The Lord Is the Spirit. John A. Studebaker

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СКАЧАТЬ of Life, 217.

186. Ibid., 218.

187. Ibid.

188. Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit, xii.

189. Ibid., xii.

190. Ibid., 282.

191. Ibid., 284.

192. Ibid., 35.

193. Welker, God the Spirit, 37–38. Here Welker looks to the postmodern theology of Mark Taylor, whose “trilemma of postmodern theology” asks us “to acknowledge tradition, to celebrate plurality, and to resist domination” (footnote on M. Taylor, in Welker, God the Spirit, 21); also to the postmodern philosophy of J. F. Lyotard as developed in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

194. Bloesch, The Holy Spirit, 260.

195. In this intersubjective work, Welker concludes that “the Spirit of God, not the communion of the sanctified itself, is the power that recognizes, enlivens, and maintains the body of Christ in constantly new ways” (Welker, God the Spirit, 312). An example of such “concrete manifestations” of the pluralistic Holy Spirit is the charismatic movement—where the abundance and diversity of the gifts of the Spirit are taken seriously and the separation between community leaders and laity is broken down. Welker asserts that “speaking in tongues,” for example, was a privilege given by the Holy Spirit for healthy, pluralistic reasons: it works against abstract individualism (such as we witness in modernity), it gives rise to concrete attestations to the presence of the Spirit, and it prevents collapse into a disintegrative pluralism and relativism.

196. Welker, God the Spirit, 21–22.

197. Ibid., x.

198. Ibid., 25.

199. Fowl, Engaging Scripture, 2–3.

200. Ibid., 203.

201. Ibid.

202. Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 77 (emphasis theirs).

203. Hütter, “The Church,” 23.

204. Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, 128. Hütter adds, “As paradoxical as it may sound, the core Church practices and Church doctrine, precisely in their binding nature, are essential if the Holy Spirit is to lead the Church to perfect truth and teach it new things by perpetually reminding it of Jesus Christ” (128).

205. Buckley and Yeago, Knowing the Triune God, 2.

206. Ibid., 6 (emphasis theirs).

207. Ibid., 17–18 (emphasis theirs).

208. Jones and Buckley, Spirituality and Social Embodiment, 1.

209. Jones, “A Thirst for God or Consumer Spirituality,” 6.

210. Yeago, “A Christian, Holy People,” 108.

211. Ibid., 115.

212. Ibid., 116.

213. “Function” can be defined as “the occupation of an office. By the performance of its duties, the officer is said to fill his function” (Black’s Law Dictionary, “Function,” 606).

214. “Plenipotentiary authority” is possessed by “one who has full power to do a thing; a person fully commissioned to act for another” (Black’s Law Dictionary, “Plenipotentiary,” 1176). Oxford English Dictionary has “Invested with full power; esp. as the deputy, representative, or envoy of a sovereign ruler; exercising absolute power or authority (The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 1365). Such an authority goes beyond that of an ambassador, who simply acts on behalf of another, but includes a full authority to govern as well.

      3

      The Authority of the Holy Spirit and Systematic Theology: Part I

      The primary goal of chapters three and four is to develop a biblical/theological model that describes the nature of the Holy Spirit’s authority along with the various “realms”1 of authority possessed by the Spirit, thereby displaying the Spirit’s place within the “principle” and “pattern” of divine authority.

      Methodology

      I will attempt to do build this model by exegeting several passages of Scripture, many of which lie at the heart of the theological debates reviewed in chapter two. Regarding our principle of authority, we inferred from Patristic theology that the Spirit should be thought of as a divine Person who reveals divine authority in the world. In this chapter, we shall investigate Scriptures and theological concepts in an attempt to confirm and describe the nature of the Spirit’s divine Personhood, specifically as a Person who possesses and reveals divine authority.

      Regarding our pattern of authority, we discovered in chapter two that the “filioque theology” of the medieval Church allows us to infer the notion of the Spirit’s executorial authority—an authority to act under Christ’s authority. In this chapter we shall examine Scriptures and theological concepts in an attempt to confirm and describe this executorial authority. In the next chapter we shall examine two predominant realms where the Spirit seems to act with executorial authority.

      Hermeneutical Goals and Assumptions

      In this chapter and the next I will employ a grammatical-historical and “critical realism”2 approach to the exegetical task. First, in my exegesis of Scripture I will study specific words and particularly “speech acts” of Scripture in search of evidence for the authority of the Spirit, and will attempt to keep in mind any historical issues that may influence СКАЧАТЬ