ABSTRACT
Whereas in the previous chapter we attempted to clarify the epistemological framework by which we understand the Holy Spirit as he is towards history, we now turn to search out the principles by which we understand history as it becomes in the Spirit: we must develop a clearer understanding of how God forms history itself in such a way as to incorporate, manifest and exemplify the Holy Spirit’s lifesustaining, salvific activity – and in fact to embody the perichoretic relationship with the Father for which, together with the Son, it is destined. If the trinitarian epistemology expounded in the course of the last two chapters’ examination is now to bear fruit in this chapter and if we are to affirm and employ a correlation of Torrance’s and Gunton’s concepts of a historically-engaged Spirit with Zizioulas’s historically-unshackled Spirit, the key will lie in the resolution of Torrance and Zizioulas’s ecclesiological conflict and the issues leading up to it.
