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The Spirit over the Earth. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн.Название The Spirit over the Earth
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781783682577
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Словари
Серия Majority World Theology Series
Издательство Ingram
Contemporary Trends in the Majority World
If Orthodoxy has contributed distinctively to the texture of pneumatological reflection throughout the Christian tradition, then the emergence of Christianity as a world religion in the twentieth century has extended reflection on the Holy Spirit to the Majority World. The following in no way exhaustively summarizes the state of the discussion—the many gaps of which the rest of this book fills in—but rather highlights a few developments relevant to the constructive task ahead of us. What we will see is that Asian, African, and Latin American developments have the capacity to enrich if not complicate pneumatological thinking for the present time.[15]
The Asian context of course defies summarization, even when it comes to developments in pneumatology. It is not just that there is a diversity of thinking about the Holy Spirit across the Asian continent but also a reconsideration of what vehicles—for example, storytelling, dance, music, drama—best mediate and communicate the Spirit’s presence and activity.[16] Nevertheless, the scope of form and content is commensurate: different modalities of experiencing the Spirit lead to a range of pneumatological reflection. Limiting our focus to the Indian subcontinent at this juncture, we can see a spectrum of thinking about the Spirit, from a more traditionalist approach on the one side to more distinctively Indian versions on the other.
On the one hand, more evangelical approaches tend to parallel Western pneumatologies, both in the use of primary biblical and doctrinal categories and in concerns about overemphasis on indigenous sources believed to tend toward syncretism.[17] On the other hand, the search has been under way for more than a century for an authentic Indian theological paradigm and this has included thinking about matters pneumatological as well. At the forefront of at least this latter trajectory have been Indian theologians like Aiyadurai Jesudasen Appasamy (1891–1975), Pandipeddi Chenchiah (1886–1959), and Vengal Chakkarai Chettiar (1880–1958), each of whom has attempted to articulate pneumatological realities according to categories derived from Indian cultural, philosophical, and even religious traditions.[18] If the bhakti spirituality lends itself to understanding the Holy Spirit in terms of antaryamin, referring to the immanent and indwelling divine presence, especially in the soul (Appasamy), then yogic praxis is suggestive of the Spirit as the spiritual power, “supra-mind,” and cosmic energy of the new creation (Chenchiah), and the Vedic tradition emphasizes the relationship between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit using Brahman notions of paramatman-atman (Chakkarai). The latter runs parallel to the efforts of Indian feminist theologians to think about the Spirit in terms of power and of the Vedic sakti, the material dimension of Brahman, symbolized in Devi.[19] The challenge in the Indian context is the monistic underpinnings of Hindu philosophical and contemplative traditions that blur the distinction not only between divine and creaturely spiritual realities but also between the Spirit of the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the more ambiguous spirit of the cosmic (dis- or pre-incarnate) Christ. So while there is ongoing debate about whether Christian theology in India ought to be Hinduized, the open question persists about the need for specifically Indianized features to be articulated.[20]
The way forward has to be a dialectical conversation between the received historic tradition of orthodox Christianity and Indian thought forms.[21] Approached carefully, atman, antaryamin, and sakti can be understood as “analogous to the Spirit,” and in the long run, these notions can potentially “throw light on our understanding of the Holy Spirit and evoke certain hidden aspects of Christ and the Spirit.”[22] The discussion has to proceed deliberately and be engaged patiently, however. Theological advances are usually not made overnight.[23]
The call for a more dialogical approach applies not only along the East-West axis, but also along the North-South axis. One difference when thinking about African theology in general and pneumatology in particular is that the legacies of Tertullian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo inform both traditions.[24] The former’s time with the charismatic Montanist movement may be of new relevance in the contemporary African context since what is most pressing on this front is the combination of indigenous spirit-type churches over the past century alongside, amid, and against pentecostal-charismatic movements.[25] Across the continent, then, the kind of Christianity that is most vibrant is pneumatic in sensibility, orientation, and praxis, with manifestations of miracles, exorcism and deliverance, signs and wonders, healings, and other Spirit-related phenomena. Alongside concomitant emphases on being “born again” prevalent in especially pentecostal and charismatic churches, however, there are also extensive concerns about witchcraft, the practice of which is sustained by the African cosmology and worldview. Anxieties about witchcraft hence persist across the spectrum of African Christianity, wherever a pneumatic spirituality is prominent.[26]
If evil spirits remain to haunt the living because of tragic or untimely deaths, the Holy Spirit has been suggested as the “grant ancestor”—alongside the Father as the “proto-ancestor” and the Son as the “great ancestor”—that is, as the “source of a new life, and the fountainhead of Christian living . . . [who] sustains the entire line of humanity by embracing the beginning as well as the end of human spiritual destiny.”[27] This is “a kind of pneumatology from below” wherein the divine Spirit retains consanguinity with the living and mediates communication between the human and celestial domains through prayers, rituals, and periodic visitations (i.e., dreams, visions), but yet remains distinct from other ancestor spirits in being eternal in nature (rather than subject to death), in residing within, not just existing external to, human beings, and in sanctifying and enabling the fruit of everlasting life in the image of the “great” and “proto” ancestors.[28] Nevertheless if Western thought spiritualizes, soteriologizes, and eschatologizes the work of the Holy Spirit, African thought focuses on the material, physical, and socioeconomic work of the Spirit as an extension of the blessings of Christ in the present life.
Parallels between African and Latin American pneumatologies derive at least in part from the slave trade. African spirituality arrived in the New World through forced migration, and slave religion merged with indigenous traditions over the next few centuries. Against the backdrop of Roman Catholic saints, a range of ancestor spirits appeared, some more distant from but others more accessible to and engaged with the living.[29] But if African pneumatology has remained this-worldly in the material and existential sense, Latin American thinking about the Spirit has been this-worldly in the sociopolitical sense, especially in the hands of liberation theologians. The latter’s spirituality of the poor is, of course, also concerned with the materiality of salvation, but its liberative praxis seeks to change the world and its social, political, and economic structures in cooperation with the divine Spirit, “the start of creation’s road back to the Father.”[30]
Pneumatology across the Global Renewal Movement
We must also briefly survey pneumatological thinking inspired by the emergence of the global pentecostal and charismatic renewal movement in the twentieth century. If the classical pentecostal theology insisted on a sharp dualism between the good Holy Spirit and demonic local or indigenous spiritual entities,[31] contemporary pentecostal and charismatic thought is more nuanced. Led by the recognized dean of pentecostal studies Walter J. Hollenweger,[32] there is much greater awareness that the effectiveness of Pentecostalism as a religion of the Majority World derives at least in part from a spirituality that is contextualizable among indigenous cultures, cosmologies, and worldviews.[33] If there is a distinct gulf between the Holy Spirit and other spirits in pentecostal theology, the lines are much more blurred in practice, as the “principalities and powers” are never unambiguously good or bad so that healings, miracles, signs and wonders, glossolalia, or manifestations of other so-called spiritual gifts have to be discerned on a case-by-case basis.[34]
Two distinct trajectories of pentecostal pneumatology are noteworthy for our purposes: those