Abstract
This article addresses the notion of sacramentality in relation to revelation, framing revelation as a divine-human discursive encounter facilitated through semantic media. In doing so, it suggests disciplines for theological reflection that would preserve the import of human submission to the Holy Spirit’s guidance in interpreting God’s Word while also envisioning a positive place for subjective construction along that Spirit-led way. The article locates the basic tenets of such a methodological paradigm in the works of Sarah Coakley, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Rowan Williams. Coakley’s work provides the groundwork for a vision of ecstatic encounter with God as integral to the Spirit-led process of revelation. Next, engagement with Chauvet establishes how mediated revelation may be conceived as a sacramental and dialogical reality, which fundamentally evokes and includes human self-expression. The article closes by drawing upon Williams’ theological reflection on sexuality as a resource for embracing subjective construction, as integral to our Spirit-guided, “nuptial” incorporation into the life of Christ. The results afforded by this analysis warrant spiritual-hermeneutic commitments from communities who desire to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in acts of theological interpretation.
Highlights
Christianity is experiencing a revival of the Holy Spirit
In his plenary address to the 2007 Nordic Systematic Theology Conference, LeRon Shults offered this incisive observation: The one trend in contemporary Pneumatology that encompasses virtually all of the others is the trend represented in the very title of this conference: Spirit and Spirituality
For instance, as LeRon Shults remarked in his 2007 address to the Nordic Systematic Theology Conference, there is “growing interest in and generative use of the theological concept of the divine Spirit among those exploring issues in feminist and liberation theology, ecology, politics, ecumenism and the astonishing expansion of Pentecostalism”
Summary
Christianity is experiencing a revival of the Holy Spirit. This is true in the church, which is seeing the striking growth of Pentecostal-charismatic movements in the global South, and in academic circles, where there is burgeoning interest in fresh engagements with Pneumatology.. This has not long been the case for contemporary academics, as Shults reminds his audience: the corpus of post-Enlightenment academic theology instantiates a marked gap between attention to spiritual practice and systematic treatments of the Holy Spirit This fact is little wonder, given that, over the course of modernity, Christian spirituality had become predominantly circumscribed within the bounds of inner, individual states of psychological or transcendental experience.. The present essay’s analysis represents an effort to honor the wisdom borne out in attending to spirituality in those three contexts It seeks to do so in the interest of unearthing practical implications for Spirit-guided hermeneutics, having conceived “spirituality” as does Shults—i.e., as the interpretation of and attention to transformed relations to God and neighbor.
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