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ABSTRACT
This article argues for a continuity between Pentecostals, Wesley, and Protestant Reformers on sola fide. The Protestant Reformers retained the idea from the Middle Ages that faith is an affective movement within the soul and that the formation of Christ within the soul is tantamount to the right ordering of the affections. The presence of Christ is the Spirit’s work of forming the affections so that they embody Christ’s own character and thus Christ himself. Drawing on Wesley’s ‘heart religion’ with its emphasis on the affections, a Pentecostal understanding of regeneration and the role of faith retains the focus on rightly ordered affections. This focus reveals both the continuity with Protestant Reformers and the centrality of affections in the spiritual life.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dale M. Coulter serves as the associate dean of academics and associate professor of Historical Theology for the School of Divinity. He joined Regent University School of Divinity in 2007 and served as the interim director of the Ph.D. programme. Before coming to Regent, he had been a faculty member for eight years in the School of Religion at Lee University. Coulter currently serves on the editorial board of Victorine Texts in Translation, having also co-edited the first translation of the series (Trinity and Creation, 2010 Brepols). He also served as a co-editor of PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (2010–2015) and currently is a member of the executive committee of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Coulter is also involved in ecumenical discussions as well as a participating member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. He blogs occasionally at First Thoughts, the online platform for the journal First Things, which is published by the Institute for Religion and Public Life. As an ordained minister, Coulter remains active in the life of the local church by regularly teaching and preaching.
Notes
1 See Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 19–21; Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel, 28–36.
2 Theodor Mahlmann traces the use of the phrase, finding its earliest articulation by the Lutheran theologian Fridericus Balduinus in 1610 and its outworking in the context of the Zweite Reformation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth German reforms. See Theodor Mahlmann, “‘Ecclesia semper reformanda.’ Eine historische Aufklärung,” 420–42.
3 There have been several Pentecostal theologians who have tried to claim that Pentecostalism is not a form of Protestantism, primarily as an effort to distance it from American evangelicalism. See Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, 29–31; Castelo, Pentecostalism as a Christian Mystical Tradition, xii–xx. While sympathetic to the theological concerns behind such a reconstruction, these claims have a hard time standing up to historical scrutiny.
4 Land, Pentecostal Spirituality, 23.
5 Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism, 166–83.
6 Anderson, Spreading Fires, 17–45; Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth, 11–36.
7 Bergunder, The South Indian Pentecostal, 2–11; Bergunder, “The Cultural Turn,” 51–73; McGee, Miracles, Missions, & American Pentecostalism, 3–98.
8 See Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 15–86; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 44–76; Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism, 184–214; Bergunder, The South Indian Pentecostal Movement, 2–11.
9 Fletcher, “Last Check to Antinomianism,” 627–57; see also Turley, A Wheel Within a Wheel, 24–8; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 80–1.
10 Cameron, “For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed?,” 176–8.
11 Anderson mentions the connection between Anthony Norris Groves and John Christian Arulappan in India in the 1830s while failing to note that Groves’ own missionary method was similar to Edward Irving having published his Christian Devotedness (1825) a year after Irving’s Missionary Orations, which he delivered at the annual conference of the London Missionary Society. Cf. Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth, 18–25; Stunt, From Awakening to Secession, 122–8.
12 See Collins, The Theology of John Wesley, 1–6, on how Wesley has been read through all of these lenses and yet his theology must be viewed as an eclectic appropriation of his sources.
13 Hamm, The Early Luther, 191.
14 McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 1–30; McGinn, “Mysticism and the Reformation,” 53–4.
15 Bernard of Clairvaux, De gratia et libero arbitrio 17: “mere affections reside in us naturally” (simplices namque affectiones insunt naturaliter nobis); De dilegendo deo 23: “Love is one of the four natural affections” (amor est affectio naturalis una de quattuor).
16 Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis 1.6.17.
17 Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis 1.10.2: “Faith is a particular kind of certainty of the rational soul regarding things that are absent constituted as above opinion and below knowledge” (fidem esse certitudinem quamdam animi de rebus absentibus, supra opinionem et infra scientiam constitutam).
18 Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis 1.10.3: “Faith consists of two things: cognition and affection, that is the constancy and firmness of believing. . . . Faith has substance in affection because faith is the affection itself; it has content in cognition since faith is from that and to that which is in cognition” (duo sunt in quibus fides constat: cognitio et affectus, id est constantia vel firmitas credendi. . .propterea fides in affectus habet substantiam, quia affectus ipse fides est; in cognitione habet materiam, quia de illo et ad illud quod in cognitione est, fides est).
19 D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe 40/1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1911), 28 (hereafter WA); Luther’s Works, vol. 27, ed. J. Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1964), 24 (hereafter LW).
20 WA 40: 540–2; LW 26: 352–3: Exurgit enim in baptisatis, praeter hoc quod regenerantur & renovantur per Spiritum sanctum ad caelestem iustitiam et vitam aeternam in baptismo, etiam nova lux et flamma, oriuntur novi et pii affectus, timor, fiducia Dei, spes, &c. oritur nova voluntas, hoc tum est proprie, vere et Evangelice Christum induere.
21 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith; Braaten and Jenson, eds., Union with Christ, 25–69.
22 Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), WA 40: 648–50; LW 26: 430–1: Illum volo, inquit, in vobis formare, ut per omnia affecti sitis, sicut ipse Christus affectus est. The Latin is difficult to translate owing to the term affectus. The American edition of Luther’s works renders it ‘He is the One,’ he says, ‘whom I want to form in you, so that in everything you feel as Christ Himself feels.’
23 Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), WA 40: 229; LW 26: 130: Fides ergo est cognitio quaedam vel tenebra quae nihil videt. Et tamen in istis tenebris Christus fide apprehensus sedet. Quemadmodum Deus in Sinai et in Templo sedebat in medio tenebrarum.
24 Philip Melanchthon does as well, but it is beyond the scope of this article to explore his work. See Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ, 63–94. Although he drives too deep a wedge between Luther and Melanchthon on this point, he rightly notes that “faith is also a new affect” in the 1521 Loci communes (67).
25 Vermigli, In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Rom, 1183: deinde quo ad ipsam persuasionem, quae cum vi divina fiat, ipsa quoque firma est atque certissima, certaeque persuasionis, id est, ut nunquam sit nuda, sed trahat secum semper multos ac varios animi motus. Idem: Iure igitur a professoribus purioribus Evangelii statuitur, credere cum actione, seu modo fiduciae, spei, et similibus affectibus maximam habere coniunctionem.
26 Bucer, Metaphrasis et enarratio in epist, 6: Fides est certa per spiritum sanctum de Dei in nos charitate et paterna benevolentia persuasio, nitens Domino nostro Iesu Christo qui morte sua peccata nostra expiavit et vita sua in qua nunc regnat, participes nos suae iustitiae reddit.
27 Bucer, Metaphrasis et enarratio, 16: nam persuasionem, affectus omnes, totaque vita hominis sequuntur. See Lugioyo, Martin Bucer’s Doctrine of Justification, 80–7.
28 Wesley, An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, 7–9 , 46–8.
29 Watson, Love Abounding, 219–27.
30 Watson, Love Abounding, 5–7.
31 On this point, see Coulter, “The Spirit and the Bride Revisited,” 298–319.