Desires of the Spirit

This chapter examines the work of the Holy Spirit in the transformation and sanctification of Christians. It argues that accounts of sanctification that build upon the idea of an instantaneous implantation of new moral powers in the Christian upon receipt of the Spirit have significant problems. It then turns to Augustine’s theology of delight and desire to provide an alternative theology of sanctification that is experientially and affectively more persuasive. The second half of the chapter shows that this “affective Augustinian” approach has a number of further advantages. It can account for the fact that sanctifying experience of the Spirit exhibits variability and that human beings are often a mystery to themselves; it can affirm a qualified role for practice and habituation in Christian sanctification without overestimating the transformative power of Christian practice; and it directs attention to the social as well as materially and culturally embedded dimensions of sanctification. The chapter concludes by arguing that an “affective Augustinian” vision of Christian transformation can also account effectively and compassionately for the persistence of sin in Christians.

Experiencing the Spirit

This chapter argues that a constructive recovery of the category of “experience” in Christian theology is best accomplished through the lens of the theology of the Holy Spirit. Thinking about experience in terms of the work of the Holy Spirit helps specify what we mean when we talk about Christian “experience,” while also avoiding the problems that arise in appeals to more general concepts of “religious experience.” The chapter shows how a pneumatologically informed theology of experience draws attention to a problematic tendency towards abstraction and disembodiment in much modern systematic theology. It then argues that the work of the Spirit is likely to take forms that are “practically recognizable” in the lives of Christians in the world, exhibiting temporal specificity as well as affective and emotional impact, and that pneumatologies that cannot take account of such practically recognizable effects are deficient.

Salvation in the Spirit

This chapter applies the pneumatological and affective account of “experience” given in Chapter 2 to examine the work of the Spirit in salvation. It focuses on the movement in contemporary soteriology away from traditional Protestant theologies of justification by faith and towards theologies of participation and theosis. It analyzes a series of recent accounts to demonstrate that soteriologies of participation either have significant difficulties in articulating how the saving work of the Spirit is experienced in bodies (as in Torrance and Tanner), or else end up with a problematically optimistic account of the Spirit’s transformative work in Christians (as in contemporary neo-Thomism). It then argues that Philip Melanchthon’s sixteenth-century account of justification by faith is substantially more successful on both counts. This is due to Melanchthon’s extensive use of affective categories to make sense of how salvation in the Spirit comes to be experienced in ways that are legible in embodied human lives. This section also provides an extended refutation of the “legal fiction” argument against traditional Protestant soteriologies, made recently by Milbank, amongst others. The chapter concludes by drawing on patristic accounts of soteriological participation to argue that affective transformation of the kind described by Melanchthon can be construed as a form of soteriological participation.

Recovering Experience in Christian Theology

This chapter provides initial clarification of how the term “experience” will be used in this book, distinguishing between “formal” and “implicit” functions of experience in theological reasoning. It then examines the history of ambivalence about “experience” in Protestant theology from Martin Luther’s debates with the enthusiasts to Karl Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher and his heirs. It argues that that this longstanding history of ambivalence has substantially shaped contemporary theological anxieties about subjectivity and experience, including for those who are not Protestants. The chapter then provides a series of arguments for the importance as well as irreducibility of “experience” in theology, on historical, theological, and psychological grounds.

Conclusion

This conclusion reflects on the wider implications of the book’s focus on the connections between doctrines, affects, and experiences. It summarizes the methodological approach described and deployed in earlier chapters, and indicates a number of directions for future work that could make use of this methodological toolkit. It then sites the pneumatological and affective soteriology proposed in Chapters 4 and 5 as charting a new path forward within a contemporary Protestant theological landscape hitherto dominated by the vision of Karl Barth, on the one hand, and “Protestant Thomism” on the other.

Introduction

This introduction presents the relationship between theological ideas and Christian experience as a fundamental question for contemporary theology. It identifies a number of reasons why theology needs to turn its attention once more to “experience,” including the relevance of the topic to wider questions about the intellectual and spiritual plausibility of Christianity in late modernity, recent misunderstandings of the theological legacy of the Protestant Reformation through inattention to questions of experience, and the need to make theological sense of the global success of Pentecostal Christianity over the past century. The introduction concludes with an overview of the book as whole.

Grace as Experience

This chapter gives a constructive account of saving encounter with divine grace, through the Spirit, in the context of embodied experience. It draws on the insights of affect theory and the “material turn” in religious studies to argue for the ongoing experiential plausibility of the doctrine of sin in the contemporary world. The chapter demonstrates that theologians in recent decades have tended to follow Lindbeck and Stendahl, amongst others, in making assumptions about the plasticity of human experience through the instruments of language and discursive practice, and that these assumptions require substantial qualification. The second half of the chapter builds on these insights, together with the theology of Martin Luther, to describe Christian experience of grace in terms of an affective pedagogy effected by the Spirit through the instruments of the law and the gospel. It concludes by showing how this account of grace can make religious sense of a wide variety of experiences of affective plight in the contemporary world.