The Holy Spirit

Abstract

Bonhoeffer has a richly Trinitarian pneumatology. He emphasizes the Spirit’s identity in relation to the Son and thus to the Father. This generates an account of the Spirit’s work that is other-directed, Christ-directed. We come to know and love the Spirit in relation to Christ, into whom the Spirit baptizes us and whose words the Spirit speaks. The upshot, for Bonhoeffer, is that the Spirit is not domesticatable. The Spirit brings the reality of Christ to us, forming us in him and in his body. In pointing to the Spirit’s unity with Christ, Bonhoeffer tracks New Testament patterns of speech, resisting the ungodly tendency to isolate the Spirit from Christ whose scriptural word the Spirit speaks via the external words of preaching and sacrament.