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,”187 we must ask whether the Spirit in this model possesses any sort of “authority” with respect to the Church. This will be discussed further in chapters three and four.
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
