How does the Spirit work in any era? Some biblical scholars, representing a variety of theological persuasions, would say that we see the Spirit at work in events like the political upheavals, the reordering of governments and peoples, and the mass demonstrations and movements that one finds so many evidences of in our time.1 Others—including some of those who try to understand the Emergence movement that is occurring in latinized Christianity today—suggest that religious and spiritual upheaval may, in fact, characterize the Spirit’s most essential work. In other words, they hold that in every time and place, the Spirit—that is, God—is about movement/disruption and change/transformation.
Spirit upsets. A quarter century ago, Harvard dean Krister Stendahl provocatively wrote in the preface to his book Energy for Life that he hoped the Western Church, including his own Lutheran tradition, would begin experimenting with “Spirit language” for God rather than “Christ language.” He also advocated for the Eastern understanding of the Trinity, contra-filioque, saying that to understand the procession of the Spirit from both Father and Son is to limit and narrowly define it, leaving Spirit safely within the confines of the church where only a portion of its work is accomplished.2
Brian McLaren—not so much the forerunner as the Martin Luther, if there ever was one, of Emergence Christianity—wrote well over a decade ago in A New Kind of Christian of the personal, often existentially painful, way in which people become gradually able to dislodge themselves from old paradigms of religious and spiritual life and thought as they find themselves entering new ones. McLaren reflected with these now-famous, clearly prophetic, sentences: “What if God is actually behind these disillusionments and disembeddings? What if God is trying to move us out of Egypt, so to speak, and into the wilderness, because it’s time for the next chapter in our adventure? What if it’s time for a new phase in the unfolding mission God intends for the people (or at least some of the people) who seek to know, love, and serve God?”3
Joachim of Fiore saw the Age of the Spirit—for this was the name he gave to our third and final era—as a time when leadership in ecclesial structures would be destabilized and decentered. A faithful son of the Roman Church, as well as one subservient to the pope’s authority until his own death, Joachim in his writings nevertheless put much more hope in committed believers practicing active and contemplative lives of faith and practice than in institutions and pontiffs. And blessedly, according to that Calabrian monk’s vision, while the first era equaled a time of fear, the second era was a time of faith, and the third era would equal a time of love.4 Each era has its primary means of revelation. None of them is final until the very end.
One of our finest contemporary theologians, Professor Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School, has recently and thoroughly written of Joachim’s prophecies, summarizing that what we are currently experiencing is similar to what Joachim foresaw and is surely “a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.” In The Future of Faith, Cox posits three epochs thus far, clearly inspired by the taxonomy of Joachim, the last of which, according to Cox, might now be summarized as follows:
Era: The Age of the Spirit
Originating moment: The gradual crumbling of trust in the power of belief
Centrifugal force: Rapid growth of a non-hierarchical Christianity that centers around spiritual experience and hope, rather than belief
Hope and expectation: Various, uncertain, since this movement is by definition without any specific center
Circa: 1900 CE to the present5
Cox is an advocate for the importance of this last era, our present moment, the Age of the Spirit, and, in fact, he has been one of its champions for the better part of a half century. He summarizes: “The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it. No wonder the atmosphere in the burgeoning Christian congregations of Asia and Africa feels more like that of first-century Corinth or Ephesus than it does like that of the Rome or Paris of a thousand years later.”6
All of this having been said, however, one must also add the obvious. Even in the Age of the Spirit, to use Joachim’s term and as Cox employs it and/or in this time of Emergence Christianity, belief has not become a matter of no use and little regard. It is, and will always be, the way by which millions of religious believers like us encounter, perceive, and sort the world before our noses. Yes, it is true that reason became increasingly cold after the Enlightenment, and yes, it is also very true that Emergence and Convergence Christians today are post- everything related to “belief” when it is delivered in terms of propositional faith and creed. But belief discerned in the Spirit will always have its role in the living of a spiritual and religious life.
There is no question but that something enormous is going on in the religious life and in the way that we understand our place in human history. That something reflects not only old Joachim of Fiore and his prophecies, but it also anticipates a sharply different and new era, an era that already we have begun moving into. Before we carry our discussion any farther into immediate times, however, we need to look at one other component of them, one that we have hinted at but not yet truly explored.
Notes
1. See, for instance, José Comblin, The Holy Spirit and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989); Lee E. Snook, What in the World Is God Doing? Re-Imagining Spirit and Power (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Amos Yong, Who Is the Holy Spirit? A Walk with the Apostles (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2011); and although he is not a formally trained theologian, one also thinks of the new book by the provocative Catholic priest, Diarmuid O’Murchu, In the Beginning Was the Spirit: Science, Religion, and Indigenous Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012).
2. Krister Stendahl, Energy for Life: Reflections on the Theme “Come Holy Spirit—Renew the Whole Creation” (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990).
3. Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), xi–xii.
4. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper, 1977), 14.
5. Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 1, 4–20.
6. Ibid., 20.