderstandings of early Protestant theology and recover crucial affective elements, not least in relation to the doctrine of justification; and third, to provide the basis for a deeper engagement between Pentecostal and Charismatic theologies and mainstream academic theology.
The book has two main parts. The first part is historical and methodological and argues for the ‘irreducibility of experiential dynamics in theology’ (p. 6). The second part is constructive, elucidating an experiential theology of the Spirit in relation to two doctrines central (but not limited) to Protestant theology: soteriology and sanctification. The argument overall is powerful, not only in its critical engagement with biblical, historical and modern theology, but also in its innovative deployment of affect theory for its potential to ‘help lead theology toward a more persuasive account of the relationship between cultural influence, religious practice, and the experiences of the feeling body’ (p. 7).
There are five chapters. Chapter 1 argues that, although appeals to experience in Christian theology have attracted scepticism and hostility on various grounds, it is nevertheless the case that theology from biblical sources displays a profound engagement with experience, including defences of doctrine by appeal to their ‘affective salience’ (pp. 37–40). Chapter 2 proceeds to the question of how to understand experience in Christian terms, and argues (against phenomenological approaches such as those of Rudolf Otto or William James) that the appropriate framework is Christian theology’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Here, crucial to offering a definition of experience of the Spirit is the notion of ‘practical recognizability’, characteristics of which include affective impact. As Zahl says: ‘Very often in the New Testament, the presence of the Spirit is explicitly connected with particular emotional and emotional-dispositional outcomes’ (p. 76).
Chapters 3 to 5 then constitute a major reparative and constructive attempt to show what a pneumatological theology attentive to practical recognizability in terms of affect, emotion and embodiment looks like. Chapters 3 and 4 concern soteriology. In Chapter 3, particular attention is given to the recent theologies of T. F. Torrance and Kathryn Tanner favouring participatory over forensic models of salvation. Significantly, Zahl resists a jettisoning of justification by faith, given, not least, its powerful emotional salience and pastoral effectiveness, historically speaking (p. 117); and he finds a powerful warrant in Philip Melanchthon’s ‘soteriology of consolation’ (pp. 118–41).
In Chapter 4, entitled ‘Grace as experience’, Zahl explicates theologies of sin and plight and the law/gospel distinction in an exercise of retrieval by which he seeks to demonstrate the enduring salience of the early Protestant doctrine of justification ‘for interpreting, shaping, and generating patterns of experience, in light of the intransigence of sinful affects on the one hand, and the transforming agency of the Holy Spirit on the other’ (p. 143). And in the light of affect theory, with its sense of the intransigence of ‘the irreducibly material, embodied, and animal dimensions of human experience and behavior’ (p. 151), incisive critiques are offered of such approaches to doctrine as George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic constructivism (pp. 146–53) and Krister Stendahl’s historicist relativizing (pp. 154–8).
Chapter 5 concerns sanctification. Here, Zahl explicates what he calls an ‘affective Augustinian’ account fundamental to which is the role of the Spirit in the transformation of desire via attraction to what delights, where God becomes the source of delight and sin delights no longer (p. 190). According to Zahn, the strength of such an account is the space it creates for the practical recognizability of the Spirit’s transforming work as well as for the frank recognition of ‘Christian mediocrity’ and non-transformation (pp. 225–31).
A short review cannot do justice to the breadth and intensity of Zahl’s argument. In its appropriation of affect theory for Christian pneumatology it will be of particular interest to students of theological method. In its constructive account of soteriology and sanctification attentive to emotion and embodiment it will be an inspiration to historical and contemporary theologians, and also to Christian pastors.