hi everyone I'm glad to be meeting with you again today it's always a little bit strange to be thinking about how I'm recording and speaking and that you're going to be listening later on there's always a little sense of disconnection there but uh anyway I am glad to to engage with you in this way and always look forward to your responses in the in the discussions I'm going to begin today with um something that's a little bit more on the philosophical thing side of things uh but it's not a very long lecture and uh so if you don't really like it or it's not really your thing you can take some consolation in knowing that it's it's going to be over soon one of the um very influential Western philosophers who spent a great deal of time working on the spirit is the German philosopher uh gorg wihelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel and he lived from 1770 to 1831 and hegel's favorite term for the spirit was gist GE i s t gist and the term is not absolute or precise um but it does suggest spirit and in kind of the family of linguistics Germanic languages and and the English language uh it is related to a little bit older form of the English word ghost gist gist ghost you can hear the relationship there um and of course that can also refer to the holy spirit in in various liturgies for example um you would find that phrase the Holy Ghost um in any case Guist is as close to a word as Hegel would use for God Whatever Whenever uh Hegel really wanted to develop his ideas about God he used that word Guist Guist however is is something more like a principle or an energy or even a kind of a mind hegel's distinctive use of that term points um towards something that isn't a person but something more like the world becoming process principle the principle of the process of the world becoming so I'm going to say a little bit more about that Guist has purpose it has Direction um and it is unfolding continually in time it's unfolding within history and within especially within material reality within the creation but again it's not exactly a someone not a someone not as in we would find the way we would find the Holy Spirit spoken up in the Bible or in ancient Christianity or really in most expressions of Christianity as the way we would speak about the Holy Spirit uh V matian whom we've been reading uh says in another book for Hegel God is not a Transcendent creator of the world but a Spirit permeating everything so a something more than a someone that is found everywhere and in everything so those who are who are like Hegel and favor hegel's perspective are a little bit more philosophically inclined rather than biblically inclined with respect to Theology and they might find that conceptualization quite attractive or helpful what remains um I would say difficult to reconcile is how this world unfolding principle this world becoming Spirit which gist seems to point towards how that is difficult from Simply what is like that which already is existing that is to say um we could we could just look at at the world or we could look at history and say here is the world or here is history and we wouldn't have to say anything about Guist but when we say here is the world here is history we actually mean almost exactly what Hegel means by gist so the difficulty uh it seems to me is what is the difference between those things um and if there isn't much difference then why why have a separate word for it why have this other concept of Guist if Guist is simply the world unfolding or history unfolding through a series of processes it has no real identity apart from the material reality and its processes as they unfold from um a perspective that is is essentially not based in faith we would have to allow that this might be the case that we simply have a world unfolding that processes unfold and we can simply point to them and say there they are but Christian reality or Christian theology rather is rooted in the Bible in the biblical perspective and Christian theology really does have some quarrels with that perspective because ultimately there is some pretty important distinctions because Christian theology points toward the Triune God the Trinity who acts who is decisive who is making choices within creation and Beyond creation beyond material reality who has an existence that is God has an existence that is not strictly dependent on or kind of indexed to material reality even though we believe that God chooses to interact with Creation with matter and the Triune God is Incarnate the second person particularly is Incarnate in the one known of Jesus Christ who comes to save to transform all of that all of that cluster of convictions about the Triune God can't really be squared up with hegel's idea of gu there are some similarities some relationships but they can't really finally be lined up identically and to be sure Hegel didn't try to do that either most urgently though I think gist can be described can be conceived without any reference to Jesus Christ to his Incarnation to his saving work to all that he was about um and that is indeed characteristic of Hegel Hegel does not speak of Guist in terms of or with reference to Jesus Christ and that would be a very distinctive and essential element in Christian theology that we speak of the holy spirit in relation to Jesus Christ so in that sense it is really impossible to locate Guist as one with the Trinity and Christian theology always locates the Holy Spirit as one with the Trinity to think of the Holy Spirit apart from the Trinity or apart from Jesus Christ in in radical terms um is not the Christian theological account of reality the spirit to which the Bible testifies should not be confused with um uh what Amy po calls um hegel's perspective what the Christian perspective is or what the Bible testifies to shouldn't be confused with what po calls a generic term for human religiosity or a world process that's more like what gist is so Hegel uh absolutely has his Advocates um both in the past and in the present and I'm sure in the future um but I want to suggest that his conception of Guist would be inadequate for our account of the Holy Spirit now in our time there is kind of a a descendant we're really a couple of centuries on from Hegel we have a um a philosophical descendant or kind of a theological descendant from Hegel from gist uh which again does not really index the Holy Spirit to the Triune God and the word that is often used simply is Spirit um and that word spirit with without uh the in front of it or holy in front of it um is most often if you kind of work with with the way in which is it it is expressed is cut off from trinitarian reference and cut off from any relationship with Jesus Christ process theology which has has other strengths has a tendency to speak of spirit in in something in these terms something like the process of the universe becoming itself and you can see the connection there with Hegel um so that word on its own without reference to the Trinity without reference to uh the Dynamics of the work person and work of Jesus Christ just to say Spirit or sometimes even the spirit seems to refer in our contemporary moment to a kind of a force or an energy that is present uh without differentiation with within the universe within creation and it's very difficult to distinguish it from I mean virtually from anything else it's unclear what that force or energy is all about what its purpose is if it has a purpose uh where it is anchored uh what its goals are if it has goals in that respect I think there's quite a bit that's unsatisfying about that treatment of the spirit what what we've been calling the Holy Spirit but I think it's clear that even if it is unacknowledged or even if people are unaware of it there is a very strong relationship between that kind of language um Spirit language kind of divorced or separated at least from the Trinity and Jesus Christ um the way in which that language is used and what Hegel meant by Guist I think there's a kind of a intellectual or philosophical relationship between them so that's it that's the end of the philosophical bit for today and uh we're going to look into now a little bit more about what uh we mean by anchoring um the holy spirit in the Trinity and how that all interrelates