“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.” Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.
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“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”
Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.
About Simeon Zahl
Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.
Show Notes
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Simeon Zahl: Our internal lives are enormously complex. We're driving down the road and suddenly a song comes on and, and you're crying or you have an epiphany and you're like, why, why is this sentimental song or something from my childhood? Or why do certain words jump out at you and others? Augustine would say lots of interesting things about the function of memory and the way in which we are mysteries to ourselves.
The real engine room of where human action happens is desire, but desire is not transparent to us a great deal of the time. It's in the form of narratives and stories that certain things are able to be communicated or to get through. And someone can say, you know, Jesus died for me, can be the most profound thing a person has ever heard and changed their lives. That's happened a lot in the history of the world. To suddenly hear that in a certain kind of context, in a certain kind of way, has been about as powerful as words can be. Many other people have heard those words so much that it's very, very hard to sort of give them meaning again. They become exhausted.
But to be able to articulate the relationship between these realities and the technical language of theology, how actually certain kinds of theological concepts at their best do lead you to take these things seriously. I like drawing these connections between theology and these realities, at least as best I can.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Where do our ideas come from? Ideas about ourselves, about the world, about others, about God? Our conversation today is about the role of experience, particularly emotional experience, affective experience, embodied experience in shaping our beliefs, and of course, the feedback of those ideas and beliefs on our affections and experience.
Now our brains manage and process a ridiculous amount of information on a daily basis. It's staggering really. But from the raw atomic pixels of sense and perception, ideas tend to emerge. That's a fairly empiricist way of thinking about how we get ideas. David Hume called these pixels impressions, which when combined across senses, they generate ideas.
Now, I would love to have Humes' neuroscience checked on this, and theories might diverge. There's rationalism, maybe something innate or default or built in, whether that's a Cartesian cogito, I think I am, or George Barclay's idea of being an idea in the mind of God, or something encoded in the genetic information that we start from, or Augustine's God shaped hole in the human heart.
All of these are just theories. So let's back up. Each of us are ultimately left, at the end of the day, with the same barrage of impressions and ideas. The same weight of feeling. The same sweetness of sense. George Eliot puts it to words most of us couldn't ever dream of doing in her novella, Janet's Repentance.
Simeon Zahl: Ideas are often poor ghosts. Our sun filled eyes cannot discern them. They pass athwart us in thin vapor and cannot make themselves felt, but sometimes they are made flesh. They breathe upon us with warm breath. They touch us with soft, responsive hands. They look at us with sad, sincere eyes and speak to us in appealing tones.
They are clothed in a living human soul with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence ideas. Then their presence is a power. Then they shake us like a passion. And we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.
Evan Rosa: And that was read by my guest today, Simeon Zahl, a theologian and professor of Christian theology at the University of Cambridge.
He wrote a book called The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, and he joined me to discuss emotion and affect, the livability of Christian faith, the origins of religious ideas, the data of human desire for theological reflection, the grace of God, the ultimate context for playfulness. and freedom and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this mess of poor ghosts, warm flesh, and big feelings all together.
Thanks for listening today.
Simeon, thanks so much for joining me on For the Life of the World.
Simeon Zahl: It's great to be here.
Evan Rosa: I think we should start with really, I think the central claim of, of your books. Speaking in honor of your father, you say, "for theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart."
And I think it's just so close to the core claim of your book, and it seems to be deeply meshed in the dedication of the book, too. So, I was hoping you could say a little bit about the context you're coming from, you know, biographically, and how this project has and become animated for you in that way.
Simeon Zahl: So that dedication to my dad, I mean, my dad is a theologian and uh, I've um, I've learned so much from him and I learned a lot about theology from listening, sort of listening to his sermons growing up and that sort of thing. And he's a great kind of dialogue partner for me as well. And one thing that I did, I learned very directly from dad and that the book is very much a kind of attempt to think through and articulate in a more technical way is the fact that there is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.
And I guess that you see this especially in relation to questions about sanctification. I was often reading these beautiful descriptions of the, of the sanctified Christian life and then looking around and, and not seeing it. So that's the sort of thing that we're talking about with, with kind of real life as, as the material, not as a, as the controlling determining principle in theology, but as a necessary thing to engage with if theology isn't going to sort of float off into abstraction.
Evan Rosa: You say real life begins in the heart. What do you mean?
Simeon Zahl: Oh, well, what's the heart? What I mean is that I'm an Augustinian in the sense that I think that the feeling and desiring are at the core of who we are and are in, in some way prior to or have a certain kind of formal precedence over reasoning, for example, that God is concerned ultimately most with the heart and of course the heart and reasoning are not always opposed in fact.
But there's something about our- what's- what we're actually feeling tells us something about reality that I've been talking about in a way that the stories we tell ourselves are just a little more prone to sort of getting disconnected. So what I mean concretely in the book, I'm really talking about emotion and desire, and I'm really interested in those categories because they tie our thinking about God not just to, well, to our physical bodies, our material locations, you know, how we feel is affected by, by our bodies, by the environments we find ourselves in, by our histories, these kinds of things. So actually paying attention to our feelings rather than being, as it's sometimes been, there's been a concern in theology, feeling is ephemeral, it doesn't have a lot of content, it comes and goes. We all know how a strong feeling can come and go or, you know, how you feel when you've had too much to drink versus how you feel when you've just had some great success and then it goes away and the next day everything's changed. But in fact, feeling, I think if you do it well and if you really look at it with a certain kind of technical tools and attentively, there's a lot of information there. It's where we, where we live.
Evan Rosa: I'm- just to push a little deeper, especially like in the Augustinian context, where does love fit into that equation? You say, you know, if Christian view of life and flourishing prioritizes feeling and desire, where do we locate love? And how does love and knowledge, which is also deeply important to Augustine, where do those intersect?
Simeon Zahl: I initially got into this kind of material through really reflecting on the Reformation on Luther and Melanchthon. I grew up feeling that the Lutheran tradition in particular had this ability to traffic in a certain kind of honesty about suffering, about thwarting, about human sin that I just wasn't finding in forms of Protestantism that I was encountering as a, as a, as a kid and in youth group, but also in, in college, and then beyond. And so that's where I first, but the category of affect and emotion, I got from- I became interested in through, although it turned out it was super trendy. I came across it in a way that caught my attention in, in the work of Philip Melancon. So the, the first Protestant systematic theology is Philip Melanchthon's 1521 Loci Communes, which began as a lecture series on Romans, and he basically defines human nature in terms of the primacy of what he calls the affective power or faculty, and sees the difference between Protestantism and the kinds of Catholicism he's critiquing, as having to do with- which comes, which is more important or more, more powerful, the affective faculty or the, or the rational faculty.
So, and I got that kind of interest in, in the Lutheran Reformation, especially through my, my dad's an Episcopal minister and theologian, but there's, uh, he wrote a PhD on justification and, and I'd also had a sense that Cranmer in the Episcopal sort of Anglican tradition, I, I later learned that he very concretely got a lot of the, the, a lot of the theological, the sophistication of how he talks about emotion and desire and affect in the prayer book is, is very Augustinian, but it's mediated significantly through Philip Melanchthon.
Um, so that's, that's part of where that's coming from. But I also had experiences with Pentecostal and Charismatic churches growing up that I thought were, were great, basically. You know, they had some problems, but they weren't nearly as problematic as sort of my anxious Protestant friends had led me to believe.
And I saw a connection here with the category of emotion and desire being central. That's something that both these Lutherans I found insightful and honest, and these Pentecostals who seem to have a lot of energy in life and a sense of really engaging with the living God, that the place where those two things came together was in the category of emotion and feeling, which is connection to, to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Evan Rosa: I think how I want to now just add to, add to our context is, is I think what probably the timeliness of, of your contribution here in looking at the Holy Spirit and Christian experience is the disturbing problem that contemporary Christianity currently faces, which is the huge disparity between Christian belief and Christian life.
The way that plays out in the political domain is probably the most tangible at the moment, but this is in many ways, it is timeless, in the sense that there has always been a disparity of some kind, but you point out that there is just, there is a current gap in late modern society that really threatens the very livability and believability of Christianity going forward.
Simeon Zahl: Yes, I think that's true. I mean, I certainly I'm, I, because I've spent a lot of my life, although I'm a Christian, I've spent a lot of my life in universities that are sort of surrounded by people who are not Christians. So I'm, I'm very aware, you know, in Cambridge here, I go to lunch at my college and people around me are academics from all different disciplines, and it's fantastic.
And for the large majority of them, it just wouldn't occur to them to think of, of Christianity as a, as a, as a viable source of meaning or, or religion to subscribe to rather than it being a rational problem. Actually, the argument side is, is not so hard to at least render Christianity perfectly plausible.
The resistance is, is, is more has to do with something affective. And that's the kind of thing that say the experience of- you mainly experience Christians in your past, in your, in your life, in your upbringing, whatever it is, as people who, or through the media, you know, as people who are heavily judgmental and basically think they're better than other people and are trying to call everyone to a moral standard very publicly and yet, uh, then maybe aren't actually matching that in their own lives. It loses credibility. It loses plausibility at the affective level, not just the rational level. Like, why should I take these these people, seriously, I think, uh, Christianity that's gonna be persuasive and plausible and interesting is gonna have to be integrated and what it says and what it feels need to be closer together. And that involves being honest about problems. And that's, again, part of this, this traffic in, in reality. I think at it's best Christianity allows you to be honest. So Luther says to call a thing what it is.
And I think there are pressures that lead to certain forms of public hypocrisy where we're not calling a thing what it is, and Christianity itself has somehow become a structure that helps someone resist a certain kind of honesty, at least in some domains.
Evan Rosa: It's so interesting because it seems to me that there are certain ideals, and I think we could talk a lot- we could you know, just like a lot of ink's been spilled on the question of about what leads to the quote "sanctification gap" or something between, you know, the, the, the, the differential between what, what a given religious faithful Christian thinks about the life that they ought to live or the shape of a flourishing and just and humble Christian life, perhaps, and then the, the, the results of the behavior. We could talk a lot about that disparity, but it does seem that calling things what they are, that being real, transparent, trafficking in reality is a deeply held contemporary value that, that seems to be more and more universalized in secular society.
Simeon Zahl: You mean authenticity, kind of?
Evan Rosa: Authenticity? Yeah, just a call a spade a spade. What you see is what you get. At least we're, we're prone to talk like that. That's not to say that we aren't still hugely tempted to present false images of ourselves, to put out a facade that suggests something entirely different that protects our true self from really being known.
But the value's there, and I'm just kind of aiming at the more universal qualities of the disparity between one's ideals and values, and the shape of their lives. And all to just say like how important it is to be trafficking, trafficking in reality at this moment.
Simeon Zahl: I completely, I completely agree. And I think we're, we're caught when on the one hand we want authenticity, on the other hand, we live on Instagram or whatever, and everything is curated and it's, it's so easy to, to, to hide. But I think hiding from the world is, uh, and, and diluting ourselves, lying to ourselves is something that human beings have always done and will always do to some degree. I think at its best, a profound, prophetic, incisive, diagnostic Christianity gives you the freedom to be honest.
That's part of what a good doctrine of grace does is actually it authorizes honesty. It frees you to not have to be afraid of the consequences of, of, of telling the truth. And again, that is, that's not always what we're, what we, what we see including in ourselves, but I think that's- certainly theologically Christianity is a very powerful tool for enabling a certain kind of honesty that is still hopeful, that is still oriented towards a, a positive future horizon that believes in, in compassion and grace and so on.
Evan Rosa: You start the book with this really lovely passage from George Eliot, and I was going to ask you to read it if you have it handy enough.
Simeon Zahl: Sure, I have it right here. Yeah, so this is a quote from a novella by George Eliot called Janet's Repentance, which is about a clergyman who comes to a small town and helps a woman who has a terrible life.
And this is the quote, Ideas are often poor ghosts. Our sun filled eyes cannot discern them. They pass athwart us in thin vapor and cannot make themselves felt, but sometimes they are made flesh. They breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones.
They are clothed in a living human soul with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then, their presence ideas, then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.
Evan Rosa: I mean, that's just an incredible passage, I've never read that particular bit of George Eliot, she's known for Middlemarch. How did you encounter this, and why does it speak to you in the way it does?
Simeon Zahl: Well, so I came across this novella through my dad. My dad used to teach a seminary course, so there- I'm named after a guy named Charles Simeon who was a very influential person in the sort of- basically helping found the evangelical movement in the Church of England in the early 19th century.
He was based here in Cambridge at Holy Trinity and at Church and at King's College. And he had such an effect and so many ordinands basically came through and were at Cambridge at that point and were influenced by him that it became almost a trope in 19th century literature that the Simeonite curate, as in the guy, the person who's left Cambridge having been influenced by this evangelical charismatic kind of guy, and then goes to try to put that theology into practice in the world.
And so Janet's Repentance is very much one of those. So Tryon, who's a good character here, the curate is, is coming, has this, this kind of classic evangelical Protestant kind of theology, but he's effective. And then there's another novel by a guy named Mark Rutherford that has the reverse, that has someone who goes and then it turns out his theology hasn't prepared him for the reality of, uh, of what he faces.
And so dad used those as a contrast for, for people training for ministry. They watched the difference. They had the same doctrines. Same formation, these two characters. So that's how I came across the, the, the quote. And, and when you actually read- the whole thing is amazing. Janet's Repentance is absolutely incredible once you get past the first sort of 30 pages, but there's this discussion of life- like all 19th century novels, no. I think it's one of the most psychologically astute accounts of an evangelical conversion that we have. It's George Eliot, you know, the, the grandmaster, and she knew what she was talking about. She had a, a, a Christian background that she moved away from, and this, this book is written very sympathetically, although I think she's not really a Christian at this point. But, and so this- she's trying to explain why, why Janet, who's so, has so many walls up, why her walls come down through, through this guy.
And the answer is that he, he has his own past that's really hard and his own sin, basically, he treated someone terribly in his past. And that's her, her, her point is that he, this has effect, he's, he's humble and his voice speaks with a kind of authority when he talks about sin or when he talks about forgiveness, he has authority, but the authority is conveyed not just through the ideas, but through kind of, kind of the emotional harmonics of, of his presence, of his tone of voice, even, that- you know, that, that there's something about, he's shaped by his, by his past in a way that gives him credibility when he tells her about forgiveness and, and so on. And so I, those, those affective harmonics, you know, I think they're so crucial in life and the success of otherwise ministry in whether a, a theological idea is the most powerful thing you've ever heard, or whether it's dry as dust, that there are these other factors, and I was trying to capture how those factors are at work, both in how theology, theological ideas get sort of generated and produced. And also in how we might think about existing theological ideas.
Evan Rosa: It's fascinating to me how that made flesh really stood out to me here, uh, that sometimes they are made flesh, that they tend to pass about and they kind of become realized or particularized, reified, made perhaps at times into particular lives. And put on display, and I think that's like, that is indeed where, where there's impact when ideas are embodied.
And I just wanted to ask you a little bit about like, there's a role of narrative that those ideas made flesh, like story, narrative seems to communicate affect and emotion in a way that theological reflection, theological writing, let's be honest, doesn't often convey. Maybe I've come to tears a few times reading some bit of philosophical or theological prose, but it hasn't been often.
But those examples mount up when I've been reading literature and encountering stories and watching films, listening to music. Um, it's something about the, the narrative there is like being, being witness to those ideas made flesh, kind of seeing them walk among us. Is that, does that resonate for you?
Simeon Zahl: Absolutely, it does.
Evan Rosa: Is that a little bit about what's going on here?
Simeon Zahl: Yeah, for sure. It's funny, when I was first kind of doing my training and sort of, I love literature, I love culture, I love music, and it's a huge part of my life, but I always got a little wary of forms of theology that depended too heavily on them because I felt that it was a way of not actually making claims, you know, that it was sort of woolly, the English would, would say, and I've, I've come around partly through this kind of thing and reflecting on, on, on affect, but because so T. S. Eliot, I've been thinking a lot about T. S. Eliot recently, and he has a line that sort of poetry operates at the, at the frontiers of consciousness. It's trying to capture emotional experiences, basically, that, that, that are at the limits of what words can actually, uh, convey and what we're even aware of fully.
I mean, so this is very Augustinian, you know, our, our, our internal lives are enormously complex. You know, anyone who's, you know, been- we're driving down the road and suddenly a song comes on and you're crying, or you have an epiphany, and you're like, why, why is this sentimental song, you know, or something from my childhood or whatever it is. Why do certain words jump out at you and others don't? And Augustine would say lots of interesting things about, about the function of memory and the way in which we are mysteries to ourselves. The places, the real engine room of where human action happens is desire, but desire is, is not transparent to us a great deal of the time.
And that's what art speaks the language of the heart in a way that words, especially sort of propositional words are, they can, in the hands of great poets, they can do it, but I think it's, it's in the form of, of narratives and stories and, and so on that we, certain things are able to be communicated or to get through.
And that's why it's so interesting, the difference between a claim, you know, someone can say, yeah, Jesus died for me, can be the most profound thing a person has ever heard and changed their lives. That's happened a lot in the history of the world to suddenly hear that in a certain kind of context, in a certain kind of way has been about as powerful as words can be.
Many other people have heard those words so much that they, it's very, very hard to sort of give them meaning again, that they've become exhausted. Thornton Wilder talks about that religion is suffering from a problem of the exhaustion of religious language, and so I, I think that there's a lot of truth to that, but to be able to articulate the relationship between these kind of, these realities and, and the technical language of theology, and what we should say, how actually certain kinds of theological concepts at their best do lead you to take these things seriously, for example.
Augustine can explain to you in technical terms, why it's important to use anecdotes or to be authentic in a sermon. I like drawing these connections between the sort of the more technical side and theology and, and these realities, at least as best I can.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely. This is sort of seeming nicely with something, a distinction you brought up earlier that I wanted to ask you a little bit about between, you know, no lack for rational expression of, of Christian faith and perhaps we are in fact exhausted by religious language that really connects- for me, personally, there's no lack there, and we have desire on the other end of that spectrum. And you're talking about the Augustinian priority on desire and feeling, uh, not to the total exclusion of, of rationality, of course, but one valence I wanted to bring in was the aesthetic and, and ask you about that, because it seems to me that, that this is, is where plausibility seems to be living these days is in the aesthetic, and if it's not presented in a beautiful manner, an idea isn't really entertained with any kind of seriousness.
Simeon Zahl: Hmm. It's funny, one of two different reviewers of my book who were otherwise, you know, very positive, but they point out that they say that there's a, although the language, you know, it's, it's, it's, they don't think it's badly written or something, but they think that there's a, there's a tension between the claims I'm making about the centrality of emotion and affect, and the limitate- the limits of, of discourse to change human beings, and the actual style in which the book is written, which is- it's a, it's a very carefully argued, classically and referenced classical academic monograph, uh, for the most part. And you know, I take the point, and it has partly to do with Karen Kilby, my colleague and sort of mentor, but she, she, she said that she pointed this out to me and what one answer is that this is the language I need to speak to engage with the interlocutors I have in view, people who don't want to hear what I- who might resist what I have to say and need to sort of be kind of hedged into a place where you just have to take it seriously because, because the arguments are hard to get around in certain kinds of ways.
So I think that's really, um, important. And I also say, I think there are lots of people like, well, you know, why don't you use first person more to be consistent? You should, you know, or incorporate poetry, incorporate art, you know, these are way, there are lots of exciting theology going on right now that does this.
So Ashon Crawley, you know, uses first person narrative in his work on the Holy Spirit in a way that's really, really effective, and kind of exciting. And there are many other examples, but, and, uh, partly I'm interested in doing that kind of thing, certainly what I'm arguing for would support that kind of work.
But I also think that there, there's something about concepts for, although they may not move in the same way, move things, they have a, they're durable and they can communicate across time periods, and we come up with words and concepts in order to sort of preserve things that matter and to transfer them, to communicate them, to be able to argue about them in a certain kind of mode and there is a place for that as long as they're generated in a way that is integrated. So, for me, the integration with the aesthetic is in my own self, in writing it, rather than in the formal style.
Evan Rosa: Let's talk a little bit more about the book itself. I mean, we've laid a lot of groundwork. I wanted to read a little, another passage. It is from the beginning, but I think it really helps to sum up one of the core questions and why you're writing this.
In what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly. Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. Furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.
That is, again, like a preliminary, but it's really driving to the, the, the core claim of the book.
Simeon Zahl: Well, partly what I'm getting at there, I mean, it's, it's just true historically. So there, there's a kind of Protestant myth coming out of the power of Barth's rhetoric or, or, or various other things that theology can't talk to experience, can't talk to theological anthropology or in, without it suddenly becoming idolatrous, or it's such a dangerous task that it's best to just do revelation, just do the Bible, whatever it might be. So the examples I give, you know, there's, there's quite good scholarly work talking about how the development of the idea of Christ's divinity, basically we were worshiping, people were worshiping Christ before they sort of had a sense of who he was.
And so, so that, you know, basic Chalcedonian Christology is in part downstream of, of doxological practice in the early church, of worship practice in the early church. So that's one example, I mean, a classic, Augustine. is in the development of the theology of grace that is at the foundation of all Western reflection on grace in the, in the rejection of Pelagianism, is hugely obviously affected, all the scholars, you know, agree by, by his own experience of what I think it's Robert Marcus calls Christian mediocrity, that he just isn't getting as much more sanctified as he hoped he was earlier on, and so he has a bigger, higher view of grace and a dimmer view of, of what the will can accomplish, you know, in the fallen situation as time goes on, and that's him in part, of course, he's reflecting on Paul, he's reflecting on all kinds of things, but he's also reflecting on his own experience. The same is true of Luther, Luther's experience in the monastery. He wasn't getting more righteous. He talks about this very explicitly, and especially he found that his affects weren't changing, his desires.
He said, I would do all the right stuff, I would go to confession six hours a day, but I still, the concupiscence didn't change as I was told it would. And so he, there was a kind of empirical argument against certain kinds of concepts of, of growth and virtue for, for Christians. So Luther is reflecting the, the foundations of the Protestant Reformation, we have a very deep and complicated reflection on, on experience, in dialogue with other factors. So, over and over you can just show that this is, this is the case at key moments in the history of theology. And of course, ultimately, I talk a lot actually in the earlier on about just the way the early church is reflecting already in Acts on the descent of the Spirit on the Gentiles.
And Paul says, you know, to the Galatians at one point, you know, did you experience so much for nothing as a way of making an argument about the nature of justifying faith and the work of the Holy Spirit. So, there's stuff in the New Testament that's very clearly not just, here are experiences, but here are, here's the early church reflecting theologically, partly using experiential data. So I just want to take off the table the idea that this is something that we, we shouldn't do, the question is how to do it well, because there really are pitfalls. There really are problems of projection, of naivete, of just, you know, just because I feel it doesn't mean it's true. But to pretend that we can do theology completely divorced from feeling, from experience, from our context, from our histories is, it's never been the case, it never will be.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, and it just, it lays bare the importance of understanding the nature of human emotion and in accounting for it well in the context of how, how religious ideas are formed.
There's two really important questions that you in this book. The first is experience can't be separated from theological inquiry, and we've been talking about that. The second, which we've talked a little bit less about, I think, is speaking about experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
You're drawing this important connection, maybe, maybe they're synonymous for you, about talking about human experience and the role of spiritual experience really is to talk about pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. How, how do those two questions converge? And, and how do you make your way through an examination of those?
Simeon Zahl: Hmm. So the one thing that you, when you start paying attention to debates about experience or references to affective language in the history of theology, for example, is that it's often very closely allied to pneumatology. So the most important verse for Augustine and his whole affective theology of delight is in Romans 5:5, for the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us for... so the transformation of desire in Augustine is fundamentally a pneumatological act, and likewise in scripture, the sanctification, the Spirit- one of the arguments that won the day for the Spirit's divinity was that the Spirit is called the sanctifier. And to sanctify is only something God can do. And so the association of the Spirit with sanctification is just there in scripture, the association of the Spirit with emotion is- I mean, the first three fruit of the Spirit are affects, love, joy, and peace, or at least affective dispositional kind of qualities.
So there's a reason why people who are interested in emotion and additional life have, have often reached for, for pneumatology and vice versa, why, when you think about the Holy Spirit, you're led into the realm of, of desire and feelings. That's just, it's just a part of the kind of DNA of a sort of Christian legacy or, or something like that.
So that's, that's part of it, but also a lot of rejection or anxiety around religious experience, especially actually coming from more of a religious studies perspective is around this idea that it- there's been this sort of dunking on the, an early 20th century idea that there is this thing called religious experience. It's a discreet kind of, you know when we're talking about religious experience it's like the oceanic feeling, you know, and it's James, William James or Rudolph Otto and so on. And, and that there's this sort of discrete class or mystical experience that is, is sort of at the root of religion in some way.
And it's different from other kinds of experience. And this is where I'm, I'm a theologian, you know, I do a lot of dialogue with other disciplines here, but this is a place where I let theology drive the train. I want to talk about experience the way that the Bible talks about these whole- about experience, which is primarily in new pneumatological terms, so I say, well, what are the things the Spirit is- that are attributed to the Spirit, the actions, activities attributed to the Holy Spirit that seem to get traction on people's lives that are experienced. So like the fruit of the Spirit or sanctification or salvation, these are all things that are very much within the kind of semantic remit of how, how, how scripture talks about the Holy Spirit. And so that tells you to say, rather than trying to look for some generic universal religious experience, which I know they're, I'm not really qualified to say to talk about, well, Christian experience, we're talking about experience of the Holy Spirit and that has certain topics, certain themes, certain complexities that are specific to the traditions, so that are bounded by, by scriptural language and kind of authorized. So, so I, I think I argue that the paying attention to experience is something we actually have to do to do good pneumatology. If you're doing bad pneumatology scripturally, dogmatically, if you're not paying attention because the Spirit is where the rubber meets the road, where the theological, spiritual, divine realities get traction in human lives.
It's that the spirit is the, is sort of the mediator. Um, and many theologians from all different traditions actually say this, but then they don't sort of do it because it's so messy to, to, to, to talk about, you know, not just generic experience, but, you know, what happened after I had breakfast on Thursday? How I felt when that driver cut me off, you know? And so it is a messy area, but we can't- just because it's messy doesn't mean we should avoid it because we're not doing good pneumatology if we do.
Evan Rosa: Right. And I think this connects with a cultural moment too. Again, like an appreciation for trafficking in real life is also an appreciation for the mess, appreciation for, you know, the realities of distinctive particular emotional conscious experience that becomes difficult when when you want to organize that data, right?
Because it does introduce the messiness of passing fleeting emotional and affective life. So how do you think about sourcing that data for theology?
Simeon Zahl: It's a great question. It's because anyone who's, you know, ever been in a relationship with somebody knows that we can both do- two people can feel very strong things that are, that are not commensurate, you know, and, uh, you know...
Evan Rosa: It's hard to communicate about emotions, right? Like we know what it's well, maybe we know what it's like to feel something ourselves. It's difficult to understand ourselves, let alone communicate that to another person.
Simeon Zahl: Yeah. And to say, you know, I'm, you know, I'm angry about this thing. Therefore, I'm totally right. You know, you quickly discover that, well, well, they're angry about something else I wasn't even aware of, and actually, my anger doesn't make as much sense as I thought. And, and, you know, the, the, so clearly just on its own terms, emotional experience is, is an inadequate tool. So the way to, to, that I've tried to do it, partly I've tried to model it, you know, it's better sort of shown than told, but I think there are a couple of things.
Partly, I'm especially interested in ways in which we, that certain kinds of claims that, that Christians make can be tested, not, not- it's not the only test, but it's an important test these days to say, okay, you've said this about what deification does to the passions, and be, and you said it because Gregory of Nyssa says it, and that's a, that's a good reason under certain kinds of ways of doing theology, right? You're taking tradition seriously, and, and, and, and so on. But it's also worth considering, well, is this actually happening? You know, he's not talking about emotions in general or, or, or simply as metaphysical sort of free floating realities that are, that are not, he's talking about things that are, that are real and, and therefore real human.
And this is what I actually, I learned from, from patristic, a reflection on, on the passions is just how much the sense that, that the kind of transformations the spirit does are really very concrete and embodied in say Maximus the Confessor, but it's, it's your actual emotional experience that is being transformed, that is deification, it's not a symptom or a side effect, it's, it's actually the way your disordered soul gets reordered. That is your actual embodied emotions are, are involved. So there's a testing you can say, well, if you make this claim about danger of sanctification or about how virtue works or about how, or that the justification by faith doesn't work for these reasons or is no longer relevant to people, fine. But let's, let's bring experience in, uh, onto the table, you know, if, if certain kinds of preaching about imputed righteousness don't work, that they have all kinds of problems, but why did all these people have these experiences when Billy Graham preached about them or, or something like that? You just- it's a, it's a way of adding another factor to the mix. And I, I do think at it's best- it's sort of aspirational, rather than there's some standard everyone has to meet. It's more, if you want to do better theology, more integrated theology will find ways to take this kind of data seriously without saying it's the whole story.
Just because, because we're not, we're often not very good judges of what's, what's actually happening experientially. That's the, that's the caveat, but I think there really are concrete ways in which theologians make claims about human life, human experience, that we're, if we're not actually attending to the data, at least as we encounter it, then we're, we're missing a step.
Evan Rosa: This is really echoing what, you know, you, you quote Ernst Troeltsche at one point, every metaphysics must find its test in practical life. And I feel like that's really like the kind of space that you're speaking into at this moment that feels at least that it rings to me as a kind of top down approach, right?
You like hypothesize some kind of like metaphysical statement or claim, um, you test it in, in practice. You're looking for evidence and practical experience. Do you ever see it go, or do you see any, any ability to, to go bottom up?
Simeon Zahl: No, no, I do. I do. And actually I tell students, so here I am in this, in my office in Cambridge, I do a lot of, we do a lot of one on one supervising with student undergrads and post grads here.
And students are often very hardworking and very smart and they can get the right answer. But that won't often get them to the highest levels in terms of grades, because what we're also looking for is a certain kind of creativity, a certain kind of facility with the ideas that actually allows them to do something with it, not just say, what, basically, the secondary literature says anyway. And so, and one of the things I tell them, and I, and it just comes out of my own practice, I guess is that, you know, when you're reading a text, you know, for, to write this essay, you attend to how you, to, to, to your reaction to it. And very often you read something you- it could be that you're bored,
it could be that you're deeply excited and sort of inspired, and it could be that you're angry, that you really don't like it. These are very common kind of emotional experiences, affective reactions to just reading theological texts, that alone. And so what I tell them, if they want to write an essay about these texts, attend to that.
Just because you felt it doesn't- that's not, that itself is not an argument, but it's probably, I think Jean-Yves Lacoste calls affects the half light of understanding, which I take to mean, or at least I interpret as meaning something like, it's the beginning of, of, uh, it's the kernel of, of what insight you have, what you actually have to bring to bear your own voice, wherever you're coming from as a student, as a, as a theologian. By attending to your, and then interrogating it. So, I mean, this book came out of certain instincts, I guess, around the ways in which Pentecostal and Lutheran theology are not as opposed as I was told, or that justification by faith is, can still be useful and emotionally powerful. But then I spent 10 years reflecting, sort of really reflecting and thinking and learning more, and, and, and so, so the direction of research, the direction of thinking of travel was prompted experientially. And that leads you into to bringing these other, you know, kinds of discourse to bear as well as you kind of refine an insight. See if it's true, see if you're missing something, see and so on. So that would be just very concretely the way I think about it.
I also think just being self aware about when you like something because of how you like a piece of theology because of how it makes you feel rather than really because the, the arguments are I think a lot of we like the idea of certain kinds of theologians or certain kinds of traditions and that's fine that's just how reasoning how knowledge production how works how theology gets traction in the world but just being a being aware it is helpful to be like I just I just like the vibe and that's not exactly the same thing as saying this person is their argument is good.
Evan Rosa: Uh, yeah, I was gonna say the same could go for the feeling of disgust that follows from something if you're repulsed by a particular idea, you know, paying attention in that direction doesn't necessitate the falsehood of that, but it's something to be paying attention to. It's something to, to understand and integrate, or have an integrative understanding, I should say, of where, like, where that disgust is coming from. And it allows you to grow as an individual theologian, you know, insofar as all Christians are just are theologians. Um, so it would allow you to kind of continue to integrate experience with, with, with reason.
Simeon Zahl: Yeah. One thing that that, the implication of that is also, you know, as theologians, we're, we're always coming from where we're coming from and you can't. Yeah, invent reactions in yourself that you're, you're, you're not having, you can't, and often our insights will come out of our particular history and context and our, and our weaknesses will also come out of our particular history and context usually.
And so, you know, you don't have, we don't all have to say everything all the time. And I can say, well, I've seen a thing. I think this thing is, is not quite right, how it's been articulated. And I think there's another thing that. that we need to retrieve. And other people may say, well, I've had the reverse experience, and then they can do their theology sort of effectively in that way.
One thing you get into with this kind of thinking about how theology, theological method is that you have to be okay with a certain provisionality and humility as well, because everyone's coming from different places. And often people are noticing things that you're not noticing for very good, and they have very good reasons for it, for example.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, yeah, it's reminding me of this, this quote of Nietzsche's, one of his aphorisms. I think it's from the Gay Sciences, the hereditary error of the philosophers is a lack of historical sense. And I kind of read that as a, not just historical in the sense of chronology, but a kind of particularity of the moment as well, of taking into account that kind of,
just the data and allowing the data of one's own experience to, to, to be present there.
Simeon Zahl: And that applies to your own history and to the history of theology, you know, part of why you, you read the history of theology, even if ultimately you want to repudiate something or, or, or, it's one check on a certain kind of over, under, undercritical affirmation of our own subjective responses.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you'd say a little bit about the Holy Spirit in particular. What becomes of the application of thinking about the Holy Spirit and Christian experience to important theological stances or debates or like, what would it do at the level of helping both theologians and laypeople, I should say, professional theologians at the, in, in the sense of like a, kind of the, the, the intellectual task, but all Christian people in the sense of theology as lived experience, bring the Holy Spirit into that, where does, where does that, where does the spirit live for you?
Simeon Zahl: Well, I guess so partly just in a kind of global sense that we've, we've kind of been talking about it about at different points, but just that if you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities that that is that is an implication of the reflection of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit that is methodological and also has has content and that the human beings are, are, are not just, you know, brains on a stick, but God made creatures to be the sort of creatures where when God wants to really do something, engages with, with emotion, desire, which for us as in our bodies, that involves, you know, physiology, it involves serotonin levels, you know, that was what we ate last night. You're not just kind of generic sense of embodiment. So, so it's just an authorization of, of paying attention to, to body, which lots of people are saying, I'm not, I'm hardly the only person talking about the importance of embodiment theology, but I think it's a different kind of argument
in favor of it, which is just to say that, that, that actually classical pneumatology, classical doctrine of the Holy Spirit supports this kind of thinking. I think the way to do pneumatology well in theology, again, is to attend to- I've learned this from Lewis Ayres, that to attend to what scripture actually says about the Spirit, just that's, those are the, the arena, the general arenas that you should be focusing on, rather than formal Trinitarian reflection in the first instance. I don't think that actually should be the starting point, or it's not as fruitful a starting point as it's sometimes thought to be, you know, talking about processions and appropriations and these kinds of things. Actually, I think good Trinitarian theology, and I learn this from Ayres, learn this to some degree from
Karen Kilby, leads you into the specificity of Scripture's own language that transforms your theological imagination. You'll best understand the Spirit's role as a, as a person and yet who shares a single divine will and all these complexities by just looking at what the Spirit does in Scripture and then reflecting more broadly on that.
Evan Rosa: Which would mirror that historical motion, right? Like the movement of coming to understand, right? There's a sort of like worship of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit before there is the doctrinization of it.
Simeon Zahl: Exactly. And that's, I get, there's a, there's a wonderful article by Karen Kilby called "Is an Apathetic Trinitarianism Possible?" where she talks about the importance of getting the right order. The Trinitarian theology not only tells you that you can't- you always have to think in the same order, which is, starts with Christology and Soteriology and gets to, to the, the Trinity. You can't sort of say, okay, now that we've got there, let's cut off where we got from that there, there's a, a modeling of the pattern that we never kind of, kind of get past. There are many times when we need to think about the Trinity and think about the Trinity well, but we can't, but it's, it's always in the context of, of a, of a, of a trajectory that begins really with Soteriology and Christology to be real technical.
Evan Rosa: What about, I mean, just the broad data of the Pentecostal and Global Charismatic movements. How, how does that operate for you in sourcing some data and developing a pneumatology that is, that is integrative and, and brings reason and affect together?
Simeon Zahl: In a way, I have the luxury of not actually having a Pentecostal past when I, when I sort of say these positive things about what theology can learn from Pentecostalism.
And then sometimes someone who actually grew up and is like, dude, there's some real problems too, you know, and, and it's easy for you from, from, as a kind of, kind of friendly outsider to, to, to say these things. And so I, I, I take that. I don't want to minimize or say that the, uh, everything Pentecostal is, is good. And I argue my first book actually on why there's a kind of inadequate self critical principle in certain forms of a Pentecostal reflection that is problematic. But who are the actual Christians in the world these days, you know, and who are the average Christians or in a given town who's actually in church on Sunday, who's actually out serving the poor, you know, and so often all over the world, the answer is, is the Pentecostals and in their many forms. And so there's that to me, just with that sort of experiential kind of lens, it's like, well, something is, is getting traction in real life. People are connecting with what is going on in these ministries and, and on a very large scale and in many different contexts.
And that's, something that we shouldn't a priori not pay attention to. And maybe it's so embarrassing that sort of so called mainstream theology had to wait till there were 500 million Pentecostals before they started taking them more seriously. It's so bad. But so, so, and then, but looking, I think you go to a Pentecostal service, and they're deeply engaged with emotion.
They're very concerned with, with establishing a connect, an experiential connection between you and God, a sense of the reality of God in whatever's going on this week through a very long exegetical sermon with certain kinds of beats and rhythms, and often ending in some kind of moment of, of coming for an embodied event of coming forward to be prayed for and, and having a kind of catharsis, you know, with, with God, and, and those are- they're speaking the language of the heart. I mean, this is, this is Augustinian in that dimension very, very, um, much. And also in Pentecostal, it's just so embodied, there's so much touch and sweat and movement. And again, that's, you know, so called mainstream theology has taken a long time to realize something Pentecostals knew in 1920.
So those are the dimensions that I want to, I want to learn from. And also, and then the last, so, uh, Nimi Wariboko has a book that I really like called, um, The Pentecostal Principle. And he talks about play and playfulness as a characteristic of Pentecostal spirituality, a kind of creativity, a willingness to be open to new things, an expectation that God's work is dynamic, that keeps you, that is a kind of antidote to certain forms of fossilization or reification or, or balkanization or tribalization that, that many churches clearly are subject to, so that, that's, there's a, there's a pneumatological dynamism, the spirit blows where it wills. That taking that really seriously frees you to, to not just be stuck in, in, in the straight jacket of your confessional past, potentially, especially if you are stuck in a certain straight jacket, you know, I think sometimes Pentecostals maybe need more of a more confessional past or something.
But so that dynamism that, that Wariboko talks about in terms of, of play, I think is really exciting and something that all, all theology can, can learn from it. It's just true to something about the Holy Spirit, just written an article about this trying to, trying to argue this. So it's on my mind.
Evan Rosa: The identification of play with grace is very interesting, and that, that, that God's grace as, as, as an expression of joy and freedom and, and as you say, dynamism, something that's alive and living.
There's, there's an often, I mean, I mean this in the best way possible on, on the part of Pentecostals, but it's a kind of embarrassment almost. It's an embarrassment of play to others for whom the emotions of religious life or perhaps the emotions of ordinary human life are just constantly suppressed.
They're just held inside and they fester inside. We become unknown to ourselves in that way. We're unfamiliar with our own feelings. They become incredibly destructive sources when we don't allow them to live and move and breathe. And, and the gift of clay, I mean, we all understand the joy that that brings into life to think of the Holy Spirit as the chief architect of play.
Simeon Zahl: And it has a, it has a basis, very profound scriptural basis basically in, I mean, the, the way in which Paul talks about the freedom of the spirit is tied to a sense of freedom from the slavery of the law, and especially the fear. A life of, uh, life under the law is characterized as a kind of fearfulness. That, that, that the spirit and God's grace together- this is where Wariboko, I think he's just right on about, about a core dimension of Pauline Pneumatology, that there's a, you're free to get it wrong. Grace means you're free to, to, to tell, to say what's embarrassing or to, to mess up and, and, and that when you know that's the case, you can be creative.
You, you're, you're in a, what play researchers call a relaxed field. Play happens when we're in a relaxed field and we feel comfortable and in animals and in, in human animals. And so that grace is the ultimate relaxed field, properly, and so Christianity should be something playful and freeing and dynamic and joyful, and that doesn't have to be as opposed to certain kinds of, of concepts of, of the law or sin or something that's also significant. That's why that dynamic Wariboko talks about is really profound.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Play and grace as a relaxed field. Simeon, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this really wonderful book that you've written. Thanks a lot.
Simeon Zahl: Thanks, Evan. Great talking to you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian Simeon Zahl. Production assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollo, and Tim Bergeland. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show, welcome, and remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. And to our supporters and our faithful listeners, we've got another request besides that survey I mentioned at the beginning, the link to which you can find in our show notes.
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