Treasure in Earthen Vessels: Fleshing out Paul’s Radical Pneumatology

Abstract

The Reformed tradition claims it is “always being reformed by the Word of God.” Yet, the Spirit, the animating force of such transformation, is (too) often estranged and relegated to the Trinity’s third person and last position. There is much more focus on the doctrine of God and Christology than on pneumatology. In this paper, I engage how returning to the participatory and operative pneumatology in Paul’s thought can inform and contribute to ongoing contemporary conversations and practices within Reformed theology. Moreover, I explore the pneumatologies in John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Jonathan Edwards before turning to more contemporary approaches to develop a radical, Reformed pneumatology.

1. Introduction

There’s a specter haunting Reformed theology. It is a holy ghost. Theology itself has been part of a holy alliance to exorcise this specter, but to no avail.

My interest in this essay is to explore the participatory and embodied pneumatology at work in Paul’s dynamic theology and ponder its lack of prominence in Reformed theological conversations and practices. This paper argues that radical pneumatology and notions of Christian freedom are mutually linked and inform one another, and that they warrant continual re-centering in our theologizing. Moreover, I contend that we still have much to learn—and thus reclaim—from a more unitary view of the Spirit’s presence in our lives and in Life itself. Without a robust pneumatology, the Trinity collapses, and we are left with what some scholars have called a “flat-tire theology.”

My aim is to imagine a Pauline participatory pneumatology that goes beyond a mantric “I can do all things” and other platitudinous bumper-sticker theologies. The word radical, from the Latin radix, means “from the root.” It is a term relating to botany. By radical, I suggest indulging in this meaning by considering the “roots,” as it were, of pneumatology in the Hebrew scripture tradition. God’s Spirit is at work from the beginning (ff. Genesis 1:2). However, the Spirit’s methods are often chaotic, causing disorder and disorientation as it brings about new forms of freedom.

To that end, this paper also ponders the notion of Christian freedom. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty defines authentic Christian freedom as “The freedom to live in self-giving love for the sake of others.” (Hinson-Hasty 2025). For Hinson-Hasty, freedom is always already tempered by the needs of others. This definition, and its telos, is borne out in the Spirit’s manifestation. It is consonant with John Calvin’s focus on the participation of Christ and in the community as well as Karl Barth’s. If there is any hope of reclaiming or redeeming notions of authentic Christian freedom from Western idols of insatiable consumerism, idolatrous intellectualism, and intransigent individualism, it will be because we dared to indulge in the divinizing aspects of a capacious, life-giving Spirit from whom true freedom flows.

I have organized what follows into two sections, problems and possibilities, because I believe this is where the Spirit can be found, both in the scriptures and in our lives today. Part of the pneumatic paradigm I am proposing holds these problems and possibilities in tension rather than easing them. Tension can be generative.

2. Problems

2.1. The Textual Problem

We begin with the textual problem because we must. As the Reformed tradition makes clear, the scriptures are the source par excellence to testify to the Word of God as/in Jesus Christ. However, the exact moment of the Holy Spirit’s arrival in the New Testament is not clear. However, there are many moments of manifestation and outpouring. The Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove at his baptism (Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). At once, the Spirit is connected to the sacrament of baptism. You may recall Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus that one must be born of water and spirit. Spirit plays a prominent role in announcing Jesus’s ministry and leading him into the desert in the synoptic gospels. The story connects the Spirit with Jesus’s forty-day temptation in the wilderness. Luke’s gospel reveals “a Holy Spirit upon” Simeon.1 In the synoptics, Jesus promises to send the paraclete, i.e., one called alongside to help. But in John 20:22, after his death and resurrection, Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Like God’s breath of life in Genesis 1, Jesus breathes new life into his inner circle. Then, in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit descends (again?) upon the disciples in the Upper Room. Is this the advocate, the one Joel prophesied would be poured out on all flesh?

There is also the matter of Jesus’s so-called return. In his earliest letter to the Thessalonians, Paul tells his readers that Christ’s reappearance (parousia) is imminent (4:15–17). His letters to the Romans and Corinthians confirm his belief (Romans 13:12; 1 Corinthians 7:29–31). While he makes no mention of Pentecost in his writings, he seems to see the Spirit as the medium through which the people receive the message (1 Thes. 1:5, 8). The Spirit appears everywhere and in various ways across disputed and undisputed Pauline texts, making it difficult, if not impossible, to chart her path. I am not as much concerned with the historical criticism of the Holy Spirit’s advent as with the different ways the Spirit is made manifest, experienced, and understood, however limited, in Paul’s evolving theology.

While Paul was mistaken about the form of Christ’s parousia in his earliest letter, his life was marked by the charisms that signal a new age of the Spirit. For Paul, one of the hallmarks of this burgeoning eon is freedom. For example, as the letter to the Galatians declares, it is for freedom’s sake that Christ sets free (5:1). Rather than forging a new path, Paul stands firmly within the Jewish tradition that promises an indwelling Spirit. In Ezekiel 36:27, God says, “I will put my spirit within you. In Isaiah 11, the prophet foretells a “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (vv. 1–2). And as I mentioned above, Joel prophesies of a coming Spirit poured out on all flesh (2:12). It seems, for Paul, the new eon of the Spirit has already inaugurated a reality and era in which pneuma is poured out on all flesh, i.e., is incarnated in individual and collective bodies. As Paul tells the Romans, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead indwells them.

2.2. The Worldview Problem

Another problem is that, unlike our (post)modern world, the ancient world of Jesus and Paul was teeming with what one might call magic—spirit possession, divinization, miraculous acts and signs, celestial beings, etc. Paul’s use of Greek terms such as soma, psyche, and pneuma, and the slippage between spiritual and carnal applications, adds further challenges to retroactively engaging his writings.2 As David Bentley Hart argues: “For Paul, both psychical and spiritual bodies were in the proper sense natural objects, and both in fact are found in nature as it now exists.” (Bentley Hart 2025, p. 114). Thus, to superimpose categorical distinctions retroactively is an anachronistic error at the very least.

Since the Enlightenment, the study of ritual and religious studies has scrupulously criticized the existence and legitimacy of magic. Categorical distinctions have become the norm. Perhaps the burden of proof for supernatural forces at work in the world is too great for proponents to bear. Magic is relegated to the world of myth. The scientific method has no means of incorporating subjective personal experiences. For these reasons—not least among them bias—contemporary readers often overlook the fluid, open interplay between the natural and preternatural worlds in early Christian writings and scriptures.

For example, the role of spirit possession in the Gospels and in extravagant healing narratives central to these accounts should prompt us to pause as we consider what it means to be filled with a divine pneuma. When we encounter pneuma, we must inquire about its nature. Jesus’s mastery over unclean spirits is a defining feature of his ministry. After Jesus sends out the 72, they remark, “Even the demons are subject to us in your name” (Luke 10:17).3 The disciples are surprised to find that they possess the very same power over spirits as Jesus. Acts 5 suggests that Peter’s shadow has healing properties. The Apostle Paul’s list of divine acts includes healings (Acts 14:8–10; 19:11–12; 28:8–9), raising the dead (Acts 20:9–12), striking the sorcerer Eutychus blind (Acts 13:6–11), a miraculous prison break (Acts 16:25–26), and surviving a venomous snakebite without any symptoms (Acts 28:3–6). And, of course, there is his miraculous Road to Damascus story (Acts 9). All these encounters underscore a world of spirits, in which God’s Spirit is active.

Though a list of Paul’s miraculous deeds was mostly confined to the book of Acts, he regularly appeals to the pneuma that made them possible. They were the material evidence of the emerging eon of the Spirit. Jennifer Eyl writes:

Paul’s performance of wonders, his interpretation of signs, and his engagement in practices of prophecy and speaking in tongues, constitute a significant and legitimating aspect of his teaching. Contrary to what some other scholars have argued—that Paul did not want to draw attention to his wonderworking and divinatory practices… such practices were crucial to Paul, even when they do not constitute the primary focus of his letters.4

Like Jesus, Paul’s miraculous works legitimized his theological claims and authority. Eyl concludes: “Paul presents himself as the arbiter, administrator, and educator to his followers who have been endowed with divinatory powers, which he calls charismata pneumatika.” (Eyl 2019a, p. 3). In other words, pneuma empowered these early Jesus-followers to act as Jesus did. That said, the skepticism toward miracles, signs, and wonders in our contemporary world certainly contributes to Reformed theology’s reticence toward a more radical pneumatology.

2.3. The Tradition-ing Problem

Third is the capital-T Tradition problem. I situate this ongoing process in the present participle: Reformed traditioning. We have had millennia to distance ourselves from the biblical world and the many changes and adaptations that have occurred throughout this history. For example, for those in the tradition who affirm and uphold static definitions, like the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s definition of God as “Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness,” etc., difficulties in embracing a radical freedom brought about through/by the Spirit. These static streams of John Calvin’s thought are ambivalent toward religious experience in the Christian life and have tended to argue that “to be Calvinist is to crave order and rationality above all else.”5 It is no surprise that these views are skeptical of and inhospitable to any form of mysticism or personal religious experience. How can the Reformed tradition account for this and speak of experience or spirituality?

Calvin’s aversion to certain Catholic practices and terms, such as spirituality, iconography, and mysticism, is rooted in the Western ecclesial tradition. In Reformed Spirituality: An Introduction for Believers, Howard L. Rice offers: “The changeless God of such Calvinism has been inhospitable to any form of mysticism and uncomfortable with the language of religious experience.” (Rice 1991b, p. 25). For these reasons, the Tradition has often preferred the term piety, though it should not be conflated with spirituality. Rather, spirituality, as “the pattern by which we shape our lives in response to our experience of God as a very real presence in and around us,” informs piety, “the pattern by which we shape our lives before God.” (Rice 1991a, pp. 45–46). This is a generous contribution because older scholars, such as T. Hartley Hall IV, argued that “spirituality” was a term imported after Vatican II. His critique is both an accusation and an anti-Catholic sentiment.

Rice’s engagement with Calvin’s theology of a “mystical union” with Christ in the service of sanctification and holiness likely results from the tradition’s skepticism toward individualism, sentimentality, and otherworldliness. For Calvin, the inner work of the Spirit must not be divorced from the affairs of the world. On this point, I wholeheartedly agree. Spirituality should not be a selfish endeavor but one that seeks to transform the world even as it transforms the person. Calvin may not have used the word “spirituality,” but I believe Rice’s approach would be agreeable with him.

While this is only one reading of Calvin among others, it can account for how Traditioning has normalized a cold, standoffish posture vis-à-vis spirituality, experience, and human bodies as the locus of God’s revelation. As the Directory of Worship states: “The mystery and reality of God transcend our experience, understanding, and speech, such that we cannot reduce God to our ways of speaking. Yet we are compelled to speak of the glory, goodness, and grace of the God who is revealed in the world around us, in Scripture, and above all, in Jesus Christ” (W-1.0302). Reformed theology focuses on the Holy Spirit as the source of spiritual knowledge in and through the proclamation of the good news (kerygma).6

Other interpreters of the reformer have called Calvin the “theologian of the Holy Spirit.” Proponents of this view will point to the third book of the Institutes as an example. Paul Galbreath writes of Calvin’s “pneumatological center,” out of which he envisioned the Spirit’s work among us as leading to ethical actions (Galbreath 2024, p. 17). This is fair. Indeed, reformers were trying to return to a more biblical account of the Spirit that does not deny the Spirit’s presence, but rather how that Spirit is mediated through the Word, sacraments, and Christian life. Calvin affirms a central role for the Spirit in Word and Sacrament and in the work of sanctification, such that Word and Sacrament are meaningless without the Spirit. In other words, the Spirit is the force and source at the heart of Christian theology.

2.4. The Language Problem

In an evolving tradition, language is yet another problem. In the history of the Church, subtle differences in syntax caused pronounced consternation among Latin-speaking people of the West and Greek-speaking people of the East. Understanding and writing about the Trinity posed linguistic challenges in both traditions. As he oversaw the Council at Nicaea, Constantine called the Trinity “a trifling and foolish dispute about words.” (Miles 2004, p. 71). However, as we shall see, Trinitarian language, especially regarding the Spirit, is consequential.

Calvin owes much of his theology to St. Augustine of Hippo, the Church father from Roman North Africa, whose doctrine of the filioque asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son: “And as to be the gift of God in respect to the Holy Spirit, means to proceed from the Father; so to be sent, is to be known to proceed from the Father. Neither can we say that the Holy Spirit does not also proceed from the Son, for the same Spirit is not without reason said to be the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son.” (New Advent 2026). This view has largely influenced Western theology in general and trinitarian theology in particular. An unfortunate consequence of the filioque is that the Spirit is relegated to the third person of the Trinity through double procession (the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son).

Patrick Leigh Fermor called the filioque the “tintack which split Christendom.” (Fermor 2010, p. 197; Tickle and Sweeney 2014b, p. 65). The word was inserted into the Nicene Creed in 689 CE by the Latin-speaking Church, centuries after the initial council at Nicaea. This addition altered the Church’s universal statement of faith on the Trinity, thereby unraveling the unity of one Church. In 1054, the Great Schism officially divided the Church into East and West, just as the creed was split into two forms. The bishops of the East responded by calling the notion that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and Son an “artifice of the devil!” (Geanakoplos 1986, p. 207; Tickle and Sweeney 2014a, p. 100). It is important to note that the Reformation owes more to the Western Church’s legacy than to its Eastern counterpart.

In addition to the tradition and history of the Western church, Calvin’s understanding of the Spirit is greatly shaped by his understanding of power and its dynamics. This is signified by his use of the word “Lord,” which reinscribes sovereign governance and kyriarchy. His view of providence is complementary to this framework and offers a teleological account in which God acts universally and ubiquitously across the world, the church, and human beings. For Calvin, providence is God’s working through freedom and power, which are mutually informing–or limiting–concepts. Divine and human freedom are entwined and “joined by many bonds.” Furthermore, Calvin’s rhetoric of providence, sovereignty, and other important theological concepts was undoubtedly shaped by his own experience as a refugee caring for refugees in the community. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which his social location, experiences, and affinities for Roman law, medieval feudalism, and monarchy were reflected in his theology.7

Later, in Karl Barth’s work, the Holy Spirit is indeed present and powerful in the world. However, the Spirit is often reduced to “functioning” through the sacraments and as the spirit of Christ vis-à-vis the Church. In his treatment of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Barth spends considerable time on the Spirit. Romans, in particular, is where the Spirit is prominent as the source of revelation. He writes: “This possibility, this event, this law, is the Spirit. The Spirit is that new, existential, once-for-all, universal life, which has been revealed in Christ.” (Barth 1933, p. 273). Such a statement is consonant with his Trinitarian formula of “Revealer, Revelation, Revealedness,” in which the Spirit is the Revealedness.

The Spirit is that (not whom) through which we are in Christ Jesus. Barth’s reading does assert that the Spirit is an effective factor and influence in life and lives, but he also claims a sort of ignorance of the Spirit’s thinking, acting, and working (Barth 1933, p. 275). The Spirit is “completely the Other.” (Barth 1933, p. 275). It is an otherness, a betweenness that plagues Barth’s thought. Yet, somehow, at the same time, Barth writes that the Spirit quickens the Church (in gathering, upbuilding, and sending) and is the very awakening power of God. James Buckley identifies a core problem by stating that, “Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit, i.e., the Spirit of the Father and the Son. That is, it can be (and has been) argued that an implausible pneumatology is at the root of basic problems in Barth’s theology.” (Buckley 1994). However, Bukley softens the debate by suggesting there is friction between what Barth “states” (meditatio) and “shows” (explicatio). I appreciate this more careful approach to Barth’s work, but it still falls short of a radical pneumatology as found in Paul’s writings and life.

Because Barth is more concerned with the concrete reality of Christ’s revelation, the Christological focus risks literalizing the terms “Father” and “Lord”8 and collapsing the Trinity into Binitarianism. This could be an accidental symptom of reducing the Spirit to the third person of the Trinity that proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Though power, in this view, risks promoting domination and control, i.e., omnipotence (more on that later). David Beck sums up this critique of the continued classical influence on Reformed theology: “The Spirit’s work has tended to be confined to ecclesiology (Word and sacrament) and Christology. It has become a function of the church and Christ.”.9 Although prayer and the Christian life are central for many in the Reformed tradition, the Spirit risks becoming just a function of the church and Christ, which leads us dangerously into a modal reduction of the Trinity. And we lose the Spirit to a sort of ethereal anonymity.

Theology leads to practice. And in practice, the Reformed Traditioning problem is a dialectic between order and freedom. As noted above, Calvin saw the Spirit at work in both the Christian life and politics, and this has been read and used to emphasize order. Barth’s othering of the Spirit has contributed to a stand-offish posture. As a recovering Pentecostal and aspiring Presbyterian, the “decent and orderly,” “frozen chosen” tropes have been accurate. Looking to the scriptures, however, it is hard to call the Spirit orderly. Neither could we call the Spirit other. The Spirit broods over the chaos of creation, cannot be contained or controlled, blows unpredictably like the wind, and animates all of life. Calvin and others are comfortable with the Spirit in the world and, in particular, in theological functions, but are more averse to the Spirit in the life of individual believers. However, these critiques can be constructive and lead us to move from problems to possibilities.

3. Possibilities

We return to Paul, and to the reality of an in-dwelling Spirit of God in his theology. For Paul, the Spirit gives new life (Romans 8:11–17, 2 Corinthians 5:17); produces gifts (1 Corinthians 12); bears fruit (Galatians 5); breaks down divisions (Galatians 6); and empowers believers to do great works. The Spirit’s arrival radically transforms creation and the lives, identities, and realities of “all flesh,” as Joel is re-intoned in Acts. Therefore, when Paul writes to the Galatians, “[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” he is not speaking metaphorically. Just as Jesus died and was raised to life, this pattern becomes the model for a new Spirit-filled life. The Spirit’s arrival brings about an ontological apocalypse, i.e., an unveiling and a new eschatological reality. At the same time, Paul encourages the people to test gifts of the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). The later Johannine community encourages readers to “test the spirits” to see what is from God (1 John 4:1–4).

3.1. From Spirit-Talk to Spirit-People

John Carroll attends to the “fluidity and flexibility” of Paul’s Spirit-talk, pointing out that “the raw materials for later trinitarian doctrinal thinking are present in the Pauline letters, but not yet a systematic theology of the Spirit.” (Carroll 2018, p. 108). There is a distinction between the Spirit’s identity and activity and Christ’s identity and role as the son of God. For example, in 2 Corinthians 3:17–18, Paul reconfigures the Galatian language: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Notice the slippage and interchangeability of the terms Lord, Christ, and Spirit in the two letters.

Of course, the word Trinity is not found anywhere in the scriptures. It is a product of theological challenges in early Christian theology. Trinitarian theology relies more on the early church councils than on scripture. Paul’s theology is in-process, hence the change in language. Nevertheless, the overarching theme seems to remain that “Authentic Christian freedom comes with clear thinking and a full apprehension of the divine presence (“glory”) now available in Christ.” (Carroll 2018, p. 107). This is most evident in his letter to the Romans.

Romans is Paul’s longest and most influential letter. In 5:5, Paul writes: “… God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” What did Paul mean by this? Chapter 8 extrapolates Paul’s understanding of the Spirit’s role in the church, both corporately and personally. As Beverly Gaventa points out, the Spirit’s impartation has ontological and cosmic consequences; The Spirit mediates God’s presence and empowers God’s agents (Gaventa 2024, p. 397). This Spirit is of/from God, the same Spirit that was incarnated in Jesus.

3.2. More than Metaphor

Paul teaches his readers that the Spirit is ever-present in the community, operating to enhance human life together, strengthening persons and relationships, and counteracting the adverse effects of ongoing problems of sin and human weakness. There are markers of this radically new human existence. Just as 1 Corinthians states individual freedom is tempered by the needs of the community, the fruits of the Spirit give this moral power a shape and telos in the freedom chapter of Galatians. Matthew Thiessen writes:

The Messiah’s followers remain flesh-and-blood bodies: frail, mortal, corruptible. Yet now these fleshy people are also filled with the life-giving, empowering, holy pneuma of God. They are dirt bodies inhabited by the sacred pneuma, or as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “We have this treasure in clay jars” (4:7). It seems like a mismatch since one does not generally put immeasurably valuable items in cardboard boxes. But God has done this to show that the moral power that the Messiah’s followers have comes not out of their own beings, clay vessels that they are, but from his presence within them.

(Thiessen 2023, pp. 130–31)

We should not mistake or dismiss this as merely a metaphor. Nearly fifty years ago, EP Sanders remarked: “We seem to lack a category of ‘reality’—real participation in Christ, real possession of the Spirit—which lies between naïve cosmological speculation and belief in magical transference on the one hand and a revised self-understanding on the other. I must confess that I do not have a new category of perception to propose here. This does not mean, however, that Paul did not have one.” (Eastman 2014). I would add to Sanders a real presence—I do so aware of how loaded that phrase is in certain theological circles. I think Sanders rightly affirms Paul’s new category of perception—perhaps, a new paradigm for being human. Paul stresses his syntax throughout his writings, from Galatians to his letters to the Corinthians and Romans, to find suitable language for the relationship between the Spirit and spirit-people: participation, adoption, engrafting, etc.

1 Peter 2:7, a later addition to the tradition, calls the letter’s audience “partners” or “sharers” in the divine nature. St. Irenaeus writes: “[B]ut following the only true and steadfast Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” David Bentley Hart adds, “God became human so that humans should become God. Only the God who is always already human can become human. Only a humanity that is always already divine can become God.” (Hart 2022, p. xviii). Some scholars, such as Michael J. Gorman, elaborate on the ancient concept of theosis, while Nijay Gupta examines the emergence of what Paul calls Spirit-people. All of these approaches are attempting to understand—and flesh out—what it means to be sharers and partakers in a divine nature.

3.3. Spirit-People in Process

Another possibility, and indeed the most radical, is found in Paula Fredrikson, for whom the Spirit’s arrival after Jesus makes people an occasion of divine incarnation. She writes: “Even absent Jesus, they discovered, these followers of Jesus still seemed—and felt themselves to be—empowered by spirit. Community experienced charismata; charismata validated community.” (Fredriksen 2018, p. 99). The Spirit is imparted and gives special powers/abilities. Fredriksen brings this point home:

Christ’s cosmic Parousia in effect becomes his third manifestation. His second (post-mortem) coming, together with its coming conferral of divinatory charismata, was Christ’s continuous empowering material presence as pneuma within the bodies of Paul, of those who were apostles before him, of Paul’s co-workers and competitors, and within the bodies of those constituting Christ’s ekklêsiai.” (Eastman 2014).

The Spirit’s material presence is in individuals and collectively in the ekklêsiai. Jesus becomes a prototype for the in-dwelling Spirit, that is, God’s abiding presence (e.g., “firstborn among others” Romans 8:29). “But in his own generation—which Paul was convinced was history’s last generation—the Jesus movement was yet one more variety of late Second Temple Judaism.” (Fredriksen 2015). For Fredriksen, removing Jesus and Paul from their Jewish worldviews and theologies causes interpreters to miss what each is enacting theologically.

A complementary Reformed understanding to Fredriksen’s comes from the process-feminist synthesis in Anna Case-Winters’s God’s Power. Process theology reevaluates the nature of power in an open and unfolding universe, rather than a predetermined one. Once again, we must deal with the relationship between power and freedom. She writes:

In the tradition, the term “power” when applied to God means intrinsic, all-determining agential, causal power. But when the same term is applied to creatures, it means derivative, nondeterminative, nonagential power which is only causal in an instrumental sense. In the process-feminist synthesis, on the other hand, the same meaning for “power,” “the capacity to influence and be influenced,” is applied to both divine and creaturely realities.

(Case-Winters 1990a, p. 228)

In a similar way, in a process-feminist synthesis, freedom does not imply the Barthian notion of God’s self-determination and human obedience to God but instead entails self-creativity and other creativity for both God and creatures. The divinizing power of the Spirit takes on the character of being life-giving and co-creative over passively participatory. What is gained in further collaboration between humanity, God, and all of creation is an ethic and a newfound sense of agency. Moreover, the Spirit is not simply at work in the collaborative power of people but in individuals, too. This is radical freedom embodied experientially, just as it was in Jesus and Paul. Power is relational and empowering rather than the exercise of power-over.

Radical pneumatology and authentic Christian freedom are connected. The word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. I suggest a return to the root of radical pneumatology and authentic Christian freedom, in which the Spirit is forming and growing root systems. The Spirit is at work in Church and Spirit, as Calin, Barth, and others have affirmed. But the Spirit is also incarnated in the lives of individuals and the life of all of creation. We must no longer other the Spirit but give freedom to work in our individual and collective lives.

4. Conclusions

In On Earth as in Heaven: A Liberation Spirituality of Sharing, Dorothee Soelle writes: “These are great words: Spirit, pneuma, life, freedom… The question to all great nouns is the question the great Polish philosopher Stanislaus Lec raised: ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity—very beautiful! But how do we get to the verbs? How can we move from nouns to deeds, to action?’” (Sooelle 1993, p. 90). How do we get to the verbs, that is, to the action? How is authentic Christian freedom enfleshed in such a way that it is practiced and realized, rather than merely reserved for theoretical endeavors? Of course, it is important to theorize—which can strengthen and undergird practice—but, what Soelle is inviting the reader to do is move beyond the written word and static meaning toward a dynamism that is always action-oriented. Words alone will not suffice; they will not bring about change until they are translated and transformed into verbal form, i.e., action.

Just as “the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood,”10 a radical pneumatology that centers on the Spirit’s incarnation, beyond the one-time Incarnation in Jesus, toward freedom, joy, and agency animates and moves bodies into otherwise configurations of social and spiritual life. Such a radical pneumatology is grounded in a vision of total freedom and a fleshed-out process of becoming Spirit-people.

Perhaps there is yet hope for a solution for Reformed theology’s haunted ghost problem. That is, to embrace that we are indeed haunted and possessed. For Paul, we participate in and cooperate with pneuma. If we are indeed living in an age of the Spirit, how do we live such that this reality is affirmed and enacted in flesh and bone here and now? Reformed theology has an opportunity to answer this question in new ways, as the world groans and cries out for the actualization of authentic Christian freedom. Much more consideration, collaboration, and conversation are needed to inflate flat-tire theologies with pneuma.