6 - PCD 8 ‘The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life’

Reading Quiz on Practicing Christian Doctrine

Pneumatology is

the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

The scriptural story of God’s work in the world entails the Spirit’s full divinity, informing the following affirmations of ecumenical pneumatology:

The Holy Spirit is in eternal relationship with the Father and the Son, and with them “is worshipped and glorified,” and so is appropriately called “life giver” and “Lord”.

In the freedom of the Spirit of God,

we are transformed and enabled to reflect God’s image and glory.

The relationship of procession, confessed of the Spirit,

is affirmed by both East and West in relation to the Father, pointing to the eternal relatedness that has no creaturely parallels, and accounting for the very being of God that is relationship.

Janet Soskice says of strategies to address a perceived tendency to idolatrously address God as a man,

that calling the Spirit ‘she’ ends up masculinizing the Father and the Son, and so strengthens an idolatrous notion of God as a gendered being.

Beth Felker Jones suggests that masculine pronouns for God are least problematic because

extending the natural pronoun of Father and Son to the Spirit keeps attention on God’s triunity and the Spirit’s personal nature.

Instead of a gnostic spirituality that denies the body, Felker Jones cites liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutiérrez, saying in effect that

spirituality belongs to the Holy Spirit, and is meant to be a concrete life lived with and before God and other human, resourced out of a rich spiritual experience.

Eugene Rogers’ question “What if the Spirit had grown boring because it no longer had anything to do with the body?” fits Felker Jones’ concern that

the Spirit loves bodies and rests on them and in them, making embodied spiritual practices vital for Christian living, and bodily sin destructive of spiritual health.

The unforgiveable sin of blasphemy against the Spirit is

the total refusal of God’s own self, so not possible for Christians forgiven by the Father through the Son and Spirit.

Felker Jones suggests that hesitancy to embrace or recognize the Spirit’s extraordinary divine power can be driven by

racism, sexism, and classism, that tempt those not on the margins to stand aloof from the claims of Christians who are from the margins over there.

According to leading mission scholar Lamin Sanneh, charismatic Christianity

is the engine driving church growth and the shift of its gravity to the global south.

If Felker Jones wants to caution against too strong a focus on post-Pentecost church history as the age of the Spirit because the Spirit is co-eternally God and always among God’s people,

she does still recognize the decisive shift of the Spirit’s work in our age as internal, ecclesial, global, and powerful.

Discernment can be simply described as

testing gifts, experiences, and new revelation by the criterion of faithfulness to God’s word.

Practicing pneumatology looks like the learning of habits of

confidence in the Spirit’s presence and trust in his power so as to open our hands to the church and the world in need of good news.