What is "Affective Spirituality" anyway?

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In the DMIN program that I previously directed, our various cohorts generally present an affective or heart-based approach to Christian Formation and Discipleship. Many people have had questions about this thing called "affective spirituality." 

No, we didn't spell it wrong. And despite Grammarly constantly flagging the word and suggesting "effective" we use this word intentionally. Let me explain why this is.

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Western Christianity, taking seriously the mission of God, often focuses on effectiveness, measuring what we have accomplished quantitatively, asking questions such as — How many? How much? How long? Who best?

Yet the heart of God (manifested in Christ, revealed through the Word by the Spirit), from which his mission flows outward, is not centered on mere outward effectiveness or numerical expediency. Quite often his plan is advanced counterintuitively. And refreshingly, in the Kingdom of Heaven, the end doesn’t justify the means.

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Contrary to conventional wisdom, God extends his redemptive mission using the most unlikely methods and unworthy messengers. He consistently chooses the youngest, the poorest, the exiled, and the culturally powerless. God delights to make his case through the humbled and transformed hearts of those whom the world might have labeled, marginalized, and dismissed as adulteresses (Tamar, Rahab, the Samaritan woman at the well), scandalized (Ruth, David, Mary Magdalene), "just women" (the first witnesses of Jesus' resurrection), as ignorant fishermen (several disciples), scoundrels (Jacob), cheats and economic oppressors (Matthew/Levi). The Lord also transformed some of his most hostile enemies into great defenders of the faith (Naaman the Syrian, Nebuchadnezzar, and Saul of Tarsus) and he still does the same thing today. Our Triune God is more concerned about transforming our hearts by pouring his love into us by the Spirit (Rom. 5:5) than about how eloquent our sermon is, how much money we raise, or how many friends and followers we might have. Without what are our efforts ultimately judged to be ineffective and our very person found to be empty?

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Cor. 13:1-3)

The critique of our form of Christianity is not that we should do less, but that we should respond to his love more relationally than ever before. This critique is also found in the Book of Revelation as Jesus wrote (via John) to the Ephesian church...a church committed to missional effectiveness and Stoic endurance in the face of opposition. Yet they failed to notice that they had missed something along the way.

“‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. (Rev. 2:2-7 ESV, emphasis mine)

In the process of attempting to fulfill the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20), we can put it before the Great Commandment (Matt. 22:36-40). Our efforts at discipleship can become externally focused in sin-management initiatives in hopes that it will eventually be smuggled inside our hearts, instead of internal transformation in response to God's love that naturally works its way outward in our lives changing everything in its path. For Jesus said, 
     “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: 
             just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 
  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, 
                                                  if you have        love for one another.” (John 13:34-35) 

Our love testifies clearly to whom or what we serve.

In the remainder of this article, Dr. Ron Frost offers an answer to the questions about affective theology, or as he prefers to call it, “affective spirituality” which was originally posted on Dr. Frost's Spreading Goodness blog.

He writes…

“What do you mean by ‘affective theology?’ I’d never heard of it before I met you.”

It’s a fair question. I first found the label in Heiko Oberman’s The Dawn of the Reformation where he wrote of fourteenth-century Christians whose “suspicion of speculation” led them away from prior theological streams. They preferred “an affective theology in its place’’ that while not being anti-intellectual was more heart-based. It reflected Franciscan reforms and “a new longing for a comprehensive system of thought” (pp. 7-8). Older traditions were broken: reform was needed. Oberman viewed this impulse as a continuing element in later reforms.

In taking up this reform I also prefer the term “spirituality” rather than the more generic “theology” because the former underscores the Spirit’s role in the Spirit-to-spirit bond of regeneration. And the church today still needs a more comprehensive system of thought that receives the Bible as the guiding Christian resource for sound faith and practice.

Affective Spirituality has three prominent features. A simple Biblicism for one. In John chapter eight Jesus called on those who are “truly my disciples” to “abide in my word” by embracing the truth he offers to a capsized world. Second is the recognition that hearts rather than the human will or volition explain every action. This dismisses the Greek-Stoic anthropology that makes autonomous choice—the “free will”—a basis for human identity. Third, the reality of God’s Triune relational existence is central: we have been born of the Father, Son, and Spirit who pours out his inherent love “in our hearts” by the Spirit. So that a transforming love for God and neighbor is active in all who know him.

Let me touch on each of these very briefly.

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First, the Bible comes to us as God’s gift of self-disclosure. And our hearts must respond to him for faith to exist. I’ll offer my own story to illustrate this. I grew up in a Christian home with sound church training. But it was simply moral and creedal content, and that didn’t move me. By the time I reached my middle teen years, I was ready to leave it all behind. Yet at the same time, I wanted to hear from God! So I finally tried reading the Bible despite my skepticism. Then in reading the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) the text came alive! I met Jesus there as a living voice speaking through the written words.

While conversion through immediate Bible reading isn’t normative it is suggestive. Faith comes by hearing words about Christ, yet the same words can be barren for one reader and lively for another. And if we presume God—whose Spirit awakens the soul to “hear” the Scriptures in a life-giving way—isn’t being arbitrary, we’re left to locate the problem in “hard” and skeptical human hearts. And addressing that is another conversation!

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Second, we need to recognize the heart as God’s locale for communing with us—where his Spirit lives after our conversion. But despite the huge weight of heart-focused references in the Bible, the default view of the soul in most churches is that love is an act of our will rather than a response of the heart.

Listen, for instance, to the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing—an influential fourteenth-century guide to spirituality: “Will is the faculty by which we choose good after it has been approved by reason, and by which we love God … and ultimately dwell in God” (Penguin, 138). It sounds lovely but it’s not what the Bible actually teaches. The truth is that none of us seeks after God like that.

The Bible says the opposite: we only love God because he first loved us. So here’s a bold challenge: read the entire Bible through in just a few weeks and mark each reference to the heart and to the will. See where the real weight lands.

Third, we have the Trinity: God’s singular being with his three eternal distinctions. And his eternal loving communion is the basis for both creation and redemption. Yet we won’t have a sound grasp of these two actions if we haven’t explored the Bible’s Trinitarian roots.

In my own experience, it was the seventeenth-century Puritan Richard Sibbes who turned on the lights for me—his fascination with the Trinity as explained by the early Church Fathers and as applied in the relational insights of Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin was invaluable. Michael Reeve’s lively summary, Delighting in the Trinity—or, in the UK, The Good God—is a good starter for filling in this blind spot.

If we summarize the whole we have this: affective spirituality is a faith that arises in those who are assured by the Spirit’s personal witness to our hearts of God’s Scriptural promises: he loves us personally and he’s invested in transforming us into the likeness of the Son in order to share God’s love with us through all the ages to come. And as Jesus prayed in John 17, love among believers will show a skeptical world that God is alive and well.

Finally, if you aren’t there already I encourage you to open your heart to Christ’s affective ambitions. He looks for those who have a heart like his own.