Jacob and the Night of Faith: Analogia Spiritus

In retrospect, Karl Barth conceded that "everything which needs to be said, considered, and believed about God the Father and God the Son . . . might be shown and illuminated in its foundation through God the Holy Spirit." Nevertheless, he refrained from doing so because it was "still too difficult to distinguish between God's Spirit and man's spirit," and so it was--then. However, the late twentieth-century explosion in various disciplines of thought now provides greater discernment between human and divine spirit, a better understanding of the logic of spirit, and the concept and role of spirit in distinction to mind and body. Gorsuch's theological interdisciplinary investigation into the analogia spiritus and a Christian perichoretic relational ontology brings new meaning and coherence to previously difficult scriptures. Moreover, it provides the fundamental landscape for addressing issues of profound theological consequence: (1) redressing the death of transcendence with a new understanding of relational dynamics through which free, temporal, and self-determining human beings might mutually relate with an Eternal God of providence; (2) laying the framework for a viable Christian pluralistic hypothesis in an increasingly pluralistic world; and (3) providing an enriched theological anthropology for addressing human spirit, origins, and theodicy.