Pneumatology and Ecclesiology: Fundamentals of My Understanding
Starting Point: Speaking of the Spirit Without Possessing Him
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit stood in the shadows of theology for a long time. Today interest is considerable, yet discourse about the Spirit has not become any clearer as a result. “Spirit” is often made to serve for almost anything: enthusiasm, the spirit of the age, or the sense of community within a group.
My starting point is therefore a distinction. The Holy Spirit is God and not a property of the human being. The Spirit is neither a principle by which reality might be explained nor a disposition that one could acquire. Whoever speaks of the Spirit speaks of a counterpart who cannot be placed at our disposal. This requires restraint, because every discourse about the Spirit risks appropriating him. It also requires clarity, because an indeterminate discourse about the Spirit ultimately says nothing at all. A sound pneumatology can be recognised by the fact that it casts the whole of theology in a new light, including the doctrine of the human being. The number of references to the Spirit is not decisive.
The Spirit as Event and as the Spirit of Christ
The Spirit works in encounters. Something breaks into a life that was not there before and transforms people. I therefore understand the Spirit as event: a reality that comes towards us from the very object of faith and that we cannot produce ourselves.
This event is not arbitrary, for the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. He does not lead beyond Christ to new revelations but makes present what has happened in Christ. This guards against a free-floating doctrine of the Spirit that declares every experience to be an experience of the Spirit. It also guards against the Spirit becoming a mere appendage of Christology. It is precisely in this binding that he is the God who gives life, awakens, and illuminates.
What remains open is how far this event extends: whether it concerns only believers or all human beings. Here theology may hope and pray without raising claims and without imposing limits. The Spirit is free, even with regard to the boundaries we draw.
The Spirit as the Bond of Love
Within the framework of trinitarian faith, I understand the Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son. A bond of peace can be conceived impersonally; a bond of love cannot. To understand the Spirit in this way is to take his personal reality seriously.
This has consequences for human existence. The Spirit draws human beings into God’s relationship without deifying them. In so doing, he protects human existence and bestows freedom. This freedom is not a property but a gift, one that comes from outside and yet sets free what is most proper to human beings. At the same time, I caution against a reduction: where there is talk only of forces and energies, the trinitarian shape of theology threatens to collapse into a binitarian structure. The Spirit is not a force alongside God but God himself.
Spirit and Prayer: The Way of Life as Petition
Because the Spirit cannot be placed at our disposal, he can only be implored. The invocation “Come, Creator Spirit” is therefore more than a pious exercise. It says something about our relationship to God: we are dependent. The freedom of Christians is not a property they possess but something they receive again and again.
This has ethical consequences. Gratitude and readiness to serve can be neither compelled nor practised as a technique. They arise where people ask for the Spirit and receive him. An ethics shaped by the Spirit therefore does not reckon with a ready-made repertoire of right conduct. In this way it guards against moralism and against an activism that exhausts itself because it seeks to accomplish everything on its own.
The Discernment of Spirits
Wherever the Spirit is spoken of, the church must also be able to discern. The New Testament calls for the testing of spirits. A church that forgets this becomes susceptible to anything that calls itself spiritual. The Spirit renews the capacity for judgement: he sharpens the eye for the difference between the holy and the unholy and protects against powers that seek to dominate human beings.
In an age of religious plurality, this is important. The search for spirituality is a need that the church must take seriously. But not everything that presents itself as spiritual is the work of the Spirit of God. The Spirit is not the possession of any one group and cannot be tied to particular forms of experience. Theology therefore seeks dialogue with the many forms of Christian experience of the Spirit while insisting that the Spirit is the Spirit of God.
The Church as Event
From this doctrine of the Spirit follows a particular understanding of the church. The church is not an institution that one simply has but an occurrence: it is by happening. Wherever the Spirit gathers people who acknowledge the Lord in freedom, church comes into being. It lives neither from its organisation nor from the consent of its members but from the one who assembles it.
This occurrence has a visible form. The congregation is the earthly-historical form of existence of Christ: people come together, listen, pray, celebrate worship, and act. A church that existed only invisibly would not be a church. I share the warning against an ecclesiastical docetism that pretends the true church hovers above all forms and frailties. At the same time, the church never dissolves entirely into what can be seen and measured of it. It can be described sociologically, but such a description remains flat. A third dimension belongs to the church, one that is perceived only in faith: it is God’s work and not our possession. For this reason, the confession of faith in the church must be a critical one, aware also of shame, questions, and grief.
The Church in the Interim: Eschatological Publicity
The congregation lives between the first and the second coming of Christ. In this interim it is both strong and weak. It is strong in the certainty of living from Easter and moving towards the future. It is weak because it does not possess this reality but can only believe it, and remains dependent on the Spirit.
This is where the notion of eschatological publicity finds its place. The church has its own public space, one that is determined not by the majorities and fashions of the present but by God’s future. It need not create this space; it has been given to it. When it celebrates worship, it stands before the one who holds power, and thus appears differently from the spaces in which power is negotiated and legitimised. This space frees the church to form a counter-space in which different standards apply, and to keep open the question of human dignity.
The Church and Power
The church has structures, offices, and decision-making procedures, and it needs them. But its power is derivative. The only independently legitimate power in the church is that of its Lord; everything else is service. A twofold task follows. The church must shape its order so that it enables participation, limits power, and makes decisions transparent. And it must examine itself before criticising others, for a church that denounces abuses of power in society while tolerating them in its own ranks forfeits its credibility.
That the Spirit blows freely is no argument against order. The order of the congregation is itself worship: a resistance against disorder and chaos in trust in the Lord of the church. The Spirit works not against form but within it, without being bound to it.
Profile Without Exclusion
In a plural and polarised society, the question of the church’s identity arises anew. People seek spaces of belonging, and this is legitimate. A church without a profile becomes interchangeable. A church that derives its identity from excluding others contradicts its own foundation. Those who live from the hope of God’s open future need not secure their belonging by shutting people out. They can be clear about what they live from and open to everyone who wishes to join.
Summary
For me, pneumatology and ecclesiology belong together:
- The Spirit is God, neither a principle, nor the spirit of the age, nor a habitus.
- The Spirit is event and the Spirit of Christ: he makes present what has happened in Christ and remains free.
- The Spirit is the bond of love and thereby protects human existence.
- The Spirit is implored: petition is the form of life of faith and the foundation of ethics.
- The church is event and visible form, and does not dissolve into its form.
- The church has its own public space, eschatological publicity, which frees it from the sway of fashions and majorities.
- The church exercises critique of power, first of all upon itself, because its power is derivative and serves.
- The church has a profile without exclusion: clear in what it lives from, and open to all.
A church that lives from the Spirit stays with its own cause and, precisely in this way, serves the world.