Читать книгу The Spirit over the Earth - Группа авторов - Страница 17

It is well known that the addition of the filioque clause (the Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son)^[51] by the Roman Church has been a perennial source of dogmatic division between East and West. While there are many implications that follow from retention, or not, of the filioque, for our purposes one important question for pneumatology in the global context relates to how to understand the economies of the Son and the Spirit in relationship to the religious traditions of the world. On one reading, assertion of the filioque subordinates the economy of the Spirit to that of the Son and, concomitantly, defines the soteriological work of the triune God ecclesiologically (the church being the body of Christ); in this case, then, any consideration of the religions would either be ecclesiological (subsuming the diversity of religions within the sphere of the church), or without theological warrant altogether. An alternative approach, apart from the filioque, insists on the economies of Son and Spirit as related and yet distinct, as the two hands of the Father, to use Irenaeus’s metaphor; following this line of thought, if the religions were to be understood in relationship to this pneumatological economy, then their domain would be related to but yet also distinct from that of the church, defined Christologically.^[52] The need to attend to the world religions on their own terms, not just understand them according to Christological or even ecclesiological categories, is what motivates this proposal. Simultaneously, application of the Irenaean metaphor of the two hands of the Father to the theology of religions not only risks bifurcation of the economies of the Son and the Spirit but also, from an Orthodox perspective, fails to secure the interconnections between (a pneumatologically rich) trinitarian theology and ecclesiology.^[53] The problem, of course, is that to ask about whether the religions are salvific in Christian terms is a nonstarter since the religions invoke neither Christ nor the biblical way of salvation—that is precisely why they are non-Christian traditions; yet defining them in relationship to Christ (as needing to be fulfilled by Christ or as lacking Christ’s saving power, for instance) misrepresents the religious other in defining them negatively, precisely what Christians hope to avoid in terms of their own representation to people of other faiths.

Any pneumatological and trinitarian theology of religions will need to give both a Christological and an ecclesiological account as part of a comprehensive approach. The latter locus related to the church will need to resist triumphalism while also empowering appropriate Christian missional praxis. Toward this end, a pentecostal theology of hospitality, based on the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh, empowers members of the church to be hosts of those in other faiths amid the presence of the welcoming Father even while enabling them to be guests of religious others just as Christ sojourned in a far country and was received by strangers.^[54] This involves bearing witness from out of Christian commitment even as it discerningly welcomes the gifts of others as potentially enriching and even transforming Christian self-understanding. Such a pneumatological praxis may also have the capacity to reconcile all people—indeed, “everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him” (Acts 2:39b)—to the Father according to the image of the Son even if the trinitarian identity of God is not clearly perceived by those in other faiths not fully or formally initiated into the Christian church.

That the life-giving Spirit also proceeds from the Father thus invites consideration of how the world’s religious traditions, insofar as they are life-giving conduits of goodness and holiness,^[55] are also related to the primordial source of all living creatures. Pentecostal theologian Koo Yun thus pneumatologically reframes the classical doctrine of general revelation in dialogue with East Asian philosophical and religious sources (particularly the classic I Ching).^[56] Distinguishing the formal dimension of the Spirit of God as being present and active in all cultures and even religious traditions from the material aspect of the Spirit of Christ (and the church and its missional arm), Yun suggests what he calls a chialogical pneumatology and theology—following the East Asian cultural, philosophical, and religious concept of chi, which is at least semantically parallel to the Hebrew ruah or the English “wind” or “breath”—whereby the cosmic Spirit is generally revelatory of the divine even in the world religions. Others have forayed in similar directions, albeit seeking not only theological but also sociopolitical cache in observing how points of contact between Christian pneumatology and East Asian notions of chi are suggestive for reconfiguring democratic public spaces that are egalitarian, liberative, and life-giving.^[57] While these efforts remain distinctive on multiple fronts and precipitate new perspectives, insights, and questions—not to mention precipitate questions that heretofore have not yet garnered answers agreed on across the ecumenical spectrum—each seeks to think theologically in conversation with East Asian religious and philosophical sources via a pneumatological bridge and demonstrates the potential for rethinking the procession of the Spirit from the Father in our late modern and pluralistic global context.^[58]