Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God

Rating:
Summary: A Refreshing Book (with a Few Cautions)
Review: Fee's major work "God's Empowering Presence" is foundational in the area of Pauline pneumatology. This book successfully condenses the heavy exegesis of the larger work into an easily readable text. Fee has a lot of poignant and challenging things to say concerning modern-day evangelicalism's understanding of the Holy Spirit.

The greatest danger of this condensation is the tendency some readers will have to accept Fee's conclusions without first examining his exegetical work. I believe that Fee makes a number of exegetical mistakes--some minor, some major--which may lead the unlearned student astray. While the work as a whole holds up against scrutiny, his explanation of Romans 7 is forced and inadequately supported (I believe this comes from his holiness background). Likewise, he attempts to explain the fruit of the Spirit entirely in a community sense. This also comes across forced and ignores the most natural meaning of the text. (In this case, his focus on community seems to have overshadowed common sense in exegesis).

The book overall is a wonderful work and I would highly recommend it to anyone desiring to know more about the Holy Spirit. Fee's emphasis on community is refreshing and his understanding of Paul far exceeds most scholars of this day. May the Holy Spirit continue to work through this book for the glory of the Father and the revival of the church.

Rating:
Summary: A MUST read.
Review: This book is required reading

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read...definitly recommended!
Review: This is an excellent book written by an excellent scholar. This is a quick read, but that is not to take away from the fact that it offers a very deep, well rounded understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians. Some of the chapters are included by not limited to:

A "Theology" of the Spirit? - The Spirit in Pauline Theology
The Holy Who? - the Spirit as Person
A People for His Name - The Spirit and the People of God
The Ongoing Warfare - The Spirit Against the Flesh
Those Controversial Gifts? - The Spirit and the Charismata

Fee starts off profound immediatly in the Overture by saying that "...all too often our orthodoxy has been either diluted by an unholy alliance with a given political agenda, or diminished by legalistic or relativistic ethics quite unrelated to the character of God, or rendered ineffective by a pervasive rationalism in an increasingly nonrationalistic world" (Fee 1996, xiii).

His basic conclusion is that we need to allow the Spirit be free to interact with us individually: "...our theologizing must stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and recognize his crucial role in Paul's gospel; and it means that the church must risk freeing the Spirit from being boxed into the creed and getting him back into the experiential life of the believer and the believing community" (Fee 1996, 189).