Review

In God's Love through the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley, Kenneth Loyer offers a sophisticated, lively engagement with John Wesley and Thomas Aquinas on the subject of the Holy Spirit. Dr Loyer is a United Methodist pastor and adjunct professor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. His work feeds a growing stream of Methodist theology that looks for the renewal of Wesleyan theology in sustained ecumenical conversation with Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas. In this connection, it is pertinent to mention Stephen Long's John Wesley's Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness and this reviewer's Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian Perfection: An Ecumenical Dialogue. Loyer's work deepens this stream.Loyer makes two central claims in this book. First, he claims that the theology of John Wesley offers Methodists the resources for developing a theology of the Holy Spirit, the historically neglected third person of the Trinity. The development of a robust pneumatology is urgently needed because Methodist theology is imperilled. The modern turn to the subject has pushed variants of this tradition to treat theology as anthropology writ large. Searching for relevance and social impact, some Methodist theologians have tended to marginalize or secularize core Methodist doctrines like sanctification. Recovery of a Trinitarian pneumatology could prove a robust remedy for much of Methodism's theological malaise, and Loyer argues for the profoundly Trinitarian character of Wesleyan theology. Controversially, but persuasively, he suggests that Wesley's account of the spiritual senses was not motivated by empiricist concerns. ‘Wesley's chief interest in discussing the spiritual senses was to explicate the way in which they serve to facilitate the Christian's awareness of and personal fellowship with the Holy Trinity’ (39).Second, Loyer claims that the strong but largely implicit Trinitarianism of Wesley's pneumatology can be elucidated and deepened by engaging the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Substantively, Loyer helps his readers to understand Aquinas's discussion of the Holy Spirit as love. The Spirit is ‘personal love’ as love in person and ‘mutual love’ as the love that binds Father and Son. As Loyer elegantly states, ‘The Spirit is the imprint of love within God that blossoms from the unity of Father and Son’ (138). Readers will note that Aquinas's account of the Spirit belongs to the Western tradition that affirms the filioque, and although Loyer does not treat the topic explicitly, his book offers a powerful implicit argument for the Western side this disputed creedal position. Ultimately, Loyer believes that Aquinas's Trinitarian account of love can help Methodists resist the vague pneumatologies currently in vogue that sentimentalize and secularize love.Both Wesleyans and Thomists would benefit from reading this book. Loyer's study of Wesley and Aquinas is theologically and textually nuanced. His engagement of both Wesley brothers along with contemporary Methodist scholarship should satisfy the Wesleyans, and his sensitively diachronic reading of Thomas in light of his modern interpreters should satisfy the Thomists.Admittedly, on Loyer's account Wesleyans have more to learn from Aquinas than Thomists from Wesley. Such an imbalance may worry Methodist readers, but it need not be so. On the one hand, in an ecumenical exchange of gifts, it is more appropriate for the Methodist partner to affirm the beauty and goodness of the gift received from the other than to trumpet the virtues of one's own gift to the other. On the other hand, Loyer calls his readers' attention to the respectively different vocations of Wesley and Aquinas. Wesley's contribution to Christianity at large is not chiefly in the field of speculative theology. This does not make him less than Aquinas, but it does make him different. Hence, it is to be expected that an encounter between Wesley and Aquinas on the field of speculative theology will be asymmetrical. Instead, as Loyer shows, the encounter between the two is promising because it is complementary. Engaging Aquinas deepens Wesley's theology by grounding his reflections on the economy of salvation in the doctrines of the immanent Trinity and the Trinitarian missions. Engaging Wesley deepens Thomist reflections on Aquinas by illuminating the often neglected spiritual theology of the Angelic Doctor. In sum, as Loyer proposes, reading Wesley, Thomists can become more Thomistic and reading Thomas Methodists can become more Wesleyan. May it be so.

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