The Lord Is the Spirit. John A. Studebaker
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href="#ulink_bc4650c7-8df6-5953-8318-2913cff5f39d">132 Hume challenged religious “authority” by attacking the validity of making empirically demonstrable statements about God. Kant was helpful to the Christian concept of authority in some ways, but his argument that theology must be based only upon moral laws meant for the “modern man” that God could be known only through rational means, if at all. As a result, many groups throughout the modern period “hungered” for a new sense of the Spirit and decried that almost all traditional approaches left them only half full. Anabaptists, for example, believed themselves to “possess” the Spirit and sought a more pronounced doctrine of the Spirit’s interpretive authority (thereby rejecting Lutheran and Reformed teaching regarding authority). Quakers held that the “authority” of Church and Scripture must yield to the Spirit’s “inner light” of immediate revelation as the final authority for Christian theology and life. Pentecostal and charismatic groups at times disconnected the Spirit from the Word completely, looking for an experience that lay beyond the teaching of Scripture. This modern landscape was often shaped by a shift in the notion of “the priesthood of the believer,” which now meant that the individual was no longer bound by an authoritarian Church and was free to use his or her own intellectual and spiritual capacities for discerning truth. According to Livingston, the “modern age” brought a renewed awareness and trust in each person’s own capacities.
Reason supersedes revelation as the supreme court of appeal. As a result, theology faced a choice of either adjusting itself to the advances in modern science and philosophy and, in so doing, risking accommodation to secularization, or resisting all influences from culture and becoming largely reactionary and ineffectual in meeting the challenges of life in the modern world.133
Modern theology therefore emerged through an accommodation to human subjectivism, and took the form of both experientialism (which often seemed to replace the Spirit with human morality) and rationalism (which replaced it with human reason).134 These two approaches are represented by the theologies of Schleiermacher and Henry. For our purposes, the essential debate had to do with the final “authority” or method one could rely upon when interpreting Scripture.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Friedrich Schleiermacher, often referred to as “the father of modern theology,” defines the Spirit as “the union of the divine essence with human nature in the form of the common Spirit which animates the corporate life of believers.”135 Schleiermacher’s “liberal theology” does not give the Spirit a metaphysical status apart from this union. The Spirit confirms the notion of an immanent deity, which seems to be best understood as emerging “from below” as the presence of God in the Church. This presence is defined in terms of a “feeling of absolute dependence.” The operation of the Spirit is to be recognized primarily with regard to the humanization of the individual, so that one can be released from external sanctions and enjoy the positivistic (scientific) character of modernity. Schleiermacher asserts, “Without being knowledge, [religion] recognizes knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.”136
As a result, all doctrine is to be derived from an experiential foundation. The interpretation of the Bible in the establishment of doctrine does not proceed on grounds of rational objectivity, but as a function of the Christian Church wrestling with questions of personal faith, piety, and ethics. Each witnessing community possesses an “interpretative authority” in that each views the Holy Spirit as the one who works to form and define that particular community of believers.137 “The Spirit for Schleiermacher is effectively the spiritual influence left behind by Jesus that gives coherence to the life of the Church as a spiritual entity, and therefore to the life of the Christian faith.”138 Within this paradigm the Spirit is freed from the Catholic/Protestant approach to pneumatology (which to the “liberals” limited the Spirit to a role of preservation of life through specific methodologies) and given “authority” to meet new challenges with fresh insights and unique results.139
Following in the steps of Schleiermacher, nineteenth-century liberal theologians portray the Christian faith, and particularly Jesus’ life and teaching, as the fulfillment of humanity’s highest religious or moral aspirations. Such aspirations are thought to be embryonically implanted in universal human nature. Sabatier, for example, interprets Schleiermacher psychologically, and holds his “feeling of absolute dependency” to be an “emotional experience” that is prompted by the internal testimonium Spiritus Sancti and that becomes the sole authority over Christian theology. The Bible and the Church are historical and experiential “consequences and effects” of such an authority, and since neither is a “first cause,” neither can play a role in the theological discremin.140
Carl Henry
Carl Henry’s pneumatology has attempted to combat liberal and neo-orthodox notions of “authority” and in doing so has served to define the Spirit’s role in the inspiration and illumination of authoritative Scripture more precisely. For Henry, the Spirit’s establishment of biblical authority must precede the Spirit’s own interpretive activity. This was one of the main points established in his classic work God, Revelation, and Authority. Henry’s key hermeneutical principle is that the Spirit’s work in the inspiration of biblical propositions must be distinguished “from the Spirit’s present function as authoritative interpreter in the believer’s comprehension of the scripturally given revelation.”141 Henry is concerned that the Holy Spirit is given a rightful place in the transference of authority from Christ to Scriptures, thus avoiding the development of the sort of “dualism” between Christ and Scripture that we see in Barth, liberal theologians, and others. Henry explains how this duality develops:
Because the prophetic witness anticipates Christ as its climax and the apostolic testimony exalts Jesus as the promised son of God to whom all authority is given, Scripture has sometimes been adversely contrasted with Jesus Christ or with the Spirit of God as the sovereign authority. This contrast has been prompted during the past two centuries by champions of higher critical views of Christ. But the critical assumptions governing negative theory of Scripture inevitably carry over also into other spheres, such as Christology and pneumatology, so that any attempt to seal off the authority of Christ or of the Spirit from the fate of Scripture is vain.142
Henry posits that the Holy Spirit stands between Christ and Scripture and thereby confers to the Scripture a corresponding authority.143 Though he is concerned that evangelicals have forgotten the Spirit’s role in conferring such an authority, Henry refuses the corrections offered by many “neo-Barthians” (i.e., Leowen, Pinnock, Kelsey),144 arguing that they always move toward communal or functional hermeneutics. Instead, Henry asserts that “the Spirit of God—not any private interpreter (2 Pet. 1:20), evangelical or nonevangelical—is the authoritative illuminator of the scripturally given Word.”145 Henry’s pneumatology is best expressed by Leonard Champion: “The testimony of Scripture possesses the authority of the Spirit and every believer, guided by what Calvin calls ‘the testimony of the Spirit within,’ will recognize and respond to its truth.”146
Henry’s evangelical approach, however, does tend to incorporate a classic scholastic