The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

✍ Scribed by Simeon Zahl

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 273
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, Simeon Zahl presents a fresh vision for Christian theology that foregrounds the relationship between theological ideas and the experiences of Christians. He argues that theology is always operating in a vibrant landscape of feeling and desiring, and shows that contemporary theology has often operated in problematic isolation from these experiential dynamics. He then argues that a theologically serious doctrine of the Holy Spirit not only authorizes but requires attention to Christian experience.

Against this background, Zahl outlines a new methodological approach to Christian theology that attends to the emotional and experiential power of theological ideas. This methodology draws on recent interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion, which has shown that affects are powerful motivating realities that saturate all dimensions of human thinking and acting. In the process, Zahl also explains why contemporary theology has often been ambivalent about subjective experience, and demonstrates that current discourse about God's activity in the world is often artificially abstracted from experience and embodiment.

At the heart of the book, Zahl proposes a new account of the theology of grace from this experiential and pneumatological perspective. Focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation and sanctification, he retrieves insights from Augustine, Luther, and Philip Melanchthon to present an affective and Augustinian vision of salvation as a pedagogy of desire. In articulating this vision, Zahl engages critically with recent emphasis on participation and theosis in Christian soteriology, and charts a new path forward for Protestant theology in a landscape hitherto dominated by the theological visions of Barth and Aquinas.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience
Copyright
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1: Recovering Experience in Christian Theology
Theology and Experience
The Problem Of “Experience” In Protestant Theology
The Birth of Protestant “Experience” Polemic: Luther and the Enthusiasts
Karl Barth’s Critique of “Experience”
Experiential Arguments In The History of Theology
Implicit Experience and the Affective Salience of Doctrines
Theology as Embodied Practice
Psychological Science and Implicit Experience
Conclusion
2: Experiencing the Spirit
The Spirit, The Presence of God
Challenges For Pneumatologies of “Presence”
Towards a Practical Definition of “Experience of The Spirit”
Experience and the Problem of Theological Abstraction
Experiences of the Spirit: Practical Recognizability
3: Salvation in the Spirit
The Soteriological Horizon
Present Experience of Future Salvation
Justification and Participation in Contemporary Debate
Three Models of Soteriological Participation
Participation and Experience in T.F. Torrance
Participation and Experience in Tanner’s Christ the Key
Participation and Experience in Neo-Thomism
Problems and Parameters for a Protestant Soteriology of Participation
Philip Melanchthon’S Soteriology of Consolation
Pneumatology in the Apology
Experiencing Faith and Regeneration in the Apology
The Psychological Plausibility of Melanchthon’s Account
Affective Transformation as Participation
4: Grace as Experience
The Incongruity of Grace
Affect Theory and The Nature of Doctrine
Theology and Affect Theory
Affective Predicates of Salvation
“The Feeling of Sin”
Law and Gospel as Affective Pedagogy
Law, Gospel, and Affect Theory
The Gospel as Experience
Divine Law and Human “Laws”
An Eclipse of the Spirit
Conclusion
5: Desires of the Spirit
The Holy Spirit and Christian Transformation
Pneumatology and Desire in Augustine
The Soteriological Pattern of Sanctification
Sanctification in Affective Augustinian Perspective
The Enigma of the Heart
Desire, Practice, and Virtue
Economies of Desire
Non-Transformation
Conclusion
The Methodological Argument
The Soteriological Argument
Bibliography
Index