The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life

Historical, Interdisciplinary, and Renewal Perspectives

W. Vondey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375995
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Twelve scholars from the biblical, historical, theological, and philosophical disciplines engage in a conversation on the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. The essays are held together by an enduring focus and concern to explore the relationship between the work of the Holy Spirit and Christian formation, discipleship, personal and social transformation. The book points toward the integration of theory and practice, theology and spirituality, and the mutual interest in fostering dialogue across disciplines and ecclesial traditions.

1

MAPPING THE HERMENEUTICAL WATERS: THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE REVITALIZATION OF INTERPRETATION

Steven B. Sherman

Navigating today’s hermeneutical waters is demanding. The sheer variety of different approaches, presuppositions, texts, interpretations, methods, and communities is difficult to grasp. It is an even greater challenge to locate the Holy Spirit in the hermeneutical landscape of the Christian world. This chapter seeks to map the current topography of Christian hermeneutical approaches with the help of a metaphor of the hermeneutical sea in order to chart the course for a Spirit-oriented interpretation. Hermeneutics, or in a more general sense, interpretation, refers to an exploration of “how we read, understand, and handle texts, especially those written in another time or in a context of life different from our own.”¹ For our particular purposes, Christian hermeneutics focuses on the interpretation of the biblical scriptures amidst the challenges of vast hermeneutical waters—a mix of revelation, texts, techniques, methods, communities, and interpretations constituting divergent tributaries, bays, and estuaries. All communities along the hermeneutical waters maintain particular presuppositions and practices, including theological and hermeneutical commitments.² Some members in the broader evangelical world, particularly pentecostal and charismatic interpreters, emphasize the significance of the Spirit in providing truthful and relevant ecclesial and individual interpretations of God’s word and world. However, not all communities place equal importance on the pneumatic and pneumatological dimension of hermeneutics. In this chapter, I suggest that a Spirit-oriented hermeneutic is essential for successfully navigating the interpretive waves in the hermeneutical sea.

My focus is on the Evangelical Estuary, although the metaphor could be widened to Christian hermeneutics in general, to suggest that the Spirit is an essential source for powering the revitalization of hermeneutics in the Christian world. Put differently, faithful Christian interpreters are called to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church and the churches. This affirmation raises a number of fundamental hermeneutical questions: What is the place of the Spirit in our community? How are we to know what the Spirit is saying to the church and the churches? How do we facilitate the Spirit’s activity amidst the broad range of hermeneutical positions? What role does the community and the individual play in this interpretive process? Does the pneumatological warrant demand a discerning of spirits in order to ascertain the truthfulness of our interpretations?

To address these concerns, I map five hermeneutical territories and their respective “topography” with regard to Spirit-oriented hermeneutics. The metaphor of mapping (or remapping) is useful to reveal not only the existence and extent of boundaries, but also the possibility of cooperation and participation in other locales (i.e., fields or disciplines) of the hermeneutical task.³ Within this metaphor, the Christian map of hermeneutics has generally emphasized the importance of the Holy Spirit for knowledge, interpretation, discernment, and understanding (see Rom. 8:22–27; 1 Cor. 2:15; 12:10, etc.). Identifying the Spirit as “wind” in this metaphor not only affirms a foundational biblical motif but also suggests that the Spirit is always involved in navigating the hermeneutical waters in some form—ranging from gentle breeze to whirlwind—amidst the particular hermeneutical communities. We might say that the Spirit hovers over and penetrates the whole estuary. Immersion in Christian hermeneutical waters depends deeply on the use made of the wind. Thus, the estuary represents both pneumatic ontology and activity (e.g., the presence, power, and prompting of the Spirit) and human being and performance (e.g., the trust, thinking, and teaching of the community and the interpreter). Although a panoramic Christian lens might show agreement that the Spirit is involved in some way in interpreting God’s word and world, the different ways in which this is understood has not yet been fully charted. This chapter focuses on the specifically pneumatological emphasis of contemporary Evangelical hermeneutics and attempts to map those zones and their range of interpretations.

The Evangelical Estuary’s toponymy includes five communities mapped on the following pages. These communities are distinguished by their deliberate engagement with the sea, their depth of engagement with the hermeneutical waters and the wind of the Spirit: Land-dwellers (Community 1), Shallow-enders (Community 2), Surfers (Community 3), Sailboaters (Community 4), and Open-sea Swimmers (Community 5). These communities are somewhat porous, and members are free to “move” out of and into different locations. While various factors challenge and complicate such moves from one hermeneutical community to another, acknowledging the dissimilar mobility of participants in different groups is a central task of this exercise. The procedure for mapping these communities encompasses identifying and evaluating general and distinctive hermeneutic topographies, showing how different communities make use of pneumatology, and assessing (in light of the above sightings) how each community contributes toward interpretive revitalization by way of the Spirit. My central concern is therefore to characterize how particular confessional locales can best understand the Spirit as a source for revitalization. My modest goal is to create no more than a metaphor for different hermeneutical approaches and perspectives that allows for integration and assessment of the pneumatological lens of interpretation. I hope to present this metaphor as an illustration for the kinds of hermeneutical exercises carried out in the remainder of this collection. This essay is therefore more imaginative than prescriptive; it needs to be filled in with the various hermeneutical positions of the subsequent chapters.

COMMUNITY 1: LAND-DWELLERS

Land-dwellers are landlubbers who dislike the perceptible hazards of the hermeneutical waters with its multiplicity of authorities, instruments, and methodologies. The hermeneutical waters represent murky, unstable, unnecessary, and potentially treacherous sources, authorities, and ways of thinking—all of which must be avoided in order to preserve the purity of both the fresh water and the land. Land-dwellers believe that the world of hermeneutics is too problematic, complicated, agnostic, deceptive, toxic, or evil to be encountered. In short, it is the part of the world that Land-dwellers are called to shun. The full reliance on the land represents the affirmation of divine revelation and core Christian dogmas and doctrines (such as the Trinity, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, and the significance of conversion) including disputed secondary and tertiary doctrines (such as theological methods, atonement theories, forms of church government, and cultural engagement). Leaders of this community typically see themselves as the “watch group” of the whole estuary, although most often they focus attention exclusively on conformity within their own community. The primary bond among Land-dwellers is belief in the absolute correctness of their doctrinal position; they confidently assert flawless understanding, having no need for critique or correction from other communities. Thus, many variant smaller groupings within this land-based community may be at odds with one another despite their agreement on central or foundational theological and hermeneutical commitments.

While the Spirit blows across the territory, some landlubbers seem to detest the wind, especially as it exerts force to drive them away from the fruitless obstructions (intransigent doctrines) and injurious entanglements (divisive dogmas) of the land. To meet this challenge, these Land-dwellers construct barricades that keep out the Spirit and the demands and effects of a Spirit-oriented hermeneutics. Their fortresses defend against all challenges while attempting to control and channel the wind of the Spirit for interpretive purposes that support exclusively landlubbing (i.e., subsidiary doctrine-oriented) exegesis. For these Land-dwellers, the Spirit seems largely constrained within the pages of the Bible or to soteriological concerns understood in particular (doctrinal) ways. Pneumatology is typically restricted to the inspiration of Scripture and in service to individual conversion to Christ and sanctification of the church (especially particular models of inspiration, conversion, and sanctification). Thus, the Spirit is understood as involved mainly in particular salvific and ecclesial activities. There is little room for expanding the Spirit’s role further toward the hermeneutical waters. For many in this community, the Spirit ceased long ago from imparting gifts, healings, miracles, and other present and eschatological manifestations. Spiritual movements and outpourings were no longer necessary with the completion of the New Testament.⁴ Thus, for these Land-dwellers, it seems accurate to say there is “a subordinate, secondary role assigned to the Holy Spirit, who is thrust aside and controlled.”⁵ Pentecostal and charismatic interpreters, despite their pneumatic emphasis, can also reside among Land-dwellers when wind and water—Spirit and hermeneutics—are disconnected; interpretation and spiritual discernment are then seen as unrelated tasks. In extreme cases, the Spirit is credited with building newly formed deposits (i.e., doctrines) made of sand particles (exceptionally divergent articles).⁶ For these members, there is no need for study, reflection, or interpretive evaluation since the Spirit is directly guiding each Land-dweller’s life. They are reluctant to remember the Spirit as the constant source of life, the wind that swept over the water in the beginning of creation (a plausible translation of Gen. 1:2), thus forgetting their continuing dependence on the power and cosmic activities of the Spirit by means of a pneumatologically reductionist hermeneutic, which attempts to calm the wind and to shrink its effects.

Nevertheless, there remain real possibilities for hermeneutical revitalization in this community. First, renewal may come primarily via deeper and wider exegetical study and application of biblical teachings concerning the Spirit’s work in conversion, gifting and helping leaders, sanctification, proclamation, and convicting the world of sin.⁷ Engaging in a more systematic study of pneumatology—especially via Scripture and ecumenical creeds as well as Christian intellectual history and constructive contemporary approaches within other communities—could serve to help revitalize the churches in this community.⁸ Second, some revitalizing effects may be experienced by Land-dwellers willing to explore other parts of the land—stepping outside (even if temporarily) ensconced, exclusionary confessional or denominational strictures and relationships and into other landlubbing ecclesial communities closer to the water. The risks include losing the comfort of land and its associations, for instance, reliance on dogmas, institutions, and friends. Nevertheless, by increasing exposure to other hermeneutical groups also affirming c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The Presence of the Spirit as an Interdisciplinary Concern
• 1   Mapping the Hermeneutical Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Revitalization of Interpretation
• 2   Monasticism: Instrument of the Holy Spirit in the Renewal of Today’s Church
• 3   Absence Makes the Heart Grow: Longing and the Spirit in the Theology of St. Augustine
• 4   Hugh of St. Victor and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
• 5   A Lutheran Engagement with Wesley on the Work of the Holy Spirit
• 6   The Allurer of the Soul: The Holy Spirit in Puritan Preaching
• 7   Baptism by Fire: The Work of the Holy Spirit in Pascal’s Philosophy
• 8   The Holy Spirit and the Miraculous: John Wesley’s Egalitarian View of the Supernatural and its Problems
• 9   Apocalyptic Pneumatology and the Holy Spirit in the Religions: The Contributions of Christoph Blumhardt
• 10   An “Improbable Bond” of the Spirit: Historical Perspectives on the Christian Life in Pentecostal-Charismatic and Process-Relational Theologies
• 11   The Passion of/for Pentecost: Hermeneutics, Heterology, and the “Hauntology” of the Spirit
• Conclusion   Christianity and Renewal—A Plea for Interdisciplinarity
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index