Abstract
I’d like to respond to Simeon Zahl’s densely-argued affective Augustinian account of sanctification with a series of vignettes, in keeping with his conviction that “the theological task also requires that our accounts of such patterns [of sanctification] undergo regular testing in light of experience” (216). There is an inevitable partiality and provisionality to such testing, which must be “regular” due to the diversity and complexity of human experience. The handful of stories I offer are insufficient even to suggest a consistent pattern, but they will serve to reflect aspects of Zahl’s argument in the lives of Christians who are undergoing the sanctifying work of the Spirit.
1. Jeff was a strapping Canadian hockey player, but we met in the high school choir. 1 Ours was an instant friendship—playing basketball, sharing inside jokes, laughing at the things boys do. We could talk about anything, but he grew cold and aloof when I steered the conversation toward spiritual things. Later in our early twenties, I asked Jeff if he wanted to read the Bible with me. We shared so much, and I wanted him to share my faith, too. He sent me a clear note: He appreciated that I had never put pressure on him when it came to spiritual things, but he was feeling pressure now. I backed down. A few months later, Jeff went to Las Vegas with a few of our friends, who happened to be Christians. (This was not a mission trip.) We were having coffee after the trip when he told me he was thinking about going to church, mostly for social reasons. “Something might happen,” he acknowledged, “but I am not going to force it.” I remember being overjoyed on the inside, calm on the outside. I think I said something like, “That’s cool.” Within a few weeks, Jeff was a new man. He just kept wanting to talk about God. Conversations that had been awkward, cold, and artificial became natural, warm, and effusive.
Jeff’s story validates two of Zahl’s claims. First, it confirms that “the primary mode by which the saving work of Christ is ‘actualized in relation to us’ by the Spirit is through a practically recognizable affective sequence.” The sequence does not perfectly match the Melancthonian move “from experiential plight through consolation to new feelings of joy and freedom,” as Jeff initially exhibited little sense of plight (143). Instead, he seemed to move from disinterest or dullness to delight. Secondly, Jeff’s story attests to “the more rapid and disjunctive dimensions of Christian experience of the Spirit” (212). In our cultural moment, filled as it is with reckonings and deconstructions in response to spiritual abuses of power, many of us find ourselves suspicious of the technicolor aspects of spiritual experience. We might trust slow and steady change, but we are chary of accepting accounts of sudden and striking transformation. There is surely some wisdom in our current caution, but it is hardly sufficient as a diagnostic tool for spiritual discernment. As he so often does in his fine book, Zahl makes a point that is immediately convincing, but which had not occurred to me before: A “focus on Christian transformation in terms of habitus-formation in communities over time misses the equally if not more important ways that the transformative impact of divine grace is described in the New Testament in disruptive and temporally sudden terms as well” (212). 2 Whereas Jennifer Herdt argues that “only a virtue-based model of Christian transformation can do justice to the idea that God sanctifies through natural human processes rather than separately from them,” Jeff’s initial transformation involved no apparent process of habituation and yet was perfectly natural. In fact, my attempt to nudge him towards Bible reading backfired precisely because it felt unnatural to him. It would have been artificial and false, and he was not interested. In the easy company of Christian friends, he became, to my great surprise, suddenly open to church attendance and, within days after that, to Christ. I paused over whether to write that he “opened himself,” but that rings false; he “became open,” or perhaps “was opened,” with all the implications that divine passive carries. And yet again, this was perfectly natural. There was no paranormal activity, no altered states of consciousness, nothing that one would easily call a “miracle.” It is just that his heart warmed and his mind opened, something admittedly mysterious but no less natural in its operations (if supernatural in its source) than any other change of heart or mind.
2. I remember talking with a non-Christian friend during our first year in college. We were going back and forth about spiritual things, and I made a significant claim. “You're right,” Tetiana said. She seemed to be on the cusp of conversion, at the moment of her own sudden and striking transformation. “You're right,” she said. “And that’s great.” That was it—a gentle, complacent approval of what I had found true, what had worked for me. I thought she had seen the light. What’s more, she acknowledged that what I was saying was true. She was even glad for me to know that truth. But she was not arrested by the truth; she walked right by it.
Even as Zahl’s affective Augustinian account of transformation makes sense of Jeff’s sudden change of affection, it can shed light on Tetiana’s non-transformation. In that moment (I do not know what has become of her in the intervening years), she took no delight in the gospel of grace. Even if she might have cognitively recognized the validity of the truth claim being made (“you're right”), she did not recognize herself as claimed by the claim. Or, and more to Zahl’s point, the claim did not delight her. She did not apparently disdain it; it just did not interest her. It is not that the claim made no sense to her; it is that it made no emotional sense.
One could despair of the Christian faith’s relevance in the modern world, even suspect that its ancient diagnoses and remedies are no better than a medieval doctor’s application of leeches. Zahl suggests that it is “not that these affective experiences, these sufferings and fears and debilitations, are no longer felt, but rather that we now label and interpret them differently” and “tend not to associate these experiences with God or with sin anymore” (162). A missional implication follows from this: The church must bear witness in word and deed to a Christianity which, in the words of Francis Spufford, makes “surprising emotional sense.” 3 This need is as pressing in our evangelism as it is in our discipleship.
3. A few days ago, I was leading a discussion with seniors in our undergraduate honors college on Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations. Traherne was a 17th-century Anglican divine, and his meditations are richly affective. To be frank, I find his treacly prose a bit much; he is so effusive as to overwhelm a reader and, ironically, blunt the affective salience of his eloquent devotion. But the students’ enthusiasm prompted me to take a second look. One student read this line with relish: “All our disadvantages contracted by the fall are made up and recompensed by the Love of God.” 4 And I found myself asking the class, “What if this were actually true?”
Now, I teach at a conservative evangelical university where all the students are (at least ostensibly) Christians. All of us in that class believed that Traherne’s claim was true, but I was not asking about the content of the claim so much as (to use Zahl’s term again) its affective salience. “What if…” was my way of wondering out loud what difference it might make, primarily, or at least initially, on the level of affect.
I mention this recent interaction in class, a common and in no way outstanding one, to signal two things: First, the work of theology is frequently done on the ground of its affective salience. Nor is this limited to what we misleadingly call “practical theology” or even “spiritual theology.” The work of theology, at least if it has the slightest interest in speaking of the living God and flesh and blood human beings, concerns the way in which theological claims land in the lives of those who trust in and seek to obey the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Secondly, the affective salience of theological statements is frequently ambiguous and contested. We came to the passage in the context of an objection to Traherne’s project. He is so cheery, and while my (blessedly non-cynical) students found his ardor refreshing they also wondered whether and how it would square with their desire to accompany others in their grief. It is not so much that they questioned whether the Love of God really would make up and recompense the damage done by the fall, but they did wonder whether that might be cold comfort to those who mourn. There is an irreducibly contextual dimension to affective salience. It is not so much that a jubilant Traherne cannot be heard by those who mourn, however, as it is that we must consider both the broad affective implications of doctrines and the specific ways in which they might embed themselves in varying contexts. If anything, I found myself more receptive to Traherne’s triumphant claim as I reflected on the grounding hope that future restoration could bring to those who mourn. What if it were true that nothing is lost in the Love of God?
4. Jonah entered my Luther class hot. He was antagonistic in a way that caught me off-guard, not least because I detected in him something I have come to know in myself, something for which Luther has again and again provided a tonic. Luther has diagnosed and cured my perfectionism by the application of law and gospel many times. But Jonah’s conscience was not consoled by Luther’s words; it was agitated. Justification by grace through faith in Christ was not enough. “I need something that will change me!” he objected. We wrangled over Luther, and at some point in those weeks it occurred to me that Jonah misprized forgiveness. He had a mistaken sense of just how much being forgiven might change a person, of how much the full release from his sins past and present, from the guilt and shame that followed in their wake, and from the subtle dysfunctions that arise out of his best attempts to cope—of how much this could change his life.
Perhaps Jonah believes that a participatory model of soteriology is more experientially powerful than a forensic one, a position that has become almost axiomatic in recent decades and which Zahl roundly critiques. The courtroom can seem a cold, isolating place, as one stands in the dock, alone. A person may be acquitted, but he is still left with himself. I suspect Jonah knew as much, and was afraid of the man he was left with. He was right, too, to insist that he needs something that will change him. Where he was wrong was in thinking that God’s graceful forgiveness could not accomplish that change. Zahl writes that, “for Melanchthon, the key to understanding forensic justification lies above all in understanding the powerful affective salience he perceives it to have for fearful human beings with troubled consciences” (127). Zahl argues much the same for Luther. The point I would like to raise here is that, in addition to writing theology, teaching theology (and here we might add pastoral work of any kind, preaching, catechizing, spiritual counseling and direction) is an exercise in carefully elaborating the affective salience of doctrines. It is an exercise in meditation on the truth at hand, in considering (as we did with Traherne), “What if this were actually true?” The affective salience of forgiveness was not obvious to Jonah, for any number of reasons, chief of which may have been a consciousness of his own sin. Here is where a meditative approach to teaching theology is necessary. Jonah understood the doctrine, but he could not feel his way into its salutary effects. By ruminating together on all it might mean for this to be true, especially in an affective register, we increase the likelihood that the doctrine might make emotional sense to him.
The previous vignettes largely bear out Zahl’s affective Augustinian account of sanctification. At the very least, they offer a few testimonies to the plausibility of Zahl’s theory. Zahl defends a rather traditional claim with cutting-edge theoretical tools. The claim, that the Holy Spirit transforms the people of God into the likeness of Christ in real, often conspicuous ways, chiefly through a renewing and reordering of their lives, seems so obvious as to need little defense. But, as Zahl carefully relates, the disastrous spiritual solipsism of modern theology has left many suspicious of appeals to or even mere attention to spiritual experience.
Where I have found Luther most compelling is in his sheer soteriological disinterest in the human subject. Perhaps that’s over-stated; after all, as Zahl so effectively illustrates, Luther is subtly attentive to the affective dynamics of the law’s conviction and the gospel’s consolation. And yet, the gospel does its consoling work precisely by changing the subject, lauding the faithfulness of Christ, whose righteousness has rendered my unrighteousness irrelevant. So, while justification by faith is affectively salient, its very salience trades on a rhetorical move in which the attention turns away from the sinner to Christ.
I am deeply sympathetic with Zahl’s genealogy of “long-standing Protestant anxieties about subjective experience,” which has led to “a certain complacency with abstraction in much modern theology” (233). But here I think we need to take a second look. Zahl points to Barth’s thunderous rejection of an anthropocentric theology, his desire to speak of and to God. Along the way, “man” was dethroned, decentered, deemphasized. This quickly became a Christological point for Barth, as he realized that we can only speak of God (and “man”) in Christ. Humanity is readmitted as a legitimate topic of theological inquiry, but only humanity in Christ. So, the doctrine of election is one about Christ as the revelation of the electing God and the elected man, then a doctrine about the elect people of God, and only then, hundreds of pages later and far past what many read, a doctrine about individual women and men. Salvation is the outworking in Christ of God’s eternal election, something that happened 2000 years ago rather than in the individual lives of people who repent, believe, and are baptized. For Barth, however, none of this is abstraction. It is the deepest realism, refocused on Christ, the one in whom all things hold together. The theologians guilty of abstraction are the ones who are charmed by human subjectivity apart from Christ. Barth forcefully intervened in modern theology’s addiction to subjectivity by his resolute attention to Christ, even when it seemed more natural to speak of other things.
I take this to be the strength of T. F. Torrance and Kathryn Tanner, their intentional disinterest in the self-centered subject and (especially in Torrance) their single-hearted fascination with Christ. We might read what Zahl refers to as “abstraction” as a heuristic attempt, downstream from Barth, to teach us to delight in Christ and, in the process, lose interest in ourselves. With the grain of Zahl’s description of the affective salience of what theologians say, we can speak, too, of the affective salience of what they do not say. I have found Luther and Barth salutary (in the richest sense of the word) in just this sense, in their relative disinterest in my ongoing interest in myself. We ought not miss the affective salience of the transfer of grammatical weight to Christ.
Still, it is not sufficient to speak of the reality of what God has done in Christ without then considering the realization of that in the believer. Calvin shares Barth’s conviction that Christ “in his flesh accomplished the whole of our salvation,” but he knew not Schleiermacher and saw the need for the application of salvation’s accomplishment. 5 “We must understand,” he wrote, “that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” 6 The Spirit’s office is “to make us partakers not only of Christ himself, but of all his blessings.” 7 Zahl recognizes this in giving prominence to pneumatology, and he rightly enriches Calvin’s treatment by bringing the affective elements of the Spirit’s ongoing work to enable believers to delight in the blessings of Christ.
Paul did not know Schleiermacher, either. No more acerbic critic of the self can be imagined than this one whose spirituality can be summed up in the gnomic remark that “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). The self is undone, is quite literally put to death with and in Christ, so that my life has a new subject. And yet, Paul sees immediate and at times revolutionary moral and political implications to all this. Consider Colossians 3: Believers “have [died and] been raised with Christ,” and they are where he is, ascended to God’s right hand. In fact, their life “is hidden with Christ in God,” such that he just “is [their] life.” All this could tend toward abstraction, to a movement away from real life. Surely it is Barth’s one-sided attention to these realities that leads to Zahl’s charge. But immediately, Paul draws a series of (embodied, social, historical) implications: Believers who have put off the old self in baptism are to put to death a host of earthly practices. Similarly, those who have put on the new self in Christ are to put on apt dispositions, virtues, and practices, like clothing that fit, garb that reveals rather than dissembles.
Clearly, we cannot speak well of the sanctified life without a radical sense of the change of subject to Christ and a thoroughgoing, concrete description of life in the Spirit—which just is life in Christ, who is our life. That last sentence trips over itself, though perhaps less gnomically than Paul’s “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” I suspect that there is an inevitable dialectic here. To speak of sanctification is to speak of someone else, even as it is to speak of what happens in me, in us, as that other takes us up into his life. It would be impious to talk too much about ourselves, even as it would be ungrateful to remain silent about his work in us.