Sensation and Spirit: how disability reframes Protestantism on the Holy Spirit’s work

This paper turns to means the Holy Spirit employs to orient one to Christ’s person-forming work. Drawing out the narrative significance of bodily limits, as depictions of one’s need for God’s help, God’s power to provide, and enjoyment of divine gifts, shows that Protestants, like Luther, Wesley, and Calvin, deployed figurative language and metaphors of disability. These narrative deployments emphasize the Spirit’s use of sensation to stimulate awareness of divine activity. Indeed, analyzing disability’s textual function reveals how *hearing* the Word, the *taste* of faith, and pleasing *visions* construct a sensorial habitus. The Spirit, then, uses this habitus to carry one to the Word, restore relationships, and inspire fellowship. In contrast to criticisms of the Protestant tradition as overly intellectual and disinterested in sensation, the paper concludes to gesture towards a pneumatology that unearths Protestantism’s surprising compatibility with disability justice through its attention to sensation.

The method is experimental. By weaving together textual analysis with autobiographical voice, the paper uses narrative metaphor to perform what the argument unfolds. Personal stories of disability placed side-by-side a close reading of theological texts underscore the role sensation plays in shifting attitudes, that finitude and sin impede perception of the Spirit’s efficacious operations, and disability’s usefulness as “narrative possibility” that not only “signals the appearance of God” but also God’s hiddenness (Dunn, 2022). The implicit methodological insight here is that extended metaphors often avoid symbolic reduction because they both capture the complexities of disabled experience and refuse to use the symbolic as explanatory of experience. Even though representations of disability recurringly cause harm, narrative metaphor *can* operate as a theological strategy that allows for creative textual use of disability without instrumentalizing actual disabled people (Schalk, 2017). For instance, in this paper, disability not only depicts lived experience but also brings the significance of sensation for the reception of grace to the fore.

In other words, story acts as an analytical lens and foretaste which grounds the paper’s two sections. In the first section, experiences of autistic noise in worship open onto readings of three passages from classic Protestant texts. First, I attend to Luther’s insistence on our intellectual ineptitude and faith as a “gift of the Holy Spirit and a work of God in our hearts” (LW 26:88). The Holy Spirit operates through sensation to turn the whole of human life towards Christ. Second, I turn to John Wesley’s distinction between the Spirit’s witness and human testimony. Whereas the Spirit works on human hearts to make manifest Christ’s own qualities in the individual, human testimony is prone to error; one’s own intellectual powers and “clouded vision” hinder one’s perception of the Spirit’s witness (Wesley, 1767). Finally, I consider Calvin’s discussion of the Holy Spirit’s work through scripture. Calvin privileges the mode of God’s speech over the content of the words. God adopts inarticulable speech to comfort, console, and draw one close. Calvin’s rendering of God with a lisp, I suggest, pushes against the assumption that grace is always emphatically announced (I.13.1). These Protestant sources use the language of disability to emphasize that openness to the Spirit’s influence extends to the whole of human life. In each case, as much as the Spirit stimulates the intellect, it is just as much at work on one’s affections constructing a sensorial habitus. 

Following another personal story of non-verbal witness, the second section develops the constructive proposal. I argue that attention to the Holy Spirit amplifies a Protestant sense of sensation’s value for transformation. The Holy Spirit works through interactions with the material world and internal feeling to draw individuals to Christ’s righteousness. Then, the Spirit imparts an implicit awareness of one’s utter dependence on God for salvation (assurance). This assurance is a divine gift that washes over the individual and radiates throughout one’s life. As the scripture says, “I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:6). The benefits of this constructive proposal are its inclusion of the whole person in the reception of grace, emphasis on materiality, attention to variation within responsiveness, and the independence of receiving grace from incorporation in a specific community, creed, or ritual practice.

The paper concludes that Protestantism motivates a view of the reception of grace that, surprisingly, doesn’t absent the intellectually disabled from religious experience. In fact, attending to human limits through narrative metaphors of disability allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point, so as to “rewrite” the stories told about Protestantism and sensation.

The paper makes a series of critical interventions. First, by attending to Protestant accounts of grace through stories of disability, this paper deploys methodological playfulness and "promiscuity" to show the significance of sensation for the Holy Spirit’s transformative work (Reichel, 2023). Second, my shift away from an emphasis on human relationships in the stories that I tell encourages theologians to attend to interactions with objects, sounds, and sights as Spirit-filled manifestations of Christ’s formative activity on the whole person. Third, the reconsideration of sensation pushes the current scholarly conversation towards more expansive understandings of the modes of interaction that the gift of Christ’s own life makes possible. Importantly, the constructive material will demonstrate continuity between strands of the Protestant tradition and recent liberationist discourses. Finally, I hope this paper opens up an avenue for constructive conversation between Lutheran and Reformed theologies, disability theory, and the material turn in religious studies.