Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Tony Kelly (Australian Catholic Theologian) on the Fruits of the Spirit


In a book co-authored with a psychologist, Tony Kelly, a Catholic theologian who had one time was President of the Australian Catholic Theological Association, wrote the following insightful note about the fruits of the Spirit, much of which Latter-day Saints and others will also find of worth:

Fruits of the Spirit

There are at least four ways in which the symbol of the Spirit functions in Christian experience . . . First, in the Christian consciousness of the gift of God, the Spirit comes to overcome the inertia of the past – or better, of a present trying to establish its security by privileging the past as the paradigmatic golden age. The gift of the Holy Breath works against a version of ultimate reality in terms of repetition of what has been. As breaking the binding power of the past, the Spirit impels the believer into the possibilities of the future. It does not permit any return to an untroubled existence. In New Testament terms, it occasions scandal, by guiding Peter to the house of the pagan Cornelius (Acts 11). It surprises the early community with the unsettling gift of the former persecutor, Paul (Acts 9:13-15). It is the advantage that comes upon the departure of the earthly Jesus (Jn 16:7). It leads to a knowledge of things that before could not be borne (Jn 16:12-13). The symbol of the Spirit functions in opening the religious imagination to the radically, the imaginably, new.

Secondly, the symbol of the Spirit counters both the pathologies of legalism and irresponsibility. For the Spirit inspires genuine liberty (2 Cor 3:17). Whilst there is evidence of a joyous expansion of the human spirit, this is far from licentious self-indulgence. Genuine liberty is marked by the exigence of self-giving and self-sacrifice (Gal 5:16-25). The Spirit leads to a liberty which breaks the dreary security of legalism yet accepts the social necessity of law and structure for a responsible social existence (Cf. 1 Cor 8:8-10; 10:23-25; 14:26-33). The Spirit allows God to be God, beyond the idolatry of legalism or the demonic excesses of licentiousness. Once more the symbol of the Spirit creates a space for Christian liberty between the alternatives of an idolisation of law, and the demonization of liberty.

Thirdly, whilst the Spirit is associated with unity, the unity of the Spirit is not an immersion into some form of undifferentiated infantile symbiosis. Nor does it entail monochrome uniformity. The Spirit stands for and inspires unity-in-difference, by animating a community of distinct persons (1 Cor 12:12-30). As the coming of the Holy Spirit enables communication in the different languages of Pentecost (Acts 2:5-12), it is a space of unity revealed in a variety of gifts for the achievement of the common good (1 Cor 12:7), in the one Body of Christ with its different members. While the unity of the Spirit abolishes differences in race, religion, social status and gender, it does this only as much as such differences cause unredeemed isolation and aggression. It does not preclude the potential of such differences to be gifts in the one body of believers. In short, the Spirit is the symbol of gift of a self-transcending unity-in-difference.

Fourthly, the symbol of the Spirit counters the pathology of a false transcendence. In contrast to the dis-incarnate spiritual realm of religious individualism, the Spirit works in the earthly reality of history, in all the conflicts, challenges and opportunities to be encountered therein. In doing this, the gift of the Spirit inspires genuine faith with the ‘dangerous memory’ of the crucified Jesus. In the way of the cross, genuine spirituality is not a socially irresponsible religiosity, but a matter of entering into the compassion of Christ for the poor and the suffering. Such a spiritually demands solidarity with Christ and his suffering members. Without a discerning responsibility to the meanings and values inherent in Christian tradition – above all, to the word and example of Jesus – the symbolic meaning of the Spirit is vitiated (Rom 8:11; Jn 14:26; 1 Jn 2:22-25). Here the Spirit-symbol stands for the space in which history can occur, with its fidelity to the past and openness to the future. (Frances Moran and Tony Kelly, Search for the Soul: Psychological and Theological Reflections on Spiritual Growth [Strathfield, Australia: 1999], 132-34)