Stress on the Spirit

"I think we are on the threshold of a whole new era in theology," says James McCord, Presbyterian president of Princeton Theological Seminary. He believes that the God-the-Father theology of the centuries after the Reformation, and the more recent God-the-Son theology of Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann and Paul Tillich are giving way in stress to the third person of the Trinity. The new emphasis, McCord suggests, will be on the Holy Spirit--"the God of the present."

The growing involvement of the churches in the secular world is the basic cause of this shift of theological sights to what is alternatively called the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete and the Comforter. Thoughtful churchmen, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to clergymen involved in the current struggle for racial justice, profess to be aware of an outpouring of God's redeeming spirit outside the confines of the institutionalized churches. In this view, many groups and individuals not associated with the churches, some of them even openly atheistic, are nevertheless struggling for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. Dutch Protestant Theologian Arend van Leeuwen suggests that God speaks to contemporary churches through non-Christian channels.

All Things New. On the institutional level, this growing concern with what the Rev. Eugene Smith, executive secretary in the U.S. for the World Council of Churches, calls "the Holy Spirit at work in the world," has led to a spate of discussion. In 1964 the meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches in Frankfurt, Germany, chose as its theme "Come Creator Spirit." Last June the first national ecumenical meeting of Methodists and Roman Catholics in Chicago had the same focus. Smith believes that the "issue will really blow open" at the next meeting of the World Council of Churches, to be held in 1968, which has picked as its subject God's promise of resurrection to all men through the Holy Spirit: "Behold, I make all things new."

The Holy Spirit has always been a recondite concept. The Old Testament prophets first spoke of ruach, the "breath" or spirit of God, which manifested itself as a wind, or sometimes as fire. The New Testament mentions the Holy Spirit 88 times variously as the "spirit of truth," the bearer of "witness," and the "promise of the Father," but gives no further definition. Not until the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the 4th century was Christian Trinitarianism proclaimed: one God in three persons--Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Contemporary religious thinkers do not seek to redefine the Spirit, but rather seek to know him through his manifestations in the world, such as the ecumenical movement, strivings for peace and social justice by men of all faiths.

Via Bob Dylan. Such was the thrust of the North American Council of the World Alliance of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches, which met last January in Atlantic City. Its report argued that "the knowledge explosion, man's seeming self-sufficiency, the 'God is Dead' theology, do not make obsolete the concept of God as Holy Spirit. Rather they reinforce the concept, making it intensely relevant today to Christian witness." The Holy Spirit, in fact, was seen as manifesting himself in such unexpected areas as the increasing number of labor disputes settled by arbitration and even through such folk singers as Bob Dylan who, perhaps unknowingly, proclaims an essential message of the Gospels in one of his ballads: "He not busy being born is busy dying."

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