Indeed, one of the challenges for followers of Jesus is to “feel the Spirit in his
stirrings” so that they might “co-operate with the Spirit.”^207 The benefit of such
careful attentiveness to the Spirit may create “a spirit even swallowed up in
communion with God.”^208
Equally important to Ambrose’s theology of spiritual marriage is the role of
faith. Once again this necessitates the involvement of the Holy Spirit since faith
comes from the Spirit.^209 Further, within Ambrose’s teaching on prayer he contends,
“there is no grace but from Christ, and no communion with Christ but by faith.”^210 He
follows Calvin in emphasizing a strong affective quality of faith. However,
Ambrose’s perception of faith as relational and affective expands beyond that of
Calvin and is consistent with other Puritans of the seventeenth-century. In relation to
the Lord’s Supper, Ambrose maintains:
So if thus it be, that Christ in the Sacrament offers himself to come to us, let
our faith busily bestir itself in widening the passage, and opening our hearts to
make Christ way, let us strive with might and main to stretch open our hearts to such a breadth and largeness, as a fit way may be made for the King of
glory to come in, let us hasten, open, clasp, imbrace, welcome, and receive
Christ offered to us.^211
Clearly Ambrose understood that faith had two natures and while it was essential for
salvation it also possessed a vibrant relational and experimental dimension. When he
spoke of contending against the devil in a person’s “riper years” he wrote, “[f]aith
hath his change of rayments for gracious souls; sometimes it acts the soul in joy and
rejoycing, sometimes only in adherence and waiting.”^212 Closely related is Ambrose’s
(^207) Ambrose, Looking Unto (^) Jesus (^) , 1140.
(^208) Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus, 815 (incorrectly numbered as 905).
(^209) Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus, 788-9.
(^210) Ambrose, Media (1657), 469.
(^211212) Ambrose, Media (1657), 418, cf. 89.
Ambrose, War with Devils, 101.