Moltmann's pneumatology, because it is rooted in Christ, is powerfully incarnational. "People who ask for the Holy Spirit to come to us - into our hearts, into the community we live in, and to our earth - don't want to flee into heaven or to be snatched away into the next world" (11-12). Instead, we desire that God's Spirit transform us into people empowered to do God's work in this world, with the clear hope of resurrection glory forever provoking us to persevere.
Moltmann offers a beautiful image of the Holy Spirit as God's shining face upon us (13).
Moltmann rejects a theology of the Spirit that calls us to disembodied inwardness. Instead, he calls us to a deeply incarnational experience of the Spirit: "It is not just our hearts that are born again. So are senses. We see the world 'with different eyes'. The enlightened powers of our understanding wake to knowledge of God. The liberated will seeks for conformity with God's Will. The beating heart experiences God's love, and through that love is warmed into love for life" (55). "The whole of bodily and earthly life becomes a spiritual experience when the Spirit of life lays hold of us and we are 'born anew'" (58).
Non-sensuous spirituality that is hostile toward the body, removed from the world, and set against structures and organations bears no resemblance to the Jewish and Christian vitality that arises from living out of God's creative Spirit. Great book!
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