"For Christianity it's not everything or nothing. It's some particular thing. This.
Sin and all, it's this. What
those who choose to live require, getting back to my opening (and it seems to
me we are all asked to choose today), what we require is not another world, but
the finality of a choice for this world that somehow stands beyond and
beneath our decisions, not only as an enabling power or an inspiration
(which the Holy Spirit certainly is), but as a revelation, as an establishment. What we require, that is, is an Amen to
our life that, in its very utterance, establishes its worth, in the face of all
that clamors for its inadequacy. And
such an Amen is, we know, a Person: the
faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. The beginning of the creation itself. An Amen who comes, who speaks and teaches,
who lives as a creature, and does indeed die as one in particular ways
and forms, and, in so doing, takes to himself what is just this life as
it is created and so oddly laid out, and deformed by us to be sure, but
nonetheless in the heart of God. Those
who choose to live require first the choice that God has made to live this life
that they were given. And so I
confess: there is no other model,
figure, form, or truth than the incarnate person of Jesus Christ.
"So if the Holy Spirit does not resolve the
world as it is, and I think demonstrably, existentially, . . . [if] the Spirit
demonstrably does not resolve the existential realities of our life as we live
them[,] . . . if the Spirit doesn’t do that and if pneumatology has mistakenly
insisted that that's at the center of what the Spirit does, we must move
more deeply into the world itself, and into the primary choice for the world
that God has made, and in the way that God has made it in Christ. We shall there discover the form of that
choice as that which is therefore most truly of the Spirit. . . . [T]he
pneumatological foundations for theology . . . must [therefore] resist
theories, metaphysical frameworks, and instrumentalist promises and
fantasies. They must instead approach
the Spirit as the God who establishes the world as it is, such that the form of
life that Jesus lived and died within it is of God. Utterly.
And of course the world changes.
We know that. It will, we can
assume and imagine, someday disappear.
While we can assert the Spirit’s life as somehow wrapped up with all
this change, wherever it’s going, the purpose of pneumatology cannot be to
specify the ways of transformation as such. . . . these attempts are profoundly
off the mark. Just such intractably unspecified
change is part of the world we cannot fathom.
Nor are we meant to. And, in
fact, drives too many to run from it altogether. Rather, pneumatology, austerely chastened, as
I would like to imagine it, is, like philosophy, not meant to change the world,
but to speak truly of what it is. In
theological terms, to speak truly of the world’s worth, and of human life’s
worth, precisely given in the life lived by the Son of God. It is not for me to offer an apology for
life. God already has. Such that I can only wonder that I am worthy
of it, and must certainly confess that such a life, therefore, is enough.
"In conclusion I want to suggest that any contemporary
theological anthropology resist the allures of modern pneumatology. And that any theology of the Holy Spirit tie
itself to the forms of human creatureliness in the way our Lord did, very
specifically. There are dogmatic reasons
of truth, I think, for doing so. But there
are also the deep demands of compassion that dictate such parameters. And dogmatics and compassion are two sides of
the same valuable coin."
"diversity is hardly controversial in academia. Everyone is in favor of it. I am, too. Perhaps a few think that my retirement may enhance SPU's diversity[; that w]hen I leave the faculty will be less white, less male, and much younger. Be assured that I am not offended. After all, when I became an Episcopal priest after having been ordained by the Free Methodist Church, I made both denominations more theologically conservative. This summer I will move to Idaho, at which time I will make two whole states more politically liberal. Not bad, huh?"
