Peter Hodgson’s Winds of Spirit
Hodgson develops this book by first saying that “theology is drawn and driven by winds of the Spirit,”188 and then by building an entire “constructive Christian theology” around his postmodern understanding of the Spirit. For Hodgson, “God is not an isolated supreme being over against the world. Rather, embodied by the world, incarnate in the shapes of Christ, God becomes a concrete, living, relational God, ‘Spirit.’”189 Borrowing from Tillich, Hodgson’s God is not a Being (which to Hodgson is a term developed by modern metaphysics) but a power of being by which all beings are. Amazingly, Hodgson’s modified Trinity includes God, the world, and Spirit, and this Spirit is “not something that exists in advance as a supernatural person of the Godhead.”190 Rather, the Spirit is seen as a panentheistic “primal energy” that “takes on the shape of many created spirits; not just the spirits of living persons but of ancestors and animals as well as plants, trees, rivers . . .”191
Emerging from this understanding of the Spirit is Hodgson’s idea of “ecclesial community,” whereby the very purpose of the Church as a liberating experience of God comes forth. “My proposal is that [constructive theology] makes the direct object of its concern neither the practice of faith nor the texts of faith but the experience that gives rise to faith—a revelatory experience having its source and referent in God.”192 Using Hegel’s ecclesiology, Hodgson expands on Augustine’s idea that the Holy Spirit is the “bond of love” and as such the “soul” that indwells and quickens the mystical body. The Spiritual community is “transfigured intersubjectivity,” distinguishable from all other forms of human love and friendship. As a result, what sort of authority does Hodgson’s model grant to “Spirit?” We shall investigate Hodgson’s views further in chapters three and four.
Michael Welker’s God the Spirit
Welker’s book is an explication of a postmodern pneumatology that emerges from the Holy Spirit’s “pluralism.” A theology of the Spirit is best developed against the background of “postmodern sensitivities,” which abandon the assumption of a “unity of reality” and instead “assume a reality that consists of a plurality of structural patterns of life and of interconnected events.”193 Upon this grounding a “realistic theology” is birthed, one that allows us to gain a recognizable reality of the Spirit and theological access to the Spirit without sliding back to the problematic thinking associated with modernity—namely that a single system of reference could put God and God’s power at our disposal. According to Bloesch, “[Welker] theologizes in a postmodern way, avoiding totalistic metaphysics and respecting differences in cultural ethos,” and this makes his pneumatology essentially a “Spiritology from below” that begins with human experience.194 What results is a postmodern ecclesiology, one in which the Spirit’s main work is to reveal God’s power in the formation of pluralistic communities.195
The Spirit reveals God’s power by simultaneously illumining different people and groups of people and enabling them to become not only recipients, but also bearers of God’s revelation. The Spirit reveals the power of God in strong, upbuilding, pluralistic structures. This pluralism is not a disintegrative, Babel-like pluralism, but constitutes enriching, invigorating force fields. It is not bound up with an abstract, uniform individualism that reduces everything to an unrealistic, abstract quality, reducing everything to “the ego,” the subject, the decision-maker, the consumer, or the payee.196
Welker finds most theologies of the Spirit yield to the tendency to “jump immediately to ‘the whole’ [and thus remain] stuck in the realm of the numinous, the conjuration of merely mystical experience, and in global moral appeals.”197 The pluralism of the Spirit, on the other hand, is more “realistic” because the promises of the outpouring of the Spirit give witness to a specific sensitivity to differences. Unity of the Spirit continues to exist within such pluralism, but “becomes a reality not by imposing an illusory homogeneity, but by cultivating creaturely differences and by removing unrighteous differences.”198 In this way the Church is depicted by Welker, first and foremost, as a pluralistic society of believers. Still, the Spirit’s work in the Church seems to only possess a functional authority. Does the Spirit truly retain any sort of “governing authority” with respect to the Church? We shall investigate this further in chapter four.
Other Contributors: “Practical” Theologies of the Spirit
Since this work also has to do with the Spirit’s authority in practice, I will also briefly examine the works of several other contemporary theologians that wrestle with practical issues in the Church from the perspective of the Holy Spirit’s work therein. These theologians and their recent works include: Stephen Fowl’s Engaging Scripture and Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism (on hermeneutics); Richard Hütter’s Suffering Divine Things and Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism (on the practices of the Church); James Buckley and David Yeago’s Knowing the Triune God and Gregory Jones and James Buckley’s Spirituality and Social Embodiment (on Christian spirituality). These contemporary theologians will in turn become ideal “dialogue partners” for chapters five, six, and seven.
Stephen Fowl’s Engaging Scripture
Fowl builds his hermeneutics on a specific view of authority, placing primary emphasis upon the Spirit’s work within the Church. Fowl begins his “essay in the theological interpretation of Scripture” by saying that, “for Christians, Scripture is authoritative.”199 As his thesis develops, it becomes clear that, for Fowl, authority is essentially ecclesial, in that it “recognizes that the Spirit has been and still is at work in the lives of Christians and Christian community.”200 The Spirit seems to possess ultimate authority in hermeneutics, an authority to assist local church communities to reach crucial theological decisions based on “communal consensus.”201
For Fowl, the Spirit seems to display some sort of “hermeneutical authority” with respect to the community. What sort of authority might this be? We will investigate this further in chapter five.
Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism
Grenz and Franke present a hermeneutical model that understands the Church to be a “socially constructed” reality through the Spirit’s work of “world construction.” As individual members of society deem their knowledge about the world to be “objective,” so religion involves a legitimization of the socially-constructed world that places a society within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference and gives participants a sense of being connected to ultimate reality. This “world construction” today does not lie in the text itself but in the Spirit as he speaks through the biblical texts and, in doing so, “performs the perlocutionary act of creating a world ”202—which is precisely the eschatological world in the Church, the world God intends for creation as disclosed in the text.
For Grenz and Franke, this Spirit who constructs the Church community seems to display some sort of “authority” in the construction process. What sort of authority is this? We will pick up this discussion in chapters five