The centrality of the Holy Spirit in God’s grand acts of creation, reconciliation, renewal and fulfilment : the kingdom of God and culture

Abstract

The Spirit is the overall renewing and liberating presence-maker of God’s grand acts of creation, reconciliation, renewal and fulfilment. Not as doctrines, but these acts while we are involved therein are the ortho-experiential drivers of our reflective experience in which we reflectively pattern and process our daily experiences. The centrality of the role of the Spirit in four grand acts of God continuously opens up our awareness of our creatureliness, awareness of sin, awareness of being reconciled, awareness of being in an ongoing renewal process and awareness of the dawning of our fulfilment in our everyday experience. Taking an all-encompassing approach, the Spirit is not only present in love with every creature, but in many mysterious ways that we have never imagined possible. It is through the presence of the Spirit that the creatures of the universe are brought into communion with one another. The Spirit of God then embraces individuals, but he also enables them to exist in a social environment, that is, in an interrelated world of created beings, bringing them and keeping them within the ambit of God’s creation, reconciliation, renewal, and fulfilment of everything. Understanding the key concepts of experience and speculation is important, as well as grasping the different theological approaches to the Trinitarian scheme. At the same time, the doctrine of Revelation in form of Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Culture demonstrates how different understanding of Revelation brings about the different understandings of God (and concretely the Spirit) on the part of any Christian. Hermeneutically, the role of the Holy Spirit and God’s grand acts is to be attested by the Bible in consensual negotiation. Finally, the central role of Spirit opens up the reflective vista of the Kingdom of God as a dynamic meandering through God’s four grand acts at the end of historical time and as the only access area where people’s culture, religiosity, ethnicity, social status and language may be reflected on. Typological approaches describing the relationship between Christ and culture in Niebuhr’s work need to be compared and evaluated, leading to a deeper discussion about the ‘interminable’ and conflicting relationship between the world and state represented by culture on the one side and Christianity represented by the Spirit on the other.