Spirit and Human Integrity

In a speech delivered on April 29 to the Fulcrum Conference at Islington, NT Wright notes that the Spirit comes to bring God’s future into the present, and that the Spirit also binds together heaven and earth. This reminds me of Jim Jordan’s claim that the Spirit is the divine matchmaker, whose work is to prepare the Bride for her Husband and to bind them into one flesh. Wright is showing the breadth of the Spirit’s matchmaking work, and his speech suggests that past and future, heaven and earth, inner and outer, father and son, etc etc are bound together only by the Spirit of Christ, who binds together the Divine and Human in Jesus. And this further suggests that the various pathologies of modernity – its deliberate cultural amnesia (witness the European refusal to include any references to Christianity in the historical preamble to European Union documents); the clashes between generations and sexes; the lack of intellectual and cultural coherence – all these pathologies bear witness to the fact that our culture is bereft of the Spirit. And this further suggests the need for an Ephraim Radner-like analysis not only of the church but of Christendom.