Wolfgang Vondey, ed. The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: Historical, Interdisciplinary, and Renewal Perspectives, Christianity and Renewal – Interdisciplinary Studies 1 (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), v + 240 Pps., $95.00
Wofgang Vondey is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Center for Renewal Studies at Regent University. He has authored and edited numerous publications on Pentecostal, charismatic, ecumenical, and theological interests. In this title, 12 scholars from philosophical, theological, historical, and biblical disciplines join to discuss the transforming work of the Spirit in the Christian life. These individual essays are held together by a focus on the exploration of the relation between the work of the Spirit and personal, ecclesial, and social transformation, discipleship, and Christian formation. The title points toward interdisciplinary integration of theory and practice and theology and spirituality.
In the Introduction, Vondey notes that the biblical images for the Spirit , including wind, breath, fire, water, and love, all are metaphors that capture not only the basic elements of the world, but also the fundamental necessities of creation. Yet, as Vondey reminds us, Basil of Caesarea tells us that the “Spirit is not brought into intimate association with the soul by its local approximation;” indeed, the Spirit may drive all of creation toward God, but this does not guarantee that we shall see the Spirit’s work in all of creation, for we must still discern the spirits (2). In this title particularly, and all of this Series generally, Renewal is a “journey by way of the Spirit into and transcending the full range of classical expressions and core symbols of the faith toward their transformation” (11 cv as the book. Most of the essays in this collection were presented at this venue, or other similar venues. With the remaining space for review, I would like to minimally mention some of the more impactful chapters from the text. Starting the text off in chapter 1 is Steve Sherman’s, “Mapping the Hermeneutical Waters,” wherein he argues that only a robust, Spirit-filled hermeneutic will be apropos for the Evangelical community. Herein, Sherman maps five hermeneutical territories, and suggests that although there is general agreement regarding the necessity of pneumatic hermeneutics, Spirit-filled hermeneutics takes on vastly different form from model to model. In chapter 5, Cheryl M. Peterson participates in “A Lutheran Engagement with Wesley on the Work of the Holy Spirit.” In this chapter, she asks what a Lutheran can learn from Wesley about the Spirit in the Christian life (?). Peterson’s study shows ways in which they can reclaim their more full historical understanding of the Spirit’s work in the Christian life, as well as get an assist from their theological neighbors, the Wesley’s, regarding the fullness of salvation given through Christ in the Spirit.
Robert Webster’s chapter 8 contribution, “The Holy Spirit and the Miraculous: John Wesley’s Egalitarian View of the Supernatural and its Problems,” shows how, for Wesley, the Spirit is creatively involved in miracles in the life of the community, how a rhetorical understanding of the supernatural fit into Wesley’s evangelical strategy, and how the Perfectionist controversies of the 1760’s tested Wesley’s allegiance to an egalitarian understanding of the supernatural. In chapter 10, Joshua D. Reichard offers us “An ‘Improbable Bond’ of the Spirit: Historical Perspectives on the Christian Life in Pentecostal-Charismatic and Process-Relational Theologies,” and suggests that a shared emphasis on the Spirit may conceptually reunite the two movements in a limited sense. In the conclusion, Vondey bids Christianity and Renewal both for interdisciplinarity. Finally, in the afterword, Amos Yong, situates these essays into the wider objectives within the CHARIS series and its focus on both Christianity and Renewal from Interdisciplinary perspectives.
Bradford McCall
Western Governors University