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3 Spirit-Discourse as the Church's Self-interpretation The Spirit is the presence of the risen Christ. Since the church is essentially Christ's community, the church interprets the problems of its own life by doctrine about the Spirit. The problems of com­ munity arise in all communities; what is distinctive to the church is not the problems, but the answers imposed by the church com­ munity's specific character, that is, by the gospel. ECCLESIAL CHRISTOLOGY The church's self-understanding is intrinsically, and to a great extent histori­ cally, accomplished as pneumatology, which here functions as a sort of ecclesial christology.1 Our first task in this chapter is to trace this logic. Every community has spirit. To whatever extent you and I share a common life, to that extent you pose human possibilities that are new to me, simply by the ways in which you differ from what I already am. If these possibilities are at once surprising and fulfilling, that is, if they are liberating, you are present in my life as spirit. And just so my life also is itself spirit. If the possibilities you pose to me are in no way liberating, if you are not spirit in my life, we make no community, for the group we are has thus no space of freedom in which to conduct a moral life of its own. Indeed, every community has a spirit. For nothing in the previous paragraph changes if the "you" in it is plural; the described event is not additive. If you are two, to make with me a community of three, it is still one spirit as which I encounter you and to which I respond as spirit. And it is the same spirit to which each of you responds, when the other of you and I are the two. It is we who are spirit for each of us. These last assertions would perhaps be impossible to prove, but they must be assumed, for if they are false, if we are so shut into individuality that each of us, necessarily facing a different set of people than any other of us, thereby encounters a different spirit, there 143 8 / THE HOIY SPIRIT can be no community at all—which is the dismal analysis of many. "The spirit of America," "the team spirit," "the spirit of our family" are—we will therefore assume—individual realities. Moreover, it is not strange for the spirit of a community to be identifiable also as the spirit of an individual, in case the existence of the community depends on the presence of the individual. Thus the spirit of an academic seminar that has so developed as to make a community will not be identifiably separable from the spirit of its teacher; in earlier times no one would have been embarrassed to speak of "a master and his disciples" in such a case. We may therefore go some way in understanding the church's "possession" of Jesus' spirit without saying anything esoteric. The church, like any com­ munity, has a spirit. The risenJesus, like any living person, has a spirit. And since the church simply is Jesus' disciples, its spirit and Jesus' spirit are identical. But now,Jesus' community and the reality of its spirit differ in one decisive structure from that of other communities of master and disciples: to state the church's situation we had to insert "risen." The individual whose presence makes the church is not present in the church as its other members are. He has died; and though he nevertheless lives, by his liveliness to create the com­ munity of the church, it belongs to the very point of the proclamation "He is risen" that he is not merely resuscitated, that he has not returned to die again, that is, that he is not now an item of this age as his disciples still are. The endings of all three synoptic Gospels (taking Mark's long ending), as well as Acts' preliminary repetition of the ascension story, show the paradox (Matt. 28:16-20; Mark 16:9-20; Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:4-14). In Luke's ascen­ sion stories and in Mark, Jesus explicitly leaves this age, to be with God elsewhere; but also Matthew's concluding story is definitely of a farewell manifestation. The gloriously blunt Markan description must be quoted: "Then the Lord Jesus . . . was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand...

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