The Lord Is the Spirit. John A. Studebaker
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Church to constant reflection on the Scriptures which he himself inspired and on their traditional interpretation.169
This “postmodern” approach recognizes once again the essential community basis for the discovery of truth and spiritual life, but seems to retain the Spirit’s place in the pattern of divine authority. Oden, for example, speaks of a “postmodern paleoorthodoxy” which calls theologians to assess all texts from the historic Church that allege to be consensual Christian teaching, listening continually to the centrist interpreters of the received traditions. According to Oden, we will recognize heresy not by pure rational analysis, but “only by first knowing and sharing deeply in the language, worship, ethics and ethos of the ecumenical testimony of many cross-cultural generations of apostolic testimony.”170 The result of such a “paleoorthodox” approach seems to be a renewed focus on an experience of the Spirit within the Church that coincides with a general (though perhaps not total) respect for the pattern of divine authority. Two recent whole-book treatises on the theology of the Holy Spirit that attempt such an approach from an “evangelical” perspective include Clark Pinnock’s Flame of Love and Gary Badcock’s Light of Truth and Fire of Love.
Clark Pinnock’s Flame of Love
Pinnock’s opening concern is with the work that remains to be done regarding the recovery of “a more experiential basis for the doctrine of Spirit.”171 Pinnock asks us to view the Church from the standpoint of the Spirit, rather than as an institution or sacrament, because “this is the natural way to regard a community that was created by the Spirit on the day of Pentecost.”172 The effectiveness of the Church is thus due to God’s power rather than human competence. “The Church rides the wind of God’s Spirit like a hawk endlessly and effortlessly circling and gliding in the summer sky. . . . The main rationale of the Church is to activate all the implications of the baptism of the Spirit.”173 Pinnock adds,
My concern here is to try and recover the two-dimensionality of charism and sacrament original to Christianity. . . . The Spirit comes in power through sacrament and charism to enable the Church to participate in God’s mission of mending creation and making all things new.174
While Pinnock claims to be an evangelical theologian, his focus seems to be on the experience of the Spirit rather than on any sort of authority of the Spirit. One of Pinnock’s main concerns is to clarify the nature of the relationship between Christ and the Spirit. Pinnock tends to grant the Spirit a mission that is distinct from the mission of Christ (and thereby tend toward a “universalistic” understanding of salvation). What might we conclude about his assessment of the Spirit’s authority in relation to Christ’s authority? In chapter three we will investigate this question in light of our pattern of authority.
Gary Badcock’s Light of Truth and Fire of Love
Badcock vigorously argues that the experience of God—which is for him the primary issue in all discussion regarding the Spirit—“has not always been integrated in any meaningful way into systems of theology.”175 His concern is thus with the Spirit’s role in the spiritual life as it is experienced within the Church. According to Badcock, “one of the central arguments that will be developed in what follows is that there is a more subtle, reciprocal relationship between . . . Spirit and Church, than is generally allowed.”176 Badcock hopes that such a reformulation of the Spirit/Church relationship will mean that pneumatology might be linked to ecclesiology without necessarily being dominated by it.
Badcock provides a penetrating analysis of the history of pneumatology. In particular, he notes that Western theology seems unable or unwilling to integrate the work of the Spirit into theological thought. Badcock demonstrates that when such deficiencies exist the first result is an impoverished Church life. The Church’s theology “hardens into intellectual or moral Puritanism”177 and “ceases to be really related to the God who is the source of life.”178 Nevertheless, Badcock’s model gives the Spirit a somewhat “mystical” role in relation to the Church, a role that provokes spiritual experience. Can we discern any notion of the Spirit’s authority from this model? If so, what sort of authority does the Spirit possess in light of the pattern of authority? We will investigate this further in chapter four.
Communitarian “Postmodern” Theologies of the Spirit
Veith adds that, “The other response to the end of modern rationalism is to take the next step and deny rationalism altogether. These postmodernists maintain that truth claims and moral absolutes are nothing more than a personal or social construction.”179 This might be thought of as a strictly “communitarian postmodernism.” In this model, the denial of modern rationalism seems to coincide with a general dismissal of the need to place primary reliance on traditional sources of “authority” that emerged before the modern era (i.e., the authoritative Word of God and, secondarily, orthodox theologians and Church creeds). While these sources may be respected, the primary focus seems to be on the experience of “Spirit” (i.e., as God’s power, liberation, or presence) in the context of the Church community. Three contemporary whole-book treatises that attempt to construct theologies of the Spirit on such a “communitarian” perspective include Michael Welker’s God the Spirit, Jürgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life, and Peter Hodgson’s Winds of Spirit.
Jürgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life
Moltmann attempts to provide a “Universal Affirmation” of the Holy Spirit that can serve as “a new paradigm in pneumatology” appropriate for our time.180 Our problem, according to Moltmann, is one of experience, and particularly “the false alternative between Divine Revelation and human experience of the Holy Spirit”181 provided by dialectical theology (i.e., Barth, Brunner, Bultmann). The modern antithesis between revelation and experience only results in “revelations that cannot be experienced, and experiences without revelation.”182 Such theology presents God as “Wholly Other” and the Spirit as the “being-revealed” of God’s self-revelation. Moltmann resolves this tension in his doctrine of the Church, extolling that, as “the fellowship (koinwni,a) of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor 13:13), the Spirit “draws [believers] into his fellowship . . . into the [Trinitarian] community he shares with the Father and the Son.”183 Moltmann characterizes his worldview as “panentheism,” which begins with “the world in God and God in the world.”184 In his vision of the Church, this worldview translates into a breakdown of the distinction between the fellowship amongst the trinitarian Persons and fellowship amongst believers. Moltmann thus defines the Spirit in terms of God’s presence “as community.”185
God the Spirit evidently enters into a relationship of reciprocity and mutuality with the people concerned and—in line with this—allows these people to exert an influence on him, just as he exerted an influence on them.186
Since, for Moltmann, the Spirit amongst believers “becomes their fellowship,”