Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit: An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today
The origins of this book came in the early 1990’s when both editors (Jim Sawyer and Dan Wallace) were facing trauma in their lives and in the lives of their families—traumas that their rationalistic theological training had left them unequipped to deal with. According to Sawyer and Wallace, “The propositions of our theology left us cold, and failed to speak vitally to the pain we each felt. Independently, as scholars trained in the evangelical cessationist tradition we came to grips with the spiritual sterility of that tradition. As we shared our personal ‘war stories’ we discovered similar trajectories in the 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.”While not endorsing what they consider to be the excesses of Pentecostalism, the charismatic movement, and the Third Wave, Sawyer and Wallace have embraced what they have tentatively called pneumatic Christianity. They contend that the way much of evangelical cessationism has developed is reactionary and reductionistic. Rather than focus upon scriptural images of the Holy Spirit as a presence deep within the soul of the believer, many cessationists have reactively denied experience in opposition to the Pentecostal overemphasis upon experience, which at times supplanted the revealed truth of scripture.