Book Review: The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience
Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, Oxford University Press, 2020. 261 pages.
Review by Adam T. Morton
Simeon Zahl’s new book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, is a rarity, holding together two very different theses without coming apart at the seams. At the level of doctrinal content, the book is fairly traditional, advancing a version of early Reformation soteriology as hybridized from Melanchthon, Luther, and Augustine. From the perspective of theological method, however, the approach is innovative, proposing a theological application of that framework for interpreting emotion and the body termed “affect theory.” The glue connecting these elements is Zahl’s contention that questions about emotion and embodied experience are most naturally addressed within the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
By way of disclosure, the author served for a time as one of my doctoral supervisors at the University of Nottingham. I had heard about the book on and off going back several years and was eager to get it in hand. Now that it has arrived, much strikes me as very welcome, but a few points are more puzzling. Because those puzzling matters pertain to Zahl’s reception of Reformation theology, and Luther in particular, they are worth considering here in somewhat more detail than they would warrant as a proportion of the book.
Zahl’s doctrinal concern is born out of a double observation regarding contemporary Protestant theology. In the first place, he notes that familiar themes in Reformation theology—for example, justification by faith alone, or the distinction between law and gospel—have come under significant attack from within Protestant circles, and are often treated as metaphysically lacking or irrelevant to the conditions of late modernity. In their place, soteriologies stressing “participation” have received much attention. In the second place, Zahl notes that little role is played by experience in these participatory accounts, citing T.F. Torrance and Kathryn Tanner as clear examples. Even when experience and affect are not formally excluded, they are paid no attention, and the result is considerable vagueness regarding the Christian life.
Against this, Zahl holds that experience is an irreducible element of Christian theology, and particularly appropriate to speaking about the work of the Spirit. Affect theory, a piece of contemporary philosophy originating in certain circles of queer theory, provides the vehicle. Because affect theory is attuned to non-conceptual, non-linguistic, and resistive elements of bodily experience, it provides some insight into the affective categories of early Reformation theology. Luther and Melanchthon assume joy and sorrow, fear and desire as meaningful indicators and arguments. Their critique of scholastic accounts of virtue is basically affective—people in the early 16th century lived in systems designed around the inculcation of virtue, yet found their desires unmasterable. The expected work of the Spirit in sanctification did not take place. That experiential argument is powerful, not easily refuted by metaphysics alone (as, e.g., Jennifer Herdt, and Reinhard Hütter have attempted to do by way of appeal to non-competitive agency – see Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, and Hütter, ‘“Thomas the Augustinian” – Recovering a Surpassing Synthesis of Grace and Free Will,’ in Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas). Zahl goes on to observe that Melanchthon’s theology of consolation is, if considered as an account of the Spirit’s transformation of affect and desire in the Christian, also a more persuasive account of participation than found in Torrance or Tanner. On this basis, Zahl seeks to construct, with assists from Luther and especially the later Augustine, an affective theology of grace and the Spirit.
Luther also comes in for some criticism as part of Zahl’s recounting of the gradual exclusion of experience from Protestant theology. Here he connects Karl Barth's influence and Luther's turn against fanaticism after 1525. Zahl reads Luther as excluding experience almost totally after this date, since Luther focuses so intensely on the authority of the Word. So, e.g., in a 1532 sermon: “When you no longer accord the Word greater validity than your every feeling, your eyes, your senses, your heart, you are doomed, and you can no longer be helped… you must judge solely by the Word, regardless of what you feel or see.” It is true enough that Luther makes these sorts of statements, though also true (as Zahl somewhat acknowledges later in the book) that writings of Luther from the same period include many appeals to affect. However, Zahl’s criticism of Luther may be influenced by a misunderstanding regarding the manner of the mediation of the Spirit through the Word.
Zahl appears to think that "through the Word" and "through the church" mean, effectively, "in church"—that is, in a service, in the liturgy or a sermon. So he says, explaining Luther, “You cannot have a saving experience of the Holy Spirit while hiking in the mountains or having a conversation with a friend” (p. 20). This strikes me as off on two counts. In the first place, it ignores what is said in the Smalcald Articles about the mutual conversation and consolation of the brethren as a vehicle of the Gospel. The promises of God do come through verbal mediation but are certainly not confined by liturgical context—this is affirmed by Luther many times over. Second, and more subtly, is the precise relationship between the timing of an experience and the reception of the Word. A good hike cannot save me—but it certainly could happen that something on that hike may suddenly call to mind the promises of God given to me previously. The human mind is no simple machine, and resists crude, mechanistic interpretation—one might note here the complex of affect, memory, and external study, and the ambiguous timing of Luther’s own description of his “breakthrough” in the 1545 preface to the first edition of his Latin writings. Luther’s anti-enthusiast concern is to preserve the freedom of the Spirit and the Word over and above the affections, not to exclude them. His notion of the thoroughgoing mediation of the Spirit through the Word is so much more fluid and organic than is typical of Protestant theologies as a whole that it is easily misread. As a result, Luther comes off a little worse here than he should, and Zahl perhaps deprives his own arguments of more support from Luther.
A more fundamental critique would be that I question whether Zahl has fully appreciated the basis of Luther's anti-enthusiasm. Zahl sees that issue in terms of a defense against optimistic anthropology. This is not mistaken, but it is incomplete. Luther was not only concerned that humans were claiming too much authority for themselves. The same problem can be (and was) put in terms of God—where is God gracious, and where is he not? For Luther, seeking God outside his promise is fundamentally dangerous in a way that Augustinian talk about disordered desire doesn't quite reach. Similarly, a distinction between experience of God and “general” experience doesn’t hold for Luther. The problem with the enthusiasts was not that they did not experience God in some sense, but that they sought and imagined to have grasped him apart from his promise, which renders their experience deadly. The concern for grasping God in his Word was not a post-1525 development, but a theme that emerged early and carried on until the end of Luther’s life. Inattention to it obscures the precise (and highly affective) manner in which Luther distinguished Christian faith from human experience in general, or in the language of On the Bondage of the Will, God preached from God not preached. Luther’s mature theology is hardly less affective (and so, one might say, participatory) than Melanchthon’s, but it is somewhat distinct in its doctrine of God (and so the Spirit).
Zahl’s account is notably light on eschatological themes. This seems less an intentional step than an unacknowledged limitation of the methodology. Affect makes good sense as a tool for discussing Christian life as it is experienced in continuity; the relation between an affective pneumatology and the evidently discontinuous matters of common pneumatological reflection (death and resurrection) is not even raised as a matter for further study. In places, this preference for discussing the affective flow of Christian life has negatively touched Zahl’s reading of Luther and Luther’s interpreters, particularly in those places where discontinuity emerges as a major theme. His careful adoption of the simul iustus et peccator formula seems to veer away from the eschatological dimension of that anthropology, as the concrete coexistence of two different subjects, one sinner and one righteous. Gerhard Forde comes under criticism as he is taken to reinforce the inadequacy of experiential accounts of the law, understood as making a strong distinction between divine and human laws on this count. Neither of those concerns seem to me true to Forde’s meaning in the cited passage (in Theology is for Proclamation, p.151f), where his thrust is rather that the law does not merely induce a certain set of feelings, but brings real death to the human subject. What indeed to make of death from the perspective of an affective pneumatology? Death would seem at once the limit of affect theory, impossible to describe within it, and yet precisely the sort of resistant, non-conceptual phenomenon of bodies that inspires reflection on affect in the first place. Beyond death, what can affect theory say to what we must affirm as the true work of the Spirit - to raise bodies and bestow that which is well and truly new, even if hidden in this life?
It would of course be unfair to scold Zahl for not completing a discussion he has only just begun. This is an exciting book that opens up some genuinely new ways of articulating Reformation theology, taking account of features that play not only within but across bodies in time and space, and gives theologians strong reason to address these matters. It is psychologically attentive but not individualistic, and strikes me as offering a real way forward on some difficult ground. Seeing careful and appreciative work on Luther and Melanchthon from a non-Lutheran at a major research university (Cambridge) is surely heartening. I strongly recommend it to Lutheran pastors and theologians. That said, I remain convinced that a clearer understanding of Luther has potential to strengthen, rather than weaken, the general direction it proposes. Zahl has formulated the foundation of an “affective Augustinian” soteriology; an “affective Lutheran” approach is yet to come.
Adam T. Morton is pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, York, PA
