Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book explores the role of emotions and affections in the Christian tradition from historical and theological perspectives, especially related to the work of the Holy Spirit. Although historians and scholars from a range of traditions—including Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Pietist—have engaged these issues, there has yet to be a sustained examination of the role of emotions and affectivity across the Christian tradition. By retrieving the complex discussion about affectivity in Christian tradition and bringing its many voices into dialogue within a contemporary ecumenical context, the contributors also point toward a number of new research trajectories. The essays underscore the need to understand the shift in Western views of emotion that began in the late eighteenth century. They also explore in detail the vocabulary of affectivity as it has developed in the Christian tradition. As part of this development, the contributors reveal the importance of pneumatology in Western as well as Eastern Christianity, calling into question the idea of a pneumatological deficit advanced by some constructive theologians and addressing the relationship between affectivity and the pedagogical strategies that enable persons to cooperate with the work of grace in the soul. Finally, several essays explore the relationship between the erotic, the ecstatic, and affectivity in religious belief. This volume will interest scholars and students of historical theology, of emotions in theology, and of Christian renewal or charismatic movements.
“It must be noted that Coulter and Yong’s overarching goals for this volume are far grander than a handful of essays about the affections, as important as these may be. Instead, what they envision is a first step in a much larger project to vastly expand the scope of renewal theology beyond pneumatology and the history of the twentieth- century Pentecostal revival.” —Catholic Library World
Dale M. Coulter is associate professor of historical theology at Regent University.
Amos Yong is professor of theology and mission at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Preface
Introduction: The Language of Affectivity and the Christian Life by Dale M. Coulter
-
Blessed Passion of Love: The Affections, the Church Fathers, and the Christian Life by Robert Louis Wilken
-
Redeeming the Affections: Deconstructing Augustine’s Critique of Theater by James K. A. Smith
-
The Beauty of Holiness: Deification of the Passions in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom by Bradley Nassif
-
Holy Tears: A Neglected Aspect of Early Christian Spirituality in Contemporary Context by Michael J. McClymond
-
The Transformative Role of Emotion in the Middle Ages: Deliverance from Lukewarm Affections by Elizabeth A. Dreyer
-
Aquinas on Sanctifying the Affections: Participating in the Life of the Spirit by Craig A. Boyd
-
Letting Go of Detachment: Eckhart’s Gelassenheit and the Immanence of the Spirit by Sharon L. Putt
-
The Bondage of the Affections: Willing, Feeling, and Desiring in Luther’s Theology, 1513–1525 by Simeon Zahl
-
“Movements of the Heart”: Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) on Affections by Klaas Bom
-
“But to know it as we shou’d do”: Enthusiasm, Historicizing of the Charismata, and Cessationism in Enlightenment England by Paul C. H. Lim
-
Orthokardia: John Wesley’s Grammar of the Holy Spirit by Gregory S. Clapper
-
Jonathan Edwards on the Affections and the Spirit by Gerald R. McDermott
Conclusion: The Affective Spirit and Historiographical Revitalization in the Christian Theological Tradition by Amos Yong
List of Contributors
Index