Book Reviews -- By: Matthew S. DeMoss

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 164:655 (Jul 2007)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss


Book Reviews

By The Faculty Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss, Editor

Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today. Edited by M. James Sawyer and Daniel B. Wallace. Dallas: Biblical Studies Press, 2005. x + 319 pp. $24.95.

The editors explain that this book grew out of their own independent experiences of personal and family trauma. In the midst of crisis they each experienced the need for “development of our understanding of the reality and necessity of the personal and existential work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Doctrine and biblical knowledge alone simply did not cut it” (p. 5). In short, they discovered that their understanding of cessationism (“that miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased with the death of the last apostle,” p. iii) was reactionary and reductionistic and was in need of modification. The result is this collection of essays, all but one written by cessationists, which attempts “to steer a middle ground between the sterile cessationism that essentially locks the Spirit in the pages of scripture, and an anything-goes approach that has characterized parts of the Pentecostal/charismatic/ Third Wave movements” (p. vi).

In the final chapter Wayne Grudem, a noncessationist, graciously responds, “What a remarkable book!. .. It gives articulate expression to a kind of. .. cessationism that rightly safeguards the primacy and sufficiency and unique authority of Scripture in guiding our lives today, but that also leaves the door open for Christians to welcome the Holy Spirit to work in ways that have not been seen frequently in cessationist churches” (pp. 284–85).

It is tempting to begin a review of this book with an extended criticism of the false dichotomy between doctrine and spirituality and of the rationalistic spirituality out of which the need for the book surfaced. But the editors do that quite well, as do several of the other essayists. One of the most endearing features of this book is that the authors freely confess the inadequacies of the pneumatology they previously held; they set the essays within a theological pilgrimage toward a more holistic and explicitly Trinitarian spirituality. An underlying theme in the book is a critique of a rationalistic approach to exegesis and theology that rejects or neglects the role of experience, personal or corporate, in hermeneutics and theological method. The editors explain that in the past their fear of the Holy Spirit, and any experience of His work was due to fear of a loss of control. “We really are not in control of our lives. The place of control belongs to

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