and active in healing, cleansing, and purifying them through their new birth of baptism in water, and enables their reception of the Messiah in their first Eucharist, thus accompanying their initiation from death to eternal life. While numerous biblical symbols for the Spirit are prevalent in these sources (e.g., the Spirit as fire, dove, or oil), it is the regenerative work of the Spirit that is prominent: to indwell believers, to catalyze new birth and sonship, to sanctify and bring about union with God. For these early Syriac pastors and leaders, then, this life-giving Spirit stimulated symbolic reflection about a divine motherhood that nurtured, refreshed, and purified human creatures in order that they might participate in the divine nature.[10]
The Eastern emphasis on salvation as union with God and deification has given rise to a distinctive spiritual tradition across the Orthodox world. In this framework the life-giving work of the Spirit includes first and foremost the sanctifying formation of saints, and Pentecost becomes a symbol, then, of a community devoted to the spiritual path of disciplined ascent to the divine presence from the mundane and fallen world of creaturely passions.[11] Yet this tradition of contemplative praxis has also, when explicated with certain intellectual resources informed by philosophical idealism and even gnosticism, opened up to controversial theological developments. The pneumatology of Russian Orthodox thinker Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), for instance, set against the backdrop of his Christian divine-humanity and Neoplatonic sophiology (philosophy of divine wisdom), led to charges of heresy that, although eventually formally absolved, marked his views as at least disconcerting, if not flawed and aberrant.[12] Yet some of Bulgakov’s central notions, such as the kenosis of Spirit in creation and the Spirit’s gift of love being made available as a continuing Pentecost, resonate with important pneumatological themes both East and West, even as they are both consistent with and arguably intrinsic to Orthodox sensibilities and spiritual life. If Orthodox theologians have by and large prided themselves on retrieving the patristic tradition rather than reconstructing what has been received and handed down from the ecumenical church of the first millennium, Bulgakov is exemplary of those within this Eastern Christian milieu that have attempted to creatively reappropriate inherited resources according to the pneumatological dynamic of a continuing Pentecost.
Nevertheless, Orthodox pneumatology remains largely scriptural in foundation, liturgical in orientation, and poetic in expression. Contemporary Orthodox pneumatologies generally draw from the patristic heritage and attempt biblical articulation in ecumenically relevant categories.[13] Over time, then, the main lines of Orthodox thinking about the Spirit have permeated Latin traditions and contemporary Western theologies so much so that it almost goes without saying that efforts to formulate a pneumatology relevant for the twenty-first-century global context will be deeply shaped by Eastern thought in essential respects.[14] Yet it is important not to take for granted these Orthodox resources that remind us about the feminine dimension of pneumatology as well as the intimate and irrevocable connection between theological ideas and spiritual praxis.
Contemporary Trends in the Majority World
If Orthodoxy has contributed distinctively to the texture of pneumatological reflection throughout the Christian tradition, then the emergence of Christianity as a world religion in the twentieth century has extended reflection on the Holy Spirit to the Majority World. The following in no way exhaustively summarizes the state of the discussion—the many gaps of which the rest of this book fills in—but rather highlights a few developments relevant to the constructive task ahead of us. What we will see is that Asian, African, and Latin American developments have the capacity to enrich if not complicate pneumatological thinking for the present time.[15]
The Asian context of course defies summarization, even when it comes to developments in pneumatology. It is not just that there is a diversity of thinking about the Holy Spirit across the Asian continent but also a reconsideration of what vehicles—for example, storytelling, dance, music, drama—best mediate and communicate the Spirit’s presence and activity.[16] Nevertheless, the scope of form and content is commensurate: different modalities of experiencing the Spirit lead to a range of pneumatological reflection. Limiting our focus to the Indian subcontinent at this juncture, we can see a spectrum of thinking about the Spirit, from a more traditionalist approach on the one side to more distinctively Indian versions on the other.
On the one hand, more evangelical approaches tend to parallel Western pneumatologies, both in the use of primary biblical and doctrinal categories and in concerns about overemphasis on indigenous sources believed to tend toward syncretism.[17] On the other hand, the search has been under way for more than a century for an authentic Indian theological paradigm and this has included thinking about matters pneumatological as well. At the forefront of at least this latter trajectory have been Indian theologians like Aiyadurai Jesudasen Appasamy (1891–1975), Pandipeddi Chenchiah (1886–1959), and Vengal Chakkarai Chettiar (1880–1958), each of whom has attempted to articulate pneumatological realities according to categories derived from Indian cultural, philosophical, and even religious traditions.[18] If the bhakti spirituality lends itself to understanding the Holy Spirit in terms of antaryamin, referring to the immanent and indwelling divine presence, especially in the soul (Appasamy), then yogic praxis is suggestive of the Spirit as the spiritual power, “supra-mind,” and cosmic energy of the new creation (Chenchiah), and the Vedic tradition emphasizes the relationship between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit using Brahman notions of paramatman-atman (Chakkarai). The latter runs parallel to the efforts of Indian feminist theologians to think about the Spirit in terms of power and of the Vedic sakti, the material dimension of Brahman, symbolized in Devi.[19] The challenge in the Indian context is the monistic underpinnings of Hindu philosophical and contemplative traditions that blur the distinction not only between divine and creaturely spiritual realities but also between the Spirit of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the more ambiguous spirit of the cosmic (dis- or pre-incarnate) Christ. So while there is ongoing debate about whether Christian theology in India ought to be Hinduized, the open question persists about the need for specifically Indianized features to be articulated.[20]
The way forward has to be a dialectical conversation between the received historic tradition of orthodox Christianity and Indian thought forms.[21] Approached carefully, atman, antaryamin, and sakti can be understood as “analogous to the Spirit,” and in the long run, these notions can potentially “throw light on our understanding of the Holy Spirit and evoke certain hidden aspects of Christ and the Spirit.”[22] The discussion has to proceed deliberately and be engaged patiently, however. Theological advances are usually not made overnight.[23]
The call for a more dialogical approach applies not only along the East-West axis, but also along the North-South axis. One difference when thinking about African theology in general and pneumatology in particular is that the legacies of Tertullian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo inform both traditions.[24] The former’s time with the charismatic Montanist movement may be of new relevance in the contemporary African context since what is most pressing on this front is the combination of indigenous spirit-type churches over the past century alongside, amid, and against pentecostal-charismatic movements.[25] Across the continent, then, the kind of Christianity that is most vibrant is pneumatic in sensibility, orientation, and praxis, with manifestations of miracles, exorcism and deliverance, signs and wonders, healings, and other Spirit-related phenomena. Alongside concomitant emphases on being “born again” prevalent in especially pentecostal and charismatic churches, however, there are also extensive concerns about witchcraft, the practice of which is sustained by the African cosmology and worldview. Anxieties about witchcraft hence persist across the spectrum of African Christianity, wherever a pneumatic spirituality is prominent.[26]
If evil spirits remain to haunt the living because of tragic or untimely deaths, the Holy Spirit has been suggested as the “grant ancestor”—alongside the Father as the “proto-ancestor” and the Son as the “great ancestor”—that is, as the “source of a new life, and the fountainhead of Christian living . . . [who] sustains
