The God of Jesus Christ by Walter Kasper

Author:Walter Kasper [Kasper, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441103611
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

The Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life

1. Problem and urgency of a theology of the Holy Spirit today

‘I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life’: thus begins the third section of the Christian confession of faith. Only with this final statement does the confession reach its end and completion. For the life that has its origin in the Father, and is given to us in the Son, is made our interior, personal possession by the Holy Spirit, operating through the ministry of the church. That which has its origin in the Father and its center in the Son reaches its completion in the Holy Spirit.

The statement about the Holy Spirit is, of course, also full of intellectual difficulties. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit does not play an outstanding part in the average ecclesial and theological consciousness. The Holy Spirit is the most mysterious of the three divine persons, for while the Son has shown himself to us in human form and we can form at least an image of the Father, we have no concrete grasp of the Spirit. Not without reason has he frequently been called ‘the unknown God’. Forgetfullness of the Spirit is a charge often leveled against the Western tradition in particular, and it is true that the triad, Father – Christ – Spirit is replaced, in the minds of many by the triad God – Christ – church.1 I will have occasion to discuss in greater detail the reasons and consequences of this forgetfullness of the Spirit.

The real intellectual difficulties in pneumatology are to be seen as springing not primarily from the ecclesial and theological tradition but rather from the intellectual situation of the age and its lack of ‘spirit’. The loss of the dimension and reality which Western thinking has described by the term ‘spirit’ is perhaps the most profound crisis of the present time.2 The discovery of the world of the spirit was the great accomplishment of Greek thought, and Christian theology was able to make use of it in a manner both critical and creative. In Western philosophy spirit used to be not simply one reality among others, but the truest of realities. In the philosophy of the modern age, spirit even became the dominant basic concept; spirit was for it the totality that gave meaning and unity and grounded everything else amid the multiplicity of phenomena. The spirit which permeated all reality made it possible to recognize what was one’s own in what was alien and to be at home in it. After the passing of Goethe, Hegel and Schleiermacher this philosophy of spirit suddenly collapsed. Since that time the idealist interpretation of spirit has largely yielded the field to a materialistic and evolutionary interpretation. Reality is no longer viewed as a manifestation of spirit, but rather spirit is understood as an epiphenomenon of reality, being conceived as a superstructure built on the economic and social process or as a surrogate and sublimation of man who is defined as a being made up of needs.

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