scholarly journals Indwelling without the indwelling Holy Spirit: a critique of Ray Yeo’s modified account

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 124-141
Author(s):  
Kimberley Kroll

In 2014, Ray Yeo published a modified account of the Spirit’s indwelling in “Towards a Model of the Indwelling: A Conversation with Jonathan Edwards and William Alston.” Yeo utilizes a conglomerate of Two-Minds Christology and Spirit Christology to provide a metaphysical framework for his model which he believes offers a viable alternative to more traditional merger accounts like those of Edwards and Alston. After providing an overview of Yeo’s objections to the merger accounts of Alston and Edwards, I will summarize Yeo’s modified model. I will argue Yeo’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ in lieu of a literal, internal, and direct union of the Holy Spirit and the human person cannot alleviate the core metaphysical concerns which surface in all accounts of union between the divine and human.  Yeo’s misunderstanding of Two-Minds Christology leads him to deny the full humanity of Christ; a humanity upon which his entire account of the indwelling relies. Yeo’s modified model will be shown unsuccessful as an account of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit even if one accepts both his conception of Two-Minds Christology and his conditions for indwelling.

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-172
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson

This chapter first describes the theology of the leaders of the evangelical awakening on the British Isles, George Whitefield and John Wesley. Both insisted that by preaching the “immediate” revelation of the Holy Spirit during what they called the “new birth,” they were recovering an essential element of primitive Christianity that had been forgotten over the centuries. Both had clear affinities with the conscience theology of William Perkins, yet both distanced themselves from it in important ways. In New England, Jonathan Edwards explored the nature of religious experience more deeply than either Wesley or Whitefield had done, and Edwards proudly claimed his Puritan heritage even as opponents found him deviating from it.


Author(s):  
Jan Stievermann ◽  
Ryan P. Hoselton

Jan Stievermann and Ryan P. Hoselton consider the role of experiential piety in the exegesis of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Both were deeply engaged in the new critical questions of their day, and both were also committed to nurturing religious piety—though they differed somewhat in how they handled these concerns. Although Mather was profoundly interested in the philological and historical issues in the Bible, he prioritized devotional and contemplative engagement with Scripture. Edwards, Stievermann and Hoselton argue, drew on the experimental language and philosophy of the Enlightenment to construct a case for the supernatural authority of the Bible against increasingly naturalistic arguments. Edwards held that one gains spiritual understanding as the Holy Spirit harmonizes the believer’s internal senses with the Word; this reconstruction affected Edwards’ approach to the emotive element in Scripture, the dynamism of typology, and the nature of the regenerate interpreter of the Bible.


Africa ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Opening ParagraphThe Apostolic Church of John Maranke (Vapostori or Bapostolo), an indigenous Christian church founded in Umtali, Rhodesia, now has congregations across Central Africa. For the Church's central ritual event, the Sabbath kerek, and other occasions of worship, singing constitutes the core of ritual practice and is used to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit. These songs combine traditional Bantu rhythmic patterns with a unique Apostolic form. Often drawn from biblical themes, the songs are composed by members as spiritually inspired pieces.


Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump

A simple consideration of God’s relation to space is insufficient to elucidate God’s omnipresence. God can be not just present at a space but also present with and to a person occupying that space. In addition, the assumption of a human nature ensures that God is never without the ability to empathize with human persons and to mind-read them. In the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God can be more powerfully present with a human person in grace than any human person could be. In the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God’s union with a human person is a matter of God’s being present with a human person in grace as much as eternal divine power permits and mutual love allows. The implementation of this union to the fullest degree possible in this life (and the next) is the end to which the atonement is the means.


Author(s):  
Baird Tipson

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 112-130
Author(s):  
Steven L Porter ◽  
Brandon Rickabaugh

Of the various loci of systematic theology that call for sustained philosophical investigation, the doctrine of sanctification stands out as a prime candidate.  In response to that call, William Alston developed three models of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model.  In response to Alston’s argument for the sharing model, this paper offers grounds for a reconsideration of the interpersonal model.  We close with a discussion of some of the implications of one’s understanding of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit for practical Christian spirituality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Stephenson

Wolfgang Vondey’s Pentecostal Theology: Living the Full Gospel is a tour de force in Pentecostal systematic theology. It is also the most articulate statement of the fivefold gospel’s power to explain the impulses of past Pentecostal spirituality and its constructive potential for future Pentecostal discourse. Combining both traditional and innovative systematic loci, Vondey’s project shows great promise for the enterprise of christologically oriented narrative theology. One looming question is whether the christocentrism of the full gospel can bear adequate witness to some of the details of Spirit christology. That is, can the full gospel, with its emphasis on Jesus actively bestowing the Holy Spirit on creatures, give proper place to Jesus passively receiving the Holy Spirit from the Father, without the full gospel’s structure undergoing fundamental transformation? While some ambiguities remain in Vondey’s attempts to employ both the full gospel and elements of Spirit christology in the same theological paradigm, he takes long strides towards integrating these two themes that have often competed with each other for space in Pentecostal theology.


1993 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willem J. Ouweneel

At the time when Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen are credited with having founded anthropology as a separate branch of philosophy, Herman Dooyeweerd deserves the merit of having created a total view (Gesamtanschauung) of the human person on the basis not of a humanistic but a Christian cosmology.2 He was deeply conscious of the fact that philosophy as such is not capable of fathoming the essence of humankind. Philosophy, in his opinion, is bound to the temporal horizon, while the human ego transcends this horizon. The philosopher acquires a view of this ego only in its relation to God. Since this relation is religious in nature, the knowledge of self is also religious in nature. This true self-knowledge is effected by the revelation of God’s Word in the heart, the religious centre of human existence, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Dooyeweerd’s anthropology is therefore a transcendental anthropology, founded as it is on this transcendental critique of theoretical thought. In this transcendental critique the point of synthesis of theoretical thought is not found in some transcendental logical ego, in the sense of Immanuel Kant, but in the transcendent-religious ego of the human person.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-15
Author(s):  
Daniel Goodey

‘The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life ... the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them.’ This passage from the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) (234) on the profession of faith identifies the core principles and underlying recognition of Catholics regarding belief in a triune God – one God existent in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In addressing the people of Ephesus, St. Ignatius of Antioch (also known as Theophorus) said, faithful Christians were ‘being stones of the temple of the Father, prepared for the building of God the Father, and drawn up on high by the instrument of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, making use of the Holy Spirit as a rope, while your faith was the means by which you ascended, and your love the way which led up to God.’ (Ignatius of Antioch, 2014, loc. 4027.) St. Ignatius goes on to say, ‘the Holy Spirit does not speak His own things, but those of Christ, and that not from himself, but from the Lord’. The point St. Ignatius was making is that the three Persons of the triune God are integrally connected, and it is through the grace of the three-in-One that salvation is gained. Hence, the Trinity is the core of the Christian faith, but from the very beginning the faithful relied on metaphor to explain and help others understand how Three could be One


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