This is a response to a blog post in which a commenter asserted that once the Holy Spirit takes up residence in a person that they no longer experience doubt or mental uncertainty. They sighted Peter and Paul in the New Testament as examples. I disagree and below is why.
1. Part of the struggle with conversations about “doubt” is that it has a lexical range. You seem to be addressing certainty and doubt as emotional experiences. This aspect isn’t disconnected from faith “faith is being certain of what we do not see Heb. 11 and from my own tradition in the Heidelberg Catechism “faith is a deep-rooted assurance”.
Emotions are involuntary experiences that arise from our construal or perception of our circumstance. In this way faith very much impacts emotion and is an enormous aid in our emotional challenges.
2. Your assertion is that once the Holy Spirit comes in we no longer have the emotional experience of doubt. You base your claim I assume on personal experience and Biblical evidence.
I don’t know you so I can’t speak to your personal experience, but I find doubt to be common among people who profess to be Christians, people who in my estimation show evidence of faith in their lives, and who show evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in their lives.
Apart from my personal anecdotes I think we can find many others in the history of the church including CS Lewis in A Grief Observed and Nicholas Woltersdorff in Lament for a Son and many, many other accounts of notable Christians who have been looked upon for leadership, guidance, etc. testifying to experiences of doubt even long after having experienced and to all evidence lead exceptional Christian lives.
You might say that these are not sufficient evidence and that we need to appeal to Scripture.
a. I don’t think the corpus of the New Testament is sufficient to say that the Apostle Paul after Damascus never harbored emotional doubt or emotional uncertainty. Perhaps not. We have no testimony that I can think of that he did, but I will think longer.
b. I think in the case of Peter you are mistaken. Peter in the incident when he failed to eat with Gentile Christians shrank back out of fear of criticism and Paul reprimanded him for denying the Gospel. We might also note Peter’s uncertainty with respect to dealing with the issues that the new mission to the Gentiles involved. Should he eat with them? How did he respond to the vision on the roof in Joppa? I think we see evidence in Peter’s life, even given the tiny corpus of information about him after Acts 9 where he almost falls off the map that I don’t think we can easily say that once the Holy Spirit is present emotional uncertainty is banished.
c. Probably the best example of doubt we actually find in Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross. Here his emotional world is laid open and we have a window into his heart. I don’t think that we can define faith as not feeling fear, doubt or uncertainty, but rather what do we do when we are confronted with these things. If Jesus was tempted by all that we are, and you will not deny Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, I think we cannot say that temptations and trials of fear and doubt and uncertainty are somehow banished after we pass a historical boundary marker in real time.
d. You also seem to want to draw a hard and fast line between the Old Testament saints and the NT ones in terms of experience. I’d not go there partly because of the way the NT (again, Hebrews 11) talks about the OT saints. Of those saints, great ones wrestled with doubt and uncertainty. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel, David, Job.
3. A dynamic exchange between faith and doubt I would argue in fact builds faith in real time. That seems to be the majority way in my experience that faith is built rather than the Holy Spirit just poofing it into us. If Yhwh is the God of creation, providence and history, I believe he uses history to build his saints and his church. The Apostle Paul is a terrific example of this. I think he needed to be a Pharisee and a Christian murderer BEFORE he could be the founding theologian of the Christian church. My favorite treatment of this is Tim Keller’s introduction to “The Reason for God”. “A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it.” p. XVI.
4. I find the position that presumes that an experience of doubt is a denial of the presence of the Holy Spirit to be discouraging and potentially devastating for Christian faith and life.
a. It’s discouraging because it may lead one to have an existential crisis based on something as illusory and transitory as an emotional reaction. Despite massive attempts to keep up appearances common emotional lives can be tumultuous. Crises large and small regularly throw people into a tizzy. I think it is pastorally unwise to suggest that these fits of emotion should be seen as evidence of the absence of the Holy Spirit. This kind of thinking raises experiential validation to such a high level that nearly all will fail, especially those who struggle.
The same point in the opposite way goes to certainty. I know a lot of people who emotionally are simply wired for certainty, including the deranged. Many of these people aren’t believers at all.
I think equating validation for the presence of the Holy Spirit with experiential certainty is dangerous pastoral theology.
b. Having said this I do believe in time, as faith grows and strengthens, emotional equilibrium, perseverance, endurance, combined with emotional availability, vulnerability, and suppleness are marks of true faith and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In Jesus we see incongruous excellencies. What we find in him are excellencies that we don’t often find “in the wild” as it were. We expect people who are emotionally certain almost all the time to also be dogmatic, hard, non-transparent, invulnerable, etc. This is evidence of emotional brittleness, not strength. In Jesus we find not only a high capacity for moral perfection, but also enormous compassion for the weak, the emotionally wounded, and availability to those who are on the edge. Remember, the smoldering wick he will not snuff out, and the bruised reed he will not break.
5. I think experiences of emotional uncertainty are normal, and in fact may be in many cases marks of a healthy, growing self under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
Comments about the Holy Spirit and John Calvin
Again, comments from a blog conversation.
I think as Trace noted we’ve probably got a lot of agreement here but even perceived disagreement can produce some interesting exploration if seasoned with both honesty and generosity. 🙂
1. Part of what we’re rubbing against here is the difference between Biblical theology and systematic theology. An attempt to undertake a theology of the Holy Spirit (HS) through the OT is a difficult task indeed and simply applying NT expectations to the OT usually yields some strange results. What do we make of King Saul’s experience with the “spirit of the LORD” in 1 Sam 10:6-12? What about the elders of Israel prophesying and the two who did so in the camp? Fitting passages like these in a systematic theology derived mostly from the NT has given theologians and expositors fits. 🙂
2. I think there are problems with some of the common language and assumptions about the HS in the NT as well. It is common in American evangelical circles to talk about the HS as a “possession”, as the HS in me… I think this is sometimes an unfortunate reduction, because I think a more consistent appropriation of Paul’s theology is that we are in Christ and therefore we are in the Holy Spirit (the Spirit of Christ) rather than the other way around. The HS Is not primarily a power we wield, we are the property of the HS and we are wielded by it, albeit and unfortunately too often reluctantly, like a mule who is less than accommodating.
3. One of the governing teachings that Jesus gives us about the Holy Spirit, which is also very much in line with what we know about the entire Godhead, is that the Holy Spirit blows where it wants and wills. We don’t employ it, it employs us. The Holy Spirit doesn’t explain itself.
4. Another aspect that I find too often neglected in American evangelical language about the Spirit is the older observation of the work of the Holy Spirit both in the world in general (called “common grace” in my Reformed tradition) and in people’s lives BEFORE they make an overt profession of faith in Christ. Classical Christian theology does not endorse a timeline that “I was out there and stumbled upon information about Jesus, I liked what I heard and decided to follow.” Theology has long held that we can’t choose to follow Jesus without the HS working in our hearts to prepare us. This is called quickening or regeneration. This belief of traditional Christian theology recognizes that the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives comes way before our embrace of it. Too often I hear Christian drawing a very hard line between what professing Christians are doing BECAUSE they have the HS without recognizing that in fact the Holy Spirit works on people who are not Christians or who are perhaps not yet Christians or are perhaps that strange group that are almost Christians or perhaps even Christians and they themselves don’t know it or don’t know it yet. I can’t prove that such a group exists, but I suspect it does. Life is strange that way and this God that we serve reaps where he does not sow”, or does he. 🙂
5. Your points are well taken in terms of the powerful transformation of the Apostles. In Acts it is very clear that Pentecost is the line of demarcation between hapless, hopeless stumblers behind Jesus and these remarkable men and women who in a couple of hundred years changed “the world”.
6. And this brings me to your point about the transformative power of “the word”. Biologos.org is reposting some shorter versions of a lot of what NT Wright is doing in his longer book that Rachel is going through.
Again, I think we have a language problem in the evangelical world that is probably a legacy of the modernist/fundamentalist feud that has transformed the American church sometimes in unfortunate ways. The word is transformative because of how the Holy Spirit uses it. The Bible is not a member of the Trinity. Evangelicals keep using it like a flag, but the subtext that gets communicated is that the Bible is somehow divine or magical. It is neither. It is human words inspired by the Holy Spirit to achieve the ends that the Lord intends.
If you read some John Calvin you might want to read about how he pairs the Holy Spirit with the Bible. The Holy Spirit uses the Bible. Unless the Holy Spirit is using the Bible it does nothing. There is no power in the Bible. It has power to the degree that it is used by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is transformative and the Bible is an agent in transformation as used by the Spirit.
7. With respect to leaders today, you’re probably looking at leaders in affluent, secure North America. Leaders are often revealed in moments of desperation and danger. Find those places and you’ll find inspirational leaders. There are heroes in the world today, most of those stories we won’t know until the assembly of Christ is complete and we have time and capability to appreciate them. Also always know that all leaders have their flaws, sometimes dramatically so. Most who are seen as leaders today will be forgotten in a generation. We are a short lived, short remembered creature in this age.
8. With respect to Calvin, it is difficult (without reading history) to appreciate how broad and influential Calvin was to the development of the Protestant world. Calvin was a second generation reformer whose gifts were to synthesis, process, and systematize what the maelstrom of the first generation of reformers were spinning out in the midst of their melees. Calvin was a refugee (a Frenchman in Switzerland), a pastor (his preaching load and work load was crushing), a scholar (he was incredibly productive), a sickly, often miserable man (had could be generous, but also surly, short tempered and unpleasant) and one of the better Biblical exegetes of his generation (which Wright and others often note). There are biographies that are too hagiographic. I like Herman Selderhuis’ recent biography. I think its fair and even handed on this complex man.
It’s important to recognize that part of why Calvin is so influential is because of his book “The Institutes of the Christian Religion” that was a hugely popular book in Europe as the Reformation continued to impact the cultural conversation.
Calvinism tended to flourish in those spaces in Europe (Switzerland, the Netherlands) where the refugees of other power centers (France, Spain, Germany) had to flee from. Calvin gets a bad rap via Servitus but the truth was that people who couldn’t fit into the dominating influences of the RC and Lutheran churches tended to clump around these refugee centers that practiced greater tolerance. The two main branches that have carried on the tradition came from England (Presbyterian churches) and the Netherlands (Reformed churches, my tradition).
The noisiest Calvinists in America today tend to be “Reformed Baptists” that are an American hybrid of sorts between Calvinism and some American baptist fundamentalisms. Neal Plantinga, my systematics professor when I was in seminary said of Arminianism “Yes it is a heresy, but it’s our heresy”. Arminians too are mostly Calvinists too. Calvin and his teachings impacted Protestantism far beyond what the label reflects today which is part of the reason why labeling a Calvinist is a tricky thing.
9. Part of why I may sound inconsistent with respect to faith is probably because of my Calvinism. Calvin was notoriously inconsistent too, as was Augustine who Calvin really follows. Calvin held both a strong vision of election, that God is the author of our salvation and apart from the work of the Holy Spirit all of God’s benefits for us are not intelligible. If you look also at how Calvin taught and lived he also believed that we are responsible for what we do and must respond to God’s gifts to us. Are we responsible? Yes. Is God the primary agent? Yes. Do these two things seem incompatible? Yes. Why is Calvin so inconsistent in this? Because he’s reading the Bible and the Bible says the same thing. Jesus talks election all the time, and quickly cries out “let those who have ears hear…” Paul does the same thing, and they both come by it honestly from the Old Testament. Its in that tradition that I stand. I have to bear witness to the limits of our agency conditioned by history, time and space, and also the necessity of decision. If I short change either side problems happen, so I’ll stick with my inconsistency. pvk