The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

I am delighted and honored that The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience has been chosen as the subject of this book symposium. Writing it was a labor of nearly a decade, and it is a joy to have the opportunity to discuss it with such fine colleagues in the pages of this journal.

There are three basic observations that stand at the foundation of the theology of the Holy Spirit I develop in The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience. The first is that there is a strange but widespread tendency in a lot of modern theology to describe God’s work in the lives of Christians in curiously abstract terms. We are quick to talk about what grace does in the soul, but are strangely silent on how the work of grace is actually experienced in real human lives and bodies. The result, I have come to believe, is that theologians have become inattentive to how theological doctrines play out concretely in the world.

In her brilliant novella Janet’s Repentance, the novelist George Eliot puts the problem very well. Commenting on the relationship between the doctrine of grace and how that doctrine actually comes to be experienced as a life-changing force by Janet, the novella’s protagonist, Eliot makes the following remark:

Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame. ¹

Theological ideas, I fear, are indeed often poor ghosts, and the question of how they come to “make themselves felt” is a question of fundamental theological importance.

The second observation the book is built on is about the Holy Spirit. Simply put, my argument is that when we want to talk about how that gap is bridged – how theological ideas make themselves felt – the correct theological language to use is that of pneumatology. It is the Holy Spirit who makes theological realities alive to human beings. This observation has critical purchase too. It means that if modern theology has developed an unfortunate habit of spending so much time talking about metaphysical realities that it fails to talk about how such realities are experienced in Christian lives, then the problem is fundamentally a pneumatological one – modern theology is often operating with a deficient account of the work of the Spirit. A good pneumatology drives us to speak about concrete lives and realities, and about the living presence of God in the world.

The third observation is an extension of the second, and is perhaps the most significant one for readers of this journal. It is that one of the main ways that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit connects God’s work with Christian experience is through the close biblical association between the Holy Spirit and emotions and desires (the locus classicus here is Galatians 5). That is, the Spirit of God works in real human lives particularly by transforming desires and gifting affections. As Augustine observed long ago, the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit teaches that the deepest engine room of spiritual formation is neither spiritual knowledge nor spiritual practice, but the heart and its desires; without being wedded to desire and feeling, knowledge is impotent and practices will either be empty or will not be practiced at all.

What makes this ancient insight (which I call “affective Augustinianism”) so theologically exciting today, and indeed so pastorally fruitful, is when we remember one further point: namely, that emotions and desires are embodied phenomena. As human beings, our affective life is deeply caught up with our material life, our embodied life, and our psychological life. This means that to locate the Holy Spirit’s primary work of formation in the heart is not to locate it in some private, individualized spiritual realm, as has sometimes been assumed. It is in fact to locate it in the body and its world.

If I am right about any of this, then there are significant implications for Christian spiritual formation and soul care. First, it follows from this view of the Holy Spirit that the line between systematic and practical or pastoral theology is not so clear as is sometimes assumed. Good dogmatic reflection on the Holy Spirit not only authorizes but requires theologians to pay attention to concrete experience and to the practical ramifications of doctrines (not just their conceptual coherence), and indeed to let those practical ramifications “talk back.” For example, in the book, I advocate a theological method of attending to the “affective salience of doctrines,” by which I mean the real or perceived shaping effects of theological ideas on Christian emotions and desires.

Second, an affective Augustinian account of Christian formation raises important critical questions for one of the most widely held accounts of spiritual formation in contemporary theology and ethics: namely, virtue ethics. Although practices can and do shape desires, and habit-formation is both real and important in Christian life, a primarily practice- and habit-based model of Christian transformation tends to underestimate the centrality of the heart and the intransigence of the heart’s desires – sometimes quite severely and disastrously. For interested readers, I make this case in Chapter 5, on pp. 208-215.

Third and finally, I believe an affective Augustinian model can take much more persuasive account of a phenomenon that is all-too real but all-too-little discussed in relation to spiritual formation: what I call “non-transformation,” or the many ways in which Christians do not seem to transform or experience sanctification the way their theology assumes they should. Robert Markus memorably dubs this phenomenon “Christian mediocrity,” and shows how central it was to Augustine’s mature theology of grace; as I show in the book, it lay at the heart of Martin Luther’s development of the doctrine of justification by faith as well. In the final part of Chapter 5 (pp. 225-230), I seek to describe the phenomenon of Christian “non-transformation” and to account for it in a way that is fully compassionate, and which frees us to be honest instead of anxious in acknowledging it as a feature of Christian experience, but without losing a real sense of hope that lives can change, in light of the reality of the Holy Spirit. If my book serves no other function than to re-open theological discussion of this important topic, it will have done much.