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{"id":16503,"date":"2014-08-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2014-08-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T00:00:00","slug":"spirit-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/08\/spirit-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Spirit of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Christoph Schwobel (Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology<\/a>, 31-3) claims that because God is the \u201cunoriginate originating cause\u201d of all things created, He is \u201catemporally eternally present to every creature in every point in time of creation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet, creation is the actualization of God\u2019s \u201ceternal will to be in communion\u201d with creation, then it is also true that \u201cGod must . . . be thought of as temporally eternally present for every creature and with every creature at every point in time of creation.\u201d We may thus speak of \u201cGod\u2019s temporality\u201d in the sense of His \u201cfree and eternal self-determination for communion with God\u2019s creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within this framework, the presence of the Spirit has, Schwobel argues, a \u201ctwofold significance.\u201d First, \u201cit is the presence of the eternal God in all forms of created life as the Spirit of life that makes creation responsive to the creative action of the Creator.\u201d That is, God acts and the creature responds, but the Spirit is active in the response. It is not simply God responding to God. It is truly the creation responding to the Creator, and yet the creation\u2019s response is only response because of the Spirit\u2019s life-giving presence.<\/p>\n

Second, the Spirit is present as \u201cthe perfecting cause,\u201d as the \u201cpresence of the future presence of perfection for creation.\u201d Schwobel elaborates in a beautiful passage: \u201cIn God\u2019s Spirit, God is the future of every moment of creation. As such, the Spirit liberates from the bondage of creation to the past. As the presence of the absolute future, it counteracts the conditioning of created existence from the past, from its antecedent conditions. The Spirit is in this way the source of freedom for the creature, the way in which the eternal perfection in God\u2019s perfected communion with God\u2019s reconciled creation is already present here and now. Phenomena like emergence, which are not the predicted result of their antecedent conditions according to determinate laws, appear in this way as the correlate of the presence of the Spirit in the natural world. The Spirit\u2019s time is the actualization of novelty already before the end of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, \u201ctalk about God\u2019s eternity must comprise the forms in which God is present to creation as its eternal ground, eternally and temporally, in the chronos <\/em>of physical time, in the kairos<\/em> of the reconciliation of time and eternity, and in the eschaton <\/em>where time is taken up into the eternal presence of God.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"