Saturday, November 14, 2020

"The Spirit's [only] grace is to order our 'surrender'"

. . . to, among other things, "sheer dependence and hence lack of possession and of certainty" (265); to contingency, creaturehood, suffering, and mortality; to "vapor, shadow, and, finally, vanity" (266); to the sufficiency of the very life we have been given.  Etc.  See pp. 263 ff. ("Modes of Pneumatic Life as Creatures" and following, including "Life in the Spirit:  A Scattered Definition" (pp. 282 ff.)) for a helpful summation of the themes of the whole book.

"The Spirit's grace is to order our 'surrender'", "a surrender in the deepest way to God's will and being, and thus, in Christian terms, a surrender, not in general, but concretely in the form of Christ: 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit' (Luke 23:45).  This phrase, uttered by Jesus on the Cross, could have been uttered by the [pneumatological] Whitman.  But the life of the one who uttered it could not have been embraced by Whitman.  The pneumatic rub with respect to creation lies in the form of Jesus' own life (Phil. 2:6-7):  the fullness of life is given in self-offering.  That the one who 'loves life' must 'lose it' for the sake of God, not as something worthless but as the complete ledger of its worth before God, is an anti-pneumatological claim at its root (Matt. 10:39; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:23)."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 265-267, all underscoring mine.

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