Christian Dogmatics: Volume 2

Introduction

Introduction The phenomenon we call "spirit" is both universal in human experience and universally remarked.1 Thus, in uncommon agreement, Hebrew ruach and Greek pneuma, with their synonyms and related words, have identical backgrounds and usage.2 Both initially meant "wind" and "breath," and neither ever fully lost this sense or reduced it to pure metaphor. In the uses that concern us, both evoke the liveliness of life, as the elusive and ever-moving breath, the wind that blows where it will to set still things in motion. In the world, the wind is both the dynamism in and of the world and, in its un­ traceable origin and destination, beyond the world. In us, the breath is both the motion of our own life and drawn in from and breathed out uncontrollably into the alien world beyond. Thus spirit is self-transcendence; the liveliness of each life is precisely its origin and end beyond itself. Moreover, spirit is both life in its openness to dynamism beyond itself, and the dynamism that comes on it; any Greek could have said with the Yahwist, "God . . . breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7). The Delphic oracle and the Hebrew prophets were equally "inspired," that is, blown through. Spirit, we may say, is personal being, not as "mind," knowing and leaving the other as what he or she is, but as creative, par­ ticipatory, present to and in the other. Nor does our use of such philosophically laden words as "transcendence," "personal," or "mind" create any great distance from biblical speech or, in­ deed, from similar speech in many cultures and religions. The Western philosophical tradition is here very straightforwardly taught by the Bible; such teachings as Hegel's doctrine of "spirit" as personal self-recognition in the other make a current in Western philosophy that is indebted to the Christian tradition in a remarkably uncomplicated way, whatever may happen in other currents or in the eddies between them and this one. In this locus, we can go back and forth between biblical and some philosophical language with a freedom that elsewhere might be disastrous. Humanity is spirit; there is no mode of human life so tradition-bound or torpid that we are not a wind breathed to and by ourselves, to elude our own grasp, and that we do not experience this in ourselves. Just so, God, if God 105 8 / THE HOEV SPIRIT of the living and not of the dead, must so surely be spirit that where this is fully grasped all other spirits are, over against this God, not-spirit, "flesh" (e.g., Isa. 31:3). Not only in Christian theology, the notion of spirit is a cross­ ing place of anthropology, theology, and even cosmology. The ways in which we, and perhaps other creatures, are spirit, and the rela­ tion between our spiritness and God's, are a concern of this locus in two con­ nections; others arc discussed in other loci. Of those to be discussed in this locus, one is the matter of Chapter 3; the other will be discussed in one sec­ tion of Chapter 2, but perhaps should be touched on already at this point. That we too are spirits is the possibility of God's presence to us as a spirit. Or rather, the triune God, being the mutual creative and participatory presence of Father and Son, is antecedently Spirit; and in that the triune God becomes present also to us, we too are spirit. Our reality as spirits, and our relation to God as the Spirit, is a chief concern of the Fourth Locus; here we introduce the matter only to warn against a prevalent perversion thereof, which misidentifies the subject of this locus. That God and we are both spirits can, given a certain religious motivation, be taken to mean that "spirit" names a kind of being—perhaps an invisible kind over against the material kind—which God and we share. Religion unreformed by the gospel, outside or inside the church, regularly seeks to blur the difference between God and the human self, in order to alleviate the burden of our created distinctness and its responsibilities. In the notion of "spirit" as a common essence of God and human selves, such religion finds opportunity. Both in high mysticism and in Sunday-supplement self-help, being "spiritual" can mean melting into a just so equally indistinct and undemanding God. This temptation is...