CHAPTER 5
“SPIRITUAL
ENLIGHTENMENT”
Contributions of a
Pneumatological Epistemology
DANIEL CASTELO
OVER THE YEARS, I have begun asking my students to wrestle with a key question: What kind of knowledge is God-knowledge?1 I have stressed this question for a number of reasons, but the prompt for it is partially a result of the context in which I raise the question.
I teach at a Christian liberal arts university, and I have several non-theology majors in some of my classes, especially in the required, general education ones. In these classes, having a majority of science majors is very different from having a significant swath of art majors: the conversations are different, the questions significantly vary, the intellectual sensibilities are wide-ranging, and so on. This observation is not meant to denigrate one kind of thinking over another, but it is to suggest precisely the point: there are different ways of thinking and so different kinds of knowledge available out of which people process and reason. A university context highlights this point exceedingly because the options are so many and their formative work so profound within a concentrated location and experience. The options truly are disciplines because they represent a kind of intellectual formation—a process of disciplining the mind and the self so as to shape not only what a person thinks but also how a person thinks and processes.
In light of these disciplinary dynamics, are we clear where God-knowledge fits among other kinds of knowledge? Theologians are inclined to think that God-knowledge is its own kind of knowledge, and I agree with that point. After all, its subject matter, namely the God of Christian confession, is unique. When engaging in interdisciplinary discussions, theologians may charge themselves or be charged with the role of helping the other disciplines think about a broader picture, one in which questions of purpose and meaning come to the fore in the midst of specialized training. We encounter this situation quite repeatedly at Seattle Pacific University. When we hire scholars in nontheological areas who confess Christian identity, we tend to think that they will naturally make the connections between their discipline and their faith. If these candidates cannot make these connections (perhaps because their educational training has been in nonconfessional settings such as state schools), the School of Theology is typically called upon to lend an awkwardly helping hand. The scenario is awkward in that those of us in the School of Theology typically do not know the other disciplines well enough to engage in a meaningful back- and-forth on their disciplinary grounds. In such exchanges, we in the School of Theology typically listen, learn, and maybe offer a theme or trope to aid these colleagues as they work toward tenure, and that is about the extent of what we can do. At play in this framework are a number of undergirding assumptions, including that theology should have something significant to say to the disciplines of biology, chemistry, history, and English. After all, “all truth is God’s truth.”2
For the purposes of this exercise, I am not interested in speaking to the matter of how theology can contribute to other disciplines; I am more interested in thinking broadly about how other disciplines may contribute to theology. That is not to say that I am relativizing the subject matter of theology in light of other disciplines. I am not saying that God and Chaucer (for instance) are equally important subjects to be explored in the grand scheme of things. Chaucer, after all, is not God (which may be news to only a few people). But, pressingly for the rhythms of institutional life, a Chaucer specialist teaching at a Christian university will need to know more about theology than a theologian will need to know about Chaucer when questions of mission-fit are debated in tenure-decisions. This is just part of the reality of teaching at a Christian university.3
What I am interested in is exposing how theology engages its craft and how it casts a vision regarding the pursuit of its subject matter. The subject matter of theology may be unique, but there is not a singularly unique way of pursuing theology. Simply peruse a number of theology textbooks and theological faculties, and see how they define and do theology differently. Questions of method in addition to matters of epistemology vary widely across the discipline of Christian theology. Perhaps that is to be expected, as there are different schools of thought within the other disciplines as well. But on the ground this reality may be difficult for theological practitioners to admit, in part because of the distinction theology is given as a result of its subject matter.
And this last point raises a significant issue. Theology’s subject matter may be unique, but theology’s practitioners are not. Theologians are humans, as are chemists, physicists, and Chaucer specialists. As humans, theologians are shaped intellectually by their contextualizing influences, including their teachers, environments, experiences, and values. Again, we may want to believe that theology’s subject matter would put everybody on the same methodological and epistemological page, but experience says otherwise. Yes, the subject matter of theology is the God of Christian confession, but the “specialists” of this field vary considerably in their intellectual orientations. These differences in intellectual orientations and thus formations are part of the reason why theologians define theology differently, why they pursue different theological aims, and why they produce different scholarly products.
I begin my essay in this way because I am committed to the notion that much of how theology is undertaken in the scholarly theological traditions that I am aware of is pneumatologically anemic. Pneumatology is often not considered basic to questions related to theological method and theological epistemology.4 If this assessment is correct, then one wonders why this is the case. What things are involved that often make pneumatology incidental or highly tangential to questions of theological method and epistemology? The culprit certainly would not be the subject matter, in that the Holy Spirit is an eternal person of the triune God. Chaucer is not God, but the Holy Spirit is God. The point should matter for all aspects of theological inquiry, including method and epistemology. A major factor in all of this would have to be theology’s practitioners, many of whom would not think—given their intellectual formations and orientations—that one’s pneumatology would have a bearing on questions of method and epistemology. But if this is so, one wonders: And why would that be the case?
My hunch is that within accounts of God-knowledge there are competing accounts of knowledge, and these manifest themselves especially at the level of method and epistemology. To extend the example mentioned earlier, certain theologians approach their craft as scientists; others approach it as artists. Furthermore, certain accounts of knowledge are more Spirit-friendly than others, or at least, certain approaches within certain domains of knowledge are more Spirit-friendly than others (“Spirit-friendly” meaning the welcoming of aspects that Christians typically associate with the Holy Spirit.) Put another way, there are competing accounts of knowledge within the field of God-knowledge itself, as it is understood and pursued by its practitioners. As a result, in these epistemic contestations, some things are allowed; other things not so much. Openings and closures fill this disciplinary landscape, and one potential loss in such contestations is pneumatology. Why would pneumatology be especially vulnerable in such contestations?
A significant reason why pneumatology would be vulnerable is that we who are products of north transatlantic culture do not know how to accommodate pneumatology in our intellectual social imaginaries. At some level, pneumatology and all its features just do not make sense for how we understand, structure, and engage our world. We may have an easier time accommodating other themes associated with Christian theology generally and with the doctrine of God particularly, but pneumatology has tended to be a stumbling block to those of us who trace our intellectual lineage to various upheavals of thought where the “order of things” became increasingly demythologized, disenchanted, secularized, naturalized—in short, despiritualized.
It is no wonder, then, that the conference call for Los Angeles Theology Conference 2020 demonstrates some concern surrounding pneumatology when it stresses that pneumatology may seem “scattered or diffused across the surface of contemporary thought.” This appearance may be due to the wide applicability of pneumatology, as the call mentions earlier; but it may also be due to this latent unease with how to navigate pneumatology in the first place—an unease directly related to the intellectual and cultural resources we have at our disposal at this given moment and location. What are we to do in the midst of these circumstances? How can pneumatology be more central to the task of theology at the methodological and epistemological level?
Let me offer two general proposals along these lines. The first would be to seek the aid of the other disciplines, that is, the other kinds of knowledge available. How would this work? In short, these other kinds of knowledge can help those who pursue God-knowledge to see how they may singularly and myopically pursue their work by exposing the limits and reductions of the very methods they use and the forms of knowing and reasoning they appeal to. To harken back to my example, the goal is not to have all science or art majors in a class pursuing theology. The vitality of exchange comes through when the class contains a mix of science, art, and other majors. By this very exchange and even contestation of different ways and means of knowing, those who pursue God-knowledge can see how they may overrely on certain methods and rationalities and possibly ignore or diminish other methods and rationalities. This commitment stems from the notion that God-knowledge is not owned by theologians and that there is not a singular way of pursuing theology—the subject matter just does not lend itself to such strictures. Christian scientists and artists can and do have things to say about God-knowledge, things that theologians need to hear. Furthermore, theologians are in need of fostering intellectual modesty precisely because of the uniqueness of their subject matter. One way of actively cultivating that modesty is by being told by a Chaucer specialist that interpreting God’s revelation and interpreting Chaucer are different kinds of activities, which the theologian may recognize explicitly but maybe not methodologically in all the pertinent aspects. A person who specializes in the reading of ancient texts may have thought through many of the applicable hermeneutical dimensions of doing such work, including the possibilities and limits of that work. Only certain theologians have specialization in hermeneutics; therefore, chances are that hermeneutical tendencies could be underdeveloped in certain theological proposals. If this is the case, the default would be to appeal to customary and well-known approaches simply because they are customary and well-known. Summarily put, theologians need input from experts in other fields of knowledge in order to do theology well, but this input is of a kind of not simply filling informational gaps but also of exposing methodological and epistemological inclinations and biases. Pneumatologically framed, theologians may need the help of other disciplines to understand why their proposals tend to be pneumatologically anemic. The issues at play are not simply theological; they may very well be intellectual in a broad yet determinative way. Competing “enlightenments,” then, may need to be brought to light.
The other proposal I wish to offer as to how pneumatology can be more central to the task of theology at the methodological and epistemological level is to see how other traditions and contexts beyond our intellectual-cultural milieu have and continue to pursue the theological task. Now, rather than engaging different kinds of knowledge, theologians can appeal to past and present voices across the Christian tradition so as to locate their preferred methodological and epistemological tendencies within the intellectual narratives that brought them to be, all the while highlighting that alternatives to those preferences exist within the tradition itself. One thinks, for instance, of a number of patristic voices that stress not simply intellectual virtuosity but spiritual sanctity as necessary for those who wish to pursue theology well.5 The private-public dichotomy—one that we in the American context know all too well—and its relegation of Christian commitments to the private realm would not hold here. Pressing our concerns and conundrums on such ancient accounts would tend toward anachronism; to understand these voices as best we could, we would have to attempt to enter different theological worlds. A working displacement and reorienting process would be required at some level, which in turn could have a pneumatological payoff. Furthermore, the witness of Christians throughout the world would be important to hear in that many of these contexts happen to be relatively underdetermined intellectually by some of the upheavals of thought associated with north transatlantic culture, yet interestingly, many of these contexts also happen to be charismatically oriented. I am inclined to think that these two characteristics of Christianity in the so-called Global South are not coincidental to one another; there is a link to expose here.
These have been some thoughts regarding why accounts of God-knowledge in our setting may be pneumatologically anemic, and I have offered some general ways to ameliorate this situation. In what follows, I wish to offer brief sketches on what kind of knowledge God-knowledge is and to do so within a pneumatological framework. I will offer different Pauline tropes to expand on what I am labeling different “registers” of theological engagement and reflection. My goal in offering these sketches is to offer a vision of what “spiritual enlightenment” could look like,6 a kind of enlightenment that puts pneumatology at the center of an account of God-knowledge, as awkward and unclear as such a move would be for us in the contemporary setting. One feature of this vision that I should highlight from the start is that these registers run “deep,” if I may riff on a book-title of one of the sponsors of this event.7 What do I mean by deep in this case? I mean that God-knowledge touches us at registers that are both difficult to penetrate, yet these are the registers that make us largely who we are. God-knowledge is a kind of knowledge that cuts to the core of who we are and how things are, and that framing of going deep is work that the Spirit uniquely and properly does. Notice that I am not making a strictly anthropological argument; I am not suggesting that we go deeper into ourselves so as to find who we are in a perpetual quest of self-discovery. What I am saying is that the Spirit of God is the One who can go deep into ourselves, deeper than we can at any given moment, and in turn the Spirit does work in those deep spaces that we cannot do. And why does the Spirit do this kind of work? To accomplish the purposes of God in the world and to provide a distinct but necessary kind of “enlightenment” as to who we are, who God is, and how things are.
“SIGHS TOO DEEP FOR WORDS”
Let us move, then, to the first major register I wish to highlight, what can be labeled “sighs too deep for words.” When the apostle Paul highlights that the Spirit helps us with “sighs too deep for words” (stenagmois alalētois) in Romans 8:26,8 key points are implied. First, the Spirit is in the business of helping us; aiding us is part of the Spirit’s “job description” and character, a point that substantiates further the paracletic profile of the Spirit stressed in the gospel of John. We may be at a loss for words at moments of distress; we may not know how to pray. But a lack of words need not lead to despair; the Spirit helps us when we are speechless.
Second, the kind of help highlighted by Paul has to do with penetrating registers that run deeper than words. This is a vital point. One sometimes hears the phrase (and I have used it myself repeatedly, I must admit) that “all we have are words” when we talk about communicating and relating. When more rigorously pressed, the phrase is simply not true. Body-language experts, for example, would have something to say on this point. We do have more than words. As to the verse, it is not clear what “sighs” or “groans” are per se,9 but what is clear is that they press deeply into properly theological realms, ones that go beyond words. To stress the point pneumatologically, words are not all that God’s Spirit has either. When making intercession on our behalf, the Spirit’s choice here is to go beyond words. There are such things as sighs or groans that are significant to God when the Spirit intercedes for us since the Spirit’s very self uses them.
Third, that the Spirit groans on our behalf is an act of solidarity, given that the whole of creation groans under the pressure of the present age, as highlighted earlier in Romans 8 (vv. 22–23). The suggestion is that the natural order and humans, who are part of it, groan in their duress, and as a matter of tending to this situation, the Spirit groans in solidarity with the creation as the Spirit makes intercession on our behalf. Therefore, groans and sighs (i.e., inarticulate, unutterable, wordless expressions) mark a key register of interconnectivity and solidarity between creation, humans, and God.
The reason for emphasizing this phrase and many of its dimensions here is to show that God-knowledge runs deeper than words. Based on this passage, how the created realm expresses itself, how humans express themselves, and how the Spirit expresses the Spirit’s self can be collectively understood in terms that run deeper than words. As important as words are generally for humans and specifically for theologians and their work, words are not all that we have for connecting to God and understanding God.10 God-knowledge runs deeper than words, and this point should be understood as “helpful” to those who have the first fruits of the Spirit. There are times when words fail us, when our limits and the limits of words collide, thereby making us speechless and perhaps leaving us feeling as if we have no recourse. This passage suggests hope in such circumstances because we have available other things besides words to connect with and understand God. God’s Spirit in fact uses other things besides words at critical junctures of the Spirit’s helping us within the economy.
One way to collectively hold these points is to highlight the apophatic dimensions of the theological task. Apophaticism, of course, can be understood in different ways.11 It can simply point to the mode of denial, of saying what God is not in contradistinction to saying what God is, that is, the mode of cataphaticism. Apophatic dimensions of God-talk are important to point out in that oftentimes they are assumed and thus implicit. For instance, saying that “God is love” cataphatically bears with it (or at least it should bear with it) an apophatic dimension: “God is love but not in the way we humans typically understand love.” The same can be said with other divine attributes and characterizations. The way of denial is an apophatic strategy, but it can be understood not simply as a counterpoint to affirmation; cataphatic and apophatic strategies use words, but the apophatic strategy of denial is not simply a parallel process to cataphaticism. Distinctively, apophaticism can also point to the work of exposing limits. The exercise of denial can be understood not simply as a stopping point (by saying something like, “God is not”) but as a marker along a specific path—a path of recognizing the limits of words (and by implication, our own limits). In connection to what we said earlier, if we are exposing the limits of words, we could be on the path of recognizing the theological significance of groans. Apophaticism may be understood, then, as a theological methodological approach to enlighten us as to the importance of the biblical claim that the Spirit renders help when interceding with “sighs too deep for words.” Put another way, apophaticism may be a way of getting at the theological significance of expressions and modalities that are unutterable and so beyond words. Why is that important work?
The reason why this is important work is because one wonders the degree to which we may be inclined or disinclined to think of something like “groans” or “sighs” as theologically significant. If groans and sighs are important to God and God’s Spirit, we must ask: Have we made idols of our words? Do we have a theologically problematic relationship with our capacity to speak? Would certain majors or intellectual orientations help us see those possibilities better than others? How are we aided or hindered in recognizing the theological significance of the Spirit’s nonverbal forms of intercession on our behalf? The depth imagined here is work that the Spirit can do in expanding our imaginations as to the possibilities of what is theologically significant. Words are not all we have in discussing that which can be expressions of theological meaning.
It should be noted that within the context of Roman 8:26 we are talking about the modality of prayer. God-knowledge is a deep kind of knowledge because it is learned on one’s knees.12 That sounds awfully pious, doesn’t it? But why? Because for some reason, we tend to be comfortable with theology being something other than spirituality and contemplation.13 What precisely is at work here? One assumes that there are many reasons—the separation of the church and academy, the professionalization of the theological guild, the regnant intellectual and cultural forces we are shaped by, and so on—but one certainty is that the character of God-knowledge has already been decided in a certain sense if the theological significance of Romans 8:26 is undetectable or, more worrisomely, inadmissible. It could be that we are more comfortable with certain kinds of knowledges than others. And if this is in fact the case, God-knowledge cannot help but be impoverished or maybe even misconstrued as certainly one kind of knowledge but definitely not another. A pneumatic sensibility here is that certain things of God are only learned and known in the modality of prayer and worship. As we will develop further at a later point, when we approach God as one to be worshiped, things come to light that are not available when God is approached simply as a topic of study. Both approaches involve learning, but their significance involves a differentiation of modalities of learning, which in turn rely on different registers and produce different outcomes. We may not have the words or concepts to account for whatever comes to light, but that does not take away from its theological significance. The welcoming of a pneumatologically framed apophatic mode of participating in God-knowledge opens up these possibilities.
I should add here that I do not hear of apophaticism as a theological methodological strategy in many academic theological circles. Yes, there is something like an “apophatic turn” in certain currents of theology that rely on what traffics as postmodern sensibilities, but the impact of this work comes across at times as limited to only certain theological orientations. I certainly do not hear much about apophaticism within many evangelical theological circles, which, at day’s end, is quite ironic, is it not? Why would traditions that stress conversion, mission, biblical authority, the prevalence of sin, and the like not find appealing an apophatic mode of stressing God-knowledge? Apophaticism exposes human limits, maybe even human idolatries, all the while creating conceptual space for the majesty and glory of God; these and other themes appear to be ones that evangelicals could strongly support. But then again, the kind of apophaticism I am stressing through the language of Romans 8 involves dependence and a certain account of losing control. This is all hinted in Romans 8 within an elaboration of human weakness, which in turn occasions the Spirit’s work of helping and intercession. Yes, pneumatology may be “diffused” and “scattered” and in need of being more dogmatically disciplined within the doctrine of God; it may also be the case that our doctrine of God and our account of God-knowledge may need to be open to the significance of “sighs too deep for words.”
“GOD’S LOVE BEING POURED OUT INTO OUR HEARTS”
Let us move now to a second register. The first had to do with “sighs too deep for words.” The second register has to do with “God’s love.” It is painfully obvious that a basic claim of Christianity is that the sum of the law is to love God with all that one is and one’s neighbor as oneself. Given the culminating nature of this claim, it is hard not to make reference to it somehow when elaborating the kind of knowledge God-knowledge is, especially when approached pneumatologically. The more pressing question to raise for our present purposes is how these love commandments actually affect, order, and substantiate the work of theologizing. For instance, one rarely hears a theologian in writing claim explicitly and repeatedly one’s love for God. When I once was asked by a student why I do the work I do as a theologian, I surprised myself by stating quite spontaneously that I do this work because I love God. I must admit that as spontaneous as the response was, it nevertheless felt somewhat strange once I said it. Yet it is a vital and pressing question on Christian grounds if one could properly, fittingly, and faithfully pursue theology apart from the love of God. The same could be said about the second love commandment: How could something like Christian theology be properly pursued apart from some sense of love of neighbor?
Because there is much to unpack with these love commandments, let us split them as two additional features of the Spirit’s work of enlightening us as to the kind of knowledge that God-knowledge is. We will focus on the first in what follows and on the second in the next major section.
As Christians we are not called to define or to conceptualize God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but for those of us who theologize, we certainly spend quite a bit of time and effort doing just that. Our love for God may be implied and on display, but as we have just stated, for some reason, it is something rarely explicitly claimed in theological scholarship. Part of the issue may be the awkwardness of revealing something so personal within the venue of scholarship. After all, love runs deep. Loving is a deep kind of relating, and so it is a deep kind of knowledge that is difficult to share publicly, especially in certain spaces. And of course, we live in a highly sentimentalized culture in which the language of love is often given an uncritical pass so as to allow it to be both obvious and self-authenticating. Therefore, the challenges of integrating love within the domain of theological methodology and epistemology are formidable.
Appealing to Paul once again, we see that love can do some heavy pneumatological lifting, and this also related, as in Romans 8, to matters of both suffering and hope. Paul notes in Romans 5, “And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (vv. 3–5 NRSV). As with Romans 8, Romans 5 has several parts to explore for our present purposes.
First, as initially noted, this remark is in the context of highlighting human weakness and need, now in relation to the work of Christ that establishes peace between us and God. As Paul notes, “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (v. 2). At play here is a kind of “proper confidence,”14 a kind of epistemic certainty hinted in the language of “boasting,” that is, we can know and proclaim boldly that the work of Christ of reconciling us to God is real and efficacious. This kind of confidence and certainty is not only possible in seasons of flourishing; the apostle Paul remarks that it is also possible in times of suffering. Naturally, through various critical methods we may fittingly speculate what kinds of suffering Paul’s original hearers may have been facing. To broaden this theme to our current context, though, it is certainly the case that Christian theologians may have their own kinds of suffering proper to their specific kind of work. If God-knowledge is ultimately a revelatory, receptive kind of knowledge, there is built into it a form of dependency that may seem on the surface to be irreconcilable with boasting, confidence, and certainty. Our agency in this form of endeavoring is somewhat problematized. We may find it easier to boast or have confidence and certainty in those things that we can control. But again, Paul is pressing for the possibility of boasting precisely in times of suffering, at those moments when our limits and weakness are especially prominent.
How is boasting possible in times of suffering? In a second point from the passage worth noting, Paul stresses the primordiality of God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (v. 5). The ground of Christian confidence, certainty, and boasting is a pneumatological condition and reality. What kind of knowledge is God-knowledge? It is a kind of knowledge made possible by the Spirit pouring out God’s love upon our hearts, that very center and core of who we are. In other words, this language runs deep. This knowledge is not so much seized but received, not so much generated but participated in. By being such, it can occasion boasting in times of suffering because it forces us to look beyond ourselves and our circumstances to something greater. As such, the one who is transcendent has broken into the immanent rather than a creature perpetually grasping to achieve transcendence.
A third point worth stressing about this passage is that this pouring out of God’s love upon our hearts by the Spirit is primordial when cast within a context of time and formation. Notice that Paul highlights a sequence of “production”: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope (vv. 3–4). God’s love is hopeful when it reflects a time-driven habituation of those who live out of this love within the features of everyday life.15 Boasting, confidence, and, yes, hope are all reflective of a seasoned form of intentional embodiment in which endurance and character are critical pieces. The expansion of God’s love that is poured out is continual and ongoing, its effects made manifest over time. Some may wish to stress an instantaneity dynamic to all of this, but Paul has in mind the long view in these particular claims. Humans change and are shaped by time-driven processes. Becoming God-like—participating and being shaped by God’s love so as to be able to boast of this hope—requires time, intentionality, and embodiment amid fluctuating circumstances.
These aspects surrounding the Spirit pouring out God’s love on our hearts is crucial for a number of epistemic concerns, but let us press into the issue of discernment. One line of perennial questions surrounding God-knowledge have to do with detecting it, identifying it, and so on. Discernment has become a catch-all category to denote all of this. How do we discern God’s presence, God’s purposes, God’s will? Often, the question of discernment is pneumatologically cast, but this is one place where the “diffusion” or “scattering” that this conference has set as concerns may play a role. Is it not the case that people sometimes seek a pneumatological stamp of approval by claiming, “the Spirit is saying this,” or “the Spirit did this”? Such efforts debilitate and discredit pneumatology because they reek of projection. And let us be clear: projection is no small matter theologically, but it is especially egregious pneumatologically when various passages of Scripture point to the delicacy and subtlety of the Spirit’s operations in our midst. The biblical themes of blaspheming (Matt 12:31–32), lying to, (Acts 5:3), testing (Acts 5:9), opposing (Acts 7:51), grieving (Eph 4:30), quenching (1 Thess 5:19–21), and outraging (Heb 10:26–29) the Spirit point to a synergistic dynamic in which the love of God may be poured on our hearts by the Spirit, but we in turn have a role to play in how that love is stewarded and held. Sadly, that role can easily be distorting, if not malignant, not only in relation to the Spirit’s presence and work but in our formation and character. To take one example, quenching the Spirit not only has a deleterious effect on the work of the Spirit in our midst, but it has a deleterious effect on the one who is doing the quenching in terms of both formation and the ability to recognize and participate in the work of the Spirit in the future.16 Therefore, to recall another passage, part of the Spirit’s job description is to remind us of the words and teachings of Jesus (John 14:26), but what is done with those memories is itself a formational concern. As Jesus said in this very same portion of Scripture, “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me” (John 14:21); he adds, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23). In my view, these matters have significant implications for discernment. How so?
Simply put and working off of John 14, discernment is not possible apart from the triune God making a home in the one seeking to discern. To cite another Johannine verse, “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God” (John 7:17). Welcoming God, desiring God, and obeying God—these form some of the preconditions for discerning God-knowledge. With discernment, the issue is not calculation but renunciation and growing conformity. The goal is not projecting onto God, but reflecting and beholding God. The mode of reasoning at work is not a hard rationality but a Spirit-driven logicality in which deep things of the self and the deep things of God are on the table and so purposefully and transformatively interactive.
What kind of knowledge is God-knowledge then? It is the kind of knowledge that the Spirit pours out in the form of love and that we in turn must care for and steward so that it may thrive in our lives. Only then can we be enlightened by it, grow in it, and so recognize it. Recognition and discernment of God-knowledge are not features of an unconditioned, preliminary process; rather, they are culminations of Spirit-led lives.
“WALKING AND LIVING ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT”
I mentioned earlier that we would get around to mentioning the second love commandment, loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Again, these commandments are brutally basic to Christian self-understanding. Interestingly, however, in Matthew’s account of the passage, he has the following words appended between the commandments that are not found in the Lukan (10:27) and Markan (12:30) accounts: “And a second [commandment] is like it” (Matt 22:39). It may be the case in renditions of these commandments to think of them as sequentially ordered in terms of importance, that the first is more important than the second. In Matthew’s case, the second is not simply after the first but is said to be similar to the first. In what ways could the similarity be understood?
One of the stubborn challenges in pneumatology, at least how we in English-speaking cultures see it, is that it tends to privatization, individuation, and so to aspects that are nondiscursive and publicly unavailable. One may even tend to think that this is a critique that could be leveled at the previous registers we have considered. My response to this charge is that it all depends on the circumstances. Again, given that the references we have thus far made to both Romans 8 and 5 are to circumstances of suffering and weakness, these could be privately held and negotiated, but they could also be quite public and available to an onlooking world. A person may encounter “sighs too deep for words” in one’s prayer closet, but one may also encounter them at funerals of those senselessly killed by rampant gun violence. One may steward the Spirit-poured love of God in one’s heart in a steadfast, private way, but one may also demonstrate endurance and character in exceedingly public ways as well. In fact, the public, collective, and communal dimensions of these are indispensable. God-knowledge and growth in God-knowledge are not simply private matters; quite the contrary, involved are important public dimensions as well. How is the second love commandment similar to the first then? One way to think of this is to say that loving one’s neighbor is not dissimilar to loving God; in fact, one could argue that certain aspects of God-knowledge can only be gained by loving one’s neighbor. So, to raise once again the refrain of our session: What kind of knowledge is God-knowledge? It is the kind of knowledge that is gained in some sense by being lovingly engaged in and with the world. That this statement can hold with any significance is a result of a deep, pneumatological sensibility.
One of the challenges of biblical pneumatology is its wide-ranging features. On the one hand, one sees a particularizing, specifying, personhood-related dynamic. We could call this Trinitarian pneumatology. For Christians, this feature is most on display in the ways that the Spirit is talked about as an agent in the New Testament. The phrase “another Paraclete” from John 14:16 lifts up the point starkly—that this one will be similar to Jesus, the first Paraclete. But other New Testament passages reinforce the point as well, including the preparatory work of the Spirit for the Messiah’s coming in the early chapters of Luke and the manifest work of the Spirit throughout various portions of Acts. One could say that this dynamic is even at times on display in the Old Testament, when the Spirit of YHWH comes upon and stirs people at key moments. Given the evolving Trinitarian commitments of the Christian tradition, this pneumatological dynamic is fundamental to Christian theological reflection.
And yet, on the other hand, biblical pneumatology is far-ranging and expansive as well. The terms ruach and pneuma function at times as loose, somewhat metaphysical categories that can apply widely. We can say not only “God’s Spirit” but also “God is spirit” (John 4:24), and anthropological references, malignant forces, and others could also be referenced in terms of broad uses of these words. For the sake of convenience, let’s call this usage metaphysical pneumatology. That such language can be used so widely may be difficult for us in our setting to accommodate. After all, in a demythologized environment such as this one, we do not tend to think of the world as being governed by “spirits,” with “God’s Spirit” being the most powerful, as other Christian cultures and worldviews may hold. As cumbersome as all these factors are, my point in raising them here is to stress that this second, wide-ranging feature of biblical pneumatology may be harder for us Westerners to accommodate than the first.
One way to bridge this conceptual gulf is to link the doctrine of creation to what we are calling Trinitarian pneumatology in constructive ways. Through such a link, the Spirit would not simply be highlighted in such works as sanctification but also in the very constitution of creation, both as God intended it and as we understand it. The repercussions of this move are important; if we say that the created order proclaims or reflects God and that humanity’s uniqueness can be stressed in terms of “the image of God,” these claims can be thought of as viable and meaningful along pneumatological lines. The constructive conclusion to draw from this is that the world that the triune God created, by being created by God, is in turn a Spirit-drenched world. Obviously, the world is fallen and broken to be sure, but it is also not bereft of God’s presence, design, and purposes.
I realize that I am introducing a number of variables and themes that cannot be adequately treated in what follows. But my reason in doing so is to press a larger point: God-knowledge is not cultivated apart from worldly engagement, engagement with one’s neighbor, engagement with all that sustains and makes the world beautiful, good, and true, and engagement that resists injustice, violence, and abuse and in turn stands for the oppressed, the hurting, and the marginalized. That we as Christians have a sense of what is good, true, and beautiful harkens back to the possibilities at work with the second register we have stressed: we must have God’s love poured into our hearts so that we may know what true love is and, in turn, how to love truly. But in the act of loving, there are aspects of God-knowledge to be learned. God-knowledge is not something simply learned in the abstract or through a lecture or book; it is something that is learned via intentional action and living.
If we can press into service one more Pauline phrase, one that seems apropos to the notion of active living, it would be that of “walking and living according to the Spirit,” a theme also mentioned in Romans 8. In this portion of Romans 8, Paul is developing a contrast with the flesh; he states in verse 5, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” The contrast, as obvious as it is, is ambiguous in terms of particulars. What in fact is meant by living according to the flesh and living according to the Spirit? With such ambiguity, we may fill in the gaps and make a number of assumptions so as to substantiate the claims. One assumption that often presents itself with regard to this passage is that this all has to do with individual striving and living. Again, the tendency here may be to think of individual struggles with sin, individual victories over sin, individual resolutions to follow the things of the Spirit, and so on. But living and walking are very much public affairs. Fleshly tendencies are active not only within individuals but also within systemic and communal arrangements in the world; the Spirit is also active not only within individuals but within collectives, groups, and systems to defy the principalities and powers that govern this world.
This speaks to a larger point about how humans learn and grow. Certain things can only be appreciated through actually experiencing and performing them, a point stressed by certain philosophical, psychological, and other disciplinary orientations. Any number of examples could prove the point. Why would God-knowledge be any different? Theology in a sense is a practical discipline: it can only be lively and significant as it is enacted and embodied.17 Doctrines must have some role to play in shaping and substantiating behavior. If the Spirit dwells in us (Rom 8:9), then that reality should matter for how we pursue our politics, what we protest, how we vote, how we spend our time and money, what and how we consume, and so on. These are not incidental or ancillary matters to one’s understanding of the doctrine of God. If God desires obedience, if God commands love of neighbor, then something of God’s very self is missed if these are not heeded.
Walking and living according to the Spirit, then, is a form of lively and loving engagement with the world that involves looking for God-knowledge wherever it presents itself. It involves a mode of engagement that includes curiosity, humility, revisability, and contrition.
Why have I stressed this last section regarding “spiritual enlightenment” in this manner? What may be the subtext for thinking of God-knowledge as a kind of practical field, one that requires love of neighbor and engagement with the world? I do not think it pneumatologically inconsequential that Christians, especially those of us who are Western Christians in broadly Constantinian arrangements, perpetually struggle with hypocrisy and indifference. These are not simply ethical or moral problems; these are properly theological problems. Somehow it is possible to engage the doctrine of God on the one hand and to be impervious to the world’s ills on the other. This is a credibility crisis to be sure, but it runs deeper than that. The haunting concluding words of the Sermon on the Mount should, again, drive us to our knees, but in this sense as an act of confession on the way to restoration and transformation: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt 7:21). We are not simply talking of our knowledge of God but of God’s knowledge of us—not an enlightenment that makes us more clever but a process of ourselves coming to the light of Christ so as to be exposed in terms of our pride, our shortcomings, our vices, and our prejudices—in short, our sin. What kind of knowledge is God-knowledge in this sense? It is knowledge that is deeply exposing; it is knowledge that makes us deeply vulnerable to how we fall short of the gospel we claim to value and live by. This is not exposure for exposure’s sake; this is exposure on a path toward healing and conformity to the God of Christian confession, whom we confess to be ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness.
In conclusion, the deep registers we have considered—namely, “sighs too deep for words,” “God’s love being poured out into our hearts,” and “walking and living according to the Spirit”—collectively suggest a specific form of spiritual enlightenment, a kind of pneumatological orientation to God-knowledge that is both challenging and vitalizing. This vision of this uneasily categorized kind of knowledge suggests that it and its practitioners must in turn be disciplined by its own subject matter and wider voices. Some things must be deeply impressed; others must be exposed; and others still must be picked up and enacted. As risky and disquieting as that may sound, such pneumatological contributions undergird and substantiate theologizing as meaningful, worthwhile, and ultimately transformative activity. God-knowledge can and should make a deep difference.
NOTES
1. Naturally, the question itself assumes that God-knowledge is a legitimate and reliable kind of knowledge, a point significantly disputed in certain contexts. In many cases, the verdict is already in: rather than a branch of knowledge, God-knowledge is based on belief, a gesture no doubt aimed at a kind of intellectual marginalization. For a helpful consideration of some of the issues, see “Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium,” First Things, May 2006, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/05/theology-as-knowledge.
2. This is a common enough phrase, but the larger point was registered for me in reading John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University.
3. I limit myself to the Christian university in that the claims I am making about interdisciplinary interaction assume an intrasystemic confessional basis. Disciplines cast in a secular way could make any number of contributions to the theological task, but that conversation is a broad one I do not wish to explore here. Stanley Hauerwas generalizes that the Christian university may be no different than a secular university in terms of how work is done in the academic disciplines, a point that I believe would have to be pressed on a case-by-case basis, but the generalization is understandable given the power of the secular academy for determining what are legitimate kinds of knowledge and how to pursue and frame them. See Hauerwas, The State of the University (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
4. That is not to say one cannot find these proposals. I am heartened by what traffics as “third article theology,” a movement spurred by the likes of Lyle Dabney and Myk Habets. These proposals stress that the very conceptual formulation of faith and confession requires an admittedly explicit pneumatological orientation. In this vein, see the following: Myk Habets, ed., Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016); D. Lyle Dabney, “Otherwise Engaged in the Spirit: A First Theology for a Twenty-first Century,” in The Future of Theology, ed. Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg, and Thomas Kucharz (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 154–63; and Kenneth J. Archer and L. William Oliverio Jr., eds., Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
5. For a beautiful elaboration of this point, see Hans Urs von Balthasar’s chapter “Theology and Sanctity,” in Word and Redemption: Essays in Theology 2 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 49–86.
6. I draw this phrase of “spiritual enlightenment” from the work of the Cappadocians; although debated that it in fact could have been written by Gregory of Nyssa, “Letter 38,” attributed for quite some time to Basil of Caesarea, has the following important, epistemological claim: “For it is not possible for any one to conceive of the Son if he be not previously enlightened by the Spirit.” In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1895), 8:138.
7. Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).
8. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this chapter come from the NRSV.
9. Interestingly, Gordon Fee is of the opinion that what Paul has in mind here is akin to what he describes in 1 Corinthians 14, namely speaking and praying in tongues; see Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 584. This reading certainly is possible, but my aim is not to identify these as such as it is to suggest their role not only for this passage but for understanding a wide range of conduits for expressing theological meaning on the whole. Certainly, tongues can do that kind of theological work, one may even say theological-philosophical work, as highlighted by James K. A. Smith’s compelling title Thinking in Tongues (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
10. I realize that this point is a difficult—if awkward—one to stress at an academic conference. During the conference itself, I heard some light-hearted joking surrounding the notion of groans. Then again, an academic conference is not a place where we tend to be forthcoming and vulnerable before God and one another. The setting matters for both the intelligibility and meaningfulness of something within this domain. My aim in registering the notion within an academic conference is to remind us that a conference is not the only venue, and maybe even at some level it is an inadequate venue, for transmitting and sharing certain aspects of God-knowledge.
11. I do not wish to offer an elaborate taxonomy at this point beyond what I do in the text above, but perhaps a general orientation would prove helpful; for this, see Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry, and the Claims of Reason,” in Silence and the Word, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–34.
12. For reflections on prayer as an “epistemological presupposition” for the act of theologizing itself, see Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), beginning on p. 112.
13. I find Sarah Coakley’s adumbration of these points compelling: “[Theology] is the actual practice of contemplation that is the condition of a new ‘knowing in unknowing.’ It must involve the stuff of learned bodily enactment, sweated out painfully over months and years, in duress, in discomfort, in bewilderment, as well as in joy and dawning recognition. . . . For contemplation is the unique, and wholly sui generis, task of seeking to know, and speak of God, unknowingly; as Christian contemplation, it is also the necessarily bodily practice of dispossession, humility, and effacement which, in the Spirit, causes us to learn incarnationally, and only so, the royal way of the Son to the Father.” Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 45–46.
14. The echo here is to Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
15. It is worthwhile considering how often the Spirit is tied to virtue; certainly this is the case with Thomas Aquinas, but the tradition runs deeper still: Didymus’s On the Holy Spirit, one of the earliest Christian pneumatological texts, notes, “Now the Holy Spirit is only introduced to those who have forsaken their vices, who follow the choir of the virtues, and who live by faith in Christ in accordance with and through virtue.” See “On the Holy Spirit,” in Athanasius the Great and Didymus the Blind, Works on the Spirit, trans. Mark DelCogliano, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, and Lewis Ayres (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 211 (V, 222).
16. Interestingly, in Stephen’s speech where he speaks of “opposing” the Spirit (Acts 7:51–53), he makes reference to the intergenerational feature of this “sin against the Spirit.” In other words, Stephen is pointing to systemic, tradition-related dynamics and not simply to isolated ones when he references opposition to the Spirit.
17. Lurking in the background are theologies of perfection and holiness. Basil of Caesarea elaborates the point well: “All things thirsting for holiness turn to [the Spirit]; everything living in virtue never turns away from Him. He waters them with His life-giving breath and helps them reach their proper fulfillment. He perfects all other things, and Himself lacks nothing. He gives life to all things, and is never depleted. . . . He is the source of sanctification, spiritual light, who gives illumination to everyone using His powers to search for truth—and the illumination He gives is Himself.” Basil, On the Holy Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 43 (9.22).