God’s Love through the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley by Kenneth M. Loyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: God’s Love through the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley by Kenneth M. Loyer Justus H. Hunter God’s Love through the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley by Kenneth M. Loyer (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 295 pp. “DISTINCTIVE YET COMPLEMENTARY” is how Kenneth Loyer, in his learned study God’s Love Through the Spirit, characterizes the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley. Distinctive, in so far as Wesley’s “practical theology” foregoes the gilding of scholastic Trinitarian theology. He does not consider the distinction between persons, processions, and relations, or essential, notional, and personal concepts, as does Aquinas. Yet, Loyer contends, Wesley’s soteriology complements Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology. God’s Love Through the Spirit is a work of Methodist theology. It is a retrieval of John and Charles Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification, enhanced by Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on the Holy Spirit. That is, it is a Methodist reception of St. Thomas. But it is also an offering of Methodism, and the Wesleys, to contemporary followers of the Angelic Doctor. As Loyer puts it, his Methodist soteriology “appropriates and amplifies” St. Thomas. The text has three phases. First, two chapters outline challenges internal to Methodist theology, centering around the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification. Next, Loyer gives a detailed systematic analysis of Aquinas’s pneumatology focused around the concept of love. Finally, Loyer constructs a way forward for Methodist soteriology by appropriating Thomas’s teaching on the Spirit and love. The result is a rigorously constructed Wesleyan soteriology and pneumatology in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas that should garner interest from both Catholic and Methodist theologians. The provocation of God’s Love Through the Spirit is a deficiency in Methodist pneumatology. Loyer discerns a twofold problem descending from the lack of a developed doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Methodist theology. First, while Methodists have long emphasized their doctrine of grace, in particular sanctifying grace, they have failed to connect that doctrine to the Holy Spirit. As a result, Loyer contends, Methodist language of grace has become generic and Methodist theology “tends to end up reflecting the human spirit and its multifaceted quest for liberation more than it reflects the Spirit of God, who as the source of all life actually gives the human spirit its true freedom” (3). This dilemma he refers to as the “secularization” of sanctification, which is attended by a reduction of pneumatology to politics. [End Page 958] The question, of course, is what to do. The dilemma derives, in part, from a related problem in the reception of John Wesley. Wesley left the theological “foundation” of his teaching on sanctification implicit or undeveloped. Thus, the reception of his teaching has been prone to several misreadings, which Loyer calls variously “perfectionist,” “static,” “anthropocentric,” or “individualist.” Whatever misreadings exist, Loyer finds a single solution: to render explicit the implicit theological foundation of Wesley’s soteriology. That is, he seeks to connect Wesley’s teaching on sanctification to Trinitarian theology: “Viewing (sanctification) through the lens of trinitarian theology clarifies its appropriately theological content and orientation while illuminating Wesley’s emphasis on the immediate and ongoing work of the Holy Spirit sanctifying those in Christ so that the image of God is more fully restored in their lives” (18). Loyer ties this proposal to a broader concern in Wesley and Methodist studies for a recovery of Wesley’s teaching on holiness and perfection, most notably by William Abraham and Theodore Runyon. He therefore begins with a return to teaching of the Wesleys on sanctification and perfection. Weaving together the sermons of John and the hymns of Charles, in keeping with the best practices of Wesley studies, he shows an implicit trinitarianism. Loyer contends that making explicit, and augmenting, that Trinitarian theology promises to correct the misreadings he presents in chapter 2 and prevent the pneumatological deficiencies outlined in chapter 1. In order to express and augment the implicit trinitarianism of John and Charles Wesley, Loyer turns to Thomas Aquinas. Chapters 3 and 4 follow the sequence of articles in Summa theologiae I, question 37. Loyer first considers Aquinas’s position in article...