Lessons on the Holy Spirit
It has often been pointed out that in the 20th century the Holy Spirit went from being the forgotten person of the Trinity to superstar status. Increased attention on the Holy Spirit did not always make for theological balance but one of the encouraging features of the theological scene at the moment is the presence of a number of Pentecostal theologians who are offering real insights from their tradition without implying those of us who do not speak in tongues are second-class believers.
Veli-Matti Karkkainen, Frank D Macchia and James KA Smith are just a few examples of Pentecostals making major contributions to theology. Anthony Thiselton engages with the work of many of them in his recent book The Holy Spirit.
One theologian of an older generation who still has much to teach about the Holy Spirit is Karl Rahner. Two points Rahner makes deserve attention in the season of Pentecost.
In the first place, he argues that while the Spirit was at work before the time of Jesus only after Christ’s death and glorification did the Spirit’s presence become visible and permanent. Rahner ties the visible presence of the Holy Spirit to the church, the body of Christ. He quotes Irenaeus: “Where the church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is there is the church and every grace.”
Rahner drew a contrast between the experience of the Spirit in the church and what he called ‘religious excitement’. He wrote before it became common for people to say they were ‘spiritual’ but not ‘religious’ but his words draw attention to the dangers of a purely individual spiritual quest for religious experience. It can represent a ‘consumerist’ approach to spirituality and fail to lead to a faith that is lived out in service to others.
Rahner even went so far as to write that “we are only ‘spiritualized’, that is taken possession of and permeated by the Holy Spirit” if “we are incorporated in the body of the church”. As he was quick to point out, this does not mean every baptised church member is an active witness to the Spirit’s power. We often search in vain for signs of the Spirit’s presence in the church. It can seem, Rahner confessed, that there is “more of the Holy Spirit in many movements of religious enthusiasm than where the Holy Spirit has built his temple for ever.”
Christians, he wrote, have to make room for the Spirit to work in their lives, to renew them and use them to renew the earth.
But although Rahner tied the Spirit to the church he also wrote very movingly of the way individuals can experience God in what he called ‘the mysticism of everyday life’. He did not restrict this experience to believers but described ways in which atheists and agnostics experience God. Among 20th Century theologians Rahner stands out for his emphasis on the importance of a personal experience of God’s presence.
One way in which this comes to us, he wrote, is in those moments when everything that props up our life fails, when everything goes to pieces. It is then that we have to ask whether the darkness that engulfs us is absurdity or what Rahner calls ‘a blessed, holy night’. In a famous passage he listed a number of ways in which we experience God including times when we do good to others or forgive others and receive no thanks.
When atheists and agnostics protest against evil, suffering and injustice, Rahner suggested, it is because they have experiences of ‘ultimate life, fulfilment and meaning’. People make their protest because ‘deep down and without even being aware of it they use standards by which evils may rightly be considered meaningless and dreadful’.
For many of us Rahner’s ‘mysticism of everyday life’ is more appealing than the search for God in extraordinary phenomena like miracles and glossolalia. Charles Tallaferro is an American Anglican philosopher who explores experiences of transcendence in a recent book The Golden Cord.
Tallaferro refers to such experiences as ‘golden cords’ that lead us to God, borrowing a metaphor from William Blake. He provides examples from the lives of WH Auden, RS Thomas as well as from his own experience.
Auden’s example is well known and came before he was a Christian. One summer night in 1933 he and three companions each felt they were invaded by a power and that for the first time they knew what it meant to love their neighbour as themselves.
Among the other experiences Tallaferro quotes is that of the Methodist preacher Leslie Weatherhead who, on a train journey, described how the whole compartment was filled with light. “I never felt more humble. I never felt more exalted. A most curious, but overwhelming sense possessed me and filled me with ecstasy.”
Tallaferro’s examples are closer to special religious experiences than the mysticism of everyday life Rahner describes but they are not extravagant or miraculous and I suspect many people have had them but dismissed them from their minds. With Rahner’s help, Pentecost can remind us both of Spirit’s role in building up the church as the body of Christ and of God’s presence in our everyday experience.