LeRon Shults and Andrea Hollingsworth: The Holy Spirit

F. LeRon Shults and Andrea Hollingsworth, The Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 150 pages, ISBN 9780802824646.

This book makes a significant contribution to the “Eerdmans Guides to Theology” series and helps us understand the place of the Holy Spirit in the faith and practice of the church over the centuries and today. This book by Shults and Hollingsworth does this in a compact (150 pages) and accessible way.

F. LeRon Shults is a Reformed theologian committed to the belief that the church must ever be reforming. Once professor of theology at Bethel Theological Seminary he is now professor of theology and philosophy at the University of Agder in Norway. He has written a number of other books, including Reforming the Doctrine of God and Reforming Theological Anthropology (both Eerdmans).

Andrea Hollingsworth is a Ph.D. student in constructive theology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include spirituality and pneumatology, and she has published book reviews and essays in journals, including Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

The authors see pneumatology as “the attempt to interpret the transforming experience of the Spirit” (p. 2). And this is “implicitly or explicitly, always…within the context of trinitarian discourse” (p. 6). In the introduction we are given a succinct, refreshing account of Scripture’s witness to the Spirit. From there we move to some highlights of the church’s witness to the Spirit up to the present day.

The church has often sought to defend and promote the faith in a philosophical context, but philosophy has often not been kind to a biblical understanding of spirit. The dualism of Middle Platonism and neo-Platonic philosophy defined spirit in a way that devalued matter. This meant that the teachings of the healing of the body—even the incarnation itself—were in danger of being undermined or denied altogether. The church fathers sought to undo this influence in the Councils of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and Constantinople (381 A.D.). The focus was primarily on Christ as being one person undivided with two natures and speaking of God as Trinity, one God in three persons. Constantinople significantly added to the Creed what had developed from the Cappadocians’ theological work on the church’s understanding of the Spirit.

Augustine of Hippo’s work and analogy of Trinity as Father-memory, Son-intellect, and Spirit-will, along with Boethius’ definition of person as “an individual substance of rational nature” (p. 91) had a profound impact on Western theology in particular. In this formulation, substance had priority over being “in relation.” The Western filioque addition to the recitation of the Nicene Creed, “from the Son,” in describing the procession of the Spirit (influenced by Augustine’s writings), contributed to the eventual split between the East and the West of Christianity. The Eastern Church saw the Father as the eternal source or fountain of the Son and the Spirit, while the Western Church insisted on the Spirit’s procession from both the Father and the Son. But there have been some breakthroughs in recent times toward resolving this impasse.

Early Christian thinking on power was more or less shackled by Aristotle’s idea of an unmoved Mover. There was hardly room for spirit in such a concept. Western Christianity carried this over into determinism or voluntarism rather than the dynamic interplay between God and humanity with creation.

In spite of the fact that medieval mystics (such as Bernard Clairvaux) were influenced by Platonic philosophy, and scholastics (such as Thomas Aquinas) were under Aristotelian influence, they contributed some interesting interpretations of the experience and teaching concerning the Spirit.

The Reformation brought some fresh theological work on the Spirit from Martin Luther and John Calvin. Such work, especially Luther’s, was rooted in their struggle and concerns for the Reformation of the church. Shults and Hollingsworth argue that Luther’s work and the place he gave to the Spirit has been overlooked because of his greater emphasis on justification by faith. Calvin’s work on the Spirit demonstrates the centrality of the Spirit’s work in salvation and the Christian life. Huldrych Zwingli, the other Magisterial Reformer, is also seen by some as contributing significantly to the church’s understanding of the Spirit. He saw the Spirit’s role becoming prominent after Christ’s ascension and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost. Menno Simons, perhaps most remembered of the “radical Reformers,” disagreed with the prevailing doctrine that regeneration occurs through water baptism, arguing that it is only by the baptism of the Spirit.

In Modernism there has been a relational turn in philosophy influenced by theology, promoting the idea of person in terms of relation and communion and not substance. If energy is of the same essence as matter, then a new emphasis on God as Trinity—the Spirit integral in all God does in the world—gives us a more Scriptural and robust view of the Holy Spirit. Surprisingly, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher were among the major figures in this turn. And we find some significant contributions from Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley.

The authors believe God was moving by the Spirit through the Pentecostal revival at the beginning of the twentieth century and the charismatic renewal which came at the middle of the century as well. The authors acknowledge there has been good work that has come from Pentecostal scholars. In addition to this, some feminist and liberation theologies hold significant views of the Spirit. When you consider a number of twentieth century theologians, such as Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann (whose theology is more Trinitarian), who give more deference to the Spirit than many earlier Western theologies, you have more openness to what God wants to do through the church in the world.

The annotated bibliography is outstanding, a major portion of the book. The descriptions of the books and authors cited are interesting in themselves, and also helpful for any further in-depth reading or research one might want to do.

This book helps us appreciate and long for more of the power and presence of the person of the Holy Spirit in and through our own lives and faith communities.

Reviewed by Ted M. Gossard

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