The Holy Spirit in Church History, Part 3: The Reformation and Beyond

In Tuesday’s post, we saw how the Medieval Church tried to hold a public, ecclesiastical, and sacramental understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in creative tension with a private and mystical one. Today we turn to the Reformation, which exploded all of the Western Church’s attempted syntheses and compromises. The centuries since the Reformation have been a time of unparalleled creativity in doctrine, which, of course, have often been met by an unparalleled reaction in more traditional quarters. And to large degree, we are still living in its wake. For the Church writ large today is filled with more diverse beliefs about the Spirit than ever, so that it’s hard to know what’s what. My goal in today’s post is to try to set the lay of the land, perhaps providing a bit of a map on which you can place the teachings you’ve received over the years and set a context for where you might look next.

One of the biggest problems with how the Reformation tends to be taught is that the story starts with Martin Luther (d. 1546), as if he came out of nowhere. The reality is that there had been growing Church reform movements throughout Europe for centuries. And while some of these were fairly staid, as Luther and Calvin (d. 1564) were in their day, others were not, led by purported prophets, visionaries, and mystics, and questioning the authority of the Church and its hierarchies. When Luther did begin his public calls for reform, he was at pains to show that he wasn’t one of these ‘enthusiasts’. This context, I think, helps to explain the early Reformers’ cautious approaches to the Spirit. Luther’s basic understanding, from his Small Catechism, is that “The Holy Spirit sanctifies me [i.e., makes me holy] by bringing me to faith in Christ, so that I might have the blessings of redemption and lead a godly life.” The Spirit has “enlightened me with His gifts.” But Luther defines these gifts as “the saving knowledge of Jesus.” The Spirit also “works a renewal of my whole life – in spirit, will, attitude, and desires – so that I now strive to overcome sin and do good works.” These gifts also include the sacraments, offered to all of the faithful. But on the flashier gifts of the Holy Spirit, Luther takes a more agnostic tone, saying that “in apostolic times the Holy Spirit also gave some Christians the gift to perform miraculous signs and wonders …. The Scriptures do not teach, however, that God will necessarily give all Christians in every time and place special miraculous gifts.” Calvin’s approach is similar, with perhaps a greater emphasis on the Spirit’s role in general revelation (that ancient Wisdom theme!), and predestination (that classic Calvinist theme!). If anything, Luther and Calvin lean more heavily away from the mystical and ecstatic than the Medieval Western Church did. But they did this in a way that also marginalized the institutional Church. As Zacharias Ursinus (d. 1583), a disciple of Luther’s main disciple, put it: “We acknowledge as judge, not the church, but the Holy Ghost, who speaks to us in Holy Scripture and gives his word in a way in which we may clearly perceive it.”

The Medieval synthesis broke up even further in the seventeenth century, which saw an increasing frustration among many Protestants with the staid and formal theology that had settled in Lutheran and Reformed theology. In response to this, the Pietist movement emerged, which emphasized personal devotion and, along with it, radical transformation and spiritual rebirth. A related movement, best known today as Quakers, or the Society of Friends, insisted that the faithful are led by the movement of the Holy Spirit within them. Another quasi-Pietist group, the Moravians, ended up having a tremendous impact on the later direction of Protestantism through their influence on an English theologian and evangelist, John Wesley (d. 1791).

While in his early adulthood Wesley could be considered a ‘frustrated perfectionist,’ everything changed for him one day when he had a dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit. About this, he wrote:

I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. (Journal, 6.2.16)

Wesley experienced this as another rebirth and claimed after this moment to have gained a total victory over sin. From this, he developed a belief in radical sanctification as a second work of the Spirit, following the first work of conversion. Wesley explained:

Entire sanctification, or Christian perfection, is neither more nor less than pure love; love expelling sin, and governing both the heart and life of a child of God. The Refiner’s fire purges out all that is contrary to love. (Collected Works of John Wesley, vol. 7. p.82.)

This became an essential teaching of Methodism, a revivalist movement that swept through the United Kingdom and its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Fletcher, the first figure who tried to systematize Methodist thought, exhorted his audience to “go on to the perfection and glory of Christianity” and “enter the full dispensation of the Spirit,” “the pentecostal glory of the Church.” He concluded that “till then we shall be carnal rather than spiritual believers” (quoted in Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition (1997).

Methodism in turn spawned the Holiness Movement, a broad movement today still represented by denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene, the Foursquare Church, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. One of the major themes that set the Holiness Movement apart from more mainstream Methodists was its reclaiming of faith healing, sometimes involving anointing with holy oil, as part of the life of the Holy Spirit. (It also, in keeping with its mid-nineteenth century origins, often incorporated a stronger focus on Apocalypticism, expecting an immanent return of Jesus.) The Holiness Movement, for its part, spawned the Pentecostal Movement. Pentecostals maintained most of the Holiness distinctives, while adding on a new and revolutionary belief that equated Spirit baptism with speaking in tongues.

With Pentecostalism, belief in the Holy Spirit came full circle: From the Spirit being poured out in dramatic ways upon the whole community of faith, creating a small but vital local church committed to a radically different way of life in the earliest Church, to the movement throughout late antiquity and the Medieval world toward the Spirit being known primarily in and through the sacraments of the Church, with the exception of those who have mystical experiences, and now back again to the dramatic pouring out on a small but devoted community. As William J. Abraham helpfully put it, whereas the world of Medieval Catholicism “start[ed] from the top,” with “the primacy of honor … given to ecclesiology:”

Wesley started from the bottom and developed a vision of the church as a body of believers whose faith unites them to Christ, who in turn unites them to every other believer. Here the primacy of honor is given to pneumatology, that is, to the Holy Spirit in creating a living faith in Christ. (Wesley for Armchair Theologians)

And the same can be said for all the various movements that sprung from Wesleyan beginnings.

Of course, at the same time, a strong reactionary movement took place within the more established Church. In the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent, which was the Roman Catholic Church’s official response to the Reformation, affirmed that: “by sacred ordination the Holy Ghost is imparted.” This level of clericalism is as much a radical step away from traditional Christianity as anything the Reformation had to offer! But this attitude persisted in at least official Roman Catholicism for a long time. The early twentieth century Catholic Encyclopedia for example insists that all of the spiritual gifts exist in “subordination to the power of the hierarchy” (see Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1914), “Holy Ghost”). Thankfully, Vatican II in the mid-twentieth century stepped back from these excesses, and essentially restored the more balanced, biblical, understanding of the Medieval Church. As the current Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Now can this divine plan, accomplished in Christ, … be embodied in mankind by the outpouring of the Spirit: as the Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. (1.2.3 par. 686).

Before ending this very fast survey, it’s important to note that at various points in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly during the 1960s and 1990s, charismatic movements, incorporating many aspects of Holiness and Pentecostal spirituality, have emerged within the more traditional Western Churches, such as Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. While by no means universally accepted or loved, these movements have unquestionably brought a renewed emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit wherever they’ve arisen.

This post has covered a lot of ground, but I hope it’s been helpful in showing the vast array of beliefs about the Holy Spirit around today.

Here ends this very long historical exploration of the Spirit. In Sunday’s post, in honour of the great and holy feast of Pentecost, I’ll try to bring things together in a helpful way.