has the authority to testify biblical truth to the individual, thus giving the Spirit authority over the individual believer. While believers are utterly destitute of the light of truth, they are not ignorant that this Word is the instrument of the Spirit’s illumination.128 Calvin’s emphasis is always on the work or agency of the Spirit of Truth whereby the Spirit serves as the source of internal or spiritual interpretation within the believer. This implies an interpretive authority of the Spirit that is essentially instrumental—the Spirit is the instrument through which Christ speaks his Word in the human heart. While Calvin essentially limited the Spirit’s work to that of salvation and sanctification, the Spirit is attributed with a certain veracious authority to restore order to humankind and “seal our minds” in truth.129
As a result, Luther and Calvin portray the Spirit as possessing an interpretive, veracious authority, which is in turn an expression of the Spirit’s “executorial authority.” This authority is enacted with respect to Scripture and within the Church. This illuminating Spirit, in other words, authoritatively resides over the Church and yet executes his authority under Christ, speaking through the Word. Because the Word is a product of the Spirit and because the Spirit continues to speak this Word in contemporary confirmation, the witness of the Holy Spirit is seen as the interpretive authority established for man by God. For the Reformers the Spirit is not bound to the Word but always speaks through the Word or in accordance with the Word, thus remaining consistent with himself.
Ramm strongly asserts that the “Protestant Principle of Authority”—the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures—is the only means for avoiding the imposition of the erring voice of man upon the authoritative Word of God. His convincing logic runs as follows:
The truer Protestant principle is that there is an external principle (the inspired Scripture) and an internal principle (the witness of the Holy Spirit). It is the principle of an objective divine revelation, with an interior divine witness. These two principles must always be held together, so that it may be said either that (1) our authority is the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures, or, (2) our authority is the Scriptures sealed to us by the Holy Spirit.130
As a result, the “storyline” development of the Spirit’s authority has now reached a level of practical objectivity. In other words, Protestants could begin to see Scripture as an objectification of the Spirit’s authority, and thereby begin to grasp God’s character and will with much more significant detail than ever before.
Modern Theology
Since precise limitations of the Spirit’s authority with respect to the Word were not yet well-defined within Protestant theology, a door was left open for followers to either limit the Spirit’s authority to the Word alone (resulting in various forms of Christian rationalism), or to overreact to this thinking by separating the Spirit from the Word (often resulting in various forms of Christian “enthusiasm”). Either way, Prenter contends that after the Reformation the work of the Spirit was narrowed to the individual, especially with respect to the work of sanctification, regeneration, and the interpretation of Scripture. Several other related activities (i.e. the Spirit’s work in creation, providence, history, Church governance, and mission) were given little or no attention.131
On top of this, rapid changes in European intellectual and social culture during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries—particularly in the natural sciences, philosophy, and literature—elevated modern confidence in human reason as well as skepticism regarding “traditional authority” or “Spirit.”132 Hume challenged religious “authority” by attacking the validity of making empirically demonstrable statements about God. Kant was helpful to the Christian concept of authority in some ways, but his argument that theology must be based only upon moral laws meant for the “modern man” that God could be known only through rational means, if at all. As a result, many groups throughout the modern period “hungered” for a new sense of the Spirit and decried that almost all traditional approaches left them only half full. Anabaptists, for example, believed themselves to “possess” the Spirit and sought a more pronounced doctrine of the Spirit’s interpretive authority (thereby rejecting Lutheran and Reformed teaching regarding authority). Quakers held that the “authority” of Church and Scripture must yield to the Spirit’s “inner light” of immediate revelation as the final authority for Christian theology and life. Pentecostal and charismatic groups at times disconnected the Spirit from the Word completely, looking for an experience that lay beyond the teaching of Scripture. This modern landscape was often shaped by a shift in the notion of “the priesthood of the believer,” which now meant that the individual was no longer bound by an authoritarian Church and was free to use his or her own intellectual and spiritual capacities for discerning truth. According to Livingston, the “modern age” brought a renewed awareness and trust in each person’s own capacities.
Reason supersedes revelation as the supreme court of appeal. As a result, theology faced a choice of either adjusting itself to the advances in modern science and philosophy and, in so doing, risking accommodation to secularization, or resisting all influences from culture and becoming largely reactionary and ineffectual in meeting the challenges of life in the modern world.133
Modern theology therefore emerged through an accommodation to human subjectivism, and took the form of both experientialism (which often seemed to replace the Spirit with human morality) and rationalism (which replaced it with human reason).134 These two approaches are represented by the theologies of Schleiermacher and Henry. For our purposes, the essential debate had to do with the final “authority” or method one could rely upon when interpreting Scripture.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Friedrich Schleiermacher, often referred to as “the father of modern theology,” defines the Spirit as “the union of the divine essence with human nature in the form of the common Spirit which animates the corporate life of believers.”135 Schleiermacher’s “liberal theology” does not give the Spirit a metaphysical status apart from this union. The Spirit confirms the notion of an immanent deity, which seems to be best understood as emerging “from below” as the presence of God in the Church. This presence is defined in terms of a “feeling of absolute dependence.” The operation of the Spirit is to be recognized primarily with regard to the humanization of the individual, so that one can be released from external sanctions and enjoy the positivistic (scientific) character of modernity. Schleiermacher asserts, “Without being knowledge, [religion] recognizes knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God.”136
As a result, all doctrine is to be derived from an experiential foundation. The interpretation of the Bible in the establishment of doctrine does not proceed on grounds of rational objectivity, but as a function of the Christian Church wrestling with questions of personal faith, piety, and ethics. Each witnessing community possesses an “interpretative authority” in that each views the Holy Spirit as the one who works to form and define that particular community of believers.137 “The Spirit for Schleiermacher is effectively the spiritual influence left behind by Jesus that gives coherence to the life of the Church as a spiritual entity, and therefore to the life of the Christian faith.”138 Within this paradigm the Spirit is freed from the Catholic/Protestant approach to pneumatology (which to the “liberals” limited
