Talk Four: The Age of the Spirit
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They answered, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’. So Paul asked them, ‘Then what baptism did you receive?’ ‘John’s baptism’, they replied. Paul said, ‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in one coming after him, that is in Jesus’. On hearing this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all. (Acts 19 NIV)
This passage, and others like it, highlight how fundamental the obvious presence of the Spirit was to the early Christians. In the modern period this has been debated at great length, as you well know, having begun in Methodism and the doctrine of the second blessing, through the evangelical awakening, so called, and coming to a climax in our time with Pentecostalism. During all this the traditional institutional church, in the main, has carried on, effected by the charismatic movement to some extent, but remaining at least remote if not critical of any emphasis on the Spirit in terms of obvious, objective evidence of the Spirit’s presence. At the same time any inner subjective experience has rarely been brought forward for reflection either; the Spirit has, in many ways, remained a formal concept. Given the fact that the Pentecostal church continues to grow, and the traditional institutional church seems to decrease, there does seem to be an issue here that is really important to reflect on.
This was driven home to me yet again quite unexpectedly recently. I was talking to a senior, high churchman who epitomised the established church in all its liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching, operating in the heart of a great city. To my amazement he offered that he was beginning to think the future belonged to the Pentecostals because of their emphasis on actual experience; and clearly he meant something other or more than the sort of religious experience to be had in liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching. This latter had been the core of his church life. Part of my amazement was that I know that this particular person is no intellectual lightweight, and he would have been fully aware that at this stage at least, Pentecostalism is not known for its intellectual rigour. But its starting point is real experience and not abstract metaphysics. In our secular, scientific, materialistic culture that makes all the difference. I thought I could sense in my friend a sadness about all this; the church he understood and loved is failing and the experiential alternative, as far as he could see it in others, held little attraction. Time to retire.
I think a more nuanced but very definite turn to the Spirit is what Phyllis Tickle is concerned about in her book, The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy Is Shaping the Church. Phyllis Tickle died in 2015, a bestselling author and expert in religion and a leading light in the Emerging Church. She wants to take the Spirit very seriously, not just the Church’s theological deliberations about this ‘orphan of the Trinity’, so called by Adolf Harnack, but also the obvious manifestations in history of the Spirit, including those the mainstream church was suspicious of, such as the Montanists, Joachim of Fiore, and the Azuza Street Revival which is usually thought of as the beginning of modern Pentecostalism. Here is some intellectual rigour from Tickle being brought to real experience of the Spirit.
Her presentation is premised on the idea that every half millennium or so, the latinised cultures of the world go through a century of enormous upheaval that affects every part of their existence... semi-millennial uproars that shift and toss every part of themselves so violently as to reconfigure the whole into new -sometimes almost unrecognisably new - ways of being and thinking. (98/2776)
So we had the Great Reformation which gave us amongst other things Protestantism, and before that The Great Schism that finally split the East and the West. Around 500 CE we had The Great Decline and Fall which gave birth to monastic and conciliar Christianity; and originally The Great Transformation and the spread of a variant of Judaism that eventually became the religion of the West around Rome and Constantinople in the East. We are now experiencing in our day The Great Emergence, Tickle believes. It is necessarily a time of turmoil and great change. In all these transitions the overarching question, Tickle believes, is: ‘Where now our authority?’ Or ‘How now shall we live?’ These are the questions we must face.
From the very beginning, authority has been the central issue in the Church and remains so today; but not only the Church, in all human community. To live in community we need to establish authority. In a community of love and goodwill authority is barely visible. In a community that fragments, authority becomes apparent and can need to enforce itself; it takes on power. It is now believed hunter/gatherer groups were largely egalitarian, with women taking leading roles as well as men. Gods, as symbols of authority, appeared when human groups settled and became bigger. Institutions formed, embedding authority and hence decision making.
The original authority in the life of the Church had been the Spirit, as it had been in the lives of the great prophets, individuals with their own strong sense of God’s real presence. Immediately institutionalising processes however came into play to help contain the growing community; the election of a replacement for Judas to make twelve apostles, the disciplining deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the election of deacons, the need for apostolic authority to receive the Spirit in Samaria, the vetting of Paul, the Jerusalem Council and so on. The answer to ’Where now our authority’ was a shifting sand between the Spirit and the emerging institution with its newly established authorities. And so it has always remained, but with each development of institutional authority so the Spirit became less needed to be immediately experienced or directly related to, a movement eventually capped off by the Church coming directly under the Empire and the Emperor.
Coupled with this institutionalising process was the shift in focus. Originally the focus was the carpenter from Nazareth, murdered by legitimate authority, risen from the dead, declared Son of God, the baptiser in the Holy Spirit, a fellow human being. The more the growing Church took on institutional authority and its reflection widened on just who Jesus was, the focus moved to the eternal Godhead, to God the Son and the Holy Trinity. This was now where real authority lay, in metaphysical ideas of the Godhead given earthly expression and affirmation in the liturgy through the hierarchy of the clergy and ultimately the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The tension between Church and State was now set for more than a thousand years. We may hope the Spirit had some influence in this, but it is not hard to imagine that it may have been minor, if at all at times. The life of the Spirit went to the periphery, always at risk of being snuffed out by the institutional Church. Dostoyevski’s scene in The Brothers Karamazov between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor so wonderfully captures this tension.
The Reformation of course brought a major shift in the answer to the question ‘Where now our authority?’. I remember Professor Yule at the United Faculty in Melbourne claiming that for Luther authority lay in the preached Word, but such concession to the Spirit gave way generally to the written Word. Here was the new ground upon which to stand, augmented by various confessions, and articles of faith. The conscience and experience of the individual had been brought back into contention, but subject to the popular authority of preachers and the elucidation of doctrine garnered from the Bible. Nonetheless, in all this the Spirit in people’s everyday lives could manifest in quite overt ways, and not only in the individual’s subjective experience, as was the case in some of the preaching of John Wesley.
The last 500 years has been about the gradual questioning of biblical authority, on the one hand, by biblical studies and theology committed to the great cultural shifts we have undergone, and on the other the tightening of biblical authority, including the intellectual support for this by the original fundamentalists such as Hodge and Warfield. Culturally in the West this way of understanding ‘where now our authority’ reached a popular zenith in the world crusades of Billy Graham. But I wonder if it was also its end in any universal or global sense.
This then is now our dilemma in approaching our questions, ‘Where now our authority?’, or, ‘How now do we live?’ Do we remain ambivalent about the Spirit and stay with the great shifts in our culture and face an authority vacuum? Or do we put our lot in entirely with the Pentecostals and return to the Bible as the basis of our authority? Or do we all return to Mother Church and look to the Pope to give us our authority?
Or do we stay with the culture, on the one hand, but really take the Spirit seriously as well, on the other, but resisting fundamentalism and claiming our capacity to think for ourselves and act in the Spirit? I mean really taking the Spirit seriously. Can we who are drawn to liberality really do this? What would it mean?
I think this is what the Emerging Church is about or can be about. I think this is what Phyllis Tickle is about, and the shift is very big. It is The Great Emergence. How now do we live? Can we give up our argumentation and self righteousness; can we genuinely love and respect each other; can we seek the Spirit and the Spirit’s authority and place this above any other? Can we put everything on the table and yet honour and respect all that has gone before?Can we allow ourselves to be crucified rather than deny the truth of the Spirit? So many questions; so big a challenge.
Some may say, but isn’t this approach how the Quakers have been trying to live for centuries? Yes and No. Yes in that the Quakers have tried to give priority to the Spirit in everyday life and in their gatherings, at least at the inner, subjective level. But No in that they have not tried to interpret the whole Story in terms of the Spirit; more than that the crucifixion is not central in their approach to the Spirit. In that sense they have not taken the Spirit seriously enough. This is where Phyllis Tickle is different in what she is advocating. The Great Emergence includes re-thinking the whole Story from the point of view of the Spirit. God is back on the table in a radical way.
Who can tell the Spirit’s story? Who, indeed, would dare to attempt to? Of all the pieces and parts of theology and religion, faith and belief, talking and wondering, it is the nature, substance, and function of the Spirit that are sacrosanct and the most fraught with danger, should error be committed. Our forefathers and mothers have threaded their way very cautiously over the centuries, and we would do well to remember that. Yet there is a story to be told here— or better said, there is the beginning of a story, and it wants telling, albeit carefully. (Tickle 2014: Kindle postions 1852-1856)
In my Introduction I proposed that the great intellectual challenge we face is finding a new meta-narrative in which to understand ourselves, a meta- narrative that embraces science but understands its boundaries, that considers all spiritual and religious traditions seriously and which in effect provides a universal story in which we can all fit as players, including the Christ and the Buddha and the Prophet and other great spiritual figures. And also the despots, the Hitlers, the Herods and the multitudes that rarely see beyond their sense-certainty existence.
I think that this meta narrative needs to be the Spirit’s story. Can we begin to dare to tell it.
We should not underestimate the shift required in our thinking here. It means seeing the Spirit as the main player in creation and history, not only as a nice little post resurrection gift to believers within the Christian tradition. Only Hegel has ever really attempted this before at this grand level; but he got it wrong in the end, or so I think. He failed to see the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection in the story of the Spirit in creation and history, although I think he alludes to it as we shall see in my last talk. Absolute knowledge for Hegel in the end was the philosophy he was expounding. But he had grasped the big picture, and he had grappled with the Spirit in a way the Church has never done. It was his philosophical assumptions that won the day for him, however, rather than the possibilities of experience in our evolved psyches. In any further attempt to tell the Spirit’s story we need to stay within the boundaries of human experience. This means finding what those boundaries are.
It means also re-interpreting Christ’s death and resurrection as the work of the Spirit, which amongst other things may lead to a quite new understanding of the atonement. It is this possibility that I am introducing in these talks. Regaining real meaning for these central events is at the heart of any new meta-narrative that is to be true to Christ.
It means bracketing the metaphysics the Church worked so hard at in the first centuries and is so historically committed to even now, and focussing on God as Spirit, and all that can be drawn into this in terms of the point and purpose of creation and life. The importance of this metaphysics is not being doubted, just bracketed so that we can approach it all afresh from the point of view of the Spirit.
It means embracing the authority of the crucifixion as our authority, mediated to us by the Spirit. There is no ecclesiastical hierarchy in this; but there is the trust of little children however. The power of the Spirit comes only to a broken spirit.
It also means trying to understand the Spirit as both an experience and a concept in relation to our scientific, materialist culture; and I want to finish this talk looking very briefly at just that.
Jesus was very wary of people who sought miracles for their own sake. I remember in my early days being told of people who witnessed miracles of healing yet went away as dead to God, to the reality of the Spirit, as ever. No sense of the Spirit’s presence had occurred for them regardless of what they had witnessed with their eyes. And although, as I have already said, the obvious manifestation of Spirit in the early church was very important, something bystanders could witness, the really crucial thing was what was actually happening within these people. What were they experiencing within themselves? What was their subjective experience? It is the conscious reality of the Spirit within the psyche that makes all the difference. This can be sometimes a sensing of energy and power, sometimes strong imagery, sometimes gentle words, sometimes a strong conviction of uncleanness and sin, sometimes ‘a dusting over the pit’, sometimes a deep peace, sometimes overwhelming joy. It is as if something quite new and different has come into consciousness. The most general word that makes sense to me in describing these subjective experiences is Presence.
There have been some significant attempts to be scientific about this approach to inner subjective spiritual or religious experience. To do so means collecting data, analysing it, theorising about it, and trying to verify any hypotheses. The first significant attempt was by the philosopher/ psychologist William James, published as the Varieties of Religious Experience. In more recent times the biologist Alistair Hardy established the Religious Experience Research Unit (later Centre) at Oxford, which eventually moved to the University of Wales. Hardy’s early efforts were interesting. He approached the churches first, expecting this to be the most fruitful ground to find data. He got almost no response. This is so worth reflecting on. So he went to the general media and was inundated. Food for serious reflection here. Some of his later colleagues have estimated that some 70 to 80% of people in the general community have had experiences they are prepared to declare as religious or spiritual. Few take these experiences to church. Does this maybe match the hard time the institutional church has given the Spirit over the centuries?
While research approaches to such subjective experiences can be deemed scientific in principle, nothing concrete or objective can be asserted about what might lie behind such experiences. Individuals may have strong beliefs arising from these experiences, but they remain individual and subjective. Various explanations can be brought forward, or the validity of the experiences denied and dismissed outright. This is particularly so in our time when ‘evidence based’ science prevails at all levels. Anything that can’t be replicated on demand in an objective way is denied, or worse still is deemed supernatural nonsense and hence entirely rejected.
Even Jung hesitates at this point. In his famous paper Spirit and Life, published in 1926, he upholds Spirit as something psychologically real, but as a psychologist he would not go beyond this and posit any necessarily objective reality behind these psychological experiences. This was a professional boundary. But personally he could and did. When toward the end of his life he was asked did he believe God exists, he answered: I do not believe God exists, I know He does.
How he knew this was through his subjective experience. This is the rub we need to come to terms with in telling the Spirit’s story. God as Spirit is pure subjectivity. I think Hegel was the first to say this in this way. Here is a real boundary for science, and I and many others believe it is fundamentally important this boundary is culturally recognised. Our subjectivity is increasingly under threat from science and technology. The reality of our inner being is being denied.
Science’s need for objectivity in relation to God can only answered if, for instance, a human being is God; and of course Christianity is saying just that. Or perhaps the Universe or the Multiverse. But God as Spirit can only be subjective, even if we objectively see its effects like ‘the wind in the trees’ as Jesus said.
So in telling the Spirit’s story I believe we have to start taking our own spiritual and psychic nature seriously, to focus on our subjectivity and develop this focus. Who I am as an experiencing person is known by me only in the flow of psychic images. We are ourselves spirits. I do not even experience my own body except as images in spirit and psyche. To tell the story of Spirit we have to really come to terms with our spiritual nature as human subjects. I am happy to prophesy that this is the most urgent issue emerging in the world today. May we who would follow Christ stop trying to think of God as Object and start living God as Subject.
To do this we have to start valuing our inner experiences and sharing them together in our gathering and worship. One such central and vital experience of the inner life is the subject of my next talk.
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They answered, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’. So Paul asked them, ‘Then what baptism did you receive?’ ‘John’s baptism’, they replied. Paul said, ‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in one coming after him, that is in Jesus’. On hearing this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all. (Acts 19 NIV)
This passage, and others like it, highlight how fundamental the obvious presence of the Spirit was to the early Christians. In the modern period this has been debated at great length, as you well know, having begun in Methodism and the doctrine of the second blessing, through the evangelical awakening, so called, and coming to a climax in our time with Pentecostalism. During all this the traditional institutional church, in the main, has carried on, effected by the charismatic movement to some extent, but remaining at least remote if not critical of any emphasis on the Spirit in terms of obvious, objective evidence of the Spirit’s presence. At the same time any inner subjective experience has rarely been brought forward for reflection either; the Spirit has, in many ways, remained a formal concept. Given the fact that the Pentecostal church continues to grow, and the traditional institutional church seems to decrease, there does seem to be an issue here that is really important to reflect on.
This was driven home to me yet again quite unexpectedly recently. I was talking to a senior, high churchman who epitomised the established church in all its liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching, operating in the heart of a great city. To my amazement he offered that he was beginning to think the future belonged to the Pentecostals because of their emphasis on actual experience; and clearly he meant something other or more than the sort of religious experience to be had in liturgy and ritual, fine music and intellectual preaching. This latter had been the core of his church life. Part of my amazement was that I know that this particular person is no intellectual lightweight, and he would have been fully aware that at this stage at least, Pentecostalism is not known for its intellectual rigour. But its starting point is real experience and not abstract metaphysics. In our secular, scientific, materialistic culture that makes all the difference. I thought I could sense in my friend a sadness about all this; the church he understood and loved is failing and the experiential alternative, as far as he could see it in others, held little attraction. Time to retire.
I think a more nuanced but very definite turn to the Spirit is what Phyllis Tickle is concerned about in her book, The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy Is Shaping the Church. Phyllis Tickle died in 2015, a bestselling author and expert in religion and a leading light in the Emerging Church. She wants to take the Spirit very seriously, not just the Church’s theological deliberations about this ‘orphan of the Trinity’, so called by Adolf Harnack, but also the obvious manifestations in history of the Spirit, including those the mainstream church was suspicious of, such as the Montanists, Joachim of Fiore, and the Azuza Street Revival which is usually thought of as the beginning of modern Pentecostalism. Here is some intellectual rigour from Tickle being brought to real experience of the Spirit.
Her presentation is premised on the idea that every half millennium or so, the latinised cultures of the world go through a century of enormous upheaval that affects every part of their existence... semi-millennial uproars that shift and toss every part of themselves so violently as to reconfigure the whole into new -sometimes almost unrecognisably new - ways of being and thinking. (98/2776)
So we had the Great Reformation which gave us amongst other things Protestantism, and before that The Great Schism that finally split the East and the West. Around 500 CE we had The Great Decline and Fall which gave birth to monastic and conciliar Christianity; and originally The Great Transformation and the spread of a variant of Judaism that eventually became the religion of the West around Rome and Constantinople in the East. We are now experiencing in our day The Great Emergence, Tickle believes. It is necessarily a time of turmoil and great change. In all these transitions the overarching question, Tickle believes, is: ‘Where now our authority?’ Or ‘How now shall we live?’ These are the questions we must face.
From the very beginning, authority has been the central issue in the Church and remains so today; but not only the Church, in all human community. To live in community we need to establish authority. In a community of love and goodwill authority is barely visible. In a community that fragments, authority becomes apparent and can need to enforce itself; it takes on power. It is now believed hunter/gatherer groups were largely egalitarian, with women taking leading roles as well as men. Gods, as symbols of authority, appeared when human groups settled and became bigger. Institutions formed, embedding authority and hence decision making.
The original authority in the life of the Church had been the Spirit, as it had been in the lives of the great prophets, individuals with their own strong sense of God’s real presence. Immediately institutionalising processes however came into play to help contain the growing community; the election of a replacement for Judas to make twelve apostles, the disciplining deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the election of deacons, the need for apostolic authority to receive the Spirit in Samaria, the vetting of Paul, the Jerusalem Council and so on. The answer to ’Where now our authority’ was a shifting sand between the Spirit and the emerging institution with its newly established authorities. And so it has always remained, but with each development of institutional authority so the Spirit became less needed to be immediately experienced or directly related to, a movement eventually capped off by the Church coming directly under the Empire and the Emperor.
Coupled with this institutionalising process was the shift in focus. Originally the focus was the carpenter from Nazareth, murdered by legitimate authority, risen from the dead, declared Son of God, the baptiser in the Holy Spirit, a fellow human being. The more the growing Church took on institutional authority and its reflection widened on just who Jesus was, the focus moved to the eternal Godhead, to God the Son and the Holy Trinity. This was now where real authority lay, in metaphysical ideas of the Godhead given earthly expression and affirmation in the liturgy through the hierarchy of the clergy and ultimately the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople. The tension between Church and State was now set for more than a thousand years. We may hope the Spirit had some influence in this, but it is not hard to imagine that it may have been minor, if at all at times. The life of the Spirit went to the periphery, always at risk of being snuffed out by the institutional Church. Dostoyevski’s scene in The Brothers Karamazov between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor so wonderfully captures this tension.
The Reformation of course brought a major shift in the answer to the question ‘Where now our authority?’. I remember Professor Yule at the United Faculty in Melbourne claiming that for Luther authority lay in the preached Word, but such concession to the Spirit gave way generally to the written Word. Here was the new ground upon which to stand, augmented by various confessions, and articles of faith. The conscience and experience of the individual had been brought back into contention, but subject to the popular authority of preachers and the elucidation of doctrine garnered from the Bible. Nonetheless, in all this the Spirit in people’s everyday lives could manifest in quite overt ways, and not only in the individual’s subjective experience, as was the case in some of the preaching of John Wesley.
The last 500 years has been about the gradual questioning of biblical authority, on the one hand, by biblical studies and theology committed to the great cultural shifts we have undergone, and on the other the tightening of biblical authority, including the intellectual support for this by the original fundamentalists such as Hodge and Warfield. Culturally in the West this way of understanding ‘where now our authority’ reached a popular zenith in the world crusades of Billy Graham. But I wonder if it was also its end in any universal or global sense.
This then is now our dilemma in approaching our questions, ‘Where now our authority?’, or, ‘How now do we live?’ Do we remain ambivalent about the Spirit and stay with the great shifts in our culture and face an authority vacuum? Or do we put our lot in entirely with the Pentecostals and return to the Bible as the basis of our authority? Or do we all return to Mother Church and look to the Pope to give us our authority?
Or do we stay with the culture, on the one hand, but really take the Spirit seriously as well, on the other, but resisting fundamentalism and claiming our capacity to think for ourselves and act in the Spirit? I mean really taking the Spirit seriously. Can we who are drawn to liberality really do this? What would it mean?
I think this is what the Emerging Church is about or can be about. I think this is what Phyllis Tickle is about, and the shift is very big. It is The Great Emergence. How now do we live? Can we give up our argumentation and self righteousness; can we genuinely love and respect each other; can we seek the Spirit and the Spirit’s authority and place this above any other? Can we put everything on the table and yet honour and respect all that has gone before?Can we allow ourselves to be crucified rather than deny the truth of the Spirit? So many questions; so big a challenge.
Some may say, but isn’t this approach how the Quakers have been trying to live for centuries? Yes and No. Yes in that the Quakers have tried to give priority to the Spirit in everyday life and in their gatherings, at least at the inner, subjective level. But No in that they have not tried to interpret the whole Story in terms of the Spirit; more than that the crucifixion is not central in their approach to the Spirit. In that sense they have not taken the Spirit seriously enough. This is where Phyllis Tickle is different in what she is advocating. The Great Emergence includes re-thinking the whole Story from the point of view of the Spirit. God is back on the table in a radical way.
Who can tell the Spirit’s story? Who, indeed, would dare to attempt to? Of all the pieces and parts of theology and religion, faith and belief, talking and wondering, it is the nature, substance, and function of the Spirit that are sacrosanct and the most fraught with danger, should error be committed. Our forefathers and mothers have threaded their way very cautiously over the centuries, and we would do well to remember that. Yet there is a story to be told here— or better said, there is the beginning of a story, and it wants telling, albeit carefully. (Tickle 2014: Kindle postions 1852-1856)
In my Introduction I proposed that the great intellectual challenge we face is finding a new meta-narrative in which to understand ourselves, a meta- narrative that embraces science but understands its boundaries, that considers all spiritual and religious traditions seriously and which in effect provides a universal story in which we can all fit as players, including the Christ and the Buddha and the Prophet and other great spiritual figures. And also the despots, the Hitlers, the Herods and the multitudes that rarely see beyond their sense-certainty existence.
I think that this meta narrative needs to be the Spirit’s story. Can we begin to dare to tell it.
We should not underestimate the shift required in our thinking here. It means seeing the Spirit as the main player in creation and history, not only as a nice little post resurrection gift to believers within the Christian tradition. Only Hegel has ever really attempted this before at this grand level; but he got it wrong in the end, or so I think. He failed to see the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection in the story of the Spirit in creation and history, although I think he alludes to it as we shall see in my last talk. Absolute knowledge for Hegel in the end was the philosophy he was expounding. But he had grasped the big picture, and he had grappled with the Spirit in a way the Church has never done. It was his philosophical assumptions that won the day for him, however, rather than the possibilities of experience in our evolved psyches. In any further attempt to tell the Spirit’s story we need to stay within the boundaries of human experience. This means finding what those boundaries are.
It means also re-interpreting Christ’s death and resurrection as the work of the Spirit, which amongst other things may lead to a quite new understanding of the atonement. It is this possibility that I am introducing in these talks. Regaining real meaning for these central events is at the heart of any new meta-narrative that is to be true to Christ.
It means bracketing the metaphysics the Church worked so hard at in the first centuries and is so historically committed to even now, and focussing on God as Spirit, and all that can be drawn into this in terms of the point and purpose of creation and life. The importance of this metaphysics is not being doubted, just bracketed so that we can approach it all afresh from the point of view of the Spirit.
It means embracing the authority of the crucifixion as our authority, mediated to us by the Spirit. There is no ecclesiastical hierarchy in this; but there is the trust of little children however. The power of the Spirit comes only to a broken spirit.
It also means trying to understand the Spirit as both an experience and a concept in relation to our scientific, materialist culture; and I want to finish this talk looking very briefly at just that.
Jesus was very wary of people who sought miracles for their own sake. I remember in my early days being told of people who witnessed miracles of healing yet went away as dead to God, to the reality of the Spirit, as ever. No sense of the Spirit’s presence had occurred for them regardless of what they had witnessed with their eyes. And although, as I have already said, the obvious manifestation of Spirit in the early church was very important, something bystanders could witness, the really crucial thing was what was actually happening within these people. What were they experiencing within themselves? What was their subjective experience? It is the conscious reality of the Spirit within the psyche that makes all the difference. This can be sometimes a sensing of energy and power, sometimes strong imagery, sometimes gentle words, sometimes a strong conviction of uncleanness and sin, sometimes ‘a dusting over the pit’, sometimes a deep peace, sometimes overwhelming joy. It is as if something quite new and different has come into consciousness. The most general word that makes sense to me in describing these subjective experiences is Presence.
There have been some significant attempts to be scientific about this approach to inner subjective spiritual or religious experience. To do so means collecting data, analysing it, theorising about it, and trying to verify any hypotheses. The first significant attempt was by the philosopher/ psychologist William James, published as the Varieties of Religious Experience. In more recent times the biologist Alistair Hardy established the Religious Experience Research Unit (later Centre) at Oxford, which eventually moved to the University of Wales. Hardy’s early efforts were interesting. He approached the churches first, expecting this to be the most fruitful ground to find data. He got almost no response. This is so worth reflecting on. So he went to the general media and was inundated. Food for serious reflection here. Some of his later colleagues have estimated that some 70 to 80% of people in the general community have had experiences they are prepared to declare as religious or spiritual. Few take these experiences to church. Does this maybe match the hard time the institutional church has given the Spirit over the centuries?
While research approaches to such subjective experiences can be deemed scientific in principle, nothing concrete or objective can be asserted about what might lie behind such experiences. Individuals may have strong beliefs arising from these experiences, but they remain individual and subjective. Various explanations can be brought forward, or the validity of the experiences denied and dismissed outright. This is particularly so in our time when ‘evidence based’ science prevails at all levels. Anything that can’t be replicated on demand in an objective way is denied, or worse still is deemed supernatural nonsense and hence entirely rejected.
Even Jung hesitates at this point. In his famous paper Spirit and Life, published in 1926, he upholds Spirit as something psychologically real, but as a psychologist he would not go beyond this and posit any necessarily objective reality behind these psychological experiences. This was a professional boundary. But personally he could and did. When toward the end of his life he was asked did he believe God exists, he answered: I do not believe God exists, I know He does.
How he knew this was through his subjective experience. This is the rub we need to come to terms with in telling the Spirit’s story. God as Spirit is pure subjectivity. I think Hegel was the first to say this in this way. Here is a real boundary for science, and I and many others believe it is fundamentally important this boundary is culturally recognised. Our subjectivity is increasingly under threat from science and technology. The reality of our inner being is being denied.
Science’s need for objectivity in relation to God can only answered if, for instance, a human being is God; and of course Christianity is saying just that. Or perhaps the Universe or the Multiverse. But God as Spirit can only be subjective, even if we objectively see its effects like ‘the wind in the trees’ as Jesus said.
So in telling the Spirit’s story I believe we have to start taking our own spiritual and psychic nature seriously, to focus on our subjectivity and develop this focus. Who I am as an experiencing person is known by me only in the flow of psychic images. We are ourselves spirits. I do not even experience my own body except as images in spirit and psyche. To tell the story of Spirit we have to really come to terms with our spiritual nature as human subjects. I am happy to prophesy that this is the most urgent issue emerging in the world today. May we who would follow Christ stop trying to think of God as Object and start living God as Subject.
To do this we have to start valuing our inner experiences and sharing them together in our gathering and worship. One such central and vital experience of the inner life is the subject of my next talk.
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