Toward a Pastoral Theology of the Holy Spirit
Joseph Havens
We talk a great deal about “the priesthood of all believers”; I think we could appropriately think of “the pastorhood of all believers” in the Society of Friends. In the sense of shepherding, we are all “pastors one to another.”
The dimension of pastoral theology we are most concerned with here might be stated in this way: “the formulation of ideas regarding the Holy Spirit—the way in which It works, and the way in which we, as overseers, elders, ministers, and members of Friends Meeting, can facilitate Its working.”
Asked whether they had ever been moved by the Holy Spirit, most people would look at us askance. For many, this phrase is associated with hearing voices, and thus with psychopathology. Anton Boisen, a mental hospital chaplain who himself went through a period of psychosis, has written a great deal about the hearing of voices as a symptom which psychiatrists use in diagnosis. He tells about a Negro patient whom he knew in a mental hospital who felt he had a special channel of communication with the Man Above, as he said. Boisen talked at length with this man and felt that he had a deep spiritual sensitivity, and that his relationship with the Man Above was a great strength to him. It enabled him to endure great suffering, gave him a structure for his life, a solidity, a depth, which he otherwise would not have had. He did have the problem of using his fists too freely, but so far as Boisen could tell, this was the only serious psychological difficulty he had. The patient was not released from the mental hospital partly because he continued to communicate with the Man Above.
Boisen feels that this is a serious error on the part of modern psychiatry. Many psychiatrists assume much too quickly that anyone who hears voices is psychotic. We are living in a time and a culture in which being moved by something outside one’s conscious mind is “pathological,” it is to be questioned, and I think that many of us even within the Society of Friends are influenced by this way of thinking. We are all children of our culture to some extent, and we are influenced by the suspicions which modern psychology and other influences have embedded in our attitudes concerning feelings, intuitions, and imagination as sources of truth. Scientism puts undue stress on man’s rational faculties, and upon verification by empirical studies. Freud considered himself solidly within the scientific tradition, and was himself a great believer in the power of reason. We need to distinguish between Freud’s discovery of the importance of man’s emotional life in determining behavior, and his valuation of it. He feels that one should never be deeply influenced by one’s feelings when one is seeking truth. Emotions are always there in some sense, of course, but he feels we need to eliminate them as far as possible in our search for truth. This view has been an important ingredient in the Freudian revolution of our time, and has touched us all in one way or another.
This scientific-Freudian suspicion of the emotions is one aspect of the loss of a sense of the unity of human personality. Tillich comments on our loss of the very concept of “spirit,” with a little “s,” as referring precisely to the unity of mind or meaning and power. Our “age of analysis” has underlined and further refined the dichotomy between intellect and emotions; it values most highly the logical operations of the mind, and then goes on to consider the emotional life as “mere feeling,” an intruder in the arena of the objective intellect, where the only valid search for truth goes forward.
It seems to me essential that we take into account this cultural-psychological state of affairs in dealing with the spiritual problems of our times. A spiritual revival will not come about simply by a return to a New Testament or 17th century Quaker understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. Somehow we must bring these traditional views into fruitful relationship with the Weltanschauung of modern man, and with the new knowledge of man which has grown out of this same Freudian revolution. This is not to say that the first should in any sense be reduced to the latter two—the writer heartily dissents from this error of some liberal theology—but only that Christ must be allowed to speak in and through our culture as well as from “above it.” The writer takes the position that God, or the inward Christ, or the Holy Spirit, works through but not in opposition to the structures of physical, psychological and social reality. This permits the assertion of the great relevance of psychology for our theological understanding of God’s work in the world. Psychology, for instance, can suggest some of the conditions for the working of the Spirit within us, and perhaps help us to test the validity of what we deem to be the Spirit; it is not, on the other hand, controlling or determinative in such divine action.
Let us examine some of the marks and tests of experiences of the Holy Spirit.
The word “Numinous” comes from the writings of Rudolph Otto, The Idea of The Holy. He felt that one could not understand religion through a study of its rational elements alone, and that we needed to find categories in which to express its more-than-rational character. The “Numinous” is the word he uses to designate the experience of God’s holiness, the sense of living Presence which grasps one in any genuine religious experience. It is my thesis that something of the Numinous frequently or usually accompanies visitations by the Spirit.
One dimension of the Numinous is the feeling of the “Mysterium Tremendum,” the Mystery before which one shudders, the Unknown evoking awe, even dread, within us. It is expressed in Habakkuk: “The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the world be silent before Him.” The other dimension of the Numinous for Otto is “the Fascinans,” the attraction of the Mystery, its intriguing quality. It is that which fascinates, which absorbs one in admiration. In some of its modes this feeling becomes one of exaltation, of spiritual well-being in a sense of participation in the Divine Bliss. A frequent accompaniment of the Numinous is a sense of our own smallness, our createdness, sometimes a self-devaluation. Isaiah’s words express it: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips…” All these are responses of the total being of man to the God Who is God.
Reason can be thought of here in two senses: as the assumption of a dependable, continuous, and to some extent understandable structure of reality, which underlies our life and our experiences; and as the assumption that our lives have some sort of meaning which relates them to other people’s lives, and which gives them continuity, purpose and significance. Reason in the first sense would, for instance, cast doubt on the spiritual leading that proclaimed the physical and social laws of our natural world irrelevant to or contradicted by Jesus’ life on earth. Reason in the second sense would be called upon to test, let us say, a leading toward a particular vocation: an Albert Schweitzer would need to test his guidance to go to Africa against his knowledge of the needs of Africans, his own ability to meet those needs, and on the other hand, the needs of Europe for his gifts in theology and sacred music. Note that reason is suggested only as a way of examining leadings, not of controlling spiritual guidance. The relative weighting of reason and guidance will properly vary with individuals, and be arrived at after experimentation. In other words, tests other than reason need also to be used.
A third test, that of consistency with the considered judgment of the Meeting, and with the truth of Scripture, is well discussed in Quaker and in other Christian writings, and does not need development here.
Mistaking the secret desires of the ego for divine leadings is one of the subtlest dangers of the religious life. This is sin in its most demonic form, the spiritual pride which attempts to use the divine Spirit in the service of the ego. In certain ways modern depth psychology has documented the fact of sin, yes, even of “original sin,” more powerfully than any other secular movement. And at the point of testing divine leadings, I propose that we make full use of all that psychology can teach us.
One of the most fully documented manuals on the sin of spiritual pride is Karen Horney’s book, Neurosis and Human Growth. I want to discuss particularly the neurotic solution to life’s problems which she calls “the search for glory.”
Dr. Horney, in her discussion of the neurotic person (and I am assuming that all of us have something of the neurotic in us), points out that as a result of a pervasive anxiety and insecurity he feels less substantial, less well-equipped than many to cope with life; and thus, living in a competitive society, he feels a need to lift himself above others—to feel adequate, significant, even powerful, as he sees others around him apparently feeling. To accomplish this he gradually and unconsciously erects an “idealized image” of himself. “…he endows himself with unlimited powers and with exalted faculties; he becomes a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god.” It is natural that “each person builds up his personal idealized image from the materials of his own special experiences, his earlier fantasies, his particular needs, and also his given faculties.”
So the idealized image among Quakers, or the tendencies toward it, draws many of its pigments from the Quaker or Christian heritage, and portrays a modern prophet, a Quaker warrior of the Spirit, etc. In course of time the neurotic’s idealized self becomes more real to him than what he really is, not primarily because it is more appealing but because it answers all his stringent needs. The drive to express, or to be, this idealized self is what Horney calls “the search for glory.” I submit that in one form or another it is in all of us, that the Spirit works in spite of it, and that always we must try to distinguish between a search for our own glory and the sense of the glory of God working in and through us.
Horney goes on to delineate, as only an analyst can who has been over the long road of psychotherapy with many neurotics, some of the signs of this neurotic drive. One of them is the need of the neurotic person to perfect himself in accord with his idealized image. He cannot tolerate any lapses. He sets up a complicated system of shoulds and taboos to handle these deviations, and frequently chastises himself violently when he falls short. This very chastisement becomes of course a part of the idealization once it has taken place; it is part of the virtue of “a religious man.”
Another danger signal of the search for glory is the craving for success in the eyes of others—the need to excel, and especially to have others notice that one is excelling! Among religious people this may be the need to be recognized as the reconciler, or as the most sensitive member of the Meeting, or as the one to whom all the others come with their troubles. (A mark of freedom from neuroticism in this latter image of oneself may be the extent to which one is willing to go to others for similar help.)
Another important characteristic of the search for glory is its compulsive nature, the power of the idealized self-image to demand fulfillment regardless of any interests, wishes, or feelings which might indicate another course. This implies an external or “ego-alien” source of the drive. Since this quality has been frequently associated with “leadings of the Spirit,” self-deception is particularly easy at this point.
All of the above—the demand for perfection, the need for approval and recognition in the eyes of others, the compulsive or driven character of what we think we are supposed to do—are suggested as aids in ferreting out neurotic components in our spiritual leadings. It is quite clear that we are talking about sins long since recorded in the annals of the Christian Church. On the other hand, some persons have found, in the concepts of the idealized image and the anxiety-driven demand to fulfill it, a new perspective on the way in which their egocentric natures permeate even their loftiest spiritual ideals or leadings.
The psychological self-examination described above we can carry through before we act upon the leading, or before we share it with others. But it may well be that the real test comes after we have acted – when we come to assess, perhaps months or years later, the consequences of our acts. William James has especially stressed the importance of the results in evaluating whether or not guidance really was from God. The question is what criteria we shall use. James uses rather uncritically the values of “saintliness” as they have tended to be understood in the Christian tradition: inward peace and the capacity to endure suffering or evil, sensitivity to others, moral helpfulness, social concern, etc. Certainly, if work which we consider to be that of the Holy Spirit contradicts these time-honored virtues, it is to be questioned.
However, here too some of the contemporary psychologists may be helpful to us. There are two useful bridges between the religious ideal and the psychological one; both are discussed by Tillich. One is that it is the intention of God that each person fulfill his potentialities, “become himself.” Divine providence “drives” or “lures” all things toward fulfillment, toward their essential beings. This is a theological statement of what the psychologists call “self-actualization” or “self-realization.” There is much Biblical basis also for considering fulfilled-man as integrated and not split, as unified and not in conflict with himself. It is Christian and also modern-psychological to assume that if the Holy Spirit works within a man, It should lead him both toward a fuller realization of his given potentialities, and towards a greater unity of his faculties.
Abraham Maslow made a psychological study of about twenty-five people who, he thought, exhibited the basic characteristic of “self-actualization,” including such people as Lincoln, Jefferson, Einstein, William James, Jane Addams, and a number of contemporaries whom he could study more directly. The results, empirical though not strictly objective, are helpful to us in understanding, on the one hand, just what it means to talk about “actualizing oneself,” and on the other, some of the additional characteristics of those who have reached a state approaching self-actualization.
Another way of looking at the following points is to see them as a part of the psychologists’ definition of “human nature” as it is ideally meant to be. From a religious perspective it will not be a total definition of the nature of man; but I propose that leadings which go against these characteristics should be subject to further scrutiny. For example, a freshman college student had a religious leading to refuse to conform to generally accepted behavior in the required chapel service, and to devote almost his total time to study, with only minimum attention to his roommate and other students. It seemed legitimate to raise the question whether a leading which cut him off almost totally from his fellow human beings, thus denying a basic aspect of his nature, could really be from God.
Maslow says that self-actualizing people accept themselves, others and nature. They seem to feel at home in this world, “uniformly unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown.” He quotes Einstein: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science.” Self-actualizing people seem more able than most of us to take the frailties and sins, the weaknesses and evils of human nature as “givens” of life. This is not so much self-satisfaction or even resignation as it is the attitude of the child who “looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise.” Such people do feel bad about discrepancies between what is and what might be, or ought to be; but they are willing to look what is squarely in the face. This is what we mean by acceptance.
Secondly, self-actualizing people can all be described as relatively spontaneous in behavior, and wholly spontaneous in their inner life, in what they let into their awareness. This of course is closely related to their knowing who they are and where they are going, while most of us, torn by conflict or fear of our inner selves, simply are not aware of what we really feel and think. Their inner freedom gives these persons a “code of ethics relatively autonomous and individual rather than conventional. The unthinking observer might sometimes believe them to be unethical, since they can break not only conventions but laws when the situation seems to demand it. But the very opposite is the case. They are the most ethical of people, even though their ethics are not necessarily the same as those of the people around them.”
Maslow devotes considerable space to a discussion of love among self-actualizing persons. Growth in love would probably be accepted by everyone as a crucial “after the fact” test of a leading of the Spirit. Some of the following characteristics of love in self-actualizing people I think may be useful to us in “testing the spirit”:
Another frequently encountered aspect of the life of the self-actualizing person is what Maslow calls “the mystic experience.” Especially in sexual experience, his subjects described to him “feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space…” Maslow himself explicitly tries to dissociate this from “supernatural reference,” but he adds in another place that only one of his subjects was clearly an atheist. His disclaimer notwithstanding, there is evidence here that self-actualizing people are open to or susceptible to experiences surprisingly similar to those which in other ages have been regularly attributed to the divine.
Love has tended to be a subject studiously avoided by empirically-minded psychologists; only lately has it come within the scope of “human behavior”! The idea of “acceptance” has been extensively studied as a part of the process and end-point of psychotherapy, and represents one of the few small plots of common ground among the various schools of therapy. In general, then, acceptance of self, others and nature, spontaneity, and the capacity to form deep relationships are a few of the criteria supplied by psychology against which apparent leadings of the Spirit might be tested.
Other “tests after the fact” are: consequences in one’s role in the community, confirmation by further leadings, a clearer sense of vocation, and deeper relatedness to God. The journals of Friends are filled with illustrations of these confirmations, and many writers on the spiritual life, such as Evelyn Underhill, deal with them at some length; so we shall leave them undeveloped here.
In closing, let us stress once again that the above formulations can in no way be thought of as limiting, defining, explaining, or concluding upon the work of God in man.
The writer once tried to apply a set of categories he had evolved to the religious experiences of Martin Luther. He showed these and his analysis, to a seasoned scholar of Luther. The latter offered a comforting phrase or two and concluded with these incisive words, “But Luther shatters all your rubrics!” And so it must be with any attempt to conceptualize about the workings of the Spirit. The Spirit blows in ways and times we know not; It “shatters all our rubrics.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures In Psychoanalysis. Chapter on “A Philosophy of Life.”
Hiltner, Seward, Preface To Pastoral Theology. Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis And Human Growth.
Maslow, A. H., Motivation And Personality.
Nuttall, Geoffrey, Studies In Christian Enthusiasm, Pendle Hill. 1948.
Otto, Rudolph, The Idea Of The Holy. Galaxy Books.
Rogers, Carl R., Some Personal Formulations, University of Chicago Counseling Center. Dittoed.
Joseph Havens is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, and College Counselor on the Danforth Foundation. He is particularly interested in the relation between psychological counseling and spiritual directing.