After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West, by Eugene F. RogersOne of the most interesting aspects of the class I took this semester on the Holy Spirit was reading the book After the Spirit. I hadn't intended to read it because of time constraints (I had a paper due on it less than a week after I started the book) and because Dr. Begbie had recommended this book for Th.M. and Ph.D. students, and another one for M.Div. and M.T.S. students. But my roommate read it and said it was incredible, so I dove in. And this book blew my mind. You can read my whole book review (which didn't quite do it justice but is still more thorough than this post will be) here.
For Rogers, the Spirit is no mere decoration or bond of love, but the person of the Trinity on whom we utterly depend for communion with God. In fact, the way we tend to think about the Spirit—as superfluous, as unnecessary—may actually have an important truth to it. The Spirit's work is to share God and God's grace with us, gratuitously, superfluously, excessively. We are not saved because we deserve it or because it makes sense, because we don't and it doesn't; we are saved purely because God loves us, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens that love out to us and draws us into it.
This book not only presents a robust, positive theology of the Holy Spirit; it has huge implications for how we think about ethics, sexuality, etc. Some of the things Rogers hinted at in terms of sexuality were not fleshed out (ha), but I fully intend to read his book Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way Into the Triune God and will report back on that. A lot of that would be difficult to explain in brief, so I encourage you, if you're theologically-minded, to check out that book, and I may go back to After the Spirit and deal in depth with one or two points that Rogers brings up.
Favorite Quotations
"Even the distance between God and creation is contained within the Trinitarian embrace."
"[O]nly God can pray to God, so that when human beings pray, they are caught up into the triune activity of the Persons praying to one another."
"To think about the Spirit it will not do to think 'spiritually': to think about the Spirit you have to think materially."
"The logic of the Spirit is not the logic of productivity, but the logic of superfluity, not the logic of work but the logic of Sabbath."
"The Son gives his life in trusting the Spirit before all Israel has come in, allowing himself to 'fail' as Messiah, and the Spirit gives the unexpected and peculiar gift of the mostly Gentile church."
"The whole point of grace, after all, is its gratuity, its non-necessity."
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