Shape of Pneumatology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, The

The Shape of Pneumatology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. By John McIntyre. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997. 304 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

I attend a men's prayer group consisting, surprisingly, of Episcopalians and Pentecostals. At a recent meeting, the subject of the Holy Spirit came up. An elderly Episcopalian observed that he had never really given the Spirit much thought; he had always believed in God and Jesus, and figured that the Spirit could as a result be "taken for granted." To this a young Pentecostal objected: how could we truly depend on the Spirit to be guiding and ruling our lives if we paid the Spirit no attention? Those theologically unschooled Christians raised the crucial question. How can you pay attention to this, the "shy" member of the Trinity, if the Spirit is characterized precisely by binding others together, or by being the unperceived medium in which the Son reveals the Father to us? On the other hand, how can the Spirit be a co-equal Person with this lowest of profiles?

John McIntyre is addressing just this question in his The Shape of Pneumatology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The book is the third in a series, having been preceded by studies of Christology and soteriology. in each case, McIntyre employs a method organized around the idea of "shape." By this he means starting with the given of a discipline, which would include in this case the diverse references to the Spirit in Holy Scripture, the major models by which this information has been organized throughout the tradition, and finally some sense of the means by which the models are employed and evaluated. In the case of the present book, McIntyre offers a careful, learned, sometimes technical, but generally useful survey of interpretations of the doctrine of the Spirit, particularly in the Reformed tradition.

Yet McIntyre's book is also driven by_a deep pastoral interest in the contemporary Church as well. He opens the book with the venerable Puritan question whether today's Church has 'betrayed" the Church of the apostles. Though he concludes that such a statement is too strong, he does observe that the early Church's palpable and ubiquitous sense of the presence of the Spirit directing its life is sadly missing. By contrast we are left, he contends, with the Solomonic choice between the pentecostal emphasis on certain phenomena and a desiccated orthodoxy in the mainline churches. How can historical and systematic theology help to discern a third alternative?

The Shape of Pneumatology is an extended reflection on the tradition, and so one must glean McIntyre's conclusions along the way. In hearing the tradition again he shows how one can move past the impasse of pentecostal and mainline by grasping how the persons of the Trinity are neither to be separated nor elided. In this light one can see how they have distinctly prominent roles in creation and salvation, but always and essentially in concert.

Beyond this basic point McIntyre offers, often in passing, some analytic insights and constructive proposals. At the heart of the contrast we have mentioned above is the traditional distinction between the economic and the immanent Trinity, between the activity of the triune God in the world, and the eternal relations within God in Himself. For some the distinction bears in itself the seeds of trouble, but insofar as it lies at the very heart of the original point and development of the Trinity, it is unavoidable. McIntyre perceptively observes that the distinction represents, implicitly, a "transcendental argument," in other words, that the immanent Trinity is the condition for the possibility of the working of the Persons of the Trinity we see in creation and redemption. So the logic of the Trinity of Persons moves from what can be observed in the economy of salvation, back to what must be true so as to make that economy secure and efficacious, and then on once more from God in Himself to God "for us."

But what does -all this have to do with the Holy Spirit? First of all, McIntyre suggests that, within the range of the traditionally doctrinally permissible, different emphases may prove more useful for the immanent and economic Trinities. While we can understand the Spirit as the "bond of love" within the one God in Himself, a greater emphasis on the "social" dimension of the Trinity@ and hence of the Persons, including the Holy Spirit, as "separate and independent personalities" (p. 209) may be appropriate for the latter. Within the limits of orthodoxy, the combining of two root metaphors may not only be permissible but required.

Secondly, McIntyre suggests on several occasions that the distinct personhood of the Spirit should be found precisely in its enabling self-abnegation. He refers to the possiblity of a "kenotic pneumatology" at one point, and also cites with appreciation (and also criticism) John V Taylor's original idea of the Spirit as the "go-between" who is always invisible as the medium in which perception and agreement takes place. What if the very personhood of the Spirit in its distinctiveness makes the question of its prominence or reticence unhelpful?