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That the divine wind is the Spirit of life is clear from the scriptural witness to its bringing forth and sustaining animal and human creaturely breath (Gen. 1:30; 2:7; Job 34:14–15; Ps. 104:29–30).^[41] Yet these ancient Hebraic reflections on the breath of YHWH remain pertinent for Majority World theologians. Amid rapid social change, poverty, injustice, and environmental degradation, the communal-forming, health-giving, interpersonally harmonizing, and ecologically nurturing work of the Spirit is potent, if not actually salvific.^[42] Even if some forms of pentecostal and charismatic emphasis on prosperity theology are unbalanced and the expectation that the Spirit will bring about maximal material health and wealth is unsound, the cries and prayers of the faithful for divine blessing and favor in the present life are both instinctive and in accord with the biblical testimony.^[43] The point is that the work of the life-giving Spirit has been understood perennially as having implications for human material well-being and flourishing.

Two theological points are worth noting in this regard. First, the divine Spirit bestows not only new (everlasting, eternal) life but also historical (material, fleshly) life. The life-giving Spirit thereby imbues both spiritual and creaturely vivacity. In contradistinction to the dualism between spirit and matter bequeathed by modern Enlightenment assumptions, Anglican theologian Eugene Rogers has in recent times accentuated just this material dimension of the Spirit’s character and work, in conversation with Eastern Christian theological resources.^[44] The strength of Rogers’s thesis is to highlight the working and resting of the Spirit on bodies, including the materiality of the Spirit’s primary modus operandi in the life of Christ: his annunciation, conception, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection, and ascension. Rogers’s material pneumatology is thus not materialistic but Christological: the identity of the Spirit in the light of Christ is not ethereal but palpable, tangible, and historical. Such a pneumatological construct—informed not only by the biblical witness but also by the early Syriac emphases on the feminine features of the Spirit—undermines the modernist binary of spirit as opposed to matter and illuminates the immanence of the divine breath within the fabric of created materiality.^[45]

The second point to be noted is that the prominence of the Spirit as material and creaturely life-giver begs reconsideration of the relationship between the Spirit of creation and the Spirit of Pentecost. Classical Reformed pneumatology presumes a sharper distinction between the Spirit that gives life and the Spirit who births new life—through justification and especially sanctification—in Christ. This is consistent with the Protestant scholastic ordo salutis (order of salvation) that also separates common grace from saving grace, or general revelation from special revelation. Yet even if the regenerative work of the Spirit is not denied, identification of the Spirit as life-giver undermines notions of creaturely life as being bereft of the divine breath.^[46] Again, the goal is not to equate the Spirit of creation and of re-creation or Pentecost, but to acknowledge that any hard and fast bifurcation between the two goes beyond the scriptural witness.^[47] Acknowledgment of the continuity, rather than discontinuity, between the Hebraic wind of YHWH and the apostolic Spirit of Jesus reopens old questions and raises new ones about the relationship between the older and newer covenants, testaments, and peoples of God.

Among a number of other tasks, then, a theology of the third article includes a theology of creation. More precisely, what opens up is a pneumatology of creation, even a pneumatology (rather than just theology) of nature itself,^[48] since the work of the Spirit rests not only on material bodies but also animates the very dust of the ground if not the stardust of the cosmos. Such a pneumatological and theological vision, however, is not just theoretical, but also potentially practical. The liberative, transformative, and salvific work of the life-giving Spirit in this case is not limited to the practice of spiritual disciplines but also includes the deployment of scientific, political, and socioeconomic rationalities in order to effect change and bring about the common good.^[49] Hence, when assessed as the Spirit of life, pneumatology opens up to theology’s interface with the broad scope of the scientific and anthropological disciplines. Theology of life as an inter- and multidisciplinary undertaking is here fundamentally pneumatological.^[50]