After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (review)

In this inventive new monograph, Rogers attacks the notorious problem of the neglect of the Holy Spirit in historic mainstream Christian theology. Instead of turning to contemporary Pentecostalism for compensation, however, he garners a rich harvest of neglected pneumatological sources from “outside the Modern West” in order to construct a corrective thesis of some ingenuity and power. Drawing on poetic, creedal, and liturgical materials from the Syriacspeaking churches and other non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, on the twentieth-century Russian “sophiologists,” and on unusual artistic representations of the Spirit in both Greek- and Latin-speaking contexts, he seeks to examine afresh how a robustly “orthodox” understanding of the Spirit might arise from reflection on the biblical economy. The constellating theme in the book is supplied by a formula utilized by John of Damascus, that “The Spirit rests on the Son” (61: see de fide orthodoxa, 1.7). To this insight, Rogers adds his own characteristic twist, familiar from his earlier writings on sex and gender: that it is the specific job of the Spirit to “deify” the body—not only to mark that presence of the divine in the human, incarnate Christ, but to offer it thereby (“dilate” it open, as he likes to put it) to all Christian bodies.

Rogers’ aim, in the first part of the book, is to provide a systematic account of why the Spirit’s hypostatic existence in the Trinity has almost invariably been subordinated—in effect, if not in “orthodox” rhetoric—to the dyad of Father and Son. It (or “she,” as Rogers prefers, following the gendering of the Semitic languages) has been rendered either “superfluous” to Father and Son as their conjoiner (“reified,” but not obviously “personal”) or made a mere means to their “subjective” appropriation by the believer (a “distance-crosser,” 35). Who, or what, is to be blamed for this tale of pneumatological woe? Here, Rogers makes a somewhat surprising step, insisting that the problem becomes most intense as a result of “modernity.” The claim is that the “nineteenth century” created a notion of the self in which the body was shunned even as “religiosity” retreated inward (5). Schleiermacher’s understanding of the Spirit, as an ecclesial means of “human response,” thereby only led to her further demise (30). But Barth, says Rogers, ironically did no better with the Spirit (or not much better). In his Dogmatics, the Spirit is all but occluded by the Son, and is at best (in I/1 and IV/4) the divine means of the human appropriation of him. Moreover, twentieth-century Eastern Othodoxy (represented here by Schmemann and Bulgakov) did not obviously supply an antidote, despite much posturing against the “West.” What then is missing in this regrettable “modern” tale? Here, we arrive at Rogers’ central thesis: that it is the disembodied nature of “modern” pneumatology that is the overriding systematic problem to be confronted.

The second, and longer, part of the book then turns to analyze how the “resting” of the Spirit “on the body of the Son” (which purportedly resolves the difficulty) is worked out at key moments in the biblical narrative and then spread to the “bodies” of Jesus’ followers: in resurrection, annunciation, baptism, transfiguration, ascension, and Pentecost. As Rogers acknowledges, it is in this latter section of the book that he is in his “Yale” mode, seeking in the spirit of Hans Frei to delineate the “identity” of the Spirit “as a character interacting with the Son and the Father in a story” (208, my emphasis). Rogers draws at this point from an almost bewilderingly rich well of resources, pouring artistic, literary, and symbolic streams into his more strictly doctrinal brew in ways which the reader may find either intoxicating or confusing by turns. Mercifully, there is a scintillating chapter at the end (“About Face”) in which a retroactive doctrinal analysis is brilliantly performed, and...