Robert Jenson’s Pneumatological Contribution: An Engagement

Abstract

I argue that Robert Jenson’s pneumatology, as it is developed in his Systematic Theology, secures the personhood of the Holy Spirit by emphasizing the narrative and eschatological dimensions of God’s being. While Jenson successfully eludes the problem of abstraction implicit in many classic pneumatological approaches, I suggest that his reconstructed pneumatology fails to go far enough to personalize the Spirit in narrative concrescence. To push Jenson’s insight to a further, yet more salutary, extent, I enlist the pneumatology of Martin Luther, whose understanding of proclamation in word and sacrament provides an adequately historical, eschatological, narrative frame for a fully personal account of the Holy Spirit.