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Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (review)

gives the Spirit something to do to the Son; and it is hard in any case not to see this “resting” as redundant in abstraction from an incarnate “body.” Here, then, is the first remaining perplexity at the heart of Rogers’ argument: these two strands of argument seemingly never fully cohere. The second problem is connected. It concerns Rogers’ assertion that the redundancy of the Spirit is a peculiarly “modern” problem, associated with its purported aversion to the “body.” This line of argument ties in with Rogers’ important existing work on contemporary problems of (homo)sexuality; but it tends to obscure a deeper systematic problem which can be traced right back into the New Testament. It is, after all, John’s gospel which presents the Father/ Son relationship as eternally perfected in advance of the Spirit’s “economic” advent, and seemingly in abstraction from her; and to the extent that that Johannine vision has regularly trumped the more subtly elusive indications of Romans 8, we can scarcely be surprised at the repetitive tendency to render the Spirit’s “thirdness” as redundancy or “superfluity.” Rogers’ own somewhat tortured and unconvincing attempt to give “superfluity” new stature in light of current debates on “gift” (chapter 2) accords with his revealing admission, earlier, that “the tendency of Barth, to announce the Spirit and expound the Son” (27) has actually been a recurring problem in the tradition, not just a “modern” aberration born of body-phobia. Finally, the brief, and slightly defensive, mention of the charismatic movement in Rogers’ introduction (4–5) cannot go unremarked. To write a whole book as theologically rich as this “from Resources outside the Modern West,” and not to reflect on the ambiguous power and fervor of the contemporary charismatic and Pentecostal movements, also “outside the Modern West,” is an ironically back-handed achievement! But not everything can be done even in one volume as elegant, suggestive, and creative as this. Whether the Spirit blows transformatively even “outside” the bounds of creedal trinitarian “orthodoxy” is a matter of profound contemporary theological and political import, to which we can only hope Rogers will be willing to return anon.