The Holy Spirit in the world today

Graham Tomlin, Jurgen Moltman, Ken Costa and Rowan Williams

Q & A with Moltmann, Costa & Williams

Miroslav Volf

I've spent today with friends and colleagues from the Diocese at the conference on 'The Holy Spirit in the world today' organised by St Mellitus College and held at Holy Trinity Brompton.

It has been a lengthy (made longer by a station evacuation at Holborn) but very fruitful day hearing from some of the most interesting and stimulating contemporary theologians including David Ford, Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf and Rowan Williams.

The day got off to the best possible start with a wonderful homily from Rowan Williams in which he spoke of the Holy Spirit as desire or longing to become the new humanity for which we have been created by God. Quoting St Symeon - "Come, you who have become yourself desire in me, who have made me desire you, the absolutely inaccessible one!" - and Mother Maria Skobtsova - "either Christianity is fire or there is no such thing" - he argued that the Holy Spirit is the desire in us to be where Christ is - God's child - and to become Christ-like - self-emptying. True freedom, he said, is freedom for a full humanity. Full humanity is Christ-shaped. Freedom is kenotic - for self emptying - humanity overwhelmed by the energy of gift.

By contrast Ken Costa seemed to me to provide only a lightweight comic turn between the heavyweights with a contribution which had plenty of jokes but was light on illustrations of his theme that the Holy Spirit was active in the world of work and economics. Philip Ritchie and Graham Hamborg however assured me that that message was a necessary one for those who tend to view the Spirit as primarily working through the Church and, to be fair to Costa in the later Q&A with Moltmann and Williams he did provide examples to back up his argument.

Moltmann, like Williams, was simply wonderful. A brief initial interview by Costa revealed the humanity which informs his theology and then he spoke on 'The Church in the power of the Spirit'. His perspective is a European theological voice not commonly heard in Church debates within the UK which is informed by the destruction of state Christianity that occured in Europe following the First World War but which is only slowly occuring in the UK. As a result, he is comfortable seeing the Spirit's initiative in and the need for the Church to ally itself with human rights organisations and Greenpeace, alliances over which much of the UK Church still agonises or resists. He emphasised the extent to which his theology had been a response to world events - The Theology of Hope was a response to Germany after the War and The Crucified Christ a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King - and an attempt to resource the Church for ministering in the light of those events.

'Think globally, act locally' is a lesson that the Church can inhabit and so he began with stories of the Church in Germany and his own church of St Jacob's Tübingen. This is a church which has moved from being a church for the people (religious caretaking) to become an inviting, participatory community church of the people where the gifts of all are trusted. The opposite of poverty and property, he argued, is community because in community we discover our true wealth the spirit of solidarity through which all our needs can be met. Such spirit-filled communities are seen in the fulfilling of Joel's prophecy at Pentecost and the descriptions of the Jerusalem Church in Acts. Such spirit-filled communities are bridgeheads to new life on earth where righteousness will dwell.

He posited three paradigms of Church - the hierarchical, the hierarchical community and the charismatic community - which equated to the Father above us, Christ with us, and the Spirit within us. The Church is come of age, he suggested, so we are no longer just God's servants or his children but, his friends. Peace with God, however, makes us restless in the world and a revolutionary Christiaity will both call the world evil and seek to change it, ultimately by reconciling the cosmos. The Spirit of God is no respector of social distinctions which divide us and awakens democratic energies for a new humanity.

Graham Cray drew on John V. Taylor's The Go-Between God to identify criteria for discerning the work of the Spirit in leading God's mission and the part that the Church plays within it. Discernment involves learning of what God is doing and learning to do it with him. This means understanding the shape of the Spirit's ministry. The Spirit is essentially relational and arranges the meaningless pieces of reality until they suddenly fall into shape. The Spirit anticipates in the present, things which are still to come. The Church is, therefore, to live in each culture as an anticipation of the future. Christ-likeness is the ultimate test of the Spirit's presence and where the Spirit is making Jesus more real neither caution nor convention or reputation ought to make us resist his possession of us. The Spirit is manifest in the translation of Christ in all times and cultures, so that he is multiply incarnate.

Cray's specific criteria for discernment were: charism, character, content, characteristics, community, cultivation, and experience. However, each of these is open to interpretation as was illustrated by his response to a question regarding the Episcopal Church which he thought to have departed from scripture. The actions of the Episcopal Church in relation to the LGBT community could be understood within Cray's criteria as a discerning of a move of the Spirit in a direction that subverts previous understandings of scripture, as in his biblical example from Acts of Peter's re-evaluation of his understanding of God's mission in response to the Spirit's work in Cornelius.

Paul Westin helpfully summarised Lesslie Newbigin's understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in mission. Newbigin blazed a trinitarian trail in thinking about mission as he responded to the changing thinking seen at the major mission conferences of the twentieth century. For Newbigin pneumatology is mission, as the gifts of the Spirit are always for mission. It is the Spirit which takes the initiative bringing the Church after, in contrast to the Church-centric focus of the 1938 mission conference in India. The Spirit brings new forms of Church into being and by doing so works towards unity which is the deepest expression of the Gospel.

Miroslav Volf posed the key question in a globalised world of whether and how religious exclusivists can live comfortably with each other i.e. is monotheism by its very nature exclusivist? He answered this question by arguing that Christian monotheism contains democratising and universalist aspects which justify political pluralism, including the Spirit of justice and of many languages/cultures, so that a consistent religious exclusivist ought to be a political pluralist.

Having set his question up in an interfaith context I felt that Volf should have explored an interfaith answer and was disappointed that he unpacked only a Christian answer. Others thought that this decision was appropriate to the nature of and audience at this conference. As a side issue he also suggested that the example of religious conflict in India indicates that the pluralism of Hinduism is no more effective at warding off exclusivism than is monotheism. This would have had my friend, the Hindu educationalist, Jay Lakhani fuming at the suggestion that his faith should be defined by its worst and therefore least representative practices (an approach that we rightly resist when used by Richard Dawkins' to stereotype Christianity), particularly when he views the pluralism of Hinduism as the solution to religious exclusivity (a position which has an imperial aspect as it requires other faiths to reframe themselves in Hindu terms). All this in my view indicates a need to examine this issue within the worldview of each of the monotheistic faiths, although this too might involve remaining within, as opposed to challenging, the exclusivist mindset.

David Ford summed up a part of what the conference has covered to date with the following questions: What is real humanity in the Spirit? How do we relate the world and the Spirit? How do we shape the Church globally in the Spirit?

Ford also gave these key elements in wise and creative theology inspiered by the Spirit:

• retrieval of the past and of scripture;
• engagement with God, the Church and the world;
• mastering the disciplines of thought;
• wrestling with mediums to come to and to commuicate new understanding.

In his experience intensive conversations had led to the greatest breakthroughs. Conversation and dialogue is therefore a key location for the movement of the Spirit in the world.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hillsong United and Tim Hughes - Consuming Fire.