In the march of modernity and the opening of global boundaries, the face of the world changed. How we understood the world, and our place in it, changed. And with that great shift, our concept of the Holy Spirit also changed. Now the third person of the Trinity became a diffusive power in a universalizing attempt at resolving the expansively harsh realities of human existence. In A Profound Ignorance, Ephraim Radner traces the development of pneumatology as a modern discipline and its responses to experiences of social confusion and suffering, often associated with questions linked to the category of theodicy. Along the way, study of the Spirit joined with natural science to become study of spirit, which was at root study of the human person redefined without limitation. Radner proposes that the proper parameters of pneumatology are found in studying Israel and her historical burdens as the Body of Christ, showing how the Spirit is the reality of God that affirms the redemptive character of Christ, the Son. The traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought to the fore the problematic distance between earlier and more modern approaches to the Spirit. Drawing on writers from Paracelsus to John Berryman, and including theologians and philosophers like Anne Conway and John Wesley, as well as literary figures from d'Aubign? (R) to Duhamel, Radner attempts to locate modern pneumatology's motives and interests within some of the novel social settings of a rapidly globalizing consciousness and conflicted pluralism. It is by following Israel into the Incarnation of Jesus, Radner contends, that humans find their unresolved sufferings and yearnings redeemed. The Holy Spirit operates in deep hope, the kind of hope that is inaccessible to simple articulation. Finally, Radner argues for a more limited and reserved pneumatology, subordinated to the christological realities of divine incarnation: here, creaturely limitations are not denied, but affirmed, and taken up into the life of God.
Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology in Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.
Introduction Part One: Corruption 1. The New World, a New Spirit 2. The Modern Invention of Pneumatology 3. A Short History of Pneumatic Human Being (I) 4. A Short History of Pneumatic Human Being (II) 5. The Spirit against the Body Part Two: Redemption 6. Jesus and the Spirit 7. Life in the Spirit Conclusion
"Radner's work is a many-layered gift, an important work that deserves a wide hearing across a range of historical and theological discussions. A book both difficult and profound, probing yet modest, it contains deep insights for a late modern Christian imagination, where pneumatology can easily be subordinated within a story of progress rather than seen as the Spirit's work within the frailty of mortal, creaturely limits." --J. Todd Billings "Journal of Reformed Theology" This is a perceptive book that will both challenge and enlighten its readers. --Roger L. Revell "Anglican and Episcopal History" ...Radner's careful study is effective in inspiring curiosity about how theological ideas always say as much or more about humans as they do about the divine. Ultimately, the mystery of the Incarnation and the limitations of being human are enveloped--and redeemed, but not resolved--in the life of God and the God of life. --Shea Watts "Reading Religion" An extraordinary book. --Christopher Holmes "International Journal of Systematic Theology" An erudite and in-depth analytical study, A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption is enhanced with the inclusion of 116 pages of Notes, an eighteen page Index of Subjects and Persons, and a three page Index of Scripture. -- "The Midwest Book Review"
