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 and six.
Reinhard Hütter’s Suffering Divine Things
A contemporary doctrine of practical ecclesiology that seems to grant the Spirit some sort of “authority” is found in Hütter’s ecclesiology. Reminiscent of Luther, Hütter aligns the Spirit with the doctrines and practices of the Church. The Church begins with a trinitarian conception of “communio–ecclesiology,” where the Church is the fellowship of participation in the communion of the Father with the Son in the Spirit. Hütter’s concern is that the Church see herself rightly, as “a glad recipient” of God’s saving work, but also as a body that understands how this “receiving” takes place. “This receiving embodied in practices is precisely the way in and through which the Holy Spirit works the saving knowledge of God.”203 In this paradigm, Church doctrine and practice become the “mediate forms” through which the Spirit guides the Church to truth, and these truths become the “binding authority” of the Church.204 Since Hütter describes the Spirit’s actions as the “poimata” of the “Spiritus Creator,” the Spirit seems to possess a sort of “poetic authority” with respect to the local church. How might such an authority of the Spirit be discerned in light of our pattern of divine authority? We shall investigate this further in chapter six.
James Buckley and David Yeago’s Knowing the Triune God
Buckley and Yeago seek to construct an “evangelical Catholicity” that is “deeply embedded in the Luther tradition.”205 Like Hütter, who seeks to discover the Spirit’s work in the practices of the Church, these editors attempt to understand the Spirit’s work in the Church’s practice of spirituality—they “hope to know the triune God by the gift of the Spirit in the practices of the Church.”206 They want to re-focus on the Spirit’s work as that which goes beyond the modern “dividing line between the inner and the outer” (which aligned the Spirit with inward subjectively and posited the Spirit against outward practices). Instead, all aspects of spirituality must begin from “one single starting point: in the Spirit, beginning with God’s action and beginning with the Church and its practices are one beginning, in a unity in which the divine and the human are neither divided nor confused.”207 Because of the Spirit’s intimate role in the practices of spirituality, we must ask Buckley and Yeago whether the Spirit has a specific authority with respect to spirituality. We shall investigate this further in chapter seven.
Gregory Jones and James Buckley’s Spirituality and Social Embodiment
Jones and Buckley’s goal is to confront modern “spirituality,” which only “takes us out of the socially embodied world into a more inward (mystical) space.” A “socially-embodied spirituality,” on the other hand, “calls us beyond our selves to more material realities.”208 Jones develops this spirituality by looking at Bernard of Clairveaux, and concludes that,
Christian living involves a journey of learning to know oneself precisely as one who is known by God. This journey of self-knowing requires awareness of both our absence from God . . . [and] our being renewed in the divine image by God’s Spirit learned through such practices as prayer and almsgiving.209
Yeago builds on this initial approach to spirituality by showing its actualization in the Church. “The mature Luther” described the Church as “the gathered
