The Presence of the Spirit in Certain Kinds of Painful Experiences

Abstract

Andrew Gabriel’s book The Lord is the Spirit presents a well-written, innovative and effective critique of classical theism. The primary approaches to this in recent decades have been by way of Christology, an analysis of the nature of love or through feminist analysis of women’s experience. The Lord is the Spirit shows how pneumatology clashes with classical theism’s understanding of God as unaffected by the world so well, that reading it made me wonder why no one had thought of doing this before. It’s a significant contribution to pneumatology and the doctrine of God.