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God’s Spirit, the Human Spirit, and the Outpouring of the Spirit

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Leaning into the Spirit

Part of the book series: Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue ((PEID))

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Abstract

For centuries, understanding the doctrine of God’s Spirit was overshadowed, if not blurred by a metaphysical understanding of the spirit. This understanding goes back to Aristotle and the Stoics. Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Book 12) offers a fascinating identification of spirit and reason. It centered all thinking about the spirit on reflexive and self-reflexive knowledge. An intellectual understanding of the spirit in bipolar relations (subject and object, mind and reality, thought and the material) characterized the orientation. In the following, I should like to show that the biblical orientation on God’s Spirit and the figure of the “outpouring of the Spirit,” a figure often considered strange, offer a much richer understanding, not only of God and God’s workings but also of human nature and our cognitive and ethical capacities. Above all, the biblical understanding enables us to see how the Divine Spirit establishes a differentiated Body of Christ with many fruits and gifts for the common good and for the glory of God.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This splendid orientational foundation has emerged with increasing clarity through an international and interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and the natural sciences over several years (Welker 2012, 2014a, b).

  2. 2.

    109ff, distinguishes in all three offices a “christological, baptismal, soteriological, ministerial” and “ecclesiological use.”

  3. 3.

    Großer Katechismus, in: BSLK, 660.

  4. 4.

    This is not yet apparent in the New Testament texts which expressly connect Jesus with the title “prophet” (e.g. Mark 6:4; 15; 8:28; Luke 7:16; 13:31ff; John 6:14; Acts 3:22; 7:37).

  5. 5.

    With an amplification and with increasing clarity regarding the details of his fate, the Son of Man will be handed over to the religious elites in Jerusalem; he will be handed over to “the people”; he will also be handed over “to the Gentiles to be mocked.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Michael Welker

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  1. Michael Welker
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Correspondence to Michael Welker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT), Charles Sturt University, Barton, ACT, Australia

    Virginia Miller

  2. Archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church, Aotearoa, New Zealand

    The Most Rev’d. Sir David Moxon

  3. Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Barton, ACT, Australia

    The Rt. Rev’d. Prof. Stephen Pickard

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Welker, M. (2019). God’s Spirit, the Human Spirit, and the Outpouring of the Spirit. In: Miller, V., Moxon, T., Pickard, T. (eds) Leaning into the Spirit. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19997-5_3

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