as well as the end of human spiritual destiny.”[27] This is “a kind of pneumatology from below” wherein the divine Spirit retains consanguinity with the living and mediates communication between the human and celestial domains through prayers, rituals, and periodic visitations (i.e., dreams, visions), but yet remains distinct from other ancestor spirits in being eternal in nature (rather than subject to death), in residing within, not just existing external to, human beings, and in sanctifying and enabling the fruit of everlasting life in the image of the “great” and “proto” ancestors.[28] Nevertheless if Western thought spiritualizes, soteriologizes, and eschatologizes the work of the Holy Spirit, African thought focuses on the material, physical, and socioeconomic work of the Spirit as an extension of the blessings of Christ in the present life.
Parallels between African and Latin American pneumatologies derive at least in part from the slave trade. African spirituality arrived in the New World through forced migration, and slave religion merged with indigenous traditions over the next few centuries. Against the backdrop of Roman Catholic saints, a range of ancestor spirits appeared, some more distant from but others more accessible to and engaged with the living.[29] But if African pneumatology has remained this-worldly in the material and existential sense, Latin American thinking about the Spirit has been this-worldly in the sociopolitical sense, especially in the hands of liberation theologians. The latter’s spirituality of the poor is, of course, also concerned with the materiality of salvation, but its liberative praxis seeks to change the world and its social, political, and economic structures in cooperation with the divine Spirit, “the start of creation’s road back to the Father.”[30]
Pneumatology across the Global Renewal Movement
We must also briefly survey pneumatological thinking inspired by the emergence of the global pentecostal and charismatic renewal movement in the twentieth century. If the classical pentecostal theology insisted on a sharp dualism between the good Holy Spirit and demonic local or indigenous spiritual entities,[31] contemporary pentecostal and charismatic thought is more nuanced. Led by the recognized dean of pentecostal studies Walter J. Hollenweger,[32] there is much greater awareness that the effectiveness of Pentecostalism as a religion of the Majority World derives at least in part from a spirituality that is contextualizable among indigenous cultures, cosmologies, and worldviews.[33] If there is a distinct gulf between the Holy Spirit and other spirits in pentecostal theology, the lines are much more blurred in practice, as the “principalities and powers” are never unambiguously good or bad so that healings, miracles, signs and wonders, glossolalia, or manifestations of other so-called spiritual gifts have to be discerned on a case-by-case basis.[34]
Two distinct trajectories of pentecostal pneumatology are noteworthy for our purposes: those crafted by Hispanic theologians and those in search of a global pneumatological theology. The former have engaged, not surprisingly, with liberation theological themes, urging attentiveness to how pentecostal spirituality and perspective is conducive not only for other-worldly foci but also for this-worldly soteriological concerns.[35] In each case, substantive attention is placed on socioeconomic realities, albeit the approach is informed by a deeply pentecostal and Latino(a)-Hispanic spirituality, one that is affectively shaped and that motivates a distinctive pentecostal orthopathy and orthopraxy. The goal here is not only to theorize or theologize about the Spirit, but also to nurture a pentecostal “social spirituality” through which the divine breath can transform the world.[36]
Asian and African pentecostal pneumatologies are still on the horizon. However, the quest for a global pentecostal theology is well under way, and the major developments along this line are robustly pneumatological in orientation.[37] The emphases here are not only on formulating or extending discussion on the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but on rethinking Christian theology itself, as well as its constitutive doctrines, from a pneumatological perspective. Hence pneumatological themes are woven into other theological loci, resulting oftentimes in new insight on established doctrines and formulations.[38] The intuition driving these explorations is that the pentecostal and charismatic encounter with the Spirit inspires not only theologies of the Spirit (pneumatology) but also has the capacity to expand thinking toward a more vigorously articulated trinitarian theology.
To the Ends (of the Times) of the Earth: Toward a Third Article Theology
This section seeks to press forward in part by looking backward. The goal is to contribute toward a global theology that both builds on the preceding and thinks pneumatologically with the early church,[39] in particular the third article of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.”[40] Each clause of this affirmation will serve as a springboard for engagement with non-Western and Majority World resources in order to sketch the contours of a historically rooted pneumatological theology that is nevertheless relevant for the twenty-first-century world context.
The Lord, the Giver of Life
That the divine wind is the Spirit of life is clear from the scriptural witness to its bringing forth and sustaining animal and human creaturely breath (Gen. 1:30; 2:7; Job 34:14–15; Ps. 104:29–30).[41] Yet these ancient Hebraic reflections on the breath of YHWH remain pertinent for Majority World theologians. Amid rapid social change, poverty, injustice, and environmental degradation, the communal-forming, health-giving, interpersonally harmonizing, and ecologically nurturing work of the Spirit is potent, if not actually salvific.[42] Even if some forms of pentecostal and charismatic emphasis on prosperity theology are unbalanced and the expectation that the Spirit will bring about maximal material health and wealth is unsound, the cries and prayers of the faithful for divine blessing and favor in the present life are both instinctive and in accord with the biblical testimony.[43] The point is that the work of the life-giving Spirit has been understood perennially as having implications for human material well-being and flourishing.
Two theological points are worth noting in this regard. First, the divine Spirit bestows not only new (everlasting, eternal) life but also historical (material, fleshly) life. The life-giving Spirit thereby imbues both spiritual and creaturely vivacity. In contradistinction to the dualism between spirit and matter bequeathed by modern Enlightenment assumptions, Anglican theologian Eugene Rogers has in recent times accentuated just this material dimension of the Spirit’s character and work, in conversation with Eastern Christian theological resources.[44] The strength of Rogers’s thesis is to highlight the working and resting of the Spirit on bodies, including the materiality of the Spirit’s primary modus operandi in the life of Christ: his annunciation, conception, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension. Rogers’s material pneumatology is thus not materialistic but Christological: the identity of the Spirit in the light of Christ is not ethereal but palpable, tangible, and historical. Such a pneumatological construct—informed not only by the biblical witness but also by the early Syriac emphases on the feminine features of the Spirit—undermines the modernist binary of spirit as opposed to matter and illuminates the immanence of the divine breath within the fabric of created materiality.[45]
The second point to be noted is that the prominence of the Spirit as material and creaturely life-giver begs reconsideration of the relationship between the Spirit of creation and the Spirit of Pentecost. Classical Reformed pneumatology presumes a sharper distinction between the Spirit that gives life and the Spirit who births new life—through justification and especially sanctification—in Christ. This is consistent with the Protestant scholastic ordo salutis (order of salvation) that also separates common grace from saving grace, or general revelation from special revelation. Yet even if the regenerative work of the Spirit is not denied, identification of the Spirit as life-giver undermines notions of creaturely life as being bereft of the divine breath.[46] Again, the goal
