When I was a lad, I distinctly pictured the Trinity. The Father was a broad and benign figure, remarkably like an elder in our church. The Son was younger and slimmer, as in familiar Western portrayals of a white Jesus. The Holy Spirit was about as slim, but older, bespectacled and very solemn. He was even more remarkably like the minister of our church (save for the spectacles), whose white hair epitomized holiness. The Spirit was undoubtedly the most distant of the three as befitted, no doubt, his holiness. I should not have been surprised to learn that he was rather particular and circumscribed in his sphere of his operations. All this is far removed from the connotations and impressions now frequently abroad in relation to the word Spirit. It conjures up breadth, expansiveness, and universality, not to mention life and warmth. Should it?
In its less cryptic form, the question goes: Are the significant operations of the Spirit actually confined to the church, where Christ is known and confessed, or are they present in the world, where he is certainly not confessed and, we may say, presumably not known? At least, that is the interrogative that should form in the honest and well-adjusted Christian mind. Another will prey equally on the mind of that dubious specimen, the theologian, namely: “How do you adumbrate a theology of the Holy Spirit?” Many theologians are in the business of doing that at the moment, as attested by the recently published works by Gary Badcock, Sinclair Ferguson, and Clark Pinnock. And, although we shall not do so, we could reach further back this decade to scrutinize other noteworthy studies.1
Theologians have long lived with a dual concentration on the subject with which they are engaged and their own engagement with that subject. That is, questions of theological method are regularly interwoven with matters of theological substance either in the writing or in the reading of theological works. Even when theologians in pursuit of the Spirit look ahead or look up instead of looking sideways to see how their companions are running the race, spectators will be struck by differences of style as they head for their goal. The imagery is soberly apt. Paul reckoned that the failure of his addressees to appropriate the Spirit aright was a sign that he might have run his race in vain and wondered whether one could begin with the Spirit but be effectively deflected from the goal (Gal. 2:2; 3:3). Theologians take on themselves as sacred a task as any when they seek anew to understand the Holy Spirit.
Badcock, Ferguson, and Pinnock are all fully aware of this, and conscientiously eager to harness reflection on the Spirit to the realities of spiritual life. But in this respect, they are not all equally successful. There is unquestioned integrity in Gary Badcock’s asseverations, in the closing chapter, that “Christian theology … exists only for the sake of religious life, and in religious life, the doctrine of the Spirit is absolutely central.” Indeed, he has declared this from the beginning and during the work, but his way into the subject is via engagement with the Trinitarian discussions that are the standard fare of professional theologians, and the religious point is somewhat eclipsed by the terms of this discussion. The authorial spirit may be willing, but the academic flesh is none too weak.
There was a warning issued over half a century ago by Emil Brunner, none too well heeded by theologians, about the dangers of Trinitarian speculation.2 He was accused of wavering in Trinitarian belief, perhaps to the point of denial, but his position was actually that belief in God as Trinity is more like a terminus for theological reflection than its luxuriant arena. He may have exaggerated the point, but it was well made and worth making.
On the other hand, Badcock’s book points to the connections that can be made, if one is disposed to make them, between apparently intractable, abstract theological issues and the question that we first flagged up, on Spirit, church, and world. It is a question about salvation. Is God’s redeeming interest in the world limited in time to the church, without much qualification, or is his activity and interest as redeemer coterminous with his activity and stake as its creator?
Let us instantiate the classic case of an apparently intractable, abstract issue, the one that has historically divided Eastern Orthodoxy from Western Christianity: the filioque. Its theological form is this: Within the immanent Trinitarian life of God, does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? Nontheologians may raise a quizzical eyebrow, not knowing exactly what the question means and more than half-suspecting that theologians will make more of it than it deserves. Informed theologians may substitute the weary shaking of the head for the eyebrow routine, knowing too well what the question means and much more than half-convinced that it is a speculative dead end.
But let us abjure all body language for the moment. Supposing one holds that the saving operations of the Holy Spirit are so tied to the Word that, ordinarily, salvation comes through Scripture and proclamation. The eternal Word is the eternal Son. Does our belief about Spirit in relation to Word/Son depend at all on the Western conviction, forged in the deep mines of Trinitarian theology, that the Spirit, in his very being, proceeds from the Son as well as the Father? On the other hand, if we maintained, with the Orthodox tradition, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, but not from the Son, in the immanent Trinitarian order, would that enable us to conceive of the Spirit acting in the world in a way that does not “subordinate” him to the Word? These questions conceal a plethora of conceptual possibilities. All we note here are the contours of a shaft that runs from the speculative heights or depths of theology to the mundane depths or heights of religious sensibility.
Clark Pinnock, like Badcock, notices those contours. While not directly objecting to belief that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), he thinks it is open to misunderstanding and abuse:
It might suggest to the worshiper that Spirit is not the gift of the Father to creation universally but a gift confined to the sphere of the Son and even the sphere of the church. It could give the impression that the Spirit is not present in the whole world but limited to Christian territories. Though it need not, the filioque might threaten the principle of universality—the truth that the Spirit is universally present, implementing the universal salvific will of Father and Son. … In my view the phrase diminishes the role of the Spirit and gives the impression that he has no mission of his own. It does not encourage us to contemplate the broad range of his operations in the universe. It tends to restrict Spirit to the churchly domain and deny his presence among people outside. It does not encourage us to view the divine mission as being prior to and geographically larger than the Son’s. … It undercuts the idea that Spirit can be active where the Son is not named and supports the restrictive reading of the axiom “Outside the church, no salvation.”
But if it is in the gift of the theologian to bring the apparently abstract to bear on the certainly concrete, it is also his or her merry prerogative to leave us wondering how we should proceed to answer the question we first put. We might here observe the three authors severally at work.
Ferguson works through the biblical data methodically, allying its objective matter to the soteriological concerns of the classical Reformed tradition. He writes with exegetical care and theological clarity, adhering to the perceived best in that tradition, but doing his own work, not parasitic on a borrowed biblical theology. On page 191, he appears to raise his head when he states that talk of personal regeneration, when there is a whole new creation to be consummated, is like maintaining one’s view of the Spirit’s operations from the lower slopes of a high mountain. Yet it is only after two further chapters that the title of the concluding chapter, “The Cosmic Spirit,” promises the elevation portended in that announcement:
What is the relationship between the created order of things and the redeemed order? … If he is the creator Spirit, can we also speak of him as the cosmic Spirit, so that God’s purposes for the world as such, not merely for individuals, or indeed for the church, will be brought to consummation through his ministry?
The answer comes swiftly:
When we consider this emphasis on the cosmic and universal ministry of the Spirit in the light of the explicit statements of the New Testament, we immediately encounter a surprising datum. The New Testament places the Spirit and the world in an antithetical, not a conciliatory, relationship.
The Spirit is present in the world, but in the form of restraining mercy and kindness, not saving grace. This said, in four pages, the book concludes with a summary of the eschatological cosmic work of the Spirit.
It is no part of Ferguson’s theological task either to engage deliberately with much on the modern theological scene, on its broad front, or to ponder the specific manifestations of human experience, a point that appears most clearly in his references to twentieth-century Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism. The strength of the book is its robust biblicism, if we may use that word with its favorable connotation. But, texts cited to illustrate the negative or antithetical relation of world to Spirit, we are left with the fact that the Spirit is “the executive in ordering creation” and “the executive of the powerful presence of God in the governing of the created order”; the scope of his redemptive operations in time appears severely circumscribed.
Can we dispense with a fuller theological account of this? I think not. One must go beyond the citation of Scripture to a rich account of its coherence. Conclusions on the limits of the redeeming interest of the Spirit should not be derived just from biblical references to the Spirit. We need both a larger theological framework and a concomitant hermeneutic. Of course, one might then come to the same conclusions as Ferguson does—but persuasively. And should it be protested that we are asking for aminisystematics and not a monograph on the Spirit, so be it, if we are being presented with such big conclusions. We can cut it in different ways, but Ferguson surely conceives the theological task too narrowly.
At the other end of things, Badcock’s most specifically biblical work is done by the time he reaches the end of chapter 1, called “Spirit in Biblical Perspective.” Thereafter, he pursues “The Patristic Consensus,” “The Filioque Controversy,” and “The Reformation Tradition” before engaging with modern theology in the train of a transitional chapter on “Experience of the Spirit.” The theologian, on this account of things—or at least, on this performance—must integrate the outlines of biblical theology or theologies into an effort to appropriate the tradition of historical reflection in an interconfessional ecumenical dialogue with modern theologians. The strength of the work is the appearance of roundedness: genuine concern for biblical data, the history of theology, the contemporary systematic task, and practical spirituality.
A general concluding chapter, which promises a bit more than it delivers, after the author has been lured into speculative theology, impinges on some of the things that divide Ferguson and Pinnock. Badcock cites Kasemann and Bultmann with disapproval, for they “dissociate the Holy Spirit from the spiritual generally in human life,” maintaining that “the work of the Spirit has nothing to do with the ordinary features of human existence, or with human dignity,” a stance Badcock connects with an otherworldly view of the kingdom of God, a kingdom “totally discontinuous with all human moral idealism.” Badcock discerns, inter alia, a theologically deficient doctrine of creation behind the position he rejects. He admits that the “exegetical merits of the case [for so viewing the kingdom] are beyond the scope of this study.” There is more to this than lack of space. The author feels the freedom to rest his theological case on rather selectively broad theological principles. Badcock surely conceives the theological task too abstractly.
To say that Clark Pinnock’s method of approach is somewhere in between the other two is to sacrifice truth to orderliness. His approach is just different. It goes in neither for relatively detailed exegesis, nor for relatively close engagement with modern theologians. It is part of a project toward a nondeterministic theology. The theological treatment is thematic, characterized by a sense of the dynamic movement of the Spirit and of rejoicing and celebration in his presence. The great strength of the work lies here, in its depiction of a Spirit who deeply attracts, his saving grace extended wide, wide as the ocean of the world. We become aware that the whole theological enterprise is grounded on a perception of God.
The word perception is used advisedly. Theologians might agree on a given list of divine perfections, such as holiness, love, justice, power, wisdom, and lovingkindness. But they may as certainly differ on what mercy means or whether and to what extent love is a controlling perfection. Moreover, differences may be elusive, rooted in a person’s “sense” of God, as it were. Such differences are not easily resolved. Stark exegesis is fundamental, but it will not get us all the way. Hermeneutical schemes will differ and will not always be proposed or rejected sheerly on the basis of exegesis. Further, Scripture offers something like a portrayal of God and not just propositions about him; different perceptions here are not easily adjudicated by recourse to an assumed and perspicuous textual objectivity.
Now in order to make his case, Pinnock needs maximal care, since he is overtly challenging a strong tradition that apparently “restricts” the saving operations of the Holy Spirit to the church. If he can be caught out on matters of exegetical or theological rigor, the case will appear to many to be lost by default. That would be a pity since the position he maintains deserves careful consideration, whether or not eventual acceptance. But the rigor is lacking. Portions of Scripture are often quoted more in the presumption that they make a point than in the demonstration of it. Scottish readers will regularly tend to a “not proven” verdict.
Pinnock admits that only a handful of texts connect Spirit and creation positively, but he insists on their importance. Some of his texts refer to the presence of Spirit as a life-giving force, in the broad sense of animation, but their scope does not clearly extend to the domain of extra-ecclesial soteriology. The texts provide a kind of springboard or impetus for looking at things a certain way; they allow us to have “a broad sympathy for detecting the presence of God everywhere we look and fighting off dark thoughts about God’s absence.”
This is a call for an operation of the theological imagination. Now, no doubt there is room for imagination as well as inference in theology, and Pinnock explicitly owns the liberty for theological experiment. But it should be mounted on the best argument available, and not substituted for it. Pinnock’s theology of the Spirit is sketched out in the service of a general aim to unify creation and redemption, but the argument is not screwed down firmly enough in exegesis, so we are not assured that the craft in which he takes his theological flight was secured sufficiently on the ground prior to takeoff. Pinnock surely conceives the theological task too impressionistically.
It does not strangely warm the critic’s heart to pick on these drawbacks. To repeat: the issues at stake, particularly in relation to Spirit and salvation, particularity and universality, are very important. My point is that none of these studies—all of which are well worth reading, written by able theologians in pursuit of the Spirit—has resolved them.3 True, they do not equally aim at it in the same proportions. What shall we conclude? Perhaps we must await another. Perhaps we need a cooperative effort. Perhaps resolution will not come in a study peculiarly devoted to the Spirit. How can we possibly say which it shall be? For the Spirit blows where he wills.
Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the editor of Themelios and the author most recently of Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press).
1. Two that come to mind are Jurgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life (London: SCM, 1992) and Michael Welker’s God the Spirit (Fortress, 1994). Badcock curiously fails to refer to this latter work in the bibliography or the index to his volume, though there is a reported citing of it hiding in one of the footnotes. Ferguson makes no reference either, though this is less surprising because of his general lack of engagement with modern theology. John McIntyre has also produced The Shape of Pneumatology (T&T Clark, 1997), but although the volume everywhere evinces the author’s deep concern for the proper place of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer and the church, it is a less substantial contribution to the subject than the other volumes mentioned.
2. E. Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (London: Lutterworth, 1949). In the context of this article, I must be excused the necessity of offering a detailed defense of this point. In the course of making it to professional theologians, I should certainly offer some concessions, without surrendering the basic claim.
3. The reader of this article may justifiably suspect that its writer has not done so, either.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
