What do you think?
Rate this book
Getting Real: Pneumatological Realism and the Spiritual, Moral, and Ministry Formation of Contemporary Christians
Some reputable sociological research indicates that a surprising number of evangelical churchgoers are living out a version of the Christian life that's more informed by the values of the surrounding culture than by the discipleship teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Viewing the cause of this disturbing trend in the church to be a "discipleship deficit" that's exacerbated by a "pneumatological deficit," Gary Tyra has written a book that addresses both. In this work, Tyra encourages evangelical Christians of all stripes to become more fully aware of the tremendous difference it makes when the Holy Spirit is experienced in ways that are real and existentially impactful, rather than merely theoretical, conceptual, and/or ritualistic. Intended to be read by church leaders as well as by students in Christian colleges and seminaries, the message here is that the cure for the ministry malady currently confronting us is the recovery of a robust, fully Trinitarian doctrine of the Spirit. A pneumatological realism, says Tyra, combined with an understanding of just how important a spiritual, moral, and missional faithfulness is to a genuine Christian discipleship, can revitalize the lives of individual Christians and churches, making it possible for them to reach their post-Christian peers for Christ! Back "In this well-written volume Gary weaves together the themes of discipleship, missional thinking, and the Holy Spirit, to come up with a book that will serve to strengthen the church and enhance our witness to Jesus and his kingdom." --Alan Hirsch, Author of The Forgotten Ways, 5Q, and Untamed "Once again, Gary Tyra has delivered the goods! His long experience as a pastor and the years he has spent teaching university students have led to this significant work. He calls us to anticipate a life-transforming encounter with the triune God through the Holy Spirit." --Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. Senior Professor of Church History and Ecumenics "A superb pastoral theology--theologically and biblical informed, but accessible and geared toward ministry leaders. Tyra contends that the tangible experience of the Holy Spirit can renew the church from the vacuous moralistic deism and cultural Christianity so widespread in contemporary North America." --Steve Studebaker, Associate Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology "Gary Tyra has given us a timely treatise to effectively address a great need in the Church today--a theological reflection that will undoubtedly stimulate the disciplined mind of academia while being practical from a wealth of pastoral experiences . . . It would be a great addition to the library of the serious student of God's Word." --Dan deLeon, Senior Pastor at Templo Calvario Church Inside "Pastor-Theologian Gary Tyra encourages a real dependence on the Holy Spirit to produce fully formed disciples--for mission, morality, and spirituality. He pushes back against pastoral practice that inadvertently fails to seek the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit in the care of souls." --Bill Dogterom, Professor of Pastoral Ministries and Spiritual Formation Gary Tyra is Professor of Biblical and Practical Theology at Vanguard University of Southern California. He is the author of six previously published works, including The Holy Spirit in Mission (2011), A Missional Orthodoxy (2013), and Pursuing Moral Faithfulness (2015). In addition to his work in the academy, Tyra has pastored three churches over a thirty-year period, one of which was a church plant.
277 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 26, 2018
1 person is currently reading
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 14, 2024
Regardless of whether you consider it a significant improvement or some kind of apostatizing backsliding, it is beyond a doubt many in Churches of Christ are reassessing and reconsidering their pneumatology and how they understand the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians.
Behind all such reassessment and reconsideration remain the concerns of becoming overly “Calvinist” in terms of what one expects the Spirit to do to the Christian, or overly “Pentecostal” in terms of expressing life in the Spirit.
And yet here is Gary Tyra in Getting Real: Pneumatological Realism and the Spiritual, Moral, and Ministry Formation of Contemporary Christians arguing how many Evangelicals, even plenty of Pentecostal Evangelicals (whom he deemed “Pentevangelicals”), have themselves become functionally deist in their understanding of God and destitute in their relationship with His Spirit!
One can only imagine what he might think of a pneumatology which suggested the Spirit’s only engagement with the Christian is mediated by his or her reading and studying the Scriptures.
The author began by setting forth his thesis: Christians are called to maintain what the author deemed pneumatological realism, in which the Spirit of God is recognized as a real presence in one’s life and not merely some kind of abstraction. He compared and contrasted this pneumatological realism with the functional deism he identifies in much of what passes for Protestantism in the early twenty-first century, relying on both the Enlightenment concept of deism and the pervasiveness of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as suggested by Christian Smith et al. He then considered what pneumatological realism looks like in terms of faithful engagement in and with the Spirit in terms of one’s spirituality, one’s moral behaviors, and in accomplishing the mission of God. He concludes with suggestions about how to practically encourage and foster pneumatological realism in a local church environment. The appendix seems to be the author’s thesis on Barth and prophetic preaching.
The author does come from a Pentecostal heritage but attempts to present pneumatological realism in more ecumenical ways.
The author does well when considering how God’s Spirit may prompt people in terms of faithfulness and service and how God is able to communicate in and through people in all kinds of different ways. “Coincidences” often aren’t. Yet I wonder if the author makes a bit too much of “prophetic preaching” because of a Pentecostal blurring of the lines between the one-time apostolic witness and our later efforts at contextualizing and applying that witness to our own time and place. It would be good to heed how the Spirit might prompt us in terms of that witness and how to make it effective in the twenty-first century. We might even be able to speak of a prophetic type of proclamation, one like the prophets inasmuch as it strongly and consistently applies the truth of God to people in the twenty-first century. But such messages are not inspired; we all have our limitations and what we focus on and what we comparatively neglect; as with all preaching, it is excellent to consider how the Spirit might work in and through such messages, but do we need to attempt to sacralize them further as prophetic utterances from the Spirit? Whatever possible upside is drowned out by the possible downsides.
There is much which would commend itself for pneumatological realism: the gift of the Holy Spirit was one of the great promises of the new covenant which would demonstrate a significant contrast with what had come before, and Paul makes much of the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer. Such conversations have become far too reductive to information acquisition and distribution: some who have gone on before us seemed to think about the Spirit only in terms of making information known, and thus failed to imagine how the Spirit’s presence in life might energize and empower faithfulness in Christ. The same is true about the Calvinist emphasis and concern: yes, Calvinists went way too far in suggesting it is only the Spirit who could impart faith into a person, but imagining a person comes to faith without any spiritual influence is just as extreme as an over-reaction. Throughout the Scriptures, God works and people work; God works both in His own ways and through His servants. We are called to come to faith in Christ by our own initiative, and the Spirit will not compel or coerce us; nevertheless, do we not see, time and time again, how Paul encouraged believers to view the presence of the Spirit as the down payment of their salvation, to cultivate their relationship with God in Christ through that Spirit unto sanctification and the manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit, and to heed and follow the promptings of the Spirit? None of those things are the “speaking in tongues, prophecy, and knowledge” which would cease in 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. They remain no less important or powerful in 2024 than they were in 54.
So we do well to come to a better appreciation for the work of the Spirit of God in the life of the believer and how Christians are called to live their lives in the Spirit of God. Yet such has always, and will always, require discretion and wise judgment, discerning the Spirit of God from the various demonic spirits which would lead us astray. Making the Spirit all about information is almost a sure path to a functional deism which is bereft of the flourishing life of God in Christ through the Spirit, and it has not worked out that well for us.
Behind all such reassessment and reconsideration remain the concerns of becoming overly “Calvinist” in terms of what one expects the Spirit to do to the Christian, or overly “Pentecostal” in terms of expressing life in the Spirit.
And yet here is Gary Tyra in Getting Real: Pneumatological Realism and the Spiritual, Moral, and Ministry Formation of Contemporary Christians arguing how many Evangelicals, even plenty of Pentecostal Evangelicals (whom he deemed “Pentevangelicals”), have themselves become functionally deist in their understanding of God and destitute in their relationship with His Spirit!
One can only imagine what he might think of a pneumatology which suggested the Spirit’s only engagement with the Christian is mediated by his or her reading and studying the Scriptures.
The author began by setting forth his thesis: Christians are called to maintain what the author deemed pneumatological realism, in which the Spirit of God is recognized as a real presence in one’s life and not merely some kind of abstraction. He compared and contrasted this pneumatological realism with the functional deism he identifies in much of what passes for Protestantism in the early twenty-first century, relying on both the Enlightenment concept of deism and the pervasiveness of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as suggested by Christian Smith et al. He then considered what pneumatological realism looks like in terms of faithful engagement in and with the Spirit in terms of one’s spirituality, one’s moral behaviors, and in accomplishing the mission of God. He concludes with suggestions about how to practically encourage and foster pneumatological realism in a local church environment. The appendix seems to be the author’s thesis on Barth and prophetic preaching.
The author does come from a Pentecostal heritage but attempts to present pneumatological realism in more ecumenical ways.
The author does well when considering how God’s Spirit may prompt people in terms of faithfulness and service and how God is able to communicate in and through people in all kinds of different ways. “Coincidences” often aren’t. Yet I wonder if the author makes a bit too much of “prophetic preaching” because of a Pentecostal blurring of the lines between the one-time apostolic witness and our later efforts at contextualizing and applying that witness to our own time and place. It would be good to heed how the Spirit might prompt us in terms of that witness and how to make it effective in the twenty-first century. We might even be able to speak of a prophetic type of proclamation, one like the prophets inasmuch as it strongly and consistently applies the truth of God to people in the twenty-first century. But such messages are not inspired; we all have our limitations and what we focus on and what we comparatively neglect; as with all preaching, it is excellent to consider how the Spirit might work in and through such messages, but do we need to attempt to sacralize them further as prophetic utterances from the Spirit? Whatever possible upside is drowned out by the possible downsides.
There is much which would commend itself for pneumatological realism: the gift of the Holy Spirit was one of the great promises of the new covenant which would demonstrate a significant contrast with what had come before, and Paul makes much of the presence of the Spirit in the life of the believer. Such conversations have become far too reductive to information acquisition and distribution: some who have gone on before us seemed to think about the Spirit only in terms of making information known, and thus failed to imagine how the Spirit’s presence in life might energize and empower faithfulness in Christ. The same is true about the Calvinist emphasis and concern: yes, Calvinists went way too far in suggesting it is only the Spirit who could impart faith into a person, but imagining a person comes to faith without any spiritual influence is just as extreme as an over-reaction. Throughout the Scriptures, God works and people work; God works both in His own ways and through His servants. We are called to come to faith in Christ by our own initiative, and the Spirit will not compel or coerce us; nevertheless, do we not see, time and time again, how Paul encouraged believers to view the presence of the Spirit as the down payment of their salvation, to cultivate their relationship with God in Christ through that Spirit unto sanctification and the manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit, and to heed and follow the promptings of the Spirit? None of those things are the “speaking in tongues, prophecy, and knowledge” which would cease in 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. They remain no less important or powerful in 2024 than they were in 54.
So we do well to come to a better appreciation for the work of the Spirit of God in the life of the believer and how Christians are called to live their lives in the Spirit of God. Yet such has always, and will always, require discretion and wise judgment, discerning the Spirit of God from the various demonic spirits which would lead us astray. Making the Spirit all about information is almost a sure path to a functional deism which is bereft of the flourishing life of God in Christ through the Spirit, and it has not worked out that well for us.
April 22, 2021
First 1/3 of the book was a solid 5 for me. He pointedly and winsomely articulated the implications of the stuffy intellectualism that’s plagued the western church. The rest of the book fell short in my view. There wasn’t enough substance to his remedies for the above stated. I really had high expectations following how well he articulated the issues with purely intellectual Christianity and they weren’t fulfilled. Read at least the first 1/3.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews