that the Reformation does not stand alone in its revolutionary role. If the Renaissance weakened the ancien regime, perhaps the Reformation administered a coup de grace of sorts. However, the conjunctions of the New World’s opening horizon, Islam’s ebbtide, and paradigmatic changes in technological, social, scientific, and economic developments were certainly of momentous import. These factors, each in itself of defining consequence, joined to birth a new world that is yet with us as our formative heritage: “No Westerner can ever hope to know him- or herself, or the world he or she lives in, without first understanding this crucial turning point in history. And the same goes for any non-Westerner who wants to understand Western civilization.”4
The question then arises: as Christians who affirm the providence and sovereignty of God, do we dare to discern the role of the Holy Spirit amid such momentous events? This question lay at the root of the conference from which these chapters sprang. We should remember that while the above-mentioned movements and influences provided the context for the several reformations that occurred, the center stage of the era was religious.5 We dare to suggest that church, theology, and faith with its experience were the prime drivers of the era’s events. In other words, the living out of belief in God lay at the core of it all. It is this claimed nexus of this definitive era that gives us pause to ask how God’s Spirit, who hovered over the earth’s waters in Genesis 1:1, was active amid the Reformation’s human striving and strife.
Martin Luther linked his revolution, recognizing faith as primary over works, to the Holy Spirit:
Faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.6
It is significant, too, that Luther emphasized this infusion of the Spirit’s presence and illumination in personal terms, rather than primarily in corporate (ecclesial) or communitarian (sacramental) terms. This emphasis on the private person’s relationship to God through the Holy Spirit became central, for good and ill, in individualized Western society, even if, in our context, we are now recovering the importance of communal approaches to theological reflection.
Calvin, too, attributed high of place to the Holy Spirit. He was even given the sobriquet, “Theologian of the Holy Spirit,” 7 by various theologians including B. B. Warfield:
In the same sense in which we may say that the doctrine of sin and grace dates from Augustine, the doctrine of satisfaction from Anselm, the doctrine of justification by faith from Luther-we must say that the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit is a gift from Calvin to the church.
[And] above everything else, it is the sense of the sovereign working of salvation by the almighty power of the Holy Spirit which characterizes all Calvin’s thought of God.8
Calvin went to great lengths in his Institutes to expand upon the Holy Spirit’s significant role, in both personal and theological terms:
The Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard . . . The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit . . . Those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated . . . Let us, then, know that the only true faith is that which the Spirit of God seals in our hearts.9
It is thus safe to say, of Calvin as well as Luther, that the Reformation represented recovery and reemphasis of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Indeed neither would have maintained his path apart from “popery,” as Calvin called it, were he not convinced that such a drastic move was not only justified but required as a faithful act in response to the move and leading of the Holy Spirit of God.
G. W. F. Hegel later sought to explain history in terms of a (capitalized but impersonal) World Spirit10 that “consists in what is produced by man”:11
The realm of Spirit is all-comprehensive; it includes everything that ever has interested or ever will interest man. Man is active in it; whatever he does, he is the creature within which the Spirit works. Hence it is of interest, in the course of history, to learn to know spiritual nature in its existence, that is, the point where Spirit and Nature unite, namely, human nature.12
We Christians, while resonating with Hegel’s wish to learn the spiritual nature of history, take a different tack that seeks to discern the winds of the person of God’s Spirit moving through time, space, place, and people’s lives. We believe that God’s divine, personal, providential plan and presence, mediated by his Spirit’s activity through all time, ultimately achieve his will to bring about his Kingdom, ruled by Christ.
Exploring the degree to which the Reformation represented and reflected that rule is one aim of the conference that we convened on the Reformation’s 500th anniversary. We took our specific task from the conference’s title, “The Holy Spirit and the Reformation Legacy.” This title entailed three emphases that were required of each presentation as we examined but a few of the Reformation’s facets: first, the presence and role of the Holy Spirit in a given area of interest; second, awareness and placement of the Spirit’s role in the historical locus of the Reformation; and third, ways in which those Reformation beliefs and actions, regarding the Holy Spirit, left lasting legacies that still live today.
Regent University, the host of the conference through its School of Divinity’s Center for Renewal Studies, has, from its start, been part of the Holy Spirit renewal movement that swept the world from the twentieth century on. This movement includes Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Third Wave streams, as well as a vigorous stream in the Roman Catholic Church. Our Reformation 500 conference thus sought to take its distinction from other Reformation celebrations and explorations by giving primary attention to the Holy Spirit. We pray that this conference may thus make a unique contribution to the scholarship of those Reformation events that continue to echo through time.
As you consider each conference paper chapter, we also pray that you will find fresh insight, not only into what happened and what has come about but into the activity of the Holy Spirit in this earthly veil—including in your life.
It now remains to offer a brief outline of the chapters in this book. We have divided the book into three parts. The first part clusters chapters that consider the influence of Martin Luther and includes chapters 1–6. Chapter 1 by Michael M.C. Reardon discusses Luther and his influence on Melanchthon’s pneumatology in relation to the doctrines of the Trinity and justification. This legacy is then brought into conversation with the idealism of Hegel and its traces in Rahner, suggesting that Luther’s legacy has impacted a wide variety of thought beyond the confessionalism of the Lutheran tradition. Chapter 2 by Samuel W. Muindi takes a hermeneutical turn. It considers the legacy of Luther concerning biblical hermeneutics and in particular canonical criticism. It does this by analyzing Luther’s hermeneutical approach before attending to the post-Reformation trajectories from the Enlightenment. He continues by discussing the similarities of Luther’s hermeneutics with the canonical criticism of Brevard Childs before concluding with a discussion of pneumatic hermeneutics. Chapter 3 by Donald W. Kammer takes an entirely different approach as it reviews the early Pentecostal devotional literature in America and Britain from 1907 and how these early Pentecostals conceived of themselves as inheritors
