"What is lost is lostness itself."

For the British theologian Charles Raven (1884-1964), "Jesus is the Perfect Pneumatic Human Being, himself becoming in a condensed fashion the history of human pneumatic transformation.  The pneumatic core to this claim is important:  Christ himself constitutes the supreme moment in this process of Life or Spirit, his assertion within the world belongs to the world's own being, and thus his pneumatic perfection is simply a given.  Jesus' own body is therefore never truly under threat, for it is a modality of spirit-in-becoming; and with it the fullness of life itself is therefore never menaced.

     "The theodical claim in this scheme is that this movement of Christ's life constitutes our own becoming too.  By contrast, that bodies could simply be bodies, pain could simply be pain, and death simply death—as it appears to be, and as it is suffered in the descriptive fullness of [Georges] Duhamel, such that redemption is always itself unexpected grace—all this seems simply too difficult a paradox to insist upon.  If bodies are not only lived realities but realities that assert their lack of life, even in the midst of living, our own or others'—and this is at least implied by a person's history within the world—then Raven's argument loses something fundamental.  What is lost is lostness itself."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 185-186.