Abstract
One might well find oneself intrigued and infuriated in equal measure by Radner’s book. Setting out from the trenchant observation that modern legalization of medically assisted suicide exponentially increases the burden of proof that not just life in general but my life in particular is still worth living in the face of physical and mental suffering, Radner sets out to explore how modern pneumatology (the theology of the Holy Spirit) has both shaped and been shaped by wider social currents of thinking around suffering, redemption and divine providence over the past 300 years or so. His contention is that pneumatology is an invention of modernity, which arose out of the dislocation of traditional frames of reference by the discovery of the New World and the violent upheavals of the Reformation. It sought to integrate the particularity of individual suffering, now impossibly multiplied as entire nations are engulfed in conflict and disaster, into an overarching salvific framework guaranteed by and anchored in spirit – the Spirit/spirit in all and behind all that fulfils all by subsuming all into itself, and so offers the promise that suffering is and will be overcome. The result, he argues, has been a flight from bodily existence and particularity into a panentheism that ends up obliterating the value of human life and the created order. Yet, in order to make this argument, Radner sets off on a dizzying sprint from the Reformation to the present, taking in writers, theologians, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers, from Pedro Fernandes de Queirós and Paracelsus via Giordano Bruno and George Fox to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among very many more, all in barely 200 pages. This extreme compression in space leads to an equal compression in engagement, so that what is offered is not any kind of critical appraisal but really only a fleeting enumeration of those aspects of their work and thought that support Radner’s central thesis, in a curious mirroring of exactly the kind of flattening out and universalizing that Radner critiques in modern pneumatology, indicated most forcefully perhaps by the fact that the footnotes alone take up fully a third of the book. As a result, Radner leaves many questions begging, in particular whether the lines of intellectual descent and influence he traces exist beyond the pattern he is so determined to see. And yet that frustration is more than made up for by the conclusions he draws in the final pages, where he begins to set out the consequences of his contention that we were and are created to be human – finite, mortal and therefore inevitably suffering – and that the work of the Spirit as part of salvation has to be understood within these boundaries and not as a way to break beyond them. Salvation, he argues, might not be that Jesus’ death on the Cross earned us the reward of avoiding suffering – which would be to avoid being human – but that the Spirit enables us to follow Jesus through suffering into new creation. That seems a message the modern world needs to hear again.