God's Spirit and Revelation

Lest you think I'm neglecting my blog for frivolous reasons, I'm attempting to get a complete draft of my dissertation off to my committee by the end of this week. (If you get annoyed by sorry-I-didn't-blog/update posts, my apologies! I get annoyed by them too, if they show up too frequently. I don't expect finishing a dissertation to be a repeated event in my life, however.) In the meantime, here's what's on my mind this week (beside the dissertation, teaching, the job market, and my family and church, not necessarily in that order).

In his work Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas makes the following comment:

...it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome therefore is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith, so that all might easily be partakers of the knowledge of God, and that without doubt and error. Hence it is said: Now ye walk not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their own notions, having the understanding darkened (Eph.4;17, 18); and, I will make all thy sons taught of the Lord (Isa. 54:1, 5).

In context, Aquinas has been making the point that for all that philosophers have worked out some truths about God's existence and nature by reason alone, few people have the luxury of this kind of study, and it could never give us complete, certain results. God in his wisdom, however, has revealed himself and his purposes to us, and they are recorded in scripture.

One question I've gotten from several of my students when they read Aquinas' discussion special revelation is whether Aquinas recognizes a role for the Holy Spirit in guiding a believer's reading of scripture. I haven't studied Aquinas' material in-depth, but the review I have done doesn't seem to include this idea. Anyone know if it was present in the thought of the Protestant Reformers, or if it is a more recent idea?

Jesus says in Matthew 18:20 that when two or three gather in his name, he is with them, and I can see how you could extrapolate from that that God is present when believers study scripture together. In John 14:25-27 he promises that the Spirit will come and teach them all things/remind them of what Jesus has taught. Does this provide a scriptural basis for the idea that the Holy Spirit is a sort of scripture-study-buddy? 1 Corinthians 2: 12 shows that we are able to understand God's revelation because we have been given the spirit. Is this power to understand God and his will a general result of our sanctification, or a specific ongoing sort of prompting and dialogue with God's Spirit "in our hearts"? (Cary, remember, argues that it doesn't make sense to talk of the Spirit as a "voice in our hearts.")

Are there other scriptures that address this?

How (Not) to Hear God's Voice

This post continues my reflections on Philip Cary's book Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do, which I reviewed in the previous post. In particular, I'm interested in what Cary has to say in the first two chapters, where he talks about hearing God's voice and recognizing the difference between our own intuitions and the Holy Spirit.

Cary describes how a very honest student in one of his college classes was having trouble with the notion of revelation: it's so hard to tell if it's really the voice of God speaking in one's heart, the student explained, and if you can't tell it's God's voice, then how can God reveal anything?

Latest Read: Good News for Anxious Christians

The book: In Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do, Phillip Cary addresses a number of practices commonly advocated in Christian circles. They include things like hearing God's voice in your heart, "letting God take control" of your life, "finding God's will for your life," getting transformed, and experiencing joy. For all of us who are quite familiar with these practices, and think they're right up there at the top of the things we're supposed to do to have a healthy personal relationship with God, Cary's thesis in this book comes as a surprise, if not a shock: as they're commonly understood, these practices are without a Biblical basis, and tend to make Christians anxious rather than help them grow into a mature faith. So we don't need to do any of them. 

You might be thinking, "you're kidding me, right?"