Spirit in Time – An investigation of the proprium of the Holy Spirit in His action in history

  • Nijsse, P. (PI)
  • Huijgen, A. (CoI)
  • Wisse, P.M. (CoI)

    Project Details

    Description

    To describe a) how the proprium of the Holy Spirit has been guaranteed, and b) how it does relate to the proprium of the Father and the Son in the theology of Oepke Noordmans, Karl Rahner, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Rowan Williams. This description will be placed against the background of the relationship between God and history.
    Recently a renaissance of interest in Trinitarian theology has been observed and with that also a serious attention to social trinitarianism. The latter maintains a view on the Trinity as a sociality of the three divine Persons, each more or less considered as a center of consciousness. Although this renaissance seems to fade out nowadays, it nevertheless leaves the systematic theology with the question what can be defined as the proprium of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Especially for the Spirit there doesn’t appear to be an obvious answer in the recent Western theology.
    Without any doubt Western thinking has been influenced immensely by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. For pneumatology this is even more true because of the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Could before this age the immanent trinity hide behind the paradigm opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, after Hegel’s appearance in the field, the Spirit became more and more an inner-worldly transforming force, that one could study in the process of history. As a consequence, the person of the Spirit got fully absorbed by its work. God and world start to overlap. This fundamental difference of principles implies that post-Enlightenment pneumatology cannot be applied in the traditional systematic framework without caution.
    On the other hand because of the above mentioned paradigm, pre-Enlightenment theology has difficulties in answering the enquiry of social trinitarianism, which it imposes on us today validly. For that reason I want to study twentieth century theology to understand how they have seen the proprium of the Holy Spirit to deduce a kind of spectrum of possibilities. While doing so, the relationship between God and history will be a matter of continuous attention.
    The choice of the theologians has been inspired by the observation that they have dealt with the question explicitly and has been guided by the desire to guarantee geographical, denominational and temporal breadth.

    StatusActive
    Effective start/end date1/01/18 → …

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